La Petite Fleur

Traître

The next week and a half passed in a blur of self-defense lessons and French phrases for Steve. Each day he and Antoinette would keep their ends of the deal and teach the other for an hour before swapping. The foreign words and sentence structures came easier and easier for Steve the more he heard them from Antoinette. He still failed to converse with her or understand what she said when she spoke in French, but at least it was progress. In turn, Antoinette was now able to escape four different holds and had managed to get the "gun" once. He still wasn't certain she would be able to escape from a real hostage situation, but at least it was something.

At the end of a week and a half, Antoinette was so excited for her matinée that Steve couldn't get her to stay in one place for more than ten minutes at a time. If she wasn't spouting long and jumbled sentences in French to the open air or dancing in the middle of the living room, she was literally climbing up the walls in the hallway or pacing quickly from room to room. She reminded him of a hummingbird caught in a glass cage.

The morning of the matinée, she woke Steve at four thirty in the morning singing "What A Wonderful World" in French. He groaned and rolled off the couch, narrowly missing the coffee table with his forehead. A glance out the window told him that the sun hadn't yet risen and that the street was quiet. "If the sun's not up, then I don't have to be either," he grumbled before pulling his blanket off the couch and curling up there on the floor to go back to sleep.

His rest was brief when he was woken again at six when Antoinette tripped over him on her way to the kitchen, pacing again. She bounced back up and kept going, muttering to herself in French. He sat up and rubbed his face, knowing he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep.

"Can't you stay still?" he mumbled.

"Non, too much energy." She paced up and down the hallway before sitting on the end of the coffee table and popping up again.

"How much sleep did you get?" he asked again, getting to his feet and avoiding her arm as she performed a portion of her solo in the middle of the hallway.

"Eh, four hours?" she replied.

He stepped into the kitchen and poured himself some coffee before heading back to the living room. No sign of Antoinette. "Only four hours?"

"Oui," she answered from somewhere down the hallway.

At first he didn't see her due to the dim morning light, but when he looked up, she was eight feet off the ground with her arms and legs braced against the walls to hold herself up.

"Have you had anything to eat?" He wondered how she'd gotten up there to begin with. Then he realized that the span between the walls was about four and a half feet. It would be the perfect width for her to climb as long as she kept even pressure on all four limbs. As he thought this, one of her hands slipped and she ducked into a roll as she hit the floor. "You alright?" he asked with a small measure of concern. She wasn't getting up but appeared completely fine. She then began to laugh so hard her whole body shook until tears streamed out of her eyes and her giggles were broken by hiccups.

"Help?" she gasped between bouts of laughter. He was dumbfounded. She'd just climbed up eight feet to the ceiling and fallen, and now she was laughing. As he hesitated, she held her arms up to signal for help again. After setting his coffee down, Steve stepped forward with a chuckle and crossed his wrists to help her to her feet. Her long fingers wrapped around his hands as he pulled her up.

They cooked breakfast together and sat to eat before sharing the dish washing when they'd finished. As Steve dried the last plate, a question occurred to him that he wondered why he hadn't thought of earlier. "The other day, the glass that broke, how did you drop it?"