24 Hours in Paris

Chapter Four

"Tell me," he said, huffing and puffing, "what kind of supergenes are you made of?"

She casually stretched her legs. "My genes are standard issue, but I hired a personal trainer a little while ago, to make sure I'd fit into my . . ." She trailed off and looked away.

"Fit into your what?"

"My jeans," she said quickly. "I bought a bunch of jeans last year, back when they were uhh . . . buy one, get two free."

"Wait a minute," he said, bent over and clutching his knees. "There's a place that was selling jeans for buy one, get two free? Isn't that illegal for women's fashion? Don't the markups make the clothes seem cool?" He had a sudden flashback to a second date in Soho, when a girl he'd met on Bumble had dragged him around shopping for a whole afternoon. He distinctly recalled her picking out a plain gray T-shirt that was somehow priced at seventy freaking dollars. The thought of that T-shirt and the stilted conversation made him shudder.

"I didn't buy the jeans at a typical women's clothing store," she explained, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

He finally caught his breath. "No? Out of the back of a van then?"

"A flea market."

Jake had a sneaking suspicion she was lying, but he didn't know why, and he didn't want to press it. "You've got to hand it to flea markets; they always have the best sales."

"Mmhmm; I love a good flea market deal."

Despite having given Mira an out, a part of him harbored a sick curiosity for seeing where her lies would go. And that was the part that won. "What happened then? You bought the jeans in a size too small, and then you needed a personal trainer so it wouldn't be a wasted purchase?"

"No." She frowned and muttered something under her breath. "What happened was . . . I got hooked on the cronuts they sell at that bakery on Spring Street, and the next thing I knew, I had like this"—she gestured to her hips—"dump-truck ass." She shook her head at the thought of this alleged memory. "I mean, I could've pulled it off, but for the jeans . . . it was a lot."

He stifled a laugh. "Right, kudos on the dramatic transformation."

Jake thought back to those times he'd encountered Mira, and he didn't recall her ever having a dump-truck ass. He certainly would've remembered a physical trait like that, which made it clear she was lying but he didn't know why, and he wasn't sure why he was curious.

Jake didn't have the energy to solve the dump-truck puzzle, so he settled for changing the subject. "Now where's this place we just have to try?"

She instantly relaxed. "It's just around the corner; c'mon."

*

Mira and Jake sat across from each other at a worn wooden table in a tiny restaurant, with paintings of waterfront sceneries lining the walls, and sunlight pouring in through the windows. There were only two other people in the dining room, which gave the place a familial and homey quality. He didn't mind it.

"This is probably the only place in Paris that has house-made cider," Mira said. "Which is cool, you know? Because it's not what you'd typically expect."

"And they also have the famous crêpes you were talking about, right?" He rubbed his stomach. "I could definitely use some of those."

"What's even cooler," she went on, "is that the best crêpes in Paris are somehow here, at the top of Paris, when the famous street of crêpe restaurants is literally at the bottom of the city."

"Famous street of crêpe restaurants? Is that a thing?"

"You better believe it's a thing."

"How did that even come about? A bunch of people just said 'yup, this is where we're making crêpes?'"