Page 72 of My Best French Wedding

“No, likeLady and the Tramp, nudging a meatball back and forth with our noses while someone plays violin.”

“Are you calling me a tramp?”

“Uh, no. Obviously you’re Lady.”

“That’s a little reductive.”

“Fine. You can be the tramp. Happy now?”

“Ecstatic. Never better.”

The guide chose that moment to speak over the PA system in heavily accented English. “We are entering one of the longest cave systems in the region. You will be traveling more than one kilometer deep into the center of the cave.”

Hildy elbowed him. “How far is that? I’m too freaked out to do metric conversions.”

“Think of it like… a walk in the park,” Walter replied, evading the question.

“But what if the train breaks down? This thing is a relic.”

“Then we’ll walk out.”

She paused as if he’d said something so outrageous it defied belief. “In the dark?”

“We have our phones.”

“Until the battery dies. Maybe I should have had the drugs,” she muttered, as the train resumed its forward crawl.

“I missed that station at breakfast.”

“Like the shamans used to do back in the day. Get high and imagine they were visiting an alternate dimension with their trippy art. As opposed to being buried under tons of rock in the pitch blackness.”

“Want me to distract you?”

“Maybe,” she said following a wary silence. “What did you have in mind?”

“The offer of conversation is still on the table.”

“Is that the best you can do?”

“Unless you have a better idea?” They were practically invisible here in the back row, after all. He could be quiet if the occasion demanded.

“Do you see those lines?” their guide asked. The beam of a flashlight illuminated the stone wall. “Cave bears left those scratches with their claws. It’s like a map for them, to find their way back to the place where they spend each winter.” The pool of light panned down to the ground. “Regard the depression in the earth. That is left from a cave bear doing hibernation there.”

They passed a campground’s worth of prehistoric sleeping spots, beneath walls scored with deep vertical grooves that looked surprisingly fresh, as if the bears might return any day now.

“That’s what you did to me.” The thought traveled from Walter’s brain to his lips before he could censor himself.

“Flattened you with my huge ass?”

“Carved a permanent hollow.” He touched his chest, where the damage had been done. “A Hildy-shaped hole.” It seemed so clearto him now, that he’d never gotten over the impact of their first meeting.

“Are you drunk?”

He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see him. “No.”

“Then why would you say something like that?”

Because it’s dark, and we’re far away from everything we know, and I can’t stop thinking about kissing you, and I’m enough of a chump to convince myself our problems could be solved here and now, even though they’re littered like landmines across the last decade.