Free Consume Me by Kailin Gow Page B

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    “ Merci ,” she said as he arrived with two steaming cups of coffee and two mille feuilles .
    “My pleasure.”
    She took a sip of hot coffee.  “So where are you off to?”
    “Switzerland.”
    “You going to visit your family?”
    “Yeah.  Duty calls. I’ll be visiting one of our family farms there.”
    “Duty?”
    He chuckled. “My father tried to get out of his tractor too fast when he thought he’d run over the dog.  He hopped off that big tractor tire and twisted his ankle.  My mother called and asked me to come lend a hand for a few days.”
    “That’s so sweet of you, Henri.”
    “Timing is perfect.  I’m up to date with all of my assignments, and I had this incredible craving for my mom’s boeuf bourgignon .”  He drummed his fingers along the edge of his coffee cup.  “You left so fast the other time… and then you just cut classes without saying anything to anyone.”
    Tar chuckled. “I don’t think anyone else in the class really cared one way or the other.  You know, you're the only friend I have from the Institute.”
    “Well then, as your only friend from the Institute, can I ask how you’ve been?”
    “Great.  Just great.”
    “That’s a pretty lackluster ‘great’. Your sudden absence from class was explained with a family emergency back home.  Is that why you didn’t even say goodbye?”
    She didn’t want to lie to him, but she couldn’t very well tell him the truth about her falling out with Errol.  She nodded.  “My mother had a nasty fall and hurt her hip pretty bad.  She’s just now getting back on her feet.”  While it wasn’t the reason she’d returned to New York, it wasn’t a bald faced lie either.
    “Funny… I go to Switzerland to help my father and you went to the United States to help you mother.”
    She smiled and shrugged. “I guess for all the time they’ve tended to our scraped knees and cut fingers, it’s the least we can do.”
    He bit into his mille feuilles and looked thoughtfully at her.  “How are things with Errol?”
    Startled, Tar clumsily set her coffee cup down then tried to casually pick up her pastry.
    “I kind of couldn’t help but figure there was something going on between you two.  I mean, the way he just busted his way in at my place and… well, he pretty much made it clear that you belong to him… well, you know, that you're his girl… you know what I mean.”
    Tar smiled as Henri fumbled for the right words to describe her relationship with Errol.
    “I mean, I can understand he would want to keep you all to himself. If you were my girl, I would…” He looked sheepishly at her. “Anyway… and now, what brings you back to Paris?  I didn’t see you at the Institute.”
    “I had a few things to settle.”
    “And now you’re going off to…?”
    “Back to New York.  I hadn’t really planned to stay in Paris more than a few days.”  At least she didn’t have to lie about that.
    “You know I really missed you in class.  It wasn’t the same without you.  All the other students are so stuck up and pretentious, and all the girls, well… It’s just not the same.”
    “You're sweet, Henri. I appreciate that.  And believe me, I’ve missed you too. I really hate that I had to leave the Institute before finishing my classes.”
    “Any plans to come back to finish what you started?”
    “I’ll see.  Maybe I’ll have a few classes with you when I start again.”
    He shook his head. “Actually, I’ve already finished.”
    Her eyes popped open.  “How?  I still have almost a year to go before I finish.”
    “Like I said… when you left things weren’t the same.  I just decided I didn’t want to waste any time, so I took a few extra classes and now… well, I’m pretty much ready to go out into the world and wow them with my culinary knowledge.”
    “And I’m sure that’s exactly what you're going to do.  I have no doubt.”
    “But just because I’m not going to the Institute