Do you think we'll be in love forever?

We're back in Paris and it feels like being pulled out of a beautiful dream. I see tourists and lovers in the streets but they all remind me of how much I hate the Champs-Élysées and standing before Les Invalides in the wind and the velvety darkness at night.

Henry's calmer than before, a part of me thinks he's already given up. Elisa sends me a text saying Tom and Daisy have been arrested. "She looks surprisingly cute in handcuffs". I could tell him but decide not to.

On the first evening we return to La Coupole in Montparnasse, he drinks Talisker and asks me about everything insignificant he can think of. I look at him through the mist and I hold his hand softly in mine and it's only when I forget about the world around us that the time we spend together makes this much sense.

Because blue is how I feel on the inside

He's changed scents, downgrading his clothes but upgrading his perfume from Versace's Blue Jeans to Bleu de Chanel (EdP). He tells me he can't get us in to Milan Fashion Week but it's a cheap lie to keep us out of sight. "I always knew things would end this way" he sighs, "ever since...".

Maybe it's all in his head but the way he plays this game until there are no other options sends shivers down my spine and we're the slightly darker 21st century versions of Bonnie and Clyde. He turns toward me in bed, runs his sharp fingers through my tumbleweed hair.  "Anyway" he says, "I want you to see my mother".

So we drive north again and the pre-autumn sunlight drifts across the hillsides and the mountains like fingertips on naked skin. We stop for pastries and coffee at a run-down restaurant just east of Lausanne and he makes me promise to re-read Anna Karenina in time before the winter and the snow.

We made it out to the other side

We spend a few restful days in Milan, traces of clean Mediterranean air still infused in my lungs from the last deep breaths I took before we left. He uses a wide range of creative pseudonyms and refuses to stay more than one night in the same hotel, shopping for new clothes and accessories at H&M (this is what really frightens me).

He remembers my birthday through the temporary madness, we share a bottle of Vermentino di Sardegna at a quiet restaurant and he almost seems relaxed, the tensions in his body dissolve and the night skies are filled with silvery little stars. We walk arm in arm through the fashion quarter and Via della Spiga, he stops by the Cavalli store and talks passionately about his favorite leather jacket back in New York.

Later he fucks me slowly in a morning mist in the Montanelli gardens. "Your pussy tastes like summer rain" he says and I know he's been listening to too much Lana Del Rey but it's alright 'cause he says it like it's the only thing in the world that really matters.

Don't lose your nerve

I've had an hour to calm myself down now, posting this from my phone in a queen-sized hotel bed somewhere in northern Italy. Henry is anxiously looking out the window and in to the parking lot, the yellowish glow from the scattered streetlights makes his skin look a lot like paper.  

The events of this morning seem like an overture, the treacherously vibrating calm at the outskirts of a storm that's building its momentum. Daisy has left her passport out on the kitchen table, I open it and there's her picture next to a name she's never used. Two hours later he comes crashing in like the fall, "we have to go" he says but in to thin air as if he can't see me standing there frozen in the middle of the room.

We drive for hours, all he says to me is to stop texting. "They can track us, maybe, I don't know". A single image is stuck in my mind: that of Elisa dressed in flowingly snow-white chiffon, her hand stretched out as if to catch me and I touch her naked arm with my fingertips before he pushes me in to the car and drives away without ever looking back.