She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 136

(Sonia)

Paris is a scam.

I’ve only been here a few days and I’ve already figured it out.

It’s supposed to be this great romantic city, but it sucks.

The light is grey.

The food portions are tiny.

Every restaurant expects you to have made a reservation in 1987.

The men on the street don’t look at me the way men in Los Angeles look at me.

When they do notice me it’s the wrong way, like they’re examining a fruit they’re not sure is ripe enough.

All the women are so ridiculously well dressed that I don’t even stand out there.

I’m almost sure someone called me tacky yesterday. If my French was better I would totally have confronted them.

The apartment Hendrik found me is in the Marais.

He described it as charming.

Apparently I’m not so great at English either, because it is most certainly not what I would picture when someone says a place is charming.

The unit is on the fourth floor of a building with no lift and a staircase apparently designed for a smaller species of human.

The steps are so close together my calves are screaming by the time I reach my front door.

Not to mention how sweaty and gross I am by that time.

The kitchen is the size of a coffin.

The hot water arrives sometimes, when it feels like it.

The window looks out onto another window, in which a woman has been smoking in the same blue dressing gown every morning since I arrived.

It’s absolutely awful.

And there’s no air-conditioning.

Apparently everyone in Europe just puts up with the weather like neanderthals.

I refresh my phone.

Still nothing.

I’ve been anxiously refreshing my phone every twenty minutes since my arrival.

Expecting the worst, while simultaneously praying someone would just reach out and make contact.

Notice that I’m gone at the very least.

Nathanial hasn’t called.

My mother hasn’t called.

Chase hasn’t called. In spite of the fact that I know Natasha’s being a bitch.

There’s a cool, terrible silence at the other end of every channel I have.

I open I*******m.

I close I*******m.

I open it again, because I can’t help myself.

I scroll past three girls I went to school with who are doing better than me and one girl who’s doing worse.

She got knocked up by some nobody and looks absolutely haggard.

Which provides exactly forty seconds of relief before the algorithm punishes me with a photograph of Natasha leaving a building in a coat I want.

I close I*******m for real this time.

The art school is fine.

It’s the only part of this I don’t have to lie about.

It’s a small atelier off the Place des Vosges.

The teacher is a French woman, which isn’t ideal.

An affair with a handsome French artist may have cheered me up a little.

What has come as a shock is that I’m not bad at the still-life work.

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