Colette's as lazy as I am. It's lovely. Somehow she's pranced across an ocean and would rather leisure about and hang out than do a whirlwind tour of all the gold-plated sites of an American's Paris.
(She's seen a lot of gold-plated sights.)
It took us until four in the afternoon to both be showered and dressed and decided on a relative direction and off we skipped to the Rodin museum, where she raced into the museum itself whilst I gloried in the gardens.
They're in full bloom, and anyone who came by and saw them with me in the dead of winter needs to see them in their insane wildness, carefully trimmed and sculpted and so terribly french, violet hues carefully arranged Marn-style, and fading to whites or set off by violent and yet unearthly pinks, tended to all hell and yet virulent and alive and exploding beyond the confines of the neatly cropped curves of the wandering paths.
We sat on the grass behind stone benches and stared across the pond at the sculpture that still melts something in the colder centre of my heart, belying such tender vulnerability that I yearn to be in the very midst of it.
I tried people watching the way Mr. Pyke had explained how, yet somehow the gaggles of spoiled american schoolgirls and their outrageously expensive clothes and teachers didn't evoke much more than "aughhh, let's move" and we did, and we wandered into the darker side of the gardens where the towering trees drew goosebumps from our bare shoulders and we strolled by great copper tributes to Rodin's mastery of the human arse.
Gods, he's good at bums. We may or may not have reached out to stroke a few.
Then, quietly, shyly, I showed her one of my favourites, a white chunk of marble amongst other chunks of marble, with two figures flowing smoothly from it.
A man, a great, large, looming man with great big shoulders and great big hands, large in his life despite the tiny size of the sculpture, curved ever so carefully about the most deliciously curled figure of a perfect woman with perfect curves and a perfect angelic sweetness, curled about her curves, curved about her curls, and planting a kiss, ever so softly, on her back.
No wonder I can't handle cheesy romantic movies. I've fallen for an entire other wistfullness.
Wandering down this street and then that one, following familiar cobbles and pointing out this gold-plated dome and that great stone chunk of impressiveness, we settled on a terasse overlooking the Seine and ate salmon and shrimp and drank bitter drinks and talked of yet another thousand things.
Then we just decided to head home. We grabbed some mousse de canard (like pate but so much richer) in a starkly plain off-yellow tin, some goat cheese and cherry tomatoes and bread and champagne
and sat, at my table in my kitchen on a friday evening,
reading gay, Buffy, fanfic smut while she painted the nails of my left hand a rosy sort of pink, to match the fluttering blue of my right hand.
Whilst I read the smut aloud, in my best theatrical voices, growling for this character, being all froufy and sardonic for that one, and popping up with my own insertions until we were both howling and pissing ourselves (though doubtfully due to my attempts at theatrics).
At one point I had to stop, the images of nipples evoked by the story and carried by my far too vivid brain left me with my eyes closed and lost amongst a storm of images.
Demented puppygods (inside joke) and Colette's growling technique and hearing strains of her play flute while I was in the shower hours previous, blowjob techniques and how far we can fit things in the back our throats.
We've pledged to be elementary school girlfriends, and talk forever of boys and drink champagne (I don't even like champagne) and revel in the height of emotion.
And now, we're going to go play cards.