"Mademoiselle. Tooessoonobjette."
The words sent Marcia fumbling across the table for her French to English phrasebook. Already she could feel the blush spreading across her chubby pink cheeks-she convinced her parents to let her spend the summer before college backpacking across France in the blithe confidence that three years of middle school and three years of high school had given her a solid command of the language. But after only a week, she was finding out the hard way that the French she'd learned in the classroom was almost useless in the real world. People spoke quickly, they used slang, they mumbled and slurred and stammered and spoke in dialects. On a good day, with a very patient individual, Marcia could make out about one word in three.
This wasn't a good day. The tall Caucasian man with the piercing eyes and the silver, slicked-back hair slid into the booth next to her and placed his hand on hers, stilling her search for the dog-eared dictionary almost before it could begin. He cupped her chin in his hand confidently and tilted her head up to meet his gaze. "Raygardsmayeuze," he murmured in a calm, commanding voice, fixing her with an imperious stare and stroking her wrist smoothly and evenly as he spoke. "Raygardsmayeuzeaydaytond."
Marcia shook her head in bewilderment, looking helplessly up into his unforgiving gaze and stammering out, "T-tres desole, I... um, je, je ne comprehends-" Her tentative attempts at speech trailed off into silence as the stranger made a conjuror's pass with the hand that had been holding her chin, pressing a finger to her lips in a gesture that transcended language. She winced-more than a few people had expressed disdain for her halting, badly-accented French, but not many had gone so far as to literally shush her.
"Profond," the man said, his hand stroking Marcia's bare arm all the way up to the shoulder and back down to the wrist. "Profond, profond, profond." Marcia wanted to tell him that she didn't know what 'profond' meant, but at the same time interrupting his rich, mellifluous baritone with her stammering efforts at his native tongue seemed almost too embarrassing to contemplate. She settled for giving him a hesitant shrug that he totally and completely ignored.
She tried to look past him, to see if there was anyone in the little restaurant that she could flag down and ask for a translation, but the few patrons that she saw all seemed to be wrapped up in their own business. Not that she had time for more than a glance-the moment Marcia's gaze shifted away from the stranger's eyes, he cupped her chin again and drew her attention to his deep, penetrating stare once more. "Sangray," he growled, his hand moving her head up and down in a slow, lazy nod. "Sanponsay. Sanzyday."
He leaned in closer to her, not quite uncomfortably intimate but definitely close enough to emphasize the difference in their heights. Even sitting down, Marcia was probably a good three inches shorter than the stranger, and even with her head tilted back uncomfortably far, she found herself having to look up to keep her gaze locked onto his. It occurred to her that she didn't actually have to keep looking him in the eyes, but every time she tried to even so much as glance away, he gently but firmly directed her chin back in line with his dark, piercing stare.
"Plonjaydanzmeyeuze," he murmured softly, taking her wrist in his hand and beginning to swing her arm gently back and forth. "Plonjaydanzmongray." It made her muscles feel oddly loose and rubbery, as though he was shaking all the strength out of them and leaving her limp and passive in his grasp. Marcia opened her mouth to object, but the stranger simply pressed it closed again and Marcia found herself too distracted by the weird, tingling numbness that spread slowly through her hand and forearm to protest again.
"Pawploodugray," the man purred, his fingers stroking up and along her cheek soothingly. The constant juxtaposition between his overbearing, constant physicality and the sheer tenderness of his touch left Marcia feeling bewildered and off-balance; she didn't know how to react to anything he was doing. She'd fended off more than a few creeps in her first week in France-that part of the country's reputation, at least, held a little justification-but this didn't seem sexual, or at least not sexual in any way she was wired to recognize. He simply seemed to be asserting control over their interaction, and Marcia couldn't seem to find any compelling reason not to let him.
"Pawploodayponsay," he said, his voice rich and sensual in her ears even though she still couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. Marcia's brow furrowed in confusion, trying to summon up memories of stultifying classrooms and verb conjugation and endless vocabulary lists, but the stranger's soothing fingers stroked away the tension from her forehead and left her face as relaxed as her swinging, swaying arm. The numb sensation had spread all the way up to her shoulder now, almost as if the limb didn't even belong to her anymore.
"Pawploodaisyday," the man cooed sensuously, his fingers tracing a path down the bridge of Marcia's nose over and over again. Each time, he pulled his hand away in that same strange, abrupt conjuror's pass of a gesture, fluttering his digits in a way that made Marcia's eyes water with the effort of refocusing her gaze away from the stranger's imperious stare onto the motion between them. Each time, it got harder to remember exactly where she was supposed to be looking.
Supposed to be... Marcia suddenly realized how odd the phrase sounded in her head, how bizarre the whole situation truly was. Somehow she felt as though she was being directed, like each one of the gestures and touches and soft, soothing caresses was guiding her along to some unknown mental destination. She had a profound, acute awareness of just how much control she'd ceded to this total stranger in only a matter of minutes, balanced uncomfortably against a total absence of awareness of how to take it back.
