Chicken Skin – Chapter XI

The month of August flied away. Christine and Antoine spent their days working and their nights together. Apart from the call Antoine gave to his wife each day, he and Christine were in full possession of their whole liberty.

Benjamin had gone for a vacation. He was visiting an uncle who had settled in the United States of America for a ten years or so. He was keeping there till the end of September. Christine who couldn’t help feeling guilt when thinking about him, experienced a certain relief due to his remoteness. She kept aware that the situation was perfectly momentary. Benjamin would come back, and she would have to make a decision. She was thinking that in one month time, she would have set herself sufficiently, that in September she would be ready to take drastic action to fix a situation that she was beginning to perceive as totally unbearable. She didn’t like to conceal, nor did she like to lie.

Since the very beginning of their affair, she had been in love with Antoine. She just had lacked to be sure that Antoine wanted to commit himself with her in a lasting and firm way. He just had a single word to say. By the by, she felt he was about to do it. That was surely by then only a matter of days.

That was when she would find the strength and the energy to talk to Benjamin, sparing him at the same time: Christine didn’t want at all to lose a friend for who she had a deep affection.

While waiting for Antoine to decide himself, Christine was enjoying his presence and their solitude. She was simply living on cloud nine. Putting aside the some issues they could have to do with at work, everything single thing seemed perfect to her.

They almost didn’t let one another out of their sight during the whole day. Antoine who always had been very attentive to Christine, pleasant and comrade, had become tender and loving, almost in love. However, Christine felt he was still holding himself back from committing himself further in their relation.

She was clever enough to understand that his reservations were not at all against her, that their only reason was the sensitive situation in which Antoine was finding himself. Up to then, he only had relationships with no future. That way she was saving her own amour-propre that she knew was vulnerable and prompt in being wounded. Consequently her relations with Antoine were gentle and confident.

The leisure of the life they led together was far beyond the hopes she had entertained since Antoine had offered her to spend the month of August with him. Except at the weekends when he reached his family on the Côte d’Azur, Antoine was spending all his spare time with Isabelle. They had all their nights together, some times at her place, the other times at his place. When they were going to Antoine’s, they did their utmost not to be noticed by any tactless neighbor. To that end, they arrived late, and one after the other.

Hoping not to have to finally do it, Antoine had postponed the time to speak to Christine about the aggravation that the fact she had a boyfriend caused to him. He then began to see things from another point of view. He was going to approach the question some other way. Talking to Christine about his desire and will to install her lastingly in his life would be enough: she then would take things in hand off his own bat, she would inevitably understand, without further explanation from his part, that he wasn’t the type to share a woman for very long. That was getting him closer to all the other men: he was unable to accept from the part of a woman what he wouldn’t have admitted that anybody, even less coming from a representative of the so-called weaker sex, criticize with him.