Scarlett and her Disastrous Summer [ H i a t u s ]

✿1✿ Change of Plans

Chapter One

Change of Plans

June 23

 

For as long as I could remember, I’ve always dreamed about the summer romance my mother had when she was seventeen. You see, she met dad while studying abroad in France—Lyon to be exact. Their meeting was somewhat serendipitous.

They met on July 8, 1990. My dad was nineteen and worked at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon during that summer, and the thing was, he wasn’t supposed to be at work that day, because he had something planned with his then-girlfriend. But his manager practically begged him to fill in for one of his coworkers and he reluctantly agreed.

“Mais c’était une bonne chose que j’ai convenu!” my dad had told me. But it was a good thing I agreed.

“Pourquoi?” I had asked him. Why?

“Parce que j’ai rencontré ta mère.” Because I met your mother.

Even through my ten year old mind, I thought that what my dad said was really sweet.

When my mom first saw him, she described him as an “irate looking douchebag who glared at everyone that went by him.” He was leaning against the wall, doing his job of making sure that no one tried to steal the Virgin and Child with Four Angels painting when my mom had accidentally tripped over his feet.

Their moment went something like this:

“Enfoiré,” my dad muttered, as he caught hold of my mom’s arm.

“Excuse me?” she said, blushing. “I-I mean: desolée, excusez-moi?”

My dad helped her up and my mom ran a few fingers through her hazel-colored hair, in an attempt to fix it.

“Vous êtes américain?”

“Oui. Desolée. Je suis très…très…” My mom looked up and saw my dad for the first time. Suddenly, her brain froze. Just like that. Or at least how she described it to me.

She said dad froze, too. They made eye contact with each other. She said it felt like a million years before he finally averted his eyes. She said he looked like a tomato. A very hot tomato.

You see, here’s how my mom described dad, and I quote: “He was hot. Like Hercules hot. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His voice was hot, too. He sounded like Brad Pitt…except maybe sexier. His eyes were cute, also. Very deep brown.”

After that encounter, my dad asked my mom where she was staying for the summer. My mom gave him the address of the dorm she was temporarily living in and that’s where their relationship began. At first, things were great. She’d always hang out with him on the weekends, since that was the only time when school wasn’t in session. On their second get-together, dad kissed her for the first time. On their third get-together, they made out in the backseat of his car. However, six meetings later, mom discovered he had a girlfriend and she broke it off with him, which completely devastated my dad (not to mention my mom as well).

She cried for the next week or so, much to her best friend’s annoyance. My mom said dad was persistant in trying to get her back. After breaking up with his girlfriend of four years, he sent her letters almost every day, begging for forgiveness. He even wrote a few poems proclaiming his love for her (classic, huh?), but my mom ignored them all because she felt betrayed.

On the day before she had to leave for home, she finally gave in when she encountered dad outside of her dorm. She said she lost her virginity to him that day (to which I said, “Ew! TMI mom! I don’t want to know about that!”).