It’s over! Emma thought when she bolted from the bistro. She’d taken her shot at a relationship with Cyril and missed the mark.

He had rejected her as soon as he found out who she was.

He must despise me.

An elderly woman stopped and touched her arm, a mix of concern and pity in her eyes. “Are you all right?”

Emma wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and managed a lopsided smile. “I’m fine, thank you.”

Choking back a sob, she lowered her head and scurried down the street. She marched for a good half hour, her mind vacant and her gaze fixed to the ground. When she finally looked up, she was already on rue du Louvre. The Seine would be no more than ten minutes away. Relieved to have found a tiny purpose, Emma crossed rue de Rivoli and hurried to the waterfront. She needed to sit down somewhere by the river and contemplate its steady flow. It would calm her, dull the crushing pain in her chest to an endurable soreness.

It always did.

Emma picked one of the roomy stone benches on the Tuileries Quay not far from her favorite bridge, Pont des Arts, kicked off her sandals, and hugged her knees to her chest. She watched the breeze ruffle the river’s surface and the quaint péniche barges float by. Barge spotting had been one of her favorite pastimes since she was a kid. She had missed that most about Paris during her self-imposed Chinese exile.

Three years ago, when Geraldine and Cyril got back together, Emma was twenty, a student at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and still a virgin. As the couple’s relationship deepened, being around them became too hard, so she resolved to leave Paris. The ideal solution was to find an exchange program that would let her spend a year abroad before she’d return and finish her studies.

Of course, seeing how long she’d been in love with Cyril, a year wasn’t guaranteed to solve her problem. But it was a long time. Who knew what could happen in a year?

She applied to a bunch of arts schools and fine arts departments, and the first one to admit her was the Sichuan University in Chengdu. She looked it up. The province of Sichuan boasted spicy Tibetan food, a peaceful coexistence of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and giant pandas. Its capital Chengdu was a smallish city for Chinese standards, even though it was the size of Paris and other European metropolises. Dynamic, unpretentious, and open, Chengdu sounded like a fun place to be. It was also very, very far from home.

She didn’t wait to hear from the other schools.

In Chengdu, Emma met Manu, a quiet Frenchman studying Buddhist philosophy in one of the local monasteries. She also hooked up with Lino, a dashing fellow art student from Italy. Like her, Lino had come to China with a knowledge of Mandarin that boiled down to ni hao and xiexie. They attended after-school language classes every weekday and waited tables at the same high-end pizzeria off Jinli Street in the evenings. On Saturday nights, they went clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong, and on their free Sundays, they scoured the city’s flea markets in search of bizarre objects.

Two months into their friendship, Lino rid Emma of her virginity. He had been gentle and considerate—the almost perfect deflowering a woman could have.

When the man of her dreams wasn’t scrambling for the honor.

“Be careful not to fall in love with me,” Lino had warned her the morning after.

“You’re as safe as if I were gay,” Emma said. “This was just a one-off never to be repeated.”

He gave her a funny look that was both surprised and a little hurt. “Was I that bad?”

“No! No. You did everything right, just like it’s done in books and movies. It must be me.” Emma held her palms up as though to say, What can you do? “I guess I’m just not a sexual being.”

“Shit happens,” he said, as the last traces of hurt vanished from his eyes.

In the weeks that followed, Emma’s mind obliterated the details of that night, only retaining a diffuse sense of satisfaction that a long-delayed chore was finally over and done with.

By Christmas, which she celebrated in Chengdu with Manu, Lino and a few other friends who couldn’t afford a round trip to Europe, she had nearly convinced herself that the story she’d fed Lino was true. Her love for Cyril must have been no more than a platonic admiration for his talent. She didn’t fancy anyone. After all, even a first-class hottie like Lino hadn’t managed to stir any kind of longing in her. From there, it wasn’t so farfetched to conceive that she was, indeed, an asexual woman with no need for a boyfriend or even a fuck buddy.

When she returned to France, just in time for the start of her final school year, she was certain the libido-free persona she’d fabricated was her true self.

Until she saw Cyril again at her homecoming party.

He greeted her with a bear hug. “Welcome back, Boney Em.”

“Thanks,” she breathed, her head spinning from the caress of his velvety baritone, his intoxicating male scent, and the snug haven of his strong arms around her.

She nearly collapsed to the floor when he released her, stunned by the intensity of her reaction. Luckily, others stepped forward to hug her, providing the necessary props for her body and time for her senses to regroup.

The rest of the party was a haze, dominated by dizziness and regret. It had been a huge mistake to come back to France. She should’ve stayed in China—and to hell with finishing her fancy school and getting the degree.

Emma rubbed her forehead as if to drive away those memories and tried to focus on the river again. But her mind refused to obey this time, disregarding even the most picturesque barges that passed by. Some critical pathway in her brain got stuck on the same refrain as at that disastrous party two years ago.

I should’ve stayed in China. I shouldn’t have come back.