Chapter 2
I didn’t see Jean again.
It’s been an agonizing month. A hundred and thirty-two failed attempts to replicate the exact flavor that exploded across my tongue the moment he came down my throat.
I’ve taken notes. I’ve ruined entire batches of ganache trying to blend sea salt, milk powder, and a thousand other different things just to try and recreate what I labeled “sun-warmed innocence” on my flavor chart.
None of it tastes like him.
None of it tastes like that.
And I know it wasn’t just the moment, or my state of mind, or the thrill of being soaked in some farm boy’s semen. It was something fundamental in his chemistry, it was him. And I need to taste it again. I need it for my work.
But he doesn’t come back.
Instead, his boss does.
Gruff man with a wiry face, like a walnut that’s been dropped in a fire and rolled in the dust. Always has something under his nails. Never smiles. Three days after Jean, he showed up, slapped the side of the flour sack and said, “You owe me for last time.”
I nodded, waved him inside. “Right. That. It was my fault. Tell Jean not to worry. Lovely boy, truly. None of this was his fault. I was… Distracted.”
The man just grunted. Didn’t care.
Now every time he delivers something, I ask.
“How’s Jean?”
“Still working for the mill?”
“Where exactly is his family’s land?”
The answer’s always a grunt, or a shrug, or a damned look like I’m asking about a broken wheelbarrow instead of a radiant creature of gold, cream, and unspilled potential. The one with God in his eyes, and whose cock poured miracles.
It’s making me deranged.
Which is why today, after too much brooding and exactly zero drops of divine cum, I take a motorcar to Lyon.
The shops here still glitter with the stubborn elegance of pre-war pride. Brass balconies, polished windows. Art Deco is trying to climb over the bones of the old city like ivy, but the past won’t loosen its grip. I always liked things that resist.
My first stop is a little shop run by an old Catalan woman who stocks the specific cinnamon bark I prefer. Then, a spice importer near the river who lets me sniff anything I like if I flutter my lashes just so.
Now my basket swings from my arm, already heavy with improbable treasures—clove pods, rose vinegar, black garlic, even edible gold leaf I have absolutely no use for. I’m halfway down the Rue de la République when someone grabs my elbow.
I turn fast, ready to hiss, until I see him.
And my breath just… stops.
He’s taller than I remember. Or perhaps it’s the fault of that long, impeccably tailored coat. His jaw is sharper, his mouth a more devastating curve, and his hair—once full and always smelling of bergamot oil in school—is now cut severely, the way the idle rich wear it in Monaco.
But his eyes. Golden-brown, still piercing. Still knowing. Still...
“Hessou,” I breathe.
He smiles.
“Louis de Rochefort,” he says, stepping closer, like we’re not standing in the middle of a busy street. “Of all the gutters and gardens in France, I didn’t expect to find you in this one.”
I’m reeling.
The last time I saw him, we were seventeen and pretending we weren’t in love.
Philippe Hessou de La Tour d’Auvergne.
Prince Philippe Hessou de La Tour d’Auvergne, if you’re feeling particularly brave.
My first ruin.
He was the new boy at that dreadful private school outside Paris, the only Black student in a sea of pressed white collars and centuries-old, inbred bloodlines. His father was a Dahomean prince. His mother was a Parisian nobility.
Philippe was an aristocrat with “exotic” royal blood and more money than anyone could really count.
But he chose to be just Hessou.
And I—awkward, lonely, fourth-son-Louis—fell in lust with the way he moved.
He was dangerous even at fifteen, smoking stolen cigarettes behind the dormitory’s chapel.
I tasted him for the first time there, under the moonlight.
We kissed behind painting easels, traded poems soaked in lustful sweat, slept curled on the roof under cigarette stars.
And then he vanished. Berlin, Madrid, Cairo for a time. Letters, then silence.
And now he’s here, in Lyon, touching me.
God help me.
“You’re living in Lyon?” I ask, breathless.
“Passing through. Looking for inspiration.” A smirk. “And you?”
“I bought a bakery.”
He raises a perfect brow. “Of course you did.”
I want to kiss him.
I want to taste him again.
I want to hear his voice against my skin.
But most of all, I want to tell him about the boy with the clumsy hands and the sacred cum.
I want to ask if perfume and flavor are really so far apart.
If lust can be turned into a glaze, warm and wet and meant to melt on the tongue in seconds…
or if it’s better caught in a vial, sealed in glass, a scent that lingers on skin and linen long after the body is gone.
Or maybe both.
* * *
The front door slams, and the world dissolves into nothing but hands, mouths and heat.
Hessou’s place is exactly what I expected.
A big apartment near Place Bellecour, discreet from the outside—shuttered windows, ivy-choked gate—but inside, it’s unapologetic opulence.
Marble floors, black lacquered furniture, a whole room lined with shelves of oils and tinctures in thick-stoppered bottles, a velvet fainting couch thrown casually beneath an enormous window.
We don’t stop to look at any of it.
He drags me through the hall and throws open the door to a big bedroom, with a bed so wide I couldn’t touch the other side even if I rolled.
His coat hits the floor, and my waistcoat follows. He yanks my shirt open, sending the last buttons pinging into the dark, while I grip his shoulders and bite his lower lip.
“Still greedy,” he breathes against my mouth, and I groan in reply, shoving his suspenders off his shoulders, scraping my nails down his chest.
I want him. I want to consume him. His skin, warm and flawless.
His scent—mon Dieu, the scent of him—bergamot, sweat, and that ever-present curl of smoke still ghosting off his collarbone.
I bury my face in his neck and inhale. It makes my cock twitch, takes me back to many years before.
It makes me want to taste him where he smells strongest.
He laughs when I say that to him, biting his neck.
“Same filthy mouth,” he growls, and hurls me backward onto the bed.
I bounce, legs falling open, chest heaving.
He strips my pants away and my cock slaps back against my stomach, already painfully hard and leaking.
All I can do is moan as he crawls over me, shedding his pants as he goes, eyes burning.
He presses his nose to my chest, my ribs, my belly—breathing me in.
He’s always been like this. While I lick, he inhales.
While I want the flavor melting on my tongue, he wants to coat himself in scent.
“You smell sweet,” he murmurs, licking a hot stripe up my stomach. “Just like I remember. Messy mouth, sugar tongue, divine sweat.”
I groan into it, nails dragging against his nape.
“Yes. I remember you sniffed me half to death behind the sculpture hall.”
“I should’ve fucked you in that gallery.”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying.”
He pins my wrists to the bed, presses his weight against me, and kisses me hard. It’s not careful or nostalgic. It’s tongue and teeth and groaning into each other’s mouths. His cock slides against mine, and I rut up against him, gasping, moaning, biting his lips.
“More,” I moan. “I need more of you—”
“You’ll get it,” he says, and bites my neck.
That’s not enough.
“Get on your back,” I say, pushing him.
He laughs, low in his throat, but obeys. He stretches out across the bed, his cock thick and dark, curved toward his stomach, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in weeks.
I crawl between his legs slowly, flushed and open-mouthed, not even pretending I’m in control of myself.
“You have no idea how I missed this,” I murmur.
I lean in and press a kiss to the tip. I flick my tongue slowly across the slit, catching the pre-cum, and hum in pure appreciation. It’s a taste I’ve missed for years.
His thighs tense under my hands.
“You’re beautiful,” I murmur against his shaft, kissing along the side, dragging my mouth over the thick vein. “God, I missed this. Missed your taste.”
I lick him from root to tip, then take the head back into my mouth.
“You taste even better than I remembered. You have no idea.”
I move lower, nuzzling into the heat of his balls, kissing one, then the other, then sucking them into my mouth, slowly, wetly, letting my spit drip, my tongue roll. He hisses through his teeth and shifts his hips, offering more.
I lick back up his shaft in one long stroke, then close my lips around the tip again, kissing, sucking, breathing hard through my nose.
Then I sink.
The weight of him hits my tongue, and heat floods my mouth, my spine, my cock—everything responding to the stretch, the fullness, the way my lips strain to seal around his girth.
I groan loud and slide down farther, until the tip nudges the back of my throat.
I moan around it again, shaking, dizzy from how good it feels to have him there.
I missed this. This chaos. This stretch. This heat. The obscene mess we become the second our heartbeats sync.
There is no cleanliness purer than this kind of filth.
“God, Louis—” Hessou’s voice is hoarse. One of his hands fists the sheet, the other curls tight in my hair. “You’re still such a slut for this.”
I can’t answer because my mouth is full and my tongue is busy.
But I make a sound, because yes, yes, yes, I am.
And he knows it. He always knew it. So I keep sucking, mouth working without shame.
I want to choke on him. I want the slick weight of him hitting the back of my throat until my eyes sting and I forget my name.