Chapter 7
We didn’t stop at the oysters.
The afternoon became golden in the gluttonous, bourgeois way only Lyon can afford. From silken cravats to imported leather shoes, we dragged Jean through every damn shop that dared open its doors to us.
He didn’t say much, but he touched things. Let his fingers trail over lapels and spines of books he didn’t know anything about. I liked watching him look.
We bought everything.
Scarves. Cigarette cases. A ridiculous enamel cufflink set shaped like miniature grapes. We filled bags with things Jean couldn’t pronounce. I ordered cigars we wouldn’t smoke. Hessou bought two bottles of absinthe from a man with a glass eye.
Now the night comes down around us with a honeyed quiet that only happens after too much money has been spent. The motorcar pulls into Hessou’s private driveway, the chauffeur paid too well to comment on three men stumbling through the door like lust-drunk dogs.
The moment the door closes, Jean kisses me—clumsy, hot, hungry—and I push him against the wall. Hessou laughs, hands already at his own shirt, and says, “Well, I suppose we’re skipping dinner.”
We don’t make it to bed. Jean drops to his knees like he’s been doing this for years. He hasn’t, of course. He’s still awkward. Still messy. Still the boy who ran away after coming inside my mouth.
But now his mouth is desperate while mouthing over the hardness in my pants. Now he moans while doing that, licking and making a wet mess. Now he looks up like I hung the moon and offered it to him to lick the sugar off it.
Hessou mouths at my neck from behind, one hand stroking Jean’s thick hair, the other unfastening my pants.
“Greedy little thing,” Hessou says. “I can’t believe he used to flinch when I looked at him.”
Jean groans, mouth full of me now.
We fall apart and come back together a dozen times—in the hallway, in the living room, tangled in silken sheets with teeth marks blooming down our hips.
At one point, I sit on the cold tile of the bathroom while Hessou feeds Jean bits of ripe fig dipped in liquor, and I jerk off just watching their mouths.
We don’t sleep until the horizon bleeds pale blue.
* * *
We wake in a tangle of limbs and blankets. Jean’s hair is a mess, and I bite his shoulder just to hear him moan. Hessou drags him into the shower. I hear laughter, so I decide to follow the scent of skin and soap.
Today we buy art books, exotic fruits, and more shoes Jean insists he doesn’t need. He protests, but he tries on every single pair. Naturally, he loves the ones I hate. I pretend to sulk. He kisses me in secret. I forget what we were arguing about.
* * *
By the third night, Hessou whispers in my ear while Jean is distracted with a jar of candied violets.
“We should take him somewhere to drink.”
“Jazz club?”
“No. Our kind of place.”
I smile.
Jean had barely caught his breath from the last days, and now we are already leading him by the hand down narrow alleys that rarely appear on the maps.
The streets narrow as we walk. Not abruptly. It’s a gradual narrowing, where the buildings start leaning toward each other, the lamps thin out, and the old stones rise unevenly under our soles, as if we’re being funneled somewhere the city respectable people pretend not to know.
Jean walks between us. He’s cleaned up beautifully in his new clothes, freshly shaven, a touch of cologne at his throat—a bright citrus-and-herb water Hessou composed just for him.
Yet I can feel the tension in his shoulders.
The way his gaze skims the gaps between buildings like he expects something to lurch out.
“You said we were going to a bar,” he mutters. “This… doesn’t look like where people drink.”
Hessou chuckles. “It’s where the beautiful people come to drink.”
I glance at the side of Jean’s neck. He’s flushed. Whether from the wine at dinner or the thrill of being led somewhere he shouldn’t, I can’t tell.
“Places like this don’t have signs,” I say, looping my arm through his. “You only reach them when someone who belongs brings you inside.”
Jean swallows.
“Is it… forbidden?” he asks, voice hushed, like he’s afraid to be overheard.
Hessou smiles. “No.”
I brush a kiss against Jean’s cheek.
“Sodomy stopped being a crime in France long before our grandparents were born, Jean. You’re not going to prison just for being here.”
“But you could lose your job,” Hessou adds. “Whispers could follow you. A man in a soutane, committing sins under it, could damn you to hell. But forbidden? No.”
Jean’s throat bobs as he swallows again, this time with more weight behind it. His grip on my arm tightens slightly.
“Don’t worry, chéri,” Hessou says, “when we take you to Paris, you’ll see men like us on every street.”
I laugh under my breath. “In Paris, he’d have three admirers offering him a cigarette before he crossed a boulevard. I’m not sure if I want to take him to Paris anymore.”
Jean smiles. “I won’t accept it.”
God, I want to devour him.
We take a turn that leads us down a passage barely wide enough for three. The smell changes—more tobacco, metal, a faint trace of piss and lavender. There’s a door ahead, made of thick wood with an iron knocker shaped like a lion’s head.
Hessou knocks. Three beats, then two.
The door opens to a man in suspenders with a thin mustache. He nods, and we slip inside.
The hallway is dark, red paper lanterns bobbing overhead, and jazz oozing from somewhere deep below—warped notes rising through the floorboards. We descend a short staircase and the smell of smoke and sweat hits all at once, wrapped in clove, booze, and the perfume of men.
Jean hesitates on the last step.
I squeeze his hand. “We’re here.”
The room opens like a dream half-smoked. Low tables, velvet curtains, cigars, gloved hands around glasses of brandy, laughter from every side. A man presses a kiss to another man’s wrist in the corner. Another runs his hand slowly over the thigh of a man stretched across a chaise.
Jean stares. Not shocked—not that much, at least—but stunned, like a boy walking into a cathedral built just for sins he never knew had altars.
Hessou leans in and murmurs, “Like I said, this is Lyon. Just wait until Paris.”
And that’s to say something, because men here are not just men.
They are silk and sparkle, lacquered nails holding cigarette holders, rouge on cheekbones, mouths painted the color of crushed fruit.
Some wear top hats with nothing else but stockings.
Others are dressed to the nines in tailored suits and shiny shoes.
And in one corner, a man with false breasts pushed high in a corset flirts with a sailor.
Jean watches as if he’s trying to memorize every figure at once, eyes darting from table to table, taking in every corner of the room.
We move toward the back, to a booth sunk in a pocket of shadow. Hessou slides in first, one arm stretching along the backrest. I take the middle. Jean hesitates, then sits beside me, too stiff and too aware of the closeness.
A waiter appears before anyone can speak, glitter dusting his cheekbones, and sets down a small lamp that glows red.
“Three absinthes,” Hessou says. “Proper ones. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
The waiter only grins. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
As he disappears into the low haze of smoke and perfume, Jean leans in.
“They’re all... like us?”
“Here, yes,” I whisper. “Here, we are the norm.”
He turns back toward the room. Two men sway in the far corner, slow-dancing to music coming from a gramophone behind the bar. One spins the other, and they both laugh. No one stares.
When the absinthe arrives, I show Jean how to prepare it—the spoon, the sugar cube, the slow drip of water turning the green to a pale cloud. His hands tremble slightly as he tries it, and I steady them with mine.
“Will this make me see things too?” he asks, voice hushed.
Hessou chuckles behind his glass. “If we’re lucky.”
We drink slowly. Jean winces, swallows, coughs once, then lifts the glass again.
The second glass goes down faster. His body loosens—shoulders dropping, collar open at the throat, legs spreading under the table just a little.
The metamorphosis is something fascinating to see.
Laughter rises from a corner. Someone starts singing—off-key and bold—and a man in a feather boa pulls two others in pinstripes into a clumsy waltz that sends a chair skidding. No one stops them.
Jean leans into me. His head brushes my shoulder, and when he speaks, I can barely hear him through the music.
“I didn’t know this existed.”
“It does,” I say, stroking his thigh beneath the table. “And it belongs to you now.”
Hessou smiles over the rim of his glass. “Welcome to the velvet below, mon c?ur. You’re not in the fields anymore.”
The third glass tilts the room. The edges of Jean’s shoulders waver, then settle again under the red glow.
Everything shines now—skin, lips, buttons catching the lamp-light.
The song has changed tempo; now it’s a slow, slinky jazz number that winds itself around your ankles and pulls you onto the floor whether you mean to go or not.
Hessou has unbuttoned his shirt halfway down, and his skin gleams like lacquer in the lamp-glow.
He sits sprawled and unconcerned, his fingers tracing lazy circles on the back of my neck.
Jean, pressed to my other side, keeps blinking like he’s dreaming with his eyes open.
His cheeks are flushed all the way to his ears.
His hands shift without rest—on the table, on his lap, then brushing my leg again and again until I catch one and place it on my thigh.
“There. That belongs to you.”
He grins at me like I’ve handed him a prize pig at a fair. Then he leans in, head turned just slightly toward me.
“I feel strange.”
“Good strange or bad strange?”
He tilts his head, eyes narrowed in thought, pupils wide.
“Like… everything’s floating. Like I could fall sideways and never stop.”
“That’s the green fairy.”
“She’s fond of you,” Hessou says, amused.
Jean laughs for the first time all night. A warm, flushed sound from deep in his chest.