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Chapter One: and when the thrush sings in your wood unknowing you may meet another stranger sweetYou came to my house yesterday to deliver some flowers to my sister from Hugo Bisset, the butcher's son, and finally, we were properly introduced. Your voice, which still washes over me as if a tide, was captivating and I fear that I was too honest when my eyes dragged over your body and then, settling on your face, were shy.
But you were charming; your Americanisms, which still haven’t gone, though perhaps they are diluted, suited mine and I felt as if we could just walk out beneath the sky and the endless dream of June and talk. Totally candid.Today, I wonder if I’ll see you browsing the poetry aisle at work, for it’s Sunday and you haven’t been in for a few weeks, now.When I get to work, Louis grins and holds up Il Duro and I frown;“This came in today; Lawrence,” he says.“What of it?” I ask, hardly more curious than a bored schoolchild being chastised by his schoolmaster.“Guess who sent for it?”And then I know. How thick, I think, and Louis hands it to me, saying something about the inventory, but already I am too preoccupied. If he were shot right then and there, still I wouldn’t have noticed.By noon, you still haven’t shown up and I go to Louis, who is still pottering about in the back to ask him if he’d even bothered to call you with a reminder.“Of course I’ve called,” he says, “but which self-respecting student does anything before noon?”“Me.”Louis looks at me, and I am unsure if he is smiling or smirking when he says; “you lost all self-respect when you started crushing on Hammer, don’t you go pretending otherwise,”And so I chuckle, and so I wait; and so I jerk my head up every time the door opens and the brass bell, old and rustic, goes ding! And then, when the clock on the wall strikes three, you come in all golden and masculine, like nothing I’ve ever known, and I smile because to do anything else would be disingenuous.“Hey, Timmy,” you greet when you come to the counter. You are only twenty-one, but I can see that your chest is covered in hair from where you’ve unbuttoned your blue shirt just a little, and I know that the redness of my cheeks must very well be noticeable. You are kind enough to ignore it.“Hi, Armie. You here for Il Duro?” as if I need ask; as if I haven’t been waiting since nine o’clock this morning to say that (as if you don’t know that I have been waiting).You just smile; “yeah. But also, I was hoping you could order something else in. I came in on Friday to see if you had it, but Louis said you didn’t,”“What as the title?” I question, but really I am thinking how dare you come in on Friday when I’m not here. How dare you touch books and read blurbs and talk to Louis and Julie, the girl on the shift who’s there when I’m not. How dare you exist in this space when I do not; how dare you let me believe that you only came in on Sundays. How dare you shatter my imagination, which likes to think you come in on a Sunday because you know I’ll be here. How dare you.And even if this is silly, I am jealous of all of the people who get to see you when I do not.“Because You Died, by Vera Brittain*,” you answer.I order it. Do I know when it will be here? Probably Wednesday. You thank me, add Timothée at the end, with a little flourish, and Louis tickles me once you’re out the door, calls me le renard**.“What?”“He’s your prince, Timo. You want him to tame you,” Louis explains, face screwed up for trying not to laugh.“That’s stupid,” I scold, “you’re stupid.”It doesn’t even really make sense, but if you wanted to run your hands through my hair, I wouldn’t object.-On Thursday, I am at the ice cream parlour, waiting in line, when you come in; Esther, Louis’ sister, and Victoire are with you, too, and when you see me, the three of you come to stand beside me.“Timmy,” you clap my shoulder, “I got the book. It’s a lovely edition; Brittain writes so beautifully, too, we should go over it sometime,”“Oh no, Armie, don’t. The poor boy,” Esther groans, shaking her head.“He’ll go off on one for hours; a proper lecturer, I’ll tell you,” Victoire adds, and I want to tell her that I don’t mind, but suddenly I feel so very small standing by your pretty, female friends. Neither of which are two years younger than you; both of which are smart and have smooth skin and smell like honey and good quality perfume. Neither of which are boys.“How rude!” you huff, and then you smile “don’t feel like you have to say yes, Tim. The girls can attest to how boring I can be,” you look so insecure for a moment, though we both know that Esther and Victoire are just teasing; that they love you very much, and I say, quieter than a mouse:“I’d like that. But you’ll have to teach me the basics, I’m not much of a poetry guy,”Your face is like the sun breaking out across the world at the start of a new day; you ask, “what kind of guy are you?”“Novels. But I don’t dislike poetry at all; I’ve just never spent enough time with it to really love it, y’know?” I feel silly; like I’m rambling now, but you just grin; tell me that you’ll pick out the most magical stuff to go over. You tell me that you’re excited.Suddenly, we’re at the front of the queue; a queue I had almost forgotten all about.“What are you getting?” you ask, and I want to remind you that cutting in line is rude, but I don’t.“Pistachio,” I answer.You order for all four of us, pay, too. I open my mouth in protest but Esther grabs my arm;“He won’t let you. But you can convince him to let you pay next time, and he’ll stick to his word. It’s a hang-up from his mother, back in the States? She’s still pretty old fashioned, can’t be seen paying for anything if there’s a man within two inches of her. Armie’s second-time rule is his way of rebellion,”I nod. Perhaps, a little confused.We sit, all four of us, on the patio outside and I like the way you spread yourself out in your chair: not obnoxious, but because you have to—your legs are just so long. I like the way the breeze dances with your hair, too; the way the sun flirts with it.“So Timmy,” you say, licking at the streams of ice-cream that run down your cone, pooling in the space between your thumb and forefinger. “What poetry have you read?”“Shakespeare,” I say, “a bit of Dickinson. The Romantics. Frost. A lot of Prevert in school. That’s about it, really,”“All good,” you reply, still licking your cone, and I feel less stupid than I feared I would.After a little while, Victoire announces that she’s due at her aunt's rehearsal dinner in a couple of hours, so we call it a day. You and Esther need to help her get ready, she says, would I like to come along? I decline; I’m helping my dad with dinner and still haven’t picked up the groceries I promised I would but next time.After they hug me goodbye and kiss my cheeks, you do the same and linger for a moment, gripping my shoulder, “Sunday: what time does your shift finish?” you ask.“Five,” I reply, brows furrowed a little; stomach somersaulting with hopeful anticipation.“Great. I’ll see you then. Bring a pencil and a notebook, if you like.” you squeeze my shoulder and let your fingers trail across the exposed skin at my clavicle, where my t-shirt hangs loose.Later, when you’re gone, I think that I’ve never quite liked three people as much in all my life. I think that this Summer might be better than the last; that maybe I’m in love.-On Friday, I see you very briefly as I'm leaving the stationary shop. You’re headed down the street that I’m headed up, so you smile and as we pass each other, you grip my hips and kiss my temple;“See you on Sunday,” you say and then you’re gone.I don’t leave the house on Saturday; I have a Summer assignment and I’ve yet to start it, so I pick a spot in my garden, near the lavender bush where the bees are working and humming and plump, and I sit down. I write; I think about you; I spill lemonade all over my shorts and the first page of my draft, and as I curse and watch the ink leak and smudge, I think about how I’ll have to change and later, when I’m pulling off my pants—standing naked in front of my mirror—I imagine you here. Circling my nipples with your fingers as you stand behind me; your lips at my hairline, your erection hot against my arse, and all at once, I’m flustered and red.What the fuck is wrong with me? I spin on my heel and collapse on my bed—a melodramatic loser that dozes to the caress of your fingers, which aren’t your fingers at all, but rather the breeze that slips into my room, like a forbidden lover (as if my liberal parents would ever allow such a notion to exist in their house).Sunday, at four fifty-five, you stand by the door and smile at me, as I put the last of Bear Pond on the photography shelf, and then I call out to Louis—“I’m leaving,” I shout, and then you’re opening the door for me and I’m sad that I’ll have to disappoint you.Earlier this morning, as I walked into work, up the dusty track into town and then along the main road, where I took a left at the formagerie, turning onto the square, which was where the bookshop sat, I had time to think. I could not face you that afternoon. Not after I had masturbated furiously to the recollection of your cock lying flaccid against your thing, barely hidden by your loose shorts; surely you’d know. Surely it would be written across my forehead. So, I decided that I was going to cancel. I wasn’t going to face the mortification of your piercing gaze, which would split my skull and probe my brain, dragging up my carnal desire.Standing outside the bookshop, I halted and you did too, turning to see what it was that was holding us up. I could tell that you were suddenly regretting the unabashed eagerness of your expression as you waited for me to finish work by the door. I hated that I was making you insecure.“Tim?” you ask, fingers on your left hand stretching out and then curling back and then stretching out again.“I can’t do today!” I hurry out, and all it takes for me to feel like a prick is the stilling of your hand.“Oh,” you reply, “that’s ok. Mind if I ask why?” I don’t answer for a moment, although I planned this all out on the way into work, and each slow minute reeks with my dishonesty and your disappointment.“I—um, I have to help my mum with something. At home,” suddenly that excuse feels as flimsy as damp cardboard.“Oh right, well we can always rearrange if you want? When are you free?” I love your earnestness; I love your pretty eyes that tell me that you suspect I’m lying, but that you won’t push me for the truth, not unless I offer it. I love that you care for me, even though we’ve hardly spent time together.However, caught up in my need to be close to you, and my unchallenged guilt, I ask you if you’d like to come for dinner; maybe we could do the poetry some other time? You beam at me, nod, of course—you’d love to come—wait, don’t I need to call my mum? ask her if it’s alright first? Yes. Une minute. I call my home from the bookshop phone and wait for her to pick up. It’s a Sunday, so if mum isn’t in, then papa probably will be, and on the fourth ring ,there’s an answer.“Well, it’s fine, but we’ll need to pick up some leek for the soup,” I say, coming back out from the shop. You’re leaning against the wall, eyes gently closed.“Alright-y!” you exclaim, and I think how American! But I don’t say anything, because I’m American too, and now my thoughts are skewed because your arm has wrapped itself around my shoulders and you’re stirring me towards the greengrocers.“Is soup ok?” I ask, after we’ve paid, and I’m leading you back down the road. You laugh, shake your head at me—“—soup’s fine,” you say.-The dusty road that leads to my house seems so romantic when you’re there beside me, wheeling your bike along, which is white and red, and telling me about what it’s like in Summertime at your house, where Apolline Comtois brought you up from the age of seven. She’s the best florist in town.I want to ask you about why you live with a widowed florist in France, instead of sunny California with your own mother, but I don’t. You are so serene; so beautiful as you amble here beside me, that to drag that up from the depths of your memory, seems to be too risky.My house comes into view around the little bend in the road, and when I’m opening the door, your bike discarded in the front garden, I tell you to mind your head right as you knock it on the beam.“Sorry,” I giggle, and you grab my shoulders and turn me around—“Give me a tour,” you request, and I’m still laughing because now you’re tickling my sides, and we’re close, close, close, and then, finally, you stop and I pant,“Upstairs first?”“Sounds like a plan,” you answer.My room, much to my dismay, is a little messy. I’d forgotten. Or, rather, I’d remembered when it was too late and your curiosity was peaked, so you pushed past me when I stood in the doorway, adamant that you weren't to enter until I gave it a tidy."Timmy," you chuckle, "I lived through first-year uni students' rooms, I can handle anything,"(This does not reassure me: it reminds me that this September you'll be starting your third year of university and I'll only be starting my first. That when you were sitting through your first-year lectures, I was only in my penultimate year of upper school.)The mess turns out to be dirty clothes on the floor and freshly cleaned ones, unfolded, at the bottom of my bed; two empty mugs on my bedside table and an awkward pile of old paper exercise sheets and botched essay attempts on my bureau."This isn't even that bad, Tim," you say, fond almost, kind. Still, my cheeks burn, and they burn more when you sit down casually on my bed and pick up the clean clothes and begin to fold them.I put my dirty clothes into my laundry basket and, when I look up, you’re not only folding my clothes but putting them into neat piles. T-shirts, jumpers, socks tucked into each other, a pair of trousers and my pants.You make a beeline for my wardrobe; turning the little key and then you pause; look at me, “I like this. It’s got personality,” you say. I like your ability to turn things I find mundane and every day, into something special again, like they were when first we were acquainted.-You speak French flawlessly with my father, and I find myself content just to watch; to listen; to take notes on how your body language is different when you speak English; how your back straightens a little when my father asks you about how the First World War changed poetry and the idea of God. This, I expect, is a question you’ve had to answer before, for you come up with neat ideas and opinions—“Vera Brittain wrote ‘the people in their agony, despairing cried, there is no God’. The idea is that when God felt forgotten, he punished people with the war which made stronger their sense of disbelief”—and where you take this, I do not recall, for my mind has run off with the memory of your kind eyes, sad and deep, going over the details of my photography which hung in the bathroom, freshly developed; my eager mouth criticising the over-use of red filter on a photo of my sister in New York last December. “Too much contrast, don’t you think?’ and you’d hummed and said“maybe, but I like it. She’s very beautiful. You two look very alike; striking, wonderfully European. Not, like, ‘washed out Californian blond’.”I was hurt that you thought of yourself so, and wondered if this was someone else’s opinion or one that you’d come up on your own, but also I was giddy with the fact you’d referred to me as beautiful and striking. Now, at the dinner table, I am so pleased that I sigh aloud, which doesn’t deter your conversation one bit, but it makes my mother look at me and smile. Somehow, I know she knows.