Chapter Text
Booker’s first week in Paris, he goes home with a woman he meets at a bar. He knows he’s doing it to bury the guilt and pain, but he doesn’t care enough to talk himself out of it. She lives on a street in the 19th that somehow manages to be both chic and unsafe, and she’d be too young for him even if he were the age he looks. She’s pretty, lighthearted, and wasted on him, who just wants to numb himself with the distraction of sex.
He leaves her asleep and walks home: it takes an hour and a half, but it’s not like he has anything better to do, and the empty streets match his mood. He’s mostly sober when he gets home, but that’s easily fixed.
The next several months creep by in days that are largely indistinguishable from one another. Booker takes some document jobs to keep from using any more of his savings, slides into day trading when the illegality starts to feel like an unnecessary risk, and then does some web design and app development when the seediness of it all starts to get to him.
He never bothered to replace most of the furniture that got destroyed in the ceiling leak twenty or thirty years back, but after a while he gets sick of sleeping on the floor and eating his meals on the countertop, so he buys a table and chairs at a secondhand shop, and rug and a bed at Ikea, which he promptly vows never to enter again. A couple of months later, the neighborhood mosque has a vide-grenier, and he picks up a coffee table. When a fuse blows, he goes into the basement to replace it and discovers a couple of armchairs that he, or maybe a former tenant, apparently left there and forgot about. He hauls them upstairs and onto the rug.
So he has an apartment—several of them, in fact, though he only ever goes in the one on the ground floor that was empty when he bought the building and consequently became his by default. He has furniture. He has a rug on the floor and a painting on the wall. He’s never been one to decorate—he hasn’t lived anywhere long enough for more than a century—but it seems civilized enough, though there’s no one around besides him to care.
He’s not sure when he last spoke to another person besides a brief merci to a store clerk. The young woman from the bar, but hell if he remembers what he said. Andy, before she walked away from him in London. They were the last people he touched, too, though he remembers one significantly better than the other. Their embrace lasted only a few moments, but he doesn’t have to think hard to remember the silk of Andy’s hair between his fingers and the cords of her neck under his hand, and to feel the ghost of her arms around him, strong and sure whether mortal or immortal.
He’s been to bed with Andy many times over the years—in loneliness, in desperation, occasionally even in celebration. It was always good, but that’s not what he misses most. He misses her companionship, how they moved together in a fight, the way they could speak in glances without needing words. Right now, any woman is just going to remind him of her, either in the ways that she resembles Andy or in the ways that she doesn’t.
He doesn’t know the bars in Paris where men look for other men, but it’s not difficult to locate them nowadays: a Google search brings up quite a selection. The problem is finding one he would actually go to.
There’s a place that advertises itself as a cruising bar and sex club. It seems promising, except it turns out that you have to be naked or in your underwear, which, no. Several others are clearly dance clubs, which, again, no. Another, featuring a fisting bench and a public urinal, is obviously kink-focused, something to which Booker doesn’t object but doesn’t strongly desire. One place seems like a regular, pleasant bar that caters to people of all genders and orientations; it actually looks like a nice atmosphere to spend a few hours, but it’s clearly not where you go to pick someone up.
Finally, he finds a place that’s small and seedy looking—going from the photos, little more than a galley bar, a seating area, and a back room whose purpose is plain—but with no dress code, dance floor, or obvious fetish affiliation. It’s been a while since he’s done this with a man—Mexico City may have been the last time—but unless things have changed drastically in ten years, he remembers the basics. It’s an adventure of a much less dangerous kind than he’s used to: there’s no violence, no deception, just the straightforward understanding of two people who want to fuck.
He goes that night. The bar is packed, and as seedy as expected, but it serves its purpose. The guy is white, in his early fifties, gray-haired, handsome, wearing a sharp suit as though he’s just come from a well-paying job or wants to look like he has. He sits down next to Booker and buys him a drink, and ten minutes later they’re in an Uber to the guy’s place on a cobblestone street off the Avenue Montaigne, so at least the neighborhood matches the suit. The guy talks a lot about how he’s going to give Booker his cock, which makes it even more enjoyable when Booker has him bent over the couch and begging in front of the glass doors leading to the lovely terrace outside. As Booker dresses, he reflects that he’s probably a bit of rough trade for this guy. If only he knew.
The second time happens a few months later, by accident. Booker is in a bar, yes, but it’s because Marseille is playing Real Madrid in the Champions League, and he doesn’t have a TV and hates watching football on his laptop. It’s not easy to find bars in Paris that have Marseille games on, but it turns out that the normal-seeming place he found in his earlier search is owned by another Marseille fan. Booker’s focused on the game rather than drinking, and so he’s sober later when, as he’s reading The Meursault Investigation and enjoying the afterglow of Marseille’s victory, a cheerful male voice says, “Buy you a drink, mate?”
The speaker is in his thirties, Black, with very short hair and attractively strong features. He’s not tall, but he stands with a confidence that doesn’t require height. Booker wasn’t planning on talking to anyone, just watching the match and reading his book, but he appreciates the friendly moxy, so he accepts.
The man’s name is David, and he’s from Birmingham, in Paris on business, heading home tomorrow. He’s a Real Madrid fan, which Booker informs him is offensive; David laughs and fires back about Marseille, and they banter about football for a while. It turns out David has read The Meursault Investigation, so they talk about that, and then about Camus, then about David’s job (banking), then about some of the app development Booker has been doing, and other extremely normal things. Booker realizes that it’s the first time since he moved to Paris—almost a year now—that he’s had a real conversation with someone. He’s enjoying himself enough that it’s not until they’re finishing their third round, and David says, “At the risk of seeming forward, do you want to come back to mine?” that Booker realizes he’s being picked up.
Booker does, in fact, want to do that. David’s very respectable business hotel is about 20 minutes away on the Métro, but it’s not an awkward trip. They don’t actually make out on the train, but David stands close and, in a low, smiling voice, lists a variety of things he’d like Booker to do to and with him. Booker is by no means an innocent, but it’s difficult not to blush—and he’s grateful for the loose fit of his jeans.
The hotel, when they arrive, is too classy to openly look askance at monsieur bringing a male guest to his room in the middle of the afternoon, but they both laugh about it in the lift. It feels like getting away with something, somehow, even though they’re both of age—Booker many times over—to do what they like in private.
David is as good-natured and disarming during sex as he was in their conversation at the pub. He has a lithe, strong build, with beautifully defined shoulders and thighs, and Booker sucks him for a while so that he can spend some time running his hands over them. They finish with David riding him, and Booker enjoys the view but most of all the act of taking pleasure while giving it too.
Riding the Métro home, Booker realizes that David is someone he’d like to see again, if he weren’t just passing through Paris. He isn’t sure whether it’s a depressing thought or a cheering one: that when he meets a person he actually likes, that person is leaving the next day, but also that it’s possible for him to meet and laugh with and enjoy another person. As Booker walks into his apartment, he still hasn’t reached a conclusion, but for once his life doesn't seem like a terrible thing to live.