Physical Damage

The first time I saw Adrien Lavières, I filed him under harmless and ruined the paperwork.

I knew how men announced harm. In gyms, they rolled their shoulders before they said anything. In bars, they kept two fingers on a cup, tapping along to Battisti while the rest of them pretended not to listen. Some men studied the room the way Mastroianni watched a woman in an old film. Real life didn’t give you music.

Adrien had damp cuffs and a steam-burn at the base of his thumb.

The men I worried about touched nothing until they owned it. They rarely bothered with any of that.

Back then, I didn’t know his weight or how it would settle into my thighs. I hadn’t felt the friction of his skin under my hands, or the way he would breathe against my neck—hot and uneven, like an engine built to run too hard and cool too slow.

Stupid thing was, he went looking for the job anyway—the one that would put him in my path.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Afterward, everything points backward.

Not every kind of harm bothers to show its teeth. Some of it talks too much until it sounds reasonable. It makes itself useful by explaining what you already wanted to forgive. By the time you invite it inside, it knows where you keep the gun. That was Enri.

Need a lift? He was outside. Short twenty euros? He had ten. Trouble with a landlord? Give me his number. When you finally wanted him gone, he’d usually acquired three reasons to stay.

Enri’s favorite sentence was, I’ll take care of it. He said it about jobs, money, women, broken locks, bad nights. My answer was always, Stay out of my room!

That was how he stayed.

Summer made Lyon honest. The bells from Fourvière rolled over the city. Nobody stopped to listen. I hated the river stink that climbed the old streets by noon.

Enri called the look of men in debt energy. To me, students with cigarettes and photocopies were heat trapped between the stone buildings.

Two months before I ever met his brother, Enri dragged me into an overpriced café. He said it was urgent. His eyebrows rose, his lips pinched—the expression he wore whenever the world offended him. The offense, as it turned out, was espresso.

The café smelled of scorched milk, sugar, and the rag someone had used to lose a fight with the floor. Somewhere inside, according to him, was a barista who made it properly. He pushed through the door ahead of me, acting like porcelain cups and expensive furniture were signs from God.

I let him talk.

He was already on crema, temperature, the French ruining everything they touched. I heard maybe half of it as he slowed and swept the room.

“Not that charred swill they pass off outside Italy.”

He’d never been to my country.

“Tell me that isn’t criminal,” he said. “They’ve got marble, chandeliers, those ridiculous little spoons. No excuse.”

We don’t, I thought. You don’t. I let him make a mission of it. Small battles kept him away from the real ones.

Then he saw Lisel Hartmann. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll rescue the place or get thrown out trying.”

She had the kind of stillness a press paused just before it took a finger. Slight, blond, pale-eyed, no wasted motion. Enri watched her like she came with tolerances and a warranty.

I hadn’t spoken to the woman and somehow knew her weekly schedule. For three months he’d shown me her profile so often I could recognize her before she knew we were watching. He talked about her like a luxury asset instead of a woman who owned the business. New picture. Hair down today. Hair up yesterday.

She was alone that day, and the queue kept growing. She handled it without smiling, correcting orders in a voice so calm people apologized halfway through the sentence. She didn’t repeat herself.

Enri tipped his chin at her, and his knee started bouncing beneath the table.

“Look at her hands on the wand, Roc,” he murmured over the hiss of steam, leaning so far across the marble he nearly put his elbows in the way. “That’s engineering.”

“She’s making coffee, not rebuilding a transmission.”

He recoiled like I had slapped him. “You have no soul. She’s German. I bet she files her anger alphabetically.”

Once Enri fixated, his priorities changed.

“Buy the espresso,” I said. “We leave in five.”

Naturally he didn’t listen. He slicked back his hair and stepped up.

“You again?”

“Where’s the court today?” Enri gave her that charming, punchable smile he used whenever he was about to ruin someone’s afternoon.

The woman next in line looked at him like he’d interrupted mass.

“Sorry,” Lisel said to her. She glanced at him, deciding whether public humiliation counted as customer service, and kept tamping. “Are you helping, or are you in the way?”

“Depends. You hiring?” He looked at the queue. “You look short-staffed.”

I left him to get cut down to size and took up position by a support pillar. Shoulder to stone, helmet hooked over my elbow, I let instinct do the rest.

Two regulars. Three tourists. One man stirring an empty cup. Two blind spots. The mirror by the pastry case gave me half the room for free. The man in the reflection had stopped pretending to care about the cup. Every time I moved, his eyes came up.

I kept clocking anything that could shift the balance of a slow Tuesday.

You don’t grow up working for my uncle without learning to spot a threat. A bakery bag too heavy for bread. A chair turned half toward the door. Miss one sign, and Marco had to change the route before anyone came looking.

The debt came first. Violence only collected it.

“Rocco!” Enri shouted from the sugar station, waving a tiny white cup like a stolen prize. “Miracle, the caffeine is drinkable!”

A French café producing drinkable espresso was either a miracle or an insult.

I stepped beside him and took the cup.

He leaned in like my answer might settle a border dispute. “Well?”

I almost told him to go fuck himself. But I took a mouthful, swallowed, and looked over the rim. “Hot bean water in a very small container.”

He recoiled in theatrical loathing. “I bring you culture and you answer with fascism.”

Behind him, Lisel called him. “You know the register?”

“Enough to keep your civilians alive,” Enri said.

“Then stop talking.”

He lit up again, all bright attention and counterfeit sincerity snapping back into place. She rolled her eyes so cleanly I almost liked her.

That should have been all I carried from that noon: Lisel refusing to thaw, tile throwing every sound back twice, too many bodies between me and open air, my shirt sticking to my spine.

Mara came in two minutes later.

I saw her through the windows. Her white coat cut through the glare, marked pages tucked under one arm. She lifted a honey-toned hand and pushed her hair back. The strands were amber-brown and she hadn’t dyed them.

Her perfume reached me before she did, bitter orange and tobacco smoke. That stillness made men correct their postures and lower their voices without knowing they had done it. Even Enri looked over, just long enough to decide she was not his kind of cold.

I lowered my head and watched her from the corner of my eye. My jaw itched under the beard, and I scratched at it before I caught myself. The scar there never liked her.

She went straight to the line.

I didn’t meet Adrien that afternoon.

Months later, back in the same café with rain on my shoulders, I understood that the woman who didn’t love me was never the real mistake. It was the boy behind the chrome of the brew bar, head down over a stack of cups.

Nineteen. Nothing declared.

That was how bad cargo crossed borders.

Then he straightened.

Not tall. Not broad. Just built with the exact proportions to disappear quickly. Ink-black hair fell into his eyes, and he left it there.

I should have scanned him twice. Should have noticed he did not flinch or posture. Instead, I let those black eyes, too tired for the rest of him, lodge where they had no business being.

The first night I had Adrien under my hands, I would remember that look. The almost colorless darkness of his eyes. By then I’d be pissed off, soaked through, running on a depleted battery, and still too stupid to understand what I had hit.

At the time, he was only a brief obstruction in the corner of my vision.

“You’re dripping on the floor.”

The first fault passed. This one held.

I don’t know what made me start toward him, or what I meant to do once I got there. Then Enri cut in. Later, Adrien would trust me with that bastard’s life. I was already bleeding for the Lavières brothers.

A year before Lyon, I treated Marseille like a rented garage. One room. One bike. Grease lived under my nails. I smoked before breakfast and slept only when the body stopped arguing.

French bureaucracy wanted copies of documents I had already handed over twice. The degree demanded hours I did not have. The woman I had left behind still came back in flashes: her hair caught in a shirt, her voice in an audio message, the silence after she stopped answering.

Enri came in like fire through bad wiring and made me forget Mara quickly. He was the idiot keeping me from turning the bike south and crossing back over the Italian border.

He knew the parts of Marseille that didn’t make the brochures: the docks in La Joliette where I moved freight no one wanted traced, the Noailles backstreets to avoid when I was looking for trouble, the fight rooms where men kept swinging after blood hit the mat.

The plan was simple: graduate, keep the bike upright, don’t get killed. Family waited in Brescia. What was left of it. My father called on Sundays to ask whether the bike was running and whether I was staying out of cells.

Marco had bought me lectures and legal status. I paid him back in consignments until I mistook them for a future.

I was violence with paperwork, stamped and temporarily legal, my thoughts jammed behind broken French and worse restraint. Professors spoke at me like I was already the slowest man in the room. One wrong word and someone’s jaw would have paid for it.

I compromised the degree. The friendship. The one thing I should have kept my fucking hands off.

His little brother.

I met Enri in July, at a gym near the docks, in a concrete box with bad lighting and worse ventilation.

The place stank of sweat, industrial cleaner, and salt off the water. The lockers didn’t close properly. The floor always looked sticky, even after someone mopped it.

I was twenty-four, swinging at a heavy bag the way it had been drilled into me. Absorb impact. Return it. I’d started too young, before I understood what any of it was for.

Enri was twenty-five and strolled in wearing a leather jacket two sizes too big, white earphones still in his ears. He let the gym bag hit the floor without looking down. It stayed where it landed. He was talking fast to someone who wasn’t getting a word in.

Somewhere in back, somebody tore tape off skin like they were peeling fruit.

Enri killed the call with his thumb, shrugged out of the jacket, and dropped it over the bag. Nicotine had yellowed the side of his index finger.

I took a proper look at him. His posture was loose, too sure of itself. His short black hair was slightly rumpled, and his dark eyes promised collateral damage.

He took the heavy bag next to mine and threw one cross. The angle was wrong.

The bag didn’t care. The wrist did.

He swore under his breath. I exhaled once through my nose and hooked his gym bag clear of my feet.

He stopped to watch me. “What is so funny, l’Italien?” His French came quick and nasal. Arrogant enough to need medical supervision.

“Tuck the thumb,” I growled, my accent dragging through every word. “Or break it and be useless for a month.”

“Vaffanculo,” he spat.

That got my attention. I looked at his reach, calculating how fast I could drop him. “Who taught you that?”

He rolled his sore wrist once, still wincing. “Bad company. Your people, I assume.”

He stuck out his good hand a little too late to count as polite. “Henri.”

“Enri,” I corrected automatically.

His grin widened and his hand stayed there a second too long before he dropped it. “Already improving me. You?”

“Rocco.”

He nodded like my name was only a checkpoint.

I gave the hand one look, then put another round into the bag.

He spilled the rest like he had expected something else and found my silence better. “My uncle’s shop is down the street. Plastic junk for idiots with luggage. My parents think I’m here for a law degree.”

I caught every word. Didn’t know why.

“You look like the devil’s collections department. We should get a drink.”

“Finish the round,” I said, driving another shot into the leather. “And don’t sprain your ego.”

Enri became a habit I kept pretending was logistics. I should have left him in that hole.

For the next few weeks, he came back to the gym. He complained when the tape pulled at the hair on his wrists. Complained when sweat got in his eyes. Hated bruises. Bitched about the chafing. Couldn’t box for shit. Then he controlled his breathing and came for me.

I had been raised inside a ring with four older brothers, bigger and faster and mean enough to make speed matter. By the time I was old enough to hit back properly, I had learned to put weight behind it.

So we circled each other. His footwork was half-lazy, half-fast. I stayed planted. Enri flicked jabs that landed without conviction. I drove through mine.

One evening after sparring, he peeled off his shirt by the lockers and turned just enough for me to see the bruise spreading dark across his collarbone, right where my glove had clipped him.

“You’re getting sloppy,” he said, poking it with two fingers. “This one will ruin me.”

“You did that to yourself.”

Damp hair stuck to his forehead. His chest was still rising hard.

“No, that one is yours. I remember your face. Very cruel. Very ugly.”

Ugly. Fair enough. My mother’s eyes. My father’s jaw. Beard already coming in thick enough to make me look meaner than I had to be.

He looked worse than I did.

I was barely winded. “You keep coming back.”

He pressed the bruise again. “I like bad decisions.”

“Why?”

He caught me staring and let his shoulder fall against the locker. “Because you hit like a villain in a bad film, Rocco.” His mouth twitched. “And I keep wondering if that face does anything else.”

I said nothing.

He got better. When he landed on me, he stopped taking the sting off at the end. I answered with the same weight I used on my brothers, trying to knock the sarcasm out of him and see what was left.

He never gave me anger. He gave ground. He praised me like it was something he’d been waiting for.

The next time, he stopped treating sparring like a joke. “Not tonight.”

“Preserving your beauty?”

“Go ruin somebody else’s evening.”

“Going somewhere?”

He fussed with the wraps on his wrist. “Yeah. You should try it sometime.”

“I don’t have time.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with one.”

I shifted half a step.

He flinched. “Hey. Fuck you.”

Whatever Enri had come looking for, he had either found it or decided it cost too much. The punches gave way to cigarettes outside the gym. Then cheap beer against rusted railings and the kind of silence that only happens between men who’ve already bled on each other.

He cupped the lighter against the wind and cursed under his breath when it kept dying. I took it from him, shielded the flame with my palm, and held it steady until the cigarette caught.

“You’ve got manners for a man who looks like homicide.”

“I’m preventing the whining that comes after.”

He smiled through the first drag.

“You’re a tight knot, Roc.” He pointed a half-empty bottle at my chest. “One day somebody’s going to find the loose end.”

I took a pull first. Let the smoke sit there. “I’ll tie it back.”

He laughed like that answered something.

By the end of summer, the beers had hardened into a stupid loyalty. I didn’t know then that he’d be the one to put the thread in his brother’s hands.

By autumn we were riding the Mediterranean coast until the air scraped our skin. Nights ended near the Vieux-Port, in bars where the glasses smelled of soap and old gin. Enri spent money he didn’t have, talked to everyone, and pulled eyes in every room.

I watched from corners and made sure no man got too brave around him.

“Why are you standing over there like a bouncer?” he shouted from the middle of a bar, already halfway into a conversation with three women.

“Because someone has to watch the exits.”

He spread his arms dramatically to the blondes. “You see? Emergency infrastructure.”

The redhead inspected me. “Does he ever smile?”

“Only when something breaks,” Enri said.

That was not entirely wrong.

It was during one of those nights, tucked into a booth that smelled like a century of spilled alcohol, that I picked up his father’s vice.

“Here,” Enri said, sliding a thick, dark cigar across the scarred wood. “Stop chewing on your own mouth. You’ll annoy me less.”

I picked it up. Dense. Oily. “I need you to shut up for five minutes.”

The owner pulled down the shutters. After that, nobody cared what we lit.

“Then light it,” he said, flicking his silver lighter.

I cut the end with my pocketknife and leaned into the flame. The first pull coated my throat, left dirt in my mouth, smoke in the leather. I didn’t care. Some women moved away.

Enri was in his element. Fitting stories between puffs, never questioning his own volume. Paris. Late meetings, pointless arguments. His uncle’s useless shop. Women he’d never actually have.

“You’re too quiet,” he said, waving the cigar like a conductor’s baton. “You know you’re supposed to let that out.”

“I was using it.”

His grin stalled. He held the cigar between his teeth and studied the ember.

I liked the way smoke blurred him out. Covered the parts of the night I didn’t want to account for. The family I’d left behind, the static in my head.

By late November, Enri finally put his hands on the wrong part of me.

We were on the rooftop of a dilapidated squat in the 3rd arrondissement. Enri was half-dead on cheap Merlot, propped against a chimney, talking like it was all true. For ten minutes, he’d done nothing but trash Léa, a Brazilian from the club, because she called him mou.

“Too soft, Roc? Me?” He dragged a hand down his face, then stabbed a finger at my chest. “Can you believe the nerve? Me. A disgrace to all of France.”

Before I could answer, he shoved his palm hard enough to force me back half a step.

“Maybe she read you right.”

“That woman is blind,” he barked, lurching forward. “I’ll show her. I can finish a bottle and still—fuck, you’ll see.”

He cut himself off with a sloppy sigh. His hand stayed on my sternum, warm and heavy through my shirt.

I looked down at his hand, then back at his bloodshot eyes. “Easy. You’re drunk, not invincible.”

His head snapped up. “Moi? Soft?”

“You look soft,” I added, mostly to annoy him. “Maybe she was right. Maybe you’ve got no torque left.”

He shoved me again. This time with intention.

My back slammed into the railing. The metal let out a hollow groan that vibrated through my spine. My stomach dropped. One sick second of bad math: my weight, bad steel, his hand.

“Alright,” I said.

Rust came off on my palm when I pushed back from it. Then I stepped into his space. I was a head taller and fifty pounds heavier. “Try that again and I’ll drop you off this roof.”

He grinned, unhinged and delighted. “Finally. A challenge.”

He swung at my shoulder to prove a point. I caught his wrist midair and yanked him forward just enough for him to stumble into my chest.

His hair smelled like someone else’s cigarettes. His breath hit my cheek, warm with wine. His free hand curled into my shirt, knuckles pressing into my muscle as he tried to find his footing.

“You hit like a grandmother,” I said, pulse starting to thrum.

“Oh?” His grip turned from a stumble into a hold. “Maybe you’re worth more effort.”

I kept my breath even, pretending his weight was just another load to manage.

“You’re the only one worth the trouble,” he whispered. The slur was gone. His forehead hovered close to mine, smoke hot between us. “The only one I’d ever show the hard part.”

His grip stopped feeling like a joke.

I let go of his wrist and he let go of me.

Neither of us stepped back fast enough to make it harmless. A few weeks later, we packed our lives onto the bikes and headed for Lyon.

The following year, Enri enrolled in political science, naturally. I got stuck in Supply Chain and Logistics.

After a night class, he leaned his drunken weight against my shoulder as we stumbled home.

“Incompatible specs, Roc,” he said. “That’s why we work. You hold the line, I make it interesting.”

“You’re a leak in the tank,” I said, catching his belt loop to keep him from swaying into traffic.

He threw his head back and laughed. “See? Devotion.”

“You die, I lose my deposit tonight.”

He looked away, then back at me. “You are deeply romantic under all that fascist muscle.”

I let go of him harder than necessary.

He pulled me into motion. I kept him upright long enough to enjoy the damage.

Enri kept throwing himself at girls built for light. Campus girls laughed until he switched accents, then left him with the bill and a number. He handed me the names anyway, as if I were collecting debts.

I stayed by walls and exits. I didn’t need attention. My reputation kept distance. Wraparounds hid my eyes. Smoke did the rest.

Enri liked to say I looked less like a student and more like someone hired to dispose of problems. Mara never mistook my quiet for decency. Most people needed longer.

I saw her again at La Darsena, an Italian joint near the Saône, months after Thessaloniki. At first, only her outline through the bodies. Bad lighting always dragged the same warm gold out of her skin. One shoulder angled toward the bar. Dressed for the room without ever belonging to it.

She noticed me halfway through turning her head. Her lipstick had worn bare in the center and she hadn’t fixed it. The drink wasn’t the reason. Her mouth did not move, but something in her posture locked.

I crossed the room anyway. Enough alcohol to sand down the good sense.

The floor tugged at shoes. Citrus peel and mop water fought a losing battle with sweat. Red bulbs turned every face a little bruised.

I took the stool beside her and tapped two fingers against the bar. “Grappa,” I told the barman.

He glanced once between us, decided against curiosity, and reached for the bottle.

Mara kept her eyes on the untouched Negroni for a second too long. Then she turned her head the rest of the way.

“You following me?” she asked.

“Bad luck for both of us.”

That almost got a smile out of her.

The barman set the glass down. I picked it up, but didn’t drink.

“Thought you were done with this country,” I said.

Mara lowered her glass and looked at me properly. “That’s what you told yourself?”

I had left her in an apartment over the water with two days paid and a number to call for a car. I had done it fast, before the last night got heavier than it was supposed to.

“You were safe,” I said.

She gave a short laugh and looked down into her drink. I thought she was checking whether she still had the patience to throw it at me.

“Safe. Right.”

The bass moved through the floor. Around us, people pressed shoulder to shoulder, sweated through their shirts, smiled like idiots. Mara stayed still. That was the danger with her. She never reached for volume. She held her ground until the silence started saying ugly things for her.

“You left me with money,” she said, looking up at me. “That’s different.”

I could have said Greece had gone bad too fast and I’d known enough to leave before it got uglier. I should have kept my mouth shut. Instead, I said, “You kept it.”

Her expression changed. Small but permanent. Like I had put pressure on the wrong point and heard the crack too late.

“I was angry in Thessaloniki, Rocco,” she said. “This is what’s left.”

She stepped past me before I answered, her shoulder brushing mine.

I caught her arm. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s not your business.”

A man came up behind her and shoved my shoulder hard enough to make me let go.

“What’s your problem?” he asked in French, but his accent was strong. Naples, maybe Calabria. Same weather in the vowels.

I didn’t bother looking at him. Mara was still moving away. I went after her anyway. She dismissed me with one look. Her man stepped in front of her and pushed me back.

I was already set to drive through him when Enri appeared out of nowhere and opened his arms.

“Eh, this is not a ring, boys. Save it for outside.” He slid between us, snatched my grappa from the bar, and threw it back in one swallow. “Have a drink first.”

He set the glass down, thumped my shoulder once, and grinned. “Good choice, paisà.”

I hated when he borrowed words he didn’t understand.

“Who’s the clown?” the Italian said.

“Depends,” Enri answered, easy as ever, though his body stayed angled toward me, not him. “Who’s asking?”

Mara caught her man by the wrist. “Move, Vittorio.”

I watched her disappear into the crowd and understood, too late, that whatever we had ended long before I left her in that apartment.

Enri started turning up at my place after midnight, whenever the apartment felt quiet. He left cigarette ash on my kitchen floor and expected thanks for the company.

I always let him in.

“Good,” he said. “You’re home.”

“It’s two.”

“I know how clocks work.”

“Do you?”

He headed straight for my fridge, opened it, and frowned inside. “This is depressing.”

“It’s food.”

“It’s punishment.” He pulled out a beer, twisted the cap off against the counter edge, and drank half of it before looking around. “Do you ever feel joy in this apartment?”

“Leave.”

“No.”

There was one good chair and Enri was in it before I could tell him not to be.

He killed his beer, stripped off his shirt and wandered through the place as if he lived there.

I tracked him without thinking. The straight line of his back. A weak point built into it. The “hard part” he’d bragged about on that rooftop meant nothing from behind.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He leaned against the doorway. “Because you never ask first.”

“I just asked.”

He looked past me into the room before he answered. “And you still let me in.”

He stayed until three-thirty, talking until the beer bottle went warm in his hand. Camille had accused him of emotional laziness. His uncle was provincial. His father painted ruins nobody bought and still thought Adrien needed protecting from the rest of us. “Says I’m bad company,” he added.

I took one drag first. “Sounds accurate.”

“Are you listening?”

I was. I just kept looking at his mouth. Dry. Split at the corner. His jaw worked against the bruise. The weight of his lower lip was a different kind of target. I wanted to shut it with my hand.

At some point, he sat on the edge of my desk and dropped his lighter into my notes.

“You’re staring, Roc,” he said. “Did you find a defect?”

I stood. “A mess that needs clearing.”

He smiled without moving. Not kindly. Never kindly.

I looked at the lighter. Then at him. Too close. Always too close. “You do that again, and I’ll break one of your fingers.”

“Which one?”

I loomed over him, making him deal with the scale of me, the frame I’d built to survive the docks while he was out making a fool of himself.

He laughed, ugly and grating. “You’re a goddamn monster. What are you putting in that frame, mon frère? One day you’ll seize up and call it discipline.”

“I’m the wall you’re leaning on.”

He exhaled like he’d just come up from underwater. “Relax, brother.”

He called me that when it suited him. Then he smiled like he knew exactly where the bruise was and pressed there on purpose.

By the next week, and the one after, his late arrivals had become normal: rain on his shoulders, trouble in his pockets. Sometimes cheap wine. Sometimes cigars. Sometimes only himself and the certainty I would let him in.

Sometimes he slept on the couch. Other nights he took the far side of my bed while a movie played low enough that neither of us had to admit we were watching it.

I settled back on my pillow with one arm behind my head and kept my other arm loose across my chest.

“You really should lay off the shots.”

“Keep it down,” I said, because the volume was giving me a headache.

He smiled at the ceiling. “You’re getting broader.”

“I lift things.”

“Mostly me, apparently.”

“Fuck you.”

“See? Steroids and feelings. Dangerous mix.”

Two weeks before the move—before Enri got his side of my bed—in my kitchen in Marseille, I finally told him.

“Look at her,” Enri barked, shoving his phone under my nose. The screen showed Léa’s sister, all blonde hair and filtered skin. “Tell me she isn’t exactly what you need to fix your mood. One more night. Just one.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“You’re exactly her type. Rough men. Men who don’t explain themselves.”

“I’m not interested.”

I focused on the mechanical click of my lighter.

“Non, non, non.” He waved the phone like a flag. “You haven’t even looked properly. You get in there, have sex with a nice woman, and you’ll—”

I stopped playing along and set the lighter down while looking him in the eye.

“I fuck men, Enri.”

Part of me wanted to see the blood in his eyes, the scrape of the chair, the familiar, honest shock of a fist in my jaw. If he hit me, I could put my hands on him and drive his sarcasm into the floorboards.

Enri sat there without blinking.

The fluorescent light hummed like it wanted out of the fight.

My spine pressed against the hard plastic of the chair. My hands curled tight enough to strain the old tape scars. I realized I’d been bracing for the wrong thing.

Enri took the truth north with him. So did I.

The real impact was already in Lyon, waiting in my blind spot.

I wasn’t prepared for Adrien.