Archive of Our Own

Something Kevin said to him at the wedding got him thinking about it and now he was thinking about it all the time. He was reading this morning in a tiny coffee shop near his sister’s place, old chairs and newspapers on the window, taking up a small table with two giant books. Gabin had bought him a mass market copy of Le Comte de Monte Cristo and a deteriorating French-English dictionary from 1927 (“Older than you.”) and Tobias was working through them at the approximate speed they’d cracked Enigma. He was behind schedule because he hadn’t brought them to the wedding two weeks ago because he’d figured he’d be distracted: his boyfriend, his ex, and a drunk island filled with his one-night stands. And then Kevin had sat next to him in the sand and asked about control.

Two weeks was a long time to marinate on such a thing. Separated in particular as he was from the object of his affections.

The prince himself was working. Most of the dancers in New York, even the principals, had side gigs and got a part-time thing over the summer such as performing on cruise ships or in Dirty Dancing situations at country clubs in deepest Vermont. In France the vibe seemed to be a more vigorous annual pay but still the corps subsisted on lean meat and sauteed carrots and over the summer Gabin even now in his beknighted state surely still had something lined up. He’d called him during their first tragic separation, mid-June.

“What’re you doing over the summer? Are you dancing somewhere?”

“No,” Gabin had said. “Like, for money? No.”

And Tobias asked, “What are you doing for money?”

And Gabin was like, “Stuff. It doesn’t matter. Why?”

So Tobias had said like what stuff if you’re not dancing? and Gabin said look it’s not a thing don’t worry about it and Tobias said I’m not worried I just want to know what you’re doing if you’re not dancing and Gabin said it’s just not dancing okay? I’m not dancing over the summer and Tobias said you don’t LIKE doing anything else so what are you doing, are you in a fight club? Are you a drug dealer? Are you an Uber? Are you an escort? and Gabin said CONSTRUCTION, OKAY?

Tobias had withstood a wave of love so pure and maudlin that he’d smiled right there alone in his living room like a serial killer. “Oh. Like Archie Andrews.”

“Who the fuck is that?” Gabin said immediately.

If it would’ve done any good Tobias would’ve said come be my common-law wife in Manhattan for three months, but Gabin would’ve strangled him. He couldn’t stand the thought of being subsidized. He was plucky and independent, like the kitten in Oliver and Company.

Tobias stared down into his books. He could focus on Edmond Dantes for like ten seconds and then the picture came back. Kevin’s voice on the beach. And the specter of it, gauzy in his head: the fucking that hadn’t happened yet.

He didn’t know if he wanted it. He didn’t even know how he felt about it. But then emotions weren’t really real. He’d learned about this from the greatest book ever written which was called HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE which said that there was no such thing as emotions. The lady said the human brain felt positive/negative and off/on and that’s it, and everything else was a social language that humans developed to better triage and predict for other humans’ encroachment on their limited resources. Sadly however (if sadness had existed) Tobias could not beam this text directly into everyone’s brain and so had to constantly make up fake narratives to justify his posture or the expression on his face instead of just saying I AM VERY NEGATIVE/ON RIGHT NOW AND YOU NEED TO BACK UP.

He really, really, really liked this. It was a huge relief to know that actually your life experience broke down into an X/Y axis, like in algebra (or whatever) and your top right was generally nice, bottom right was “upset,” bottom left “suicidal,” and top left asleep. Like, hello? Could everybody please log into this program?

He had not exactly floated this cognitive framework past Gabin but that was because Tobias knew him so well—broadly understood to be a side-effect of love—that he didn’t need to. Gabin understood the graph already. And they had similar problems with what the people online called “emotional regulation.”

Of course if he didn’t have emotions he couldn’t regulate them but this reasoning was unhelpful. It seemed like most people just liked it when he was quiet, which suited him fine, unless he needed to tell them they were messing something up. But Gabin didn’t let him, so as part of their pact to stop screaming at people he was reading about de-escalation techniques you could do to yourself in your head. Ironically as a key component of his job Kevin had been wonderful at this—and adaptability, and conflict resolution—but it had a price: establishing and acting out a maternal role to a hundred tense strangers twice a day with nothing in return eventually drained him of all his blood and whom did he have to come home to but Tobias, who was basically a vampire.

But that was all in the past! ON/POSITIVE!

To ground himself Tobias traced circles over his headphones with his nails. The ambient gravelly swirl dulled some of the talking. Norah’s neighborhood was not overwhelmingly domestic but these people seemed to come in through cracks in the walls. He liked the coffee here because it tasted in no way like cardboard and all the baristas knew his order so he didn’t have to physically say it. The city had entered its certified dropped-dead summertime phase, wedding season behind them and grand reopenings of theatrical companies still ahead, so Tobias’s job circa July-August was basically to hang out and transcribe ideas.

He’d get some soon. Any day now. He turned the page.

And then he thought of the fucking! ON/WELL—SOMETHING.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t thinking about sex which he had previously not thought about for like eighteen months for eighteen hours a day anyway. This wasn’t weird because everybody was thinking about it, and more specifically everybody was thinking about him having sex with him, and he was making really goddamn sure he knew about it—the texts, the fucking texts, the texts about fucking, Gabin forewarding a cache of supplemental daydream pornography of the two of them whenever he thought the jokes were funny. It would go like this:

The girls want you to pick me up by my hair when we fight and drop me from the roof like Lestat, Gabin contextualizes helpfully.

SOTP TALKGINT TO THE GIRLS, Tobias would say.

And then Gabin sends him a screenshot of one of those TikTok frames of white text crowded on top of a picture of a girl soliloquizing in a bedroom full of plants: “[unclear top row except for Tobias’s name] left but subjecting him to full-on endurance art. shibari. four hours sitting and smiling. forced repetition. webcam modeling. pinaforing. marina abramović where she let strangers cut off her clothes and shove rose thorns into her but it’s the defense line from olympique de marseille.”

The legions thought Tobias was the boss because of what they’d seen onstage. But people were idiots. Obviously what they had actually seen was Gabin dragging Tobias around by his hair like a Tex Avery soubrette and Tobias so desperate to get his feet back under him that he’d punched himself in the face. Which was usually Gabin’s job. Get with it, people.

Tobias put his face in his book. That was the very question: where did the theater end. And Kevin had planted the seed in his head. Of course the thing could always go both ways but there was instinct to consider, and dynamics, and what the other person needed. And Gabin needed a lot. Gabin was sort of stuck in the ON position: he had to siphon gas out of parked cars. Tobias didn’t mind. He hadn’t needed anything for a year.

For the girls in Tobias’s phone—mediated by Gabin’s tact and sadism—the endpoint of this relationship was another wedding. But the French didn’t seem as enamored (IRONIC) with it as the be-all-end-all and even Gabin who would wear Tobias’s sweat as perfume was wary on the subject. On the ferry ride back to the mainland Tobias had been like apropos of nothing, how do you feel about the institution, and Gabin had been like well first of all it’s a business decision and most people shouldn’t do it. Tobias had about fallen off the brig. (To be precise, Gabin had rattled off five milestones. Tobias wrote them down in his Notes, you had to be able to: 1) Travel. 2) Co-parent. 3) Clean. 4) Argue. 5) Talk about money. These were so sober that Tobias had asked if he’d gotten this shpiel from a therapist, and Gabin had given him one of those devastating Parisian/Gen Z looks of disdain.) So that was fantasy too for now, one Gabin was happy to indulge for the masses with his little pictures of his torso swimming in a big American T-shirt in a sea of rumpled sheets like a colonial-era broadside: ATTENTION CITIZENS. I HAVE BEEN TOPPED, IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE HALF-YOUR-AGE-PLUS-SEVEN RULE.

And so usually, when it came to this person, Tobias would have said you don’t get it. If that’s what you think then you don’t get it. But the tip of the wedge beneath the door was edging through.

A burst of nervous energy thrummed through his legs and he stood. The pages of his books spread like to decode a communiqué feathered open without his arm holding them down. He went to the register and waved in lieu of words and Delaney rang him up for a caramel latte with oak milk and for old time’s sake he got a croissant and she said she’d warm it up for him. In a haze he tipped twenty-five percent. Gabin had said something once, that Proust had tipped like five hundred. Gabin was a fount of information. Tobias walked back along the edge of the room, around a sudden crowd of lovely long-limbed women from the barre class across the street, and the left side of his body grazed the pothos plants draped from floor to ceiling. The voices swelled loud and happy because they thought they could feel such a thing and Tobias held his hands tight over his headphones. When he opened his arms Gabin collapsed into them. Four in the morning, out of a Virgin airbus at JFK, feverishly beautiful and nearly delirious from lack of sleep. Tobias drove them back into the city in Norah’s tangerine Prius with his Sick & Woozy playlist low on the speakers—sleepy Breeders and when Deerhunter was heavy on the reverb—as Gabin recited, eyelashes drooping, the pitch and yaw of eighteen hours of delays and a nerve-racking eight-hour flight. (Tobias had at least gotten him a good seat. They used to be cheaper...) He refused to sleep on purpose during the drive but slipped off anyway somewhere around “Nothing Natural,” so Tobias had to reach over and gently lift his chin to see the view he’d been promised, just before the Midtown Tunnel when the highway took them up a hill which levelled out suddenly and the whole skyline of Manhattan broke across the horizon like a streak of stars. From his sister’s place they got a cab uptown and he coaxed Gabin to lie across the seats and rest his head, and when they pulled up to the apartment Tobias looped the heavier bag over his shoulders and eased Gabin onto the sidewalk with both hands. He slept for eleven hours.

They had one night in town together. Gabin still seemed water-logged (with a heart sore with fondness Tobias thought he might be a difficult flyer) but bopped along in high spirits. It was that kind of summer evening where the air was metallic; a giant East Coast thunderstorm was brewing, and everyone seemed to be walking faster and in sharper focus. Tobias cupped the back of Gabin’s neck now and then and pulled him into a kiss on the sidewalk so he could have his private Cassavetes-style New York daydreams and he tinged rosy around the edges and stared up at Tobias with starry eyes. He had asked the week before what he should wear, and Tobias had asked well how European do you want to look, and he’d said not too much, so he was wearing his black jeans with a white T-shirt, and he’d let his hair dry loose. This was a romantic concession: Tobias liked it tumbling like in a Ralph Lauren ad, but it wasn’t his place to say (offstage) so he’d had to work it in through other means, usually by getting his hands up in there while fucking him from the back like it was the steering wheel of a Ferrari. Once Gabin had accused him of wanting him to look like Timothée Chalamet and Tobias had actually gotten away with saying he didn’t know who that was. (And actually if Gabin grew his hair out he’d look like Ripley in Alien. During business hours Tobias tended to an extended fantasy sequence of himself as the synthetic onboard a pirate trawler called Mnemosyne where Gabin was the hyperspace engineer forever smeared with motor oil who won money in underground boxing matches on Planet Iliad and they conducted an illegal affair in the cargo bay that somehow eventually got everyone killed. Maybe this could be a ballet.) So people only noticed him when he said thank you, or just because he was so handsome.

They did a drive-by at MBT but didn’t go in—Gabin wanted a picture at the fountain—and holed up for dinner at their reservation, a Korean barbeque near Bryant Park lit by blue and green LED lights with loud, packed seating and a Michelin star. Tobias kept his headphones around his neck and still could barely hear what Gabin was saying but it hardly mattered: he looked so happy, sipping milky makgeolli and kneeling in his seat to better watch Tobias tend to the dried pork belly. They ate it in lettuce topped with garlic cooked in pork fat and Gabin took Tobias’s hands as he chewed and let his head fall back. In the pulsing abyssal light he looked like a vision from a seabound dream.

Back home they had sex for the first time in two weeks. It felt like it so often did like Tobias was in the presence of a comet. “On my back,” Gabin insisted, and he assented, and they kissed a lot, because Gabin had been lonely. Whenever he made a request in this area Gabin always asked for it face-to-face. It probably had something to do with this fear he still seemed to have that Tobias would decide whilst balls-deep that he wanted to leave. Like Gabin would catch him with his legs. For his birthday in April—back in Paris—he had presented Tobias with a list of expectations, which was so imperious and straightforward that it was bliss, and in multiple bullet points throughout the day it specified, “We fuck like you’ve rescued me from a serial killer FACE TO FACE,” and FACE TO FACE was underlined like a thousand times. Technically Tobias didn’t care one way or another vis-a-vis, like, emotional reasons, it was just that he could get more flush with his body if Gabin was face-down and then on top of everything else you didn’t have to factor in so much eye contact. But Gabin had asked (You KNEW it was important to me…) so Tobias had maneuvered him thusly and then while fucking him waited and waited and waited and when Gabin’s gray matter was finally going through the paper shredder he had asked into his ear does that feel good and Gabin had said yeah and Tobias said is this what you wanted and Gabin said uh-huh and Tobias said do I know how to fuck my baby and Gabin had put his own hand over his mouth he came so hard.

The ferry to the Pines left the next day at quarter after four in heavy heat under the crackling cover of dark clouds. The men’s general good cheer couldn’t be dampened and as soon as the dock came into view most everyone’s shirts came off. Gabin was drinking a secretly hard lemonade in the crook of Tobias’s arm and kept his top on but stretched his bare legs out in the aisle to general interest. They were staying in one of the island’s standard giant woodsy beige rentals. The bride himself had texted—well, not Tobias, but Natalie, an overlapping friend who had sent Tobias a Venmo invoice for one bedroom in a house on the beach (they were all on the beach) a few streets down from the garden where the ceremony would happen. She was sharing a room with her girlfriend, and down the hall on the other side were Joe and Elisha, an ex-cheerleader from USC and a lighting designer respectively who now ran a Communist latke bar in Flatbush. Joe still had great extension, and a drunkety-drunk Kevin & Tobias had once brought him home after a Viet Cong show and Tobias had gotten so high he’d awakened to two dicks inside him and had never learned who was who.

Gabin was wearing the requisite uniform of shorts and a tank but stayed true to his roots by keeping everything as tight and chicly minimalist as possible, with the exception of his bandana, which he’d let Tobias tie for him in the bathroom mirror that morning. They held hands going up the ramp.

The storm was brewing in earnest. Inside the house it was loud and warm with that snug anticipation possible even in the summertime of staying in. The girls wanted to make burgers while it was still dry; the deck wrapped around the house and formed an endless porch that included the grill and a rectangular pool, and a laundry room and outside shower, and a hot tub with its cover still on. Gabin tucked his hair behind his ears and stayed by Tobias’s side, but everyone introduced themselves right away with a decade’s-worth of cheerful distrust at Tobias’s ability to do it for them.

They had clearly heard of him already because no one acted surprised at his accent. But his name was tricky.

“Ga-what?” said Stella, leaning towards him as she rolled a patty. She did roller derby and so wore muscle tanks to show off her vicious biceps and bruises like crater impacts.

“G-A-B-I-N,” said Tobias. He was apportioning the margarita into the pink Minute Maid margarita punch bowl at the tiny green table stuck at the wall between the oven and the porch door in the little kitchen. He and Gabin could handle more liquor, and everyone else would catch up. “It’s Latin.”

“Ohhh,” she said, with a diphthong of intrigue, widening her eyes. “That’s romantic.”

Gabin glanced at Tobias from across the table like And is this going to continue to be everyone’s reaction? He was already giving Tobias’s name at coffee shops.

Tobias responded with a single I told you so eyebrow. It would all have been so different if his name had been Marcel.

Up the street, Elisha reported, the wedding party was hosting a drag show of some penultimate magnificence and all were welcome. At this the first real opportunity to see Kevin’s face the needle skipped but everyone was still recovering from the night before which was a fucking relief. At hearing Tobias was coming Stella had made a burger for him with vegetables that bled purple beets that was wonderful and uncanny. Natalie seared corncobs on the grill in their husks to their smoking point and roasting a whole garlic head in foil to make butter thick with singed cloves, and she set Gabin to quartering baby tomatoes into a bowl of basil leaves and two balls of burrata he ripped apart by hand. On the table was a giant can of cold dill spears and three flavors of La Croix (Gabin made everyone repeat how it was pronounced and pretended to try to leave) with pomegranate and blueberry juice and vodka if you wanted. Natalie served Gabin his plate with a big pose, ankle popped, and a Bon appetite! but Gabin beamed and said merci and the girls cooed over him like he was French Exchange Student Barbie. It was cruel that he’d been forced to grow up an only child. He was built to have a big sister practicing blush application on him and dressing him up like a Sailor Scout and taking him out for Halloween on a leash with her friends. Or something.

So even though Gabin sat on Tobias’s far side from everyone else (letting Tobias hold his arm palm-up and stroke the pale skin up with the tips of his fingers like at the belly of a dog until he lulled himself out of deep waters and letting Tobias gather his hands like a bouquet of thistles and squeeze slowly and letting Tobias and letting Tobias and letting Tobias) the conversation kept looping around to him and his exotic Frenchness every fifteen minutes: what was his favorite part of the States so far? The beautiful voices? The milk alternatives? The humble Stanley? And what had it been like during the Olympics; and then it was Kendrick Lamar’s flares, and the blurry line when using a tote bag became performative; how militarized were the French police, and then Christine Baranski in The Gilded Age; slugging; the worst couples in Couples Therapy; what novels he had read in “French class”; the Company episode of Documentary Now! And eventually, ineluctably, with the first spark of lightning the conversation settled through a hundred tiny adjustments on Kevin.

“Have you met Richie yet?”

Tobias shook his head.

“Have you seen his picture?”

“No…”

“Babe,” Joe said reproachfully, fishing out his phone, and he leaned in at Tobias’s left. Stella looped her arms around Natalie’s shoulders and kissed the part in her hair. Flanked by two very warm bodies Tobias kept his head still and moved only his eyes to the face of Joe’s phone. Everyone was looking at him looking.

Well. He was handsome. Soft, dark eyes. Their age.

“Okay,” said Tobias, gripping his second margarita.

“He works the door at a Puerto Rican strip club,” said Joe. “Below sixtieth. They met when Sal and Eddie threw the launch party for that whatever-it-was Hunter S. Thompson rum down there. Kev went outside with Aurora when she smoked—”

“And the rest, as they say,” Natalie began in a big voice.

Tobias tilted his head to mirror the angle of the fiancé’s onscreen. “When was that?”

“Last September,” said Elisha.

A shock of something incredibly ON and incredibly NEGATIVE shot up his spine. What the fuck? He had still been in the fucking city!

Elisha swirled his drink. “I think you were at some competition thing in Tokyo.”

“I was at Zabar’s,” said Tobias.

Thunder boomed so loud and close the glasses rattled; everyone looked up.

The rain started sudden and all at once, fat, heavy waves on the roof of the screened-in porch. Elisha leaned back and closed his eyes and they all sat listening to the sound. Tobias was aware of the warmth of Gabin’s body at his side to the point of distraction. The gas burner beneath him was surely on.

As if summoned Gabin’s arm appeared across Tobias’s chest, hand open. Gabin himself with his eyes closed, resting his temple on Tobias’s shoulder. “Let me see.”

Elisha looked at Joe looking at Tobias. Gabin gimme’d his fingers. Joe opened his phone again and plopped it into Gabin’s languid palm.

He brought the screen close to his face, then far away, as if he were farsighted. Lightning split so brightly that Natalie might have flicked on the overhead light.

“Handsome face,” said Gabin. He gripped the mouthpiece end of the phone and swiveled the length of it back towards Joe, fingers splayed for a teaparty teacup. “He must be pure of heart and gallant of soul to be allowed to protect the girls.”

“Or gay and covered in biker tattoos,” said Natalie, grinning. She’d been thrilled Gabin smoked and had already hauled him up the ramp to the beach to split menthols.

“You could be a bouncer, Gabin,” said Stella. She boxed the air at Natalie’s temple. Tobias’s aching imagination reeled.

Gabin snuggled into his nook beneath Tobias’s arm. The warmth off him now being that of a tomcat plump with a bloody bluebird. “Lucky for me Tobias is more interested in the people working inside the Puerto Rican strip club.”

The girls laughed. Elisha tipped the last of his lethal Minute Maid down his throat and rose, citing an empty glass. When the door swung shut Gabin lifted Tobias’s hand to his lips. Tobias gazed into his hair as Cate Blanchett had once into the woodland elf water fountain.

“You boys,” Natalie said over the rain, pointing with her white-polished toe at Gabin draped in Tobias’s arms like a fox fur, “need a reading.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Joe sighed, and Gabin said, “Of what?”

Tobias stroked his dreamboat curls and asked, “Have you ever met an American lesbian?” as into the roiling thunder Stella shouted FETCH THE CARDS!

It turned out that the sacred dead of gay weddings past wanted Tobias to leave behind the Six of Wands, come to terms with the Three of Pentacles, and hold in his heart the Queen of Pentacles, and then Gabin got a much larger spread that yielded among others the Tower, Death, and the Chariot, which sent the girls into paroxysms of joy. When Tobias walked Gabin to bed he was still muttering Death? Death? and Tobias had to cobble something together from his memory of Norah and her friends watching Charmed that Death meant cosmic fermentation. The next morning Joe and Elisha made a breakfast that looked so American it might have been on the cover of L.L. Bean, scrambled eggs with red pepper flakes, avocados and pickled onions on whole wheat toast, ice water and black coffee. The sky was achingly blue. In the afternoon Tobias unfolded the ironing board from the linen closet—he liked ironing—clapped his headphones on, and accepted all work: two pairs of light trousers, navy and cream; a cotton sundress with giant flowers like Cy Twombly’s; Stella’s sleeveless vest; something like eighteen button-downs. And his own outfit, tailored by the MBT costume department: linen trousers, buff ivory and shaped 30’s-style with a high waist, what Delia hunkered down at her sewing machine had called a “full cut drop-loop,” and a soft cotton polo in a deep dusky green she had resewn for him with higher sleeves and a tighter waist.

He met Gabin coming around the corner from the pool when everyone started to leave. He was standing tilted against the wall, scrolling as he smoked, in a black blouse of vivid translucence unbuttoned to his sternum.

“You look nice,” he said, not looking up.

“Is that the shirt the dancer threw at you at Nunsploitation Night?” Tobias asked slowly.

Gabin smiled hugely. “Oh good, you remembered,” he said, and put his phone away and looped his arm through Tobias’s to steer him to the ramp and up the sidewalk with Joe and Stella and everyone else to the garden.

Then Kevin and Richie got married.

The afterparty spilled into the gardens, asymmetrical whorls and pathways of flowers and leafy trees that circled another, bigger pool overlooking the beach (everything overlooked the beach) and as the sun set everybody went home and changed into slutty beach clothes and came back and the music started. The first dance—the First Dance—everyone gathered around to watch and the grooms still in tuxedos, was Chet Baker singing “I’m Old Fashioned,” which Tobias recognized with an ache of something (ON…) from years of Kevin’s Cooking & Dishes music. Pounds of nameless pressure lifted from his shoulders as the DJ transitioned to the twenty-first century and Gabin looked over his shoulder and asked, “Can we drink in the pool?”

They certainly could.

Tobias wove around with him among happy dancers and accumulated new names and faces he knew and gentle cocktails and soon they themselves found a spot not so far from the center to hold each other and revolve in a pink sunset like the inside of a disco dollhouse under the auspice of pale blue lights and Gabin kissed him. Whether Gabin really liked parties full of people he didn’t know Tobias couldn’t tell yet, although he also didn’t totally seem to like parties full of people he did know (Gabin didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. Possibly before his spending-every-night-with-Tobias era he’d just sat on the floor of his apartment staring at the phone like the girl in Audition) but something about the ridiculous circumstances and himself being so obviously and beautifully not of this place and so wildly intriguing of an invited guest, the new boyfriend of the ex-boyfriend of the betrothed, that he had ascended like his beloved Holy Mother and was simply having a good time. Soon Tobias reached his own limit and gracefully passed Gabin on to a group of boys his age draped in the pale blue Puerto Rican flag who shouted WHAT DO YOUR THIGHS TASTE LIKE?

Everyone seemed happy.

He was hailed to post up at a standing table stacked with pastel drinks like jewels and people who kissed his cheek on the way to the next table and asked him how he was, how his dances were going, where was he living now? They’d seen his video and that guy was so hot! Was he here? And was Tobias happy? What else could he say but that he was, he was in love. Maybe it was rude to say this but maybe it was the perfect place, he was always bad at gauging that, but he said it quietly and kept his mouth behind his straw and it seemed like this was okay. At some three hours in Megan Thee Stallion proclaimed that nobody got onto their tip-tip toes and rolled to the tip like her. Joe looked at Tobias. Tobias kept his face pointed significantly at the crowd.

Habitually he checked now and then, avoiding without too much trouble the gaze of the grooms, and Gabin would be dancing, talking to a girl, vivisecting a guy, in his holiest moments laughing. When Tobias would single him out for someone who wanted to see they almost all to the man did a Looney Tunes double-take back at Tobias as if to say and through what sorcery Mister Bell?

It wasn’t that Gabin was good-looking because everyone was good-looking but that he was so clearly a sort of king. But this was how it always was; Tobias had every single time he’d done it fallen in love with someone who wore his feelings like a Las Vegas showgirl. When most people were like this which most people always fucking were he could so easily dismiss it as irritating that he had in total like three human relationships. And he could stay snug and productive like that. But without fail every eighteen months a beauty with giant eyes would look at him and say something presumptuous and his dehydrated heart would stutter awake: a voice interrupting him crouched in the library aisle saying was that you onstage last night, that piece was incredibly strange, you weren’t the choreographer were you, or lost on the way back from a premiere and wandering Woodland Hills to find Mulholland Drive and a man jogging in the dark doubling back to say are you lost, why are dressed to watch the Knicks, or Kevin in his jacket and tie grinning two seats away as Tobias wrestled with the overhead bin saying Look…I never do this, or when he’d felt the impact through the wooden floor and turned and standing there, cocksure, bratty, charged hot like an electric field Gabin staring at him already impatient and two counts ahead was saying I asked you a question.

In any case Gabin got him into the pool exactly once. It involved an appallingly-placed line of tequila salt and earned him his fourth standing ovation of the year. He spun around the dance floor to “Baile Inolvidable” to dry off.

When it all started to gel together like a smear on film he wove through to the western coast of dancing bodies and stepped out of the courtyard and down the steps and through the trees onto the sand. On this side of the partition the air was cooler and the music softened against the water and the great dark sky and he took off his shoes and walked slowly in case of invisible shards of bottle glass or jagged shells parallel to the sea until the sounds of Y2K Britney became pleasantly ambient and he sat down in the dry sand and the salt and the slow metronome of the tide.

The blood in his arms and up the sides of his face was warm. It was rare but nice to be aware of this perfect state of drunk; usually he jumped straight from prickly single-gimlet self-consciousness to How Did I End Up In West Covina? Without his headphones the aural detritus of the world washed up raw and unfiltered but like this he could choose for the next five minutes to like it. Triggered automatically after ninety seconds of inaction the MGM lion roared behind his eyes and the reel started to play: Debbie Reynolds in the blue dress at the turn of the second act in Singin’ in the Rain vis-à-vis “Me Against the Music.” He kept the move with the couch, because that was really good.

“You’re not gonna walk into it, are you?” came the voice.

Visuals cut to black. The sound slotted into such a known and easy space that he didn’t startle. “I’d have to leave a note first.”

Kevin sank into a squat at his right and plopped back to sit in the sand. He was barefoot too, and his jacket had long dissolved into horny connubial champagne sweat and his bowtie was gone and the top two shirt buttons were undone. For him this was like the penultimate scarf of Salomé. “‘Whomsoever reads this…the sun has grown too bright…gift my Bartók records and first edition Tribe Called Quests to the New York Public Library and my AirPods to the Smithsonian…’”

“And I want my bones launched into space,” Tobias volleyed quietly. Kevin dimpled—he had one for every sense and sensibility—and produced from some pocket a slim white joint.

Tobias sat up straight and looked over Kevin’s shoulder from whence he had come.

“Let’s not tell the bride,” said Kevin. “He doesn’t think lungs should experiment.”

“You’re the bride,” said Tobias.

Kevin froze rooting out a lighter.

“In a nice way—”

“I should throw this in the fucking ocean!”

Tobias flung his arm in the direction of the dance floor. “He works the door at a straight Puerto Rican strip club below sixtieth!”

Kevin levelled a look directly into his face so familiar that its firepower sank into the spaces between his teeth. “Haven’t you already given me enough ammo for your own rehearsal dinner?”

“Give it here,” he said, and Kevin handed over the joint and his red gas station Bic. “Is this the sleep kind or awake?”

“Sleep.” Kevin stretched his legs, still in trousers, and pointed his feet. Since he wasn’t a dancer they didn’t spiral into Schiele-esque sickle blades. “Are you having a good time?”

Tobias blew out the fragrant smoke and passed it back. “Yes.”

“Are you?”

He squinted into the trees. “Where does Richie think you are?”

Kevin took a slow pull. “Being a gracious host.”

“That comes naturally.”

“Surprised your little croquembouche let you out of his sight.” Kevin’s baby blues drifted around Tobias’s bare thigh. “He must not yet know the potency of Chardonnay on your iron self-control.”

Tobias glanced at the diamond inside Kevin’s tented legs. “Don’t tempt me. I left your present in my apartment.”

Kevin rolled back and laughed into the Milky Way. His voice was lush and thick like wet grass. Tobias kept his eyes on outer space.

“The girls found him. They’re in the rec room playing Baldur’s Gate or something.”

“He’s a little prickly,” said Kevin. A flare of something popped and went out beneath Tobias’s ribs. “Funny, though. You can tell—I don’t know, those guys who like men but don’t like men?”

“His job is to be suspicious of every man he meets.”

“I’m glad you brought him. I’m glad you’re happy.”

“Thanks.”

“Tobias.”

He had to look.

“I mean it.”

He looked back at the invisible ocean. Surely he could fall back on its ancient pull on mankind’s consciousness as an excuse. “Well. Congratulations again.”

“You’re mad.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You look mad,” Kevin said lightly.

“That’s just my face,” said Tobias for the eight billionth time in their relationship.

“We weren’t dating anymore,” he said, “don’t worry. I wasn’t seeing him while I was seeing you.”

“I’m not worried,” said Tobias. Some spring-loaded mousetrap in his soul snapped shut. “Although the period of time when you weren’t seeing me is a little more porous of a barrier coming from your direction.”

Kevin sighed. “What? Does that mean?”

“The first weekend I didn’t respond to your RSVP for pierogi brunch in Ridgewood, you re-downloaded Grindr?”

“I didn’t meet him on Grindr,” said Kevin with infuriating sufferance. “I met him while he was working the door at a straight Puerto Rican strip club below sixtieth, which is just the sort of place you would’ve loved if you’d answered one of my double texts, which was why I invited you, in which case you would’ve met him, too.”

“And what bon temps we would’ve had,” said Tobias. “Shackled to me you’d have never gotten to exchange Instagrams and this romance would be dead in the East River.”

Kevin squinted at the sand covering Tobias’s toes. “Thank you…?”

Tobias sighed too and his shoulders collapsed, and he put his face in his hands. “That’s not what I meant. I’m glad you’re happy and got married. I swear to God.”

“We just did it ’cause my mom got sick of waiting,” Kevin said lightly. He had always possessed some weird pearl of grace that let him drop an argument the second he could tell Tobias was ashamed of himself. “Now she’s on to quote-unquote biracial grandkids.”

Tobias pulled his face out of his palms and steepled his hands in front of his mouth so Kevin could see him sort of smile. Kevin nudged him with his elbow.

“Does Lola like him? She’ll be on you hard now. She always wanted you to be the one to sire the babies, despite your medical history of sleepwalking while traveling only through Prague and the phobia of ground beef you got after that listicle about prion diseases.”

“There’s no cure,” Tobias muttered.

“She’d probably want Gabin to do it,” he said wisely. “That hair has to be inherited.”

Tobias took the joint back. “They haven’t met.”

Idly Kevin sipped his beer. “Did she see the dance?”

That was a yes. Tobias had managed to live for a few weeks in cozy plausible deniability that either of his parents were aware he was associated with anything that had been written about on the internet. Then, helpfully, after he’d beaten her by two guesses at the Wordle three days in a row, Norah had taken it upon herself to forward their mother an article from The Cut titled “Why Are Teenage Girls Obsessed With This Gay French Ballet Dancer?” and that house of cards had fallen.

“One of her students may have shown her a clip,” he said.

Kevin, briefly, put his hand to Tobias’s shoulder. Kevin, who had been duped into thinking he felt things, who was in the business of creating endless temporary caregiver relationships with his passengers, who needed only a quiet moment in a corner of the party to drink a cup of ice water before he got back in the game, could transmit tender masculine sympathy without even touching your skin. Tobias tried to receive it without going incredibly stiff (stilted…) and found this was way easier to do than usual. Perhaps this strip club joint was not fucking around.

“She sent us a lovely card,” said Kevin. “And the pink bone china vide poche.”

“Well, upon what else should you possibly eat your Eggos.”

“Look,” he said. A tremor of something ON shivered thusly. “You and me may never sit alone together again, so I have to ask and we can throw it into the ocean and know it’s finished. Did you break up with me for him?”

“No,” said Tobias.

“You didn’t wait to be with him because you thought you were with me?”

I was with you. “I didn’t wait to be with him.”

“So the timing of that morning was a complete coincidence.”

He didn’t need to know about the dreams. “Yes.”

“That whole spring, summer, we weren’t talking…you still loved me?”

Tobias nodded at the sand.

“But not by London.”

“Kevin, I don’t want to, like…the exact swing of the pendulum…”

“You don’t have to clock it. I just want to understand what you were feeling.”

Why, thought the CBD, but Tobias kept quiet.

“You had that look,” Kevin said, grinning. “On the patio.”

“No I didn’t,” said Tobias immediately.

Kevin batted his lashes like one of the bouncy shepherdesses in the Frick.

“I can’t even DO that!” said Tobias, and Kevin buoyed by something something something pot music tequila dancing friends and the love of his life dissolved into his loveliest cackle and did it again, the fluttering, with an admirable miming of that blind flowergirl’s shoulders from the Chaplin movie.

“You were nervous. You only do that when the compass points true north. All soft and sweet…”

“Meanwhile he was getting arrested.”

Kevin paused with the mouth of the bottle at his lips and looked surprised. Something leeched out of Tobias’s stomach—was that intimate proprietary information? Then he remembered that Gabin had said as much on the Jumbotron and Vanity Fair had basically printed his mugshot.

“He’s not, um. Dangerous…”

“No, much worse,” said Kevin. “He’s interesting.”

Tobias glanced perhaps apprehensively back at the music. How Gabin was faring on his own could be measured by the lack of screams or a giant fire or peripheral sounds of construction as five dozen gay maniacs built an emergency bathhouse.

“Okay, can I ask?” Kevin looked at Tobias over the top of his bottle and raised his eyebrows. “Does he fuck you?”

The cinematic wave-sounds increased by five decibels. Kevin took a gracious sip to give him time to weather blushing in the literal sea breeze. “No.”

Kevin whistled at the moon, low and long, like at a lady walking past the proverbial construction site. “Wo-ow.”

He had one of Tobias’s favorite voices in the world. Even and especially now it had its own deep, secret vein which threaded through his heartstrings where the frequency and wavelength made him feel like he’d drunk a Manhattan upside-down.

“It’s kind of obvious when you talk to him for thirty seconds.”

“Really,” said Kevin, full of cherry juice. “He’s so—I mean, not to generalize, but he’s huge and full of, like. Rage. It shoots out of his eyes. He wants to eat you.”

Promptly came the image of Gabin sucking down three fingers in tortured Catholic ecstasy on the floor of the National’s sound booth. Tobias shifted his feet. “Maybe one day we’ll be in a plane crash…”

Kevin leaned back on one hand to take another drink for him to watch. Between their shoulders purled a translucent pink-hued thought-bubble, like from Cinderella scrubbing the floors, of some anonymous Saturday afternoon years ago with Tobias’s calf draped over Kevin’s shoulder, Yo La Tengo thrumming full-bodied from the other room.

“He’s not an angry person,” Tobias said. His heart pounding On, On, On. “He just gets wound up.”

“You wind him up.”

“Street signs wind him up.”

“D’you miss it?”

“What?”

Kevin laughed under his breath at the tide. “Relinquishing control.”

“I don’t—horde control.”

“Aren’t you technically his boss?”

“No! Not like—Mad Men holding his salary over his head if he doesn’t—” He splayed his hands in mute aggravation; only Kevin so far on this planet could reach so far into his brain with an ice cream scoop. “If anything I’m at his mercy because without his body I’m useless, professionally.”

Kevin laughed: “Okay. God, you’re so indignant. Maybe that’s part of what you like.”

“That’s not how it is when you dance!”

“Oh. Okay. Just how it is when you do absolutely anything else with anyone anywhere in the world.”

“I was never controlling you.”

“No, I mean—” Kevin laughed. “I know, honey. I meant sleeping with him.” Breezily he added, “I don’t think that’s what anybody else thinks when they see you two.”

“I’m so surprised,” said Tobias. His voice had gone scratchy with pot. “If they saw thirty seconds of surveillance footage from inside our apartment they’d drop dead.” Kevin laughed again. “Not even of the bed. Of the foyer and the corner in the kitchen with the compost bucket. He steers me across the floor plan like a Cadillac.”

Serenely Kevin stretched out his legs. “Tell me about it, stud.”

“It’s like Mayerling all over again. I’m drinking electrolytes.”

He sighed melancholically. “Kids these days, with the phones and the vapes...”

Tobias looked at Kevin’s legs. “How old’s Richie?”

“Thirty-two.”

He wormed his toes deeper into the sand and nodded.

“Is he moving here?” Kevin asked. “Or staying in Paris.”

“Not yet,” said Tobias. “I’m stealing him.”

Kevin clucked his tongue like oh really. “How?”

“It’s a secret.”

It had actually been Jack’s idea, putting up this ballet, although he’d originally floated it, talking over the phone one rainy Saturday in March when Tobias had called him on the sidewalk outside Du Pain et des Idées in a metaphysical panic about Piece 4, to premier the season immediately following the swap and had no doubt wanted Cheyenne Toussaint in the Leslie Caron role and had no ideas of using Gabin as leverage and Tobias had immediately said “FUCK GERSHWIN RIGHT NOW, RESPECTFULLY,” drawing a stare from a grandmother in a leather bomber jacket, and he hadn’t brought it up again.

“Dark magic,” said Kevin. “He wouldn’t let you forget him anyway.”

This landed pleasantly, which was strange but nice. Tobias had enough of a ragged social map to know his job was to stay facetious. “He’s a lot like a French mafia death threat that way.”

“I’m sure him being twenty-two with an ass like if a peach could do a 500-pound back squat has nothing to do with it.”

“He’s twenty-three.”

“Holy shit, I was kidding,” said Kevin, “he’s twenty-three?”

“No,” said Tobias, “shut up.”

“HE’S TWENTY-THREE?” said Kevin.

“HE’S A SOLOIST,” said Tobias.

“Angry words on this beach,” said Gabin. He appeared at Tobias’s left, hands languid on his hips. His curls were drying wild and he was wearing, now, a tank top made it seemed of white Saran Wrap that said I ❤ MY GIRLFRIEND across his pecs. His swim trunks were a poignant afterthought. On an island of perfect bodies he was the quintessence. “I hope this relationship isn’t already in trouble.”

Kevin squinted. “Is that Coop’s shirt?”

Gabin’s eyebrows went up like, not anymore. “His ego wrote a check his equilibrium couldn’t cash.”

Tobias passed the joint back. Gabin watched the space between them close as Kevin took it. “I thought you were doing shots with the RPG lesbians.”

“They made me leave when they started making out.”

“Women,” he said softly. Kevin took a long pull and offered it to Gabin.

For a moment Tobias thought he might produce from the air a pack of Gauloises and say you senile bourgeois conformist, I have no need for your cheap American herbs and get your foot away from my boyfriend.

He didn’t do that. He didn’t reach down to take it. He dropped to kneel in the sand and as they watched bent across Tobias’s legs on his hands and knees and above Kevin’s languishing calf he opened his mouth. Kevin leaned over.

Tobias was obliged to hold still there like a loaded gun beneath the bridge of Gabin’s body as Kevin blew the white smoke out across the black inch of air between their mouths and he breathed it in. Tobias looked straight up at the sky until his eye muscles strained. The moon waxing crescent. And where had he seen that before?

“Thank you,” said Gabin. The small of his back arched like to hold a cupful of water.

“It’s the sleep kind,” said Kevin, obliging his effort with an up-down cruising scan. “You’ll be carrying him home in twenty minutes.”

Gabin glanced at Tobias’s hip with his eyelashes heavy like Lauren Bacall’s, if he even knew who that was. “How much wine has he had?”

Kevin stubbed the joint out daintily in the sand. “Well, he hasn’t attacked me yet in a violent carnal heat, so I’d wager he’s running on lime juice and Tito’s.”

“If I shot up a considerable dose of heroin right now, would either of you notice,” said Tobias tightly.

Hips-first like withdrawing into child’s pose, Gabin drew back from their legs to recline on his side at Tobias’s thigh, propped up on his elbow with his top knee wilting glamorously in the paradisaical sea breeze thus recalling Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, which Tobias had sat in front of every day during the summer between fourth and fifth grade while reading Herzog. “Your husband is looking for you,” he said, battling his lashes unironically at the tide. “Justin is pretending to be a flamethrower with a bottle of Absolut and one of the blowtorch candle lighters.”

“Oh my God,” Kevin sighed. “The deposit,” and he pushed himself standing, shedding sand. At once the air on that side of Tobias’s body went cooler. If he was at all crossfaded, his carriage absorbed it. “Bye.”

“Bye,” said Tobias.

Tobias and Gabin watched him brush off his trousers and fluff his hair as he meandered back towards the lights and sound. “Say goodbye before you leave,” he called back. “The island.”

“Okay,” said Tobias. Kevin raised his bottle to the sky, broadcasting happiness live in Technicolor. When he was gone, Tobias looked down at Gabin. He’d lain flat in the sand with his hands behind his head and grinned.

“So,” Tobias asked conversationally, “who’s Justin?”

Gabin rolled his eyes at the trees. “There are a hundred homosexual Americans over there. No one’s named Justin?”

“You’re taking nobody being able to pronounce your name correctly very personally,” said Tobias, but he only made it that far before the Tito’s had bent his arms and he was lowered sideways and kissing Gabin into the surf.

Gabin flexed and thawed and opened his mouth at once. He was damp but not wet, and sand was sticking to the backs of his shoulders and the arch at the curve of his waist. As Tobias cupped and lifted and kneaded him blindly the different textures told him where he was: skin, a drawstring, a bent bone, soft hair, wiry hair, a sharp tooth, a pierced earlobe, cool clinging fabric, flexing muscle, lazy muscle, an opened jaw, a canopied patch of trapped sweat, the inside of a mouth.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said against Gabin’s flushed lips, dizzy with chemicals. “But I’ve got a room down the street.”

Gabin breathed against his mouth in deep, saturated pulses. “Oh? You do this often?”

Tobias pulled back to look. His mouth was split open and pink, like the indentation on skin from a tight belt, his cheeks flushed high and florid. He had bent and spread his legs.

For one lust-soaked second Tobias seriously considered the odds of someone catching him fucking Gabin raw on this beach. But goddammit he couldn’t do it. Their first kiss already belonged to the world, but he could control that exposure now, he could move them away from that light when he wanted, certain times that they thought about or spoke to or saw each other could exist in a soft private world now that was only theirs, besides what every member of two world-renowned dance companies had already seen and what multiple glossy magazines had illustrated with conveniently resurfaced archival materials and whatever Gabin wanted to post after he’d taken whatever provocative picture for it to disappear after twenty-four coquettish hours and God knew how many subsequent international screenshots taken by little girls. Yes. Keep it together. He was still a fucking choreographer. This was still his concert. This was still his design! Sometimes!

He cupped the back of Gabin’s neck as if to lift. “C’mon. I’ll steer.”

Gabin bit his lip and his head fell back in Tobias’s hand with palpable drunk joy. “I loved when you drove me,” he cooed.

“Me too. Can you sit up?”

He sighed, abruptly bereft. “It’s so faaaaaar.”

Tobias stroked his cheek and murmured, “I know, sweet boy, but you know what? You’re very strong,” and Gabin shimmered in the sand to receive his flowers and allowed himself to be sat up, met Tobias’s mouth at the top and kissed him.

Tobias levered him standing and started the arduous walk. Gabin more or less cooperated; he wouldn’t tolerate not kissing and would reorient himself out of walking backwards and Tobias had to see where they were going so they ended up sort of waltzing very slowly up the street. They put a hand out occasionally to catch a wooden fence or the back of a bench but mostly they touched each other. Tobias rooted out a lush undercoat of dampness deep in Gabin’s hair and pulled soft, thick handfuls of it when he needed Gabin to walk faster: when they finally got to the steps of the right Verbo his curls had redoubled like petals in the sun.

“Up,” said Tobias when Gabin lingered at the doorway.

“Carry me,” Gabin said softly.

Tobias’s heart skipped. Gabin acted like a world-weary trench-warfare infantryman so much of the time that the rare moments when he looked or sounded or wanted like someone very young hit like a sheet of glass. Tobias pressed his forehead to Gabin’s and touched his hips.

He heard a pleased intake of breath, and Gabin braced Tobias’s shoulders and hiked himself up and Tobias caught him, hoisted him higher by the thighs, and Gabin held him tight at the back of the neck and kissed him desperately. Tobias wandered through the front door and shut it with his foot. Gabin was lighter now than in the spring, sinewy and lovely like a cat, and Tobias carried him slowly along the dark silent hallway, aware acutely of what sounds and touches most pleased him because his thigh muscles would jump and squeeze Tobias’s waist. He stopped just before their bedroom door and pressed Gabin’s back into the wallpaper.

Gabin hummed in a erotic agony and arced into him. He had to fight his head being pulled back by the fingers in his hair.

“I love you,” Gabin said throatily.

Tobias kissed his upper lip. “I love you.”

“I missed you—I missed—I missed you—”

His cheekbone. His temple. “I missed you.”

“I slept in your bed,” Gabin said, breathing very deeply. “She let me—I couldn’t sleep—”

He asked because he knew the answer: “Did you dream about me?”

“Yes,” Gabin moaned, kneading the long muscles across his shoulders, and he had to get his hands back on the wheel here because Gabin’s eyes were starting to well up so he pressed his nose into the side of Gabin’s and said, “Can I show you what I dreamt?”

Gabin’s thighs nearly zipped shut with him between them. “Yeah,” he warbled.

He knelt. When Gabin was splayed around him on the floor Tobias pulled his repossessed tank top up his chest and sucked and bit his nipples. In Paris this had had the firepower to melt Gabin’s spine or send him stratospheric; now he went ramrod straight against the wall and moaned through a bitten lip. To double-check Tobias cupped his cock through his swim trunks and nestled his palm against the hard, hot length. Gabin sighed shakily and his nails scratched the wall.

He felt so much, so much of the time. If you looked close enough, you could see him vibrate just waiting for the elevator. He had no mask and no capacity to fake one and so everything he felt passed through his face and everything he said was real. Tobias got so jealous of him sometimes he’d get close to tears. And other times it was like he was in a room with a messenger from God.

When they got married he would take him down the coast of California in an old car. The sun there might match him.

How am I allowed to be here, Tobias thought, and he kissed the center of Gabin’s throat and turned him by the shoulders—their legs negotiated the space—to face the wall. Gabin braced his hands on it above shoulder-height and Tobias was presented with the Venusian topography of his back. As usual he had to fight down the sensation that he had been injected with helium.

He put his thumbs together and drew them up the line of Gabin’s spine, ghosting his fingertips. The muscles roused and contracted.

“You should get another tattoo,” he said. “Give me something to look at.”

Gabin’s lats constricted to indicate indignance or otherwise. “What is possibly good enough?”

The sheet music to Beethoven’s Fifth, perhaps. Tobias kissed the clasps of Gabin’s necklaces and the inch of his neck just beneath his curls. He had dreams where Gabin let him bite into the dark mass like cotton candy or that it filled the pillow under his head. It smelled like smoke. Gabin’s back curved as he was touched. He responded always like the surface of a deep pool.

“I’ll find you a painting,” said Tobias. Gabin mumbled something about dance notations for Piece 5 and Tobias bit his neck, and he yelped and they laughed together. Tobias had to work the damp shorts by half-inches over Gabin’s ass, which as an example of ballet’s striving for the impossible sublime was no joke; he had to jump to get jeans on. Tobias wedged his knees between Gabin’s legs and pulled him onto his lap, and when he started to fuck him, Gabin’s head collapsed into the cradle of his arms.

He tried to imagine what Gabin wanted.

“Bounce,” he said quietly, and he could literally see the shiver pass all the way down Gabin’s back. “Show me.”

With a dick five inches deep in him and a few to spare Gabin huffed as if this were an imposition then immediately did as he was told. The view was miraculous. Tobias held his hips loosely and tried to remember what had made him feel insane to hear when he was twenty-three.

“You know what you did to me all night?” he asked into Gabin’s ear. “You know how hard it was to watch you and not touch you?”

Gabin undulated beneath him and exhaled humidly into the Jacobean block print toile wallpaper.

“I watched you all night.” It was fine his voice wasn’t inflected because he could make it fry. Once he’d done this while translating a review for Challengers and Gabin had compulsively pushed and pulled the sleeves of his borrowed sweatshirt up and down his arms three times. “Did you know I was watching you?”

“Yeah,” Gabin mumbled. He was only good for yes/no answers once the train pulled out of the station but he liked being flustered by the added strain of questions.

Tobias thrust into him only fractionally as Gabin panted and did all the work. “Did you know everybody was watching you?”

Gabin said something into the flowers about watching the grooms. Tobias imagined unhooking a heavy leather jacket off the wall and letting it collapse satisfyingly to the ground. He was in that perfect eerie place other people didn’t seem to have where the part of his brain that controlled backing into a parking space or sorting his art books by historic movement was as sentient and functional as the part that wanted to dissolve into the other person’s skin. He drew his tongue up the underside of Gabin’s jaw. His sweet love squirmed with electric overstimulation and tried to divert this energy by bouncing on it faster.

“Nobody’s fucking the grooms.” He took hold of Gabin’s right shoulder like a motorcycle handlebar and massaged it and Gabin actually hiccuped with pleasure. “I knew you knew, you always do. Otherwise you let them take your clothes off and lick salt off your dick pretty fucking easy.”

Gabin made a sound that might have wanted to be a laugh when it grew up but through socioeconomic circumstances had been forced to become the dewy moan of a dancehall prostitute. Tobias kissed his neck, his jaw, the scar on his left cheek.

“Go slow,” he said. He braced his hand wide and flat on Gabin’s taut belly. His cock bobbing hard and flushed blood-hot. “Let me see your back.”

Gabin’s forehead went thunk against the wall like a cartoon/ACME hammer impact but because he was Jesus’s favorite little lamb he found the strength to decelerate to a pause. He sniffled, chastely. Behind him pumping a rare single vial of oxytocin Tobias sat back on his heels to watch.

Gabin tucked his elbows in at his waist. Delicately his fingertips spread out on the wall, tented. The small of his back rolled forward in a perfect yoga arch and he rose. The length of Tobias’s cock reappeared inch by rain-slick inch. When only the tip was inside he took a deep, shuddering breath and sank back down.

The tight warmth this slow was brutally good. Gabin rolled his hips, his ass bouncing, the impact hitting Tobias’s thighs damp with sweat. “God, that’s so nice…”

“You left,” he mumbled.

“Huh,” Tobias said into his neck.

“Youlefttogotothefuckingbeachwithhim,” said Gabin.

Tobias looked incredulously at the back of his head. “What—can you fucking feel jealous right now?”

“Did you kiss him,” he slurred into the wallpaper.

Tobias looked to the ceiling for strength. “No.”

“Did he kiss you?”

“No!”

“You were smoking with him—”

“He brought it—”

“You never smoke with me—”

“I didn’t go out there to smoke with him, I went out there to be by myself—I don’t smoke—”

“Then why did he follow you?” Gabin asked through gritted teeth, riding Tobias like a cavalry officer with his sword drawn.

Tobias pulled him back hard by the hips, his vision starting to scintillate. “I don’t know, why don’t you fucking dismount and go ask him?”

“Ahh—uhhnn fuck, you didn’t—” He shuddered as he took the whole of Tobias’s cock, his thighs as taut as cords of rope. “You didn’t tell him to leave.”

Briefly Tobias imagined this exchange taking place on one of the loveseats in the Black Lodge. “Well if the bride wants to fuck her ex-boyfriend at her own wedding reception that’s her prerogative—”

Gabin smacked the wall with both hands and howled TOBIAS!

Tobias took hold of the front of his thighs like the heroic bow of the Titanic and fucked him, hard. Gabin gasped into his lungs and tried to catch himself on the wall but ended up on one elbow on the floor, his head turned and his cheek smushed to the wainscot and his other hand grasping the frame of the doorway. Tobias got up on his knees and stared down at Gabin’s shoulders, at his ass shuddering on impact, at his neck and his feverish back. If Tobias fucked him good enough Gabin would stop talking and thinking and worrying and posing and would exist as blissfully in his body as he did when he danced or that was the impression. Maybe he never stopped, just lost the ability to speak. Maybe he was trapped in an inarticulate body that could only give clues as to what he was thinking or what he wanted and no one understood them no matter how hard he tried and everyone always seemed frightened or upset and he was never really happy but that was okay because happiness wasn’t really real. And it was only really scary when he met someone who for just a second seemed to understand what he was thinking. Because then. What if it was.

“Deep,” Gabin mumbled, tears in his eyelashes.

“It is, baby,” Tobias said quietly.

He moaned something like mmmhhnghnnnn. “Call me that…”

“Mhm,” Tobias hummed for him. “You are.” He was careful to only use this word when he was physically inside Gabin’s body. It felt sexier and Soviet this way. “Only my baby can take it this deep.”

Gabin mouthed it: Baby. He must have heard it in a thousand movies. “Did you call him that?”

For a second time the needle on the record skipped. “No,” he lied.

Gabin’s shoulder blades rounded upwards like splintered wings. “Does he still love you?”

“No,” said Tobias, and he fucked inside him low and upwards, and Gabin turned his face to the wall to muffle himself as he came. Tobias rolled his hips slowly as Gabin collapsed in stages to the floor and pulled out, gently, only when he could see that Gabin’s eyes were closed.

He extricated himself from beneath Gabin’s hips and legs and stroked the back of his curls. He always came hard and afterwards it was like he needed to reboot: he would lay there sprawled in a wilted orchid version of whatever posture Tobias had wrested him into and doze, sometimes, with his head tilted at some Wildean angle on Tobias’s pillow or couch cushions, his hair a mess and throat dangerously inviting. The time on earth when he looked most like he was ripped out of a Francis Ford Coppola honeypot for gay Dracula. God, that neck.

By the time Gabin’s eyes opened Tobias usually wasn’t hard anymore, or he could have sort of discreetly finished off without making it a thing. In the hallway Tobias pulled his shorts back up and leaned down and kissed Gabin’s cheek. His eyelashes fluttered open.

Tobias traced the bridge of his nose. “Ça va?”

Gabin considered Tobias’s knee close to his face. In the very low light his expression was gauzy. “I don’t understand how someone could stop loving you,” he said.

Oh, God. Tobias looked down at the slats in the floorboards until the thing was out of his throat. He wrote Gabin’s name across his back in cursive. “Can you start the shower for us?”

“Okay,” said Gabin. Tobias helped him up. He made a big French noise like eeuughghghhhhh at the sight of his own cum all over the floor and feinted back towards the kitchen as if for a Swiffer, but Tobias turned him to face the bathroom.

“I’ll do it. Go ahead.”

Fine Gabin mumbled and half-crawled along the floor. After a moment the shower curtain was pulled back and the water cut on, and Gabin started singing the chorus to “Build Me Up Buttercup,” which he had heard surely for the first time two hours ago. Alone in the hall Tobias unbent his legs with a huge, silent face of pain at the ceiling: his knees and ankles ached like heartbreak. When he sat up the dancers walking past laden with gym bags and oversized purses and water bottles the sizes of human babies swerved around his spot on the floor to give him a berth. He rubbed his eyes; he’d drifted off in the warmth of the sunlight coming in from the window, and his headphones were strumming Spaceman 3 without him quite remembering how they got there.

As he sat there blinking the pit in his stomach solidified. Fuck. Fuck! To avoid thinking about it he fished out his phone.

The picture still sat there, from an hour ago: Tobias, from the back, sitting at a shaded patio table with his feet up on the other chair. He was reading an actual physical copy of Le Monde, delivered serendipitously if not uncannily on the house’s doorstep—Gabin had said if he could understand forty percent of it he’d let Tobias put in his curl cream. A snatch of sunshine ignited the paper from behind into a white angel wing and the steam from his coffee into a purl of haze. He was wearing shorts and his round black reading glasses and nothing else. It had been three months ago and Tobias could still feel the slats under his thighs.

And Gabin’s message: can i post it?

This goddamn thing. He always asked first, if Tobias was in the shot. Although sometimes the stuff he posted that implied past coupling—a bodiless bedroom floor covered in shirts and pizza boxes, or the blue AirPods hooked around an obviously Parisian wrought iron balcony as they charged—was way more explicit, as evidenced by the fact that Tobias always fucking heard about it from the cohort of American ballerinas who had followed Gabin en masse, either in person in the studio which was unbearable or straight to his phone: HE’S SOOOOOOO DREAMY!!!!!!!!!!

Tobias didn’t have any of these numbers saved so it was like he was surrounded by anonymous spying cupids. And so everyone who cared to could count backwards from whatever photograph to the forty-eight hours previous when Tobias blissed out on pheromones had evidently cracked and flown back to the Continent and fucked his teenaged boyfriend.

He looked at himself on the screen again. He couldn’t see what the girls would see. (They all seemed to be girls.) His arms, maybe?

The kind that disappears? he asked.

He pushed himself to stand and wandered the halls as he waited. Little girls skipped past in pink tights and black leotards, people in jeans pushing carts of boxes. Huge as he passed the main news and schedule billboard was the poster, not Gabin, exactly, but his coloring, in the slit and spraypainted sweatshirt: AMERICAN PREMIER. TOBIAS BELL’S “OFF-RHYTHM.” THREE-NIGHT LIMITED RUN AT THE METROPOLITAN BALLET THEATER.

Fuck. Fuck!

His phone buzzed: oui ❤

“God,” he muttered. He hadn’t even known Gabin had taken this picture and now that he’d been cradling it for three months. The last time they’d seen each other.

Okay, he said.

The bubble bloomed at once.

thank you ❤❤❤❤❤

handsome ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

i love you ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Why does the world deserve to see it this fine october night

say you love me and ill tell you ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

I love you

no reason ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Tobias slowed down to squint at this at the corner of two major intersections and collided with a girl in baby blue tights, crushed velvet shorts, and a knitted poncho. “Oh my God, sorry,” she said quickly, her water bottle swinging wildly, “sorry Tobias—”

“Wow,” said Tobias, blinking. “You have really good cuticles.”

Her mouth opened. He pointed at her newspaper.

“Are you done with that?”

Mutely she lifted it for him. He thumbed through as he walked for the proverbial Arts band-aid to rip off—it was tonight, he’d left it as long as he could—and there in the dance section it was, God, blah, who cared, “first season back from his operatic sojourn at Le Ballet National,” etc.

“Fine,” he diagnosed quietly, scanning, “not really…technically…harmonic—fine—”

He hit the quote. He stopped. He turned around.

Jack’s office was three stories up and Tobias took the stairs at full-tilt. It must be said that there was a voice in his head attempting something like I thought we weren’t yelling anymore…? and to that voice Tobias said I SIMPLY CANNOT HANDLE THIS ONCE AGAIN. Behind his desk Jack’s assistant half-rose and started to say, “Give him thirty seconds, Tobias—” as Tobias strode past him saying “THIS IS TIME SENSITIVE,” and he opened the door and held the paper up and said, “Are you trying to kill me? I mean if you tried any harder do you think you could actually drop me dead in the fucking hallway?”

Jack looked over from his stance leaning against the front of his desk. He looked surprised but seemed almost at once to absorb it. “…and this is Tobias Bell,” he said.

Tobias looked where he was looking. A group of five or six old people in eclectic formal dress were standing in the middle of his rug.

“Tobias, I don’t know if you know any of these fine members of the arts community,” said Jack, ushering Tobias over and taking him under his arm, and more quietly, “who are in the process of deciding whether or not to give us half a million dollars, but if you could possibly find the strength and fortitude to corral your horses for ninety further seconds before I do actually strangle you to death?”

Rigidly Tobias pointed his face at them. The paper crumbled in his grip. “Hi. Sorry to curse, um…they let you, in France…”

One of the men stepped forward. He was draped in an immaculate scarlet scarf, and his silver hair swept back from his forehead in a single soft curl that could have been surfed; the dark circles under his eyes looked Old-World European, like Tobias’s father’s, and his eyes were shocking pale green. “Tobias Bell,” he said. His soft accent was Italian. “I saw you dance many years ago, at the Tanztheater in Wuppertal. A lovely night.”

They stared at each other.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Tobias, and he found himself smiling, “God, I was like—sixteen,” and he put his hands to his cheeks, trailing the paper like a boutonnière, “was I any good?”

“Exceptional,” the man rumbled. “And that was before your shoulders came in.”

“She would lie on the ground and throw forty-pound kettlebells at me until I could do her dips the way she liked,” said Tobias, remembering in real time. “Wow. Do we have kettlebells?” he asked Jack.

“No,” said Jack. “All right, everyone, if you’ll step outside, my good-looking, patient, and single assistant is ready to escort you to the lobby where Marie will take you on a tour of the stage. Premier night!” He ferried the group loosely to the door. “Big things. Lovely, Rita. Yes. See you at the reception. Tobias,” he said once the door had closed, “as much as possible, please try to offset getting cruised in my office. We’re not on Christopher Street. What can I help you with?”

Tobias snapped the Times open taut again and took a deep breath. “‘It’s a divisive piece. It split the crowd in Paris—some of their old guard never warmed to it. Too off-kilter, too New York. It might genuinely have been the first time in some of their lives they’d ever seen a neon sign. Le Monde couldn’t stand it. By the end of the run, I think some people on their editorial board had actually dropped dead.’”

He glared at Jack over the top of the paper.

Jack was watching with expectant bonhomie.

“You gave me a body count!” Tobias shouted.

Jack waved his hand and went to the drinks cart. “Marketing is as much an art as whatever you and your shoulders were doing with Pina Bausch.”

Tobias flung his arms in the general direction of Paris. “Jack, the show is tonight! You’ve told everyone that the cool kids hate it!”

“I have not,” Jack said calmly. “I have, as a matter of fact, started an auspicious new narrative for the season, and you’re one of my main characters. I have nothing but confidence in your creations, so much so that I would even restage one that hadn’t originated in my house. I believe,” he pointed at the paper currently deflating on his white leather couch, “I go on to say that it’s a remarkable feat of quickness and displacement.”

Tobias tried cradling his own forehead. “Why are you telling them I bombed in Paris if they didn’t already know that?”

“That third one was more of a nuke,” said Jack, sipping.

“Okay,” said Tobias. “The show is off. Pack it in. Tell the dancers they can keep their costumes.”

Jack followed Tobias as he marched out of the office and down the hall. Whether the crowds parted for him or Tobias was hard to say, but Jack commanded a thoroughfare all his own: people said hello to him, waved as if he knew their names. It was a premier night—it had been going to be a premier night, but almost every month during the season there were premier nights, so the bouncing and chatter and high-wire energy was as normal as life under the freak show circus tent could be. When they got back to the bulletin board Tobias got up on his toes and pulled the pins out of the poster.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jack said conversationally, free hand in his tailored Tom Ford as he watched Tobias stab the pins back into the cork at random, “do you have any of your notations for the old third piece? The one you interrupted. The archivists are asking, they want to do an online exhibit on you while the kettle’s hot…oh, that can come down, it’s from last spring.”

He plucked a pink flyer down from the corner. Tobias was attempting to roll the poster up from the bottom but had to keep starting over because it was tilted. “You sent me over there—like a show pony—with this big story about our two big cities working together to make art—and then they hated my art—and now I’m back and you want to say they were idiots for letting me over there in the first place—how the fuck are you supposed to get this thing back in the tube!”

Jack held his hand out solemnly. Tobias gathered the mass and dropped it in his arms. Jack gave him his whiskey to hold. He began to stroll along, rolling, the path back to his office, Tobias at his heels. “I didn’t say they were idiots. I said the reaction to the piece was factious, which it was.”

“You weren’t there,” said Tobias darkly. “It was like Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said over his shoulder. It looked like he meant it. “That first half of the year was rough for you, I know. Although I think you vibed with French taste a little more than you think you did, if you want to measure by reviews. And Piece 5, Tobias—”

“But now you’re saying it was a waste of time. You entrusted them with me or whatever international cooperation like a moon landing and it nearly started a war—”

Jack pointed the end of the tightly-wound poster decisively. “I don’t care about the moon now. That’s not the story anymore. You’re back to egg and cheese on a bodega roll and we’re back to us versus them.”

Tobias sighed from the bottom of his feet. “Well, that’s a provocative about-face.”

Jack steered him by the elbow around a corner. A trio of teenage girls laden with tote bags chirped hi Mister McMillan! “Hey, you’re on my team again, and I need you tap-dancing on the stairs of the Public Library wearing I Heart New York sweatpants. If I thought I could get you to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, I’d do it—Mets, the Mets,” he edited quickly.

He brought Tobias to a stop beneath an alcove with a view of the fountain five stories below. They couldn’t quite stand next to the window, because of the tent.

“You don’t think it says ‘it’s a bad show, don’t see it’?” Tobias asked quietly, his heart aching.

Jack smiled like he had a secret, shook his head. “I think it says come and see your kid. He’s back from summer camp and his shoulders have grown in.”

“It was my idea,” said a voice from inside the tent.

Jack and Tobias looked down. Slowly, at the height of their shins, the zipper unzipped. When the flap wilted enough a large blue eye gazed out at Tobias from within.

“You are their prize fighter,” she said. “They will read that Paris didn’t like you and they will want revenge. They will want to validate themselves. Americans love to validate themselves.”

The map of the world settled like a film of dust in his head. Ah. Fine.

“Okay,” said Tobias.

The eye stayed fixed on him as the zipper clicked itself shut. Everything stayed quiet.

“She’s protesting the wage gap between the maids at her hotel and the CEO,” said Jack. “Listen, why don’t you get some lunch—leave the building, take a walk. The tickets have been sold. It’ll all be fine, I won’t let them throw things. Or I won’t let anything hit you.”

“Thanks,” Tobias muttered.

Jack knocked on the slick, wrinkled canvas roof. “How are you on water?”

“Three days,” she said from within.

“Oodles of time,” said Jack, grinning.

“Hi, Mister Bell,” said a girl.

They looked at her. She was crossing from one side of the hall to the studio and scanned Tobias up and down. She dimpled deeply as she passed, holding her phone over her mouth, and her two friends scream-giggled at her shoulders and hustled her faster to the doorway.

“Who is that?” asked Tobias. Names were always a crapshoot but he didn’t usually forget whole faces.

“They’re at the school, I think,” said Jack, “third years? Here.” He held the poster out. Tobias took it and handed him his drink. “Hang this up. Leave. Come back.”

“Okay,” Tobias muttered. And he did, he walked back to the bulletin board, trying fruitlessly to place the name of the wandering but time-critical unease still taut in his belly and the pit of his throat. Unspooling the paper yet again he was eye-level with the Gabinesque male figure splashed like paint across the center.

A year later and he was no surer. He thudded his forehead against the word NIGHT. His phone buzzed.

Woozily he took it out without standing up straight. It was a text from his dad, from a Nokia flip phone that had survived the upgrade to the twenty-first century because it still played Tetris: Son, your sister has sent me a picture of you from the Internet. Can glasses be “slutty”?

He slid to the floor.

Back home he changed into his suit (one he owned) and attempted to deescalate his anxiety by checking for the thousandth time the National’s website for their 25-26 season. The opening gala was behind them, and the upcoming program had a few small, weird things, and student showcases, a Martha Graham, a Pina Bausch, speaking of, and a touring company performance of Kaguyahime, and, smack at the end of the year, the entire production of Jewels. Tobias stared at this for a blissful moment of nothing and then the machine started up. Where could he put Gabin. Where could he put Gabin if Gabin could be in two places at once. Where could he put Gabin if Gabin could dance naked. He was possibly dancing this very moment, under someone else’s direction, as if someone else could bait the gods with enough hubris necessary to try.

Gabin sent him little videos sometimes. Not links to the ones from company class, which usually Mishi Duplessis had taken, edited, and posted into snappy vignettes featuring Gabin in a supporting actor role as Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but ones he’d taken himself, alone, in the evening. Long takes of his sporadic solos against a mirror. They were almost poisonous to watch; Tobias’s limbs would go limp, Gabin panting and thunking onto his knees, sipping water, talking to himself, which was Tobias, breathing deep. Okay, one more time…

Gabin was a Romantic, according to Doctor Lola Bell’s lushest requirements, and so probably wanted to hear that Tobias hated even the hypothetical of his being blocked by someone else. The reality was simpler but meaner: Tobias didn’t mind so long as Gabin kind of hated it. This was not self-actualized so he’d never say it and he’d surely grow out of it, but sometimes for example when someone was talking to him about scheduling or an overdue online training he’d drift and pick up where he left off in a fantasy sequence where Gabin in a mid-aughts Ewan McGregor-vein was forced to traverse a room of dark ascetic floorboards via pirouettes until his toes split and he held back furious tears, while the ballet master (Ben Daniels…) was like, “I don’t care if you sweat blood monsieur we will stay here until you dance MY FUCKING STEPS,” and Gabin was like “My legs are MY fucking legs!”—which was something he’d actually yelled at Tobias once, and Tobias had withstood a wave of something so sharp and salty he’d tasted olive brine and—okay, it rarely got past that point. Heinous and masturbatory. But cut him some slack. In his sleeping sex dreams he fucked Gabin as the manifestation of the color pink.

Back at the theater Jack parked him in the wings stage right and gamely suggested he refrain from delivering any notes. His piece was second in the lineup; the table and white boxes were perched at the wall in the dark beneath the fly system which was coming to life as techs and stagehands began setting the stage. He had a million fucking notes and had delivered none of them because, offhandedly (or not) Gabin had said to Tobias’s recitation of the director’s cut list of problems with Piece 2 that any edits between the Parisian and New York audiences would be “cheating.”

“I would change it for you if you did it now!” Tobias had said, over the phone sometime in late August, when it had become clear in a glaze of panic that without Gabin’s body in front of him he was having no new ideas. Gabin was holed up with Jean-Christophe of all convenient people in a yurt on a beach in Palombaggia; Tobias hadn’t been able to steal him away to Japan because he’d had to go to LA for that thing with Angel Olsen and so hadn’t seen Gabin in a month.

“At some point, it has to be done,” said Gabin. “Or you’ll just be making one ballet for the rest of your life.”

“I can fix the bad parts,” Tobias mumbled into his pillow.

“There were no bad parts. But if there were, just let them be bad.”

Tobias had taken his phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. It did not suddenly read “Bizarro-Gabin Who Talks Like Spike Spiegel.”

“Is Jean-Christophe mixing ayahuasca?” he asked.

“It’s your piece,” said Gabin. “It wants to be itself,” and Tobias had gotten kind of verklempt and kept his face in his pillow as his lungs got hot. So now backstage with an American accent the dancers in his piece who were not in the first piece were already dressed, milling about in their space boots and the identical violent bright costumes the sight of which was doing something turbulent to Tobias’s frontal lobe. If PTSD were not a wildly overused psychopop term right now he might have said he was withstanding gigantic psychic waves of it.

Maybe that was all ON meant. That your receptors were open and the movie your brain was playing was its best attempt at reason in face of shattered reality.

“Liquid courage?” said Jack. He sat next to Tobias on top of the empty prop box and handed him a champagne.

Tobias looked into the glass. Frantic bubbles climbed the sides.

“So you saw him over the summer?”

“Huh?”

Jack sniffed delicately and brought something up on his phone. Tobias leaned down to see, then reared back.

“Oh my god—why are you on his Instagram?”

“I have to say, Tobias, and with the utmost respect—you are wasted in sweatpants.”

“The show is off,” said Tobias, starting to stand. Jack yanked him down.

“Be cool, be cool…he knows we’re putting his piece on? Did you tell him?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he think?”

Tobias tried to shrug in such a way as to ask who could fathom the depths of such a mind. Gabin got territorial at weird times: like he hadn’t bitched at all when Tobias told him about Larry dancing lead for the restaging (though he did like it when Tobias called it the “Gabin part”) but then three days ago Tobias had passingly mentioned taking him—Larry—out so he could help Tobias pick out a new couch when his beloved green velvet had finally collapsed and Gabin had texted back What the fuck TOBIAS??????? and they’d had to have a real-time conversation on the phone about boundaries. His argument that Gabin lived in Europe was no good.

“I know you’d have rather not put it up again so soon,” Jack said. Tobias recognized the paternal tone from among other times when his dad had had to sit him down and explain that not everyone was going to understand him when he couldn’t speak. He’d been six, wearing his favorite OshKosh B’Gosh for his new kindergarten. “And I appreciate you working with me—I had to get a Bell onstage, as it were, ASAP, and you’re getting your groove back, and that’s all fine…it’s not him, and you know that, but the audience doesn’t know that.”

Then what’s the fucking point Tobias thought what is the point what is the fucking point.

“Okay,” he said.

“And Tobias…I know the rules are a little more relaxed over there, but I need you to remember—Larry’s married, and his wife pitches softball for the NYFD.”

“Nicholas beat you to that joke this morning,” said Tobias, wearily sipping Veuve.

Jack actually sputtered. “I don’t believe it! I specifically told him I wanted to say it first, that British bastard.”

And, well. The night commenced. The first was a new twelve-minute ballet by a choreographer visiting from Milan; the dancers’ gossip from the past few weeks was that it was cursed because the cast kept rolling their ankles or getting mono but it went beautifully. The costumes were silky and made everyone’s legs look like Cyd Charisse’s. At the end the audience clapped and whistled and the curtain went down and Tobias was On On On. His costumes filled his periphery as he stared straight ahead. He imagined his headphones growing so large they ate his head like a Venus flytrap.

Jack nudged him for any last words.

“Okay, listen,” said Tobias. He raised one hand.

“Yeah,” said Larry, when the pause broke thirty seconds.

The whiteboard was blank. His head collapsed.

“You heard it here first, folks,” Jack said above him. “Break a leg.”

Strangely when the cellos started up Tobias found he could watch. In a mild way it seemed as if he were time-traveling, watching it the first time, so sure and not sure. But he tried not to think about it. The thing about dance was like the thing about getting really, seriously hurt—when it actually happened, it wasn’t about anything else. You kind of just had to sit there and hold it. And when Larry hit the last pose the crowd roared awake.

At once Jack grabbed and squeezed his shoulder, jostled him, and let go, clapping grandly. The stagehands to the left whooped: the lighting had been tricky and they’d nailed it. Tobias exhaled. The dread drained and was replaced by whatever block of leg-weakening relief replaced by draining serotonin replaced by replaced by replaced by. The house was getting to its feet. He stepped backwards from the light until he hit the wall and took out his phone.

“...ghkhello.”

At the voice his heels began to lift and lower. “Are you busy?”

“Not,” said Gabin, “now.”

“What’re you doing?”

Into what sounded like a sock drawer Gabin said CROSSING THE RHINE.

Tobias glanced at his watch. Oh. “I just need—can we do, I’m at the—sorry you were asleep. Can we do the thing and you can go back to sleep?”

Long exhale. The back of his neck prickled over like hot ice. “At the what?”

“Nothing. Can we, the—”

“At the show?”

“—no.”

“I hear the clapping.” Sheets shifted. Sometimes he slept naked. “Are they throwing fruit?”

Jack was still applauding. The curtain had dropped, the dancers bouncing into a lineup for the first bow. “No.”

“You sound like you’re at a basketball game.”

Basketball to him was code for Tobias getting fucked stupid by a six-foot-six point guard. “It’s the curtain. Can we—”

“They love you,” Gabin murmured.

Tobias rested the back of his head against the wall just above some thick threading of wire that pillowed the nape of his neck. “They love Cody.”

“Larry.”

“It’s…a strong male lead…”

“Does he look as good as me?”

Tobias was forcing himself to breathe so deeply that his back was arcing off the wall on every inhale. “Not really possible.”

“Those bastards,” Gabin said with the sudden aggressive cheerfulness of a Frenchman winding himself up. “One or two of them couldn’t have been front row on my opening night? I had to get an all-German board of Olympic skating judges? WHY didn’t you let me go to that fucking man’s house?”

“Whose—”

“I had to sign an affidavit to get out of that, by the way. I am not allowed to purchase or induce another to purchase for me a copy of or subscription to any newspaper or review-publishing organization that prints or reprints the first-edition review of the opening night of a performance in which I dance lead for the duration of your contract with Le Ballet National. Or a year, whichever lasts longer.”

Tobias covered his other ear to blot out the cheering. The dancers were stepping forward hand in hand for a second curtain call; Jack was looking over his shoulder. “My contract?”

“Le Monde’s legal team sensed you were the flame to that cigarette,” said Gabin. He was sitting up; Tobias could tell. “Wait, did you change the costumes? Let me see, turn on your video.”

The vision of himself holding his phone up to the stage like a teenybopper was so perverse as to be Lynchian. “I didn’t change the costumes.”

“Did you change the jump from the floor, like you said?”

“No.”

“Did you change the lighting?”

“No—”

“It’s still cold white?”

“You said not to change anything!”

“You listened?” Gabin crowed, delighted.

“CAN WE PLEASE,” said Tobias, “DO THE THING—”

“You were very popular today,” said Gabin, abruptly as soft as his sheets. “All my little hearts and messages. Your long legs…”

“They can’t, like, track me down from that stuff, can they?”

Gabin made a fair-enough hedging sound. “They did figure out what day it was from the newspaper.”

“Jesus Christ—”

“Do you have a new ballet yet?”

Tobias shut his mouth.

Gabin hummed hmmm? “Do you need me to fly back so you can watch me stretch?”

“I have,” Tobias said slowly, the dancers were skipping offstage, “something.”

Jack looked around for him, ushered him over. Cody was alight, panting, hugging the girls. Gabin had deserved rose petals and a milk bath and Tobias had gotten him keelhauled.

“You do? What is it? Who’s in it?”

Tobias put his hands over his chest and shook his head. With a significant look of employment Jack pointed to the ground at his side.

“I have to go,” Tobias said quietly. “Can I listen to you?”

“Tell me what your dance is right now! I’ll tell you what I’m wearing.”

Tobias raised his eyes into the pulley system. “My boxers and my Erl sweatshirt?”

Pause.

“The sweatshirt,” Gabin said, “is from Off-White.”

“Ah. I can almost picture it.”

“Fine. Go without me. I’ll just read your reviews in the morning.”

“Good night,” said Tobias. “Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you,” said Gabin, grumbly but cozy, and he didn’t hang up; rather Tobias muted himself and the line stayed live, and he heard Gabin slump back down in bed and nestle until he went still, and as Tobias walked back to Jack and the dancers triumphant in his costumes Gabin sighed once for him, just so he could hear the sound. When he woke up the next morning, he was sure, so he packed some shorts—nothing longer than mid-thigh—and got on a plane. He brought Hopscotch, his airplane book, using his passport as a bookmark as he’d always done, which had used to drive Kevin crazy. After liftoff into the sweltering sun, the girl sitting to his left rubbed cold cream into her face and watched three Sophia Coppola movies while drinking frothy Campari and orange juices as fast as the blessedly heterosexual flight attendant could mix them.

Tobias drifted in and out. His flying playlist was full of childhood comfort songs namely the screaming of beautiful boys from the Pacific Northwest that Norah had forcibly raised him on while clamping her headphones onto him on the bus. He could never sleep while flying but sometimes he would disconnect to Chris Cornell and come back around to Kat Bjelland somewhere south of Greenland. Every two hours he ate or drank something and so time passed; he was getting used to this hellacious commute. Karmic payback for his usual being a five-minute stroll up Amsterdam.

Over the wifi circa Ireland he booked a house for three nights in Auvers-sur-Oise, a half hour’s drive from Gabin’s garret in Saint-Denis and slightly upcharged for Bastille Day tourists, with air conditioning, a terrace, full kitchen, and blackout curtains, and got a car waiting for him at Charles de Gaulle. In the old days he would’ve had Jack’s assistant do this for him except he was meeting the person he was meeting, for whom the vibe was he’d raised himself in a back alley teething on razor blades. So he needed to be able to say he’d done it himself. The driver was a college girl from Lisbon with toned triceps and giant false eyelashes like moth wings driving a lemon-yellow Fiat who spotted him some ibuprofen and double-parked outside a bakery while he ducked in for two espressos and a baguette. She drove him to the grocery nearest the house and loaned him a tote bag from her trunk so he wouldn’t have to pay an extra euro to haul coffee beans and cream and pomegranate juice, prosciutto, dried mango slices, brie and honey, kalamata olives, Belgian waffles, three pounds of dried pasta, two bottles of white, and a frozen opera cake. She asked him if he was having a party, and he said sort of, my boyfriend has a metabolism like a megalodon in Jurassic Park. When he showed her a picture she screamed in delight.

The rental house was brick painted black and white and shaded by a sideways-canting tree full of pink flowers. The code to the private side entrance was 1789.

Inside he put everything in the fridge, set the thermostat to twenty-three, plugged in his headphones, did ten minutes of So You Just Deplaned yoga off his phone, and went about de-kitschifying the decor eg. removing posters of aesthetic irrelevance from the walls and stacking them in the linen closet. When his suitcase was empty he washed his face, changed clothes, and passed out facedown for the whole first season of Riverdale.

He woke before sunrise and went on a run. All the houses had red Spanish tile roofs and wooden gates and the sidewalks were overflowing with hedges and eventually he hit the river, and he ran alongside it on a black gravel path lined with drooping trees and low stone walls. When he got back he took a panoramically thorough shower. He was allowing himself to fully sit with the impending sense of almost-fatal erotic suspense only in loops of ninety seconds. The man’s name repeated over the speakers in his head already sounded like a heartbeat. He put on a soft, berry-red polo and some drawstring shorts and a pair of black sunglasses that Norah had told him didn’t make him look like he was trying to look like Reservoir Dogs and walked out the door again for the rental car a few streets down.

In a spread of the average American male he would not be the most obvious candidate but he liked to drive, as long as he knew the parking situation, and driving in France outside of Paris would be fine because he knew now not to turn right on red. The site where Gabin was working had been emailed to him by an internet shadow named Etienne three degrees removed from Geneviève’s assistant and took the car out of town into a beautiful valley of lavender and yellow grass. He parked where the bespoke pedantic directions told him he could, at a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill, and stepped out into hot air between two snug houses and the field. He listened to his downloaded bass playlist and Gabin’s beloved saturnine mermaid SZA on the walk, the long desire path smoothed to blonde satin by innumerable tire tracks running in parallel columns. He kept just along the edge enough to crunch a textural pillow of dirt, soft gravel, and padded grass beneath the thin soles of his Chucks. Soon enough the Mediterranean sun had coaxed out a garland of sweat under his watchband and at the small of his back, and he pulled his shirt against his spine so he’d get one of those damp imprints that were so mind-blowingly hot on other men.

He also liked when guys’ sweatshirts showed sweat, especially leaking down from a crewneck collar. Or if, when you had long hair put up, the strands of it slipped free down the back of your neck.

The house was huge and old, what an American who grew up in a brownstone might call a chateau. On approach he lifted his headphones on cinematic instinct and yes you could hear motors, weight, and wood. The far half of the property looked untouched but the nearer half was cocooned in scaffolding and a hole in the roof draped in some white tarp rippling amiably in the breeze. Aware that if the slightest environmental event occurred he would instantly die, he stepped onto the drive and wove amongst the cars and painter’s vans up to the porch. The first man who noticed him was thirty pages deep into a clipboard and hailed him to the left of the doorway with something along the lines of are you lost, friend?

He took a deep breath. One of the lessons he’d gotten from hanging off Gabin’s shoulders for ten months was that “bonjour” and a sincere brief attempt at French went a long way, but he’d translated this script outside the Jamba Juice at JFK with a Swiss banker who’d asked him where his mother had been born for him to have cheekbones like that. He took off his sunglasses and tried to look calm and sincere.

“Hello,” he said in the native tongue. “Does Gabin work today?”

“Yes,” said the man.

Silence.

Kindly bring his body to me on a Tiffany’s platter, Tobias did not say. “Will he have a break soon?” he asked. (You had to account for the unions.)

“[something about an hour,]” the man replied.

He kept cool. “Can you tell him I want to talk to him when he’s done, please?”

“Who are you?” the man asked in English.

“I’m his—autre patron.”

Without any comment about sweaty necklines the man pointed to a picnic table twenty feet down the lawn laden with coolers, rolled-up papers, and a sledgehammer with the recognizably cheerful expression of a person about to get to boss Gabin Roux around and went back to his clipboard.

Tobias floated to the table and propped his phone sideways against a real-life hardhat and recorded himself trying to break through the brick wall in his head of next steps in this fucking arm sequence. The draining hourglass was helpful. He hadn’t told Jack his plan yet, and when he did to get a yes despite its obvious ulterior motive he’d like to be able to say “…and I’ve got the first five minutes blocked.” Already the tone of the piece was shaping into something like giddying, ankle-shattering energy, a fractalling multicolored steam engine giant enough to justify sixteen minutes of attention. And the two spotlights.

“Tobias,” said Gabin.

His immediate thought was that God had manifested his choreographic fantasy into this wheat field, Pygmalion-style. Essentially that was what had happened. Gabin, staring at him, in his black jeans and work boots and a black T-shirt from Hurlyburly, his hair was coming out of his elastic in pencil-thick strands coiling down to his chin. He was bronze with sunshine. He looked the same. He looked astounded.

“Tobias,” he said again, “what’re you doing here?”

Tobias stared.

“How did you—what the fuck are you doing here?”

He was withstanding a full-body scrub of psychic white cotton at Gabin’s voice three feet away. The sweat coming off him was like nuclear sex radiation.

“Is that my shirt?” he asked.

Gabin’s mouth hung open. “Do you want it back?”

He exhaled and lifted his headphones off. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he repeated weakly.

Back to the script. In, out. “I was thinking about what we talked about, and I want to do it. So I got a house.”

Gabin’s expression—he was always taping for his Oscar nomination—said Cogitating. “What we,” he said, “what we talked about. What did we talk about?”

What had they talked about? What else existed? Tobias glanced past him at the front porch, as if the foreman would be standing there with a hand-painted sign like at a basketball game that said WHORE. “Is this your break? Was that an hour?”

“No,” said Gabin, “he just fucking told me, I almost electrocuted myself. What are you talking about?”

Tobias opened his mouth, then remembered the phone and leaned backwards on one heel to click it asleep. Gabin was watching with almost wounded eyes the precise color of sweet Saigon cinnamon spilled across green marble. “Us sleeping together and you fuck me.”

Briefly Gabin looked like a wet bar of soap had slipped from his hands.

“Remember?” Tobias prompted. “The week before Piece 4? You’d hit your head, and we stayed in bed all weekend, and we were talking, and you said you—anything I need?”

He stood there staring. Then his hand shot out flat and fast against the forces of absurdity. “You bought a house?”

“—what?”

Gabin looked behind himself at the tarp. A pair of burly men were on the porch within hearing range, of whom neither would correctly guess the direction in which the scarecrow dance man vs. French New Wave pornography “Thirsty Architect” Male Lead #1 topped each other.

“You got a house?” he repeated.

“I rented a house.”

“For how long?” he asked at once.

“Three nights,” said Tobias, bewildered.

Gabin’s shoulders rolled back. He seemed to be seeing Tobias’s clothes and his body for the first time.

“You’re golden,” said Tobias.

He hummed hm?

“Your face. Your arms.” He was suddenly sure to the point of pain that the crook of Gabin’s neck would smell like sea salted caramel. “Do you have—”

“No,” said Gabin, grinning from nowhere.

“Oh. I—”

With a quickness like summer lightning Gabin hooked his thumb through his right-side belt loop and tugged a half-inch of denim down a half-inch of pelvic skin. It glowed like rose-gold peach juice scorched to a line of sugar by the backyard firepit.

A vaudeville cane yanked Tobias’s brain offstage left, and approximately ten thousand freezeframe Polaroids of Gabin’s body correctly blocking the arm sequence fell out of a suitcase onto the floor of the southbound 1.

Gradually he became aware of sound. Gabin was snapping his fingers laconically.

“Mon amour,” he said. As always disgusting smugness made him look like the prince in an HBO show about forbidden love between sixteenth-century clergymen. “I said did you get here this morning.”

“Yes,” said Tobias. On. ON. “No. Yesterday.”

“You didn’t call me.”

Positive. Concerningly positive. Or maybe negative? Did the good/bad binary not even exist anymore? “To do what?”

Gabin’s lazy eyelids remained haughty and now he was smiling. “Is this for your ballet?”

A toll like the O’Hara harbormaster rang sharp in his ears. “That—is.”

“What,” said Gabin. “Absurd?”

“No. Yes.”

“I think there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for a ballet,” Gabin said. “Short of looking me in the eye. Tobias.”

He was cupping his own neck. “I was asleep—and it was raining like it used to at our place and I kept going in and out of this dream at the spot in Mulholland Drive when she’s kissing Melissa George and there was this Angelo Badalamenti song that only existed in my head and you were there—and—but you weren’t there—”

“Your other boyfriends must have loved the summer break,” said Gabin. “You going insane trapped in your apartment for three months until you beg them to crank you on like one of those old airplane motors, turning the little propeller to start the engine…”

Now Tobias’s mouth opened. “I’m not a wind-up toy—”

Gabin’s smile could have killed a shark. “I know. That’s me. Come here.” Tobias was struggling to think of the bitchiest way to tell him to go fuck himself without sounding too ironic and Gabin pointed at the ground in front of his boots. “Come over here.”

His elbows wilting from their perch Tobias moved to his spot. He thought Gabin would adjust his collar and say calmly Tobias I enjoy you but you are not wanted like that but when he was close enough Gabin put his hands to Tobias’s face and delivered it to himself like a sweet mouthful of milk and kissed him.

The strange and familiar piercing which slit itself inside Tobias’s temples whenever Gabin touched him burned thin and lancing-hot. The great and terrible thing when kissing Gabin was the distinct feeling that he was kissing you as if it were the end of the world. It hijacked certain parts of your amygdala and sent pumping out wild survival-movie hormones such as The Enemy—It’s Right Behind You! and Find Shelter & Fuck.

“Gabin,” he said, strangled, into Gabin’s tonsils, “can we be gay here?”

“Yes,” said Gabin, kneading his lymph nodes with $5/minute fingertips.

“I told him to wait for your break—are you gonna get fired?”

Gabin rerouted his face and kissed him so hard it was legally a bite. Tobias’s hands fritzed down his shoulder blades to find—yes—the damp patch at the small of his back—yes—THIS IS MY DESIGN—

“You flew out here?” Gabin murmured when he surfaced for air.

Tobias’s poor heart skipped. “Did you change your mind?”

“Waste of a plane ticket,” Gabin said into his chin. “If you’d told me, I could’ve just swum the ocean.”

Feeling like there was an apple in his throat, Tobias managed, “I couldn’t sleep.”

Gabin brushed back his hair. “You know, I’ve got a room upstairs.”

Tobias looked around his face and then up at the house. Probably they would be overheard, but if Gabin didn’t care then yes acclimating rapidly to exigent circumstances like a chill normal person Tobias thought sure, well, and he said, “Would the others, um, expect to…”

Gabin’s flexed biceps flashed taut for a split second like a deep sea tremor. “No, I’m just—where’s your place?”

“Auvers…um…”

“By the castle?”

Tobias nodded. Gabin siphoned a second of attention up to the sky for Jesus Christ, then told Tobias to wait here for three more hours and maneuvered him backwards to sit at the table, with strict instructions not to touch anything that ran on gas, electricity, or physics. He could eat or drink whatever he found. Gabin had his phone on (“AS USUAL…”) but if Tobias sent him a picture of his dick the other guys would probably see it. And Gabin loved him. Tobias watched him walk back to the house under the not disinterested eye of the foreman; when he mounted the front steps—boots clomping, he was still heavy on his heels—the man asked, “He’s your other boss?”

“Not tonight,” said Gabin.

Tobias rotated ninety degrees and lay flat on the seat bench and stared at the sky with his bare eyeballs. His heartbeat was incredibly close to the surface. Whatever berserker-mode chemical his brain had decided would best keep him alive now tasted like copper, as if getting fucked was some sort of gladiatorial fight for food or a switchknife duel in the alley he needed to prepare for with faster blood. With Gabin maybe it was! It was equally likely he was this moment telling his work husband what had just happened as it was that he was gouging a hole into the foundation with a chisel and speaking the secret to the dirt.

Eventually Tobias lifted his feet off the ground and put his heels on the edge of the bench, the skin where his thighs had rested on wood clammy with sweat. Three nights. Sometimes in the past when through whatever lunar sorcery he knew this thing was about to happen to him he would feel his senses draw in one by one until he was using only what was necessary not to collapse on the sidewalk, and the results were aesthetically pure, like white noise, because he was hardly a part of it. Once in a tiny town in Washington State he’d taken what the man had said was acid and what turned out, one of the other boys thought later, to be ketamine and had floated above himself to a Galaxy 500 song and the fucking had hardly touched him. If he felt especially close to the other person he knew what sounds to make to please them. Sometimes when he was very drunk the performance was fun, while he was still drunk. Sometimes he put his clothes back on and escaped out of second-story windows while their backs were turned.

Sometimes the thing inside him was like a lit wick. And now—this floodlit wild man like a dynamite stick thrown down a tunnel in the mountainside.

Gabin woke him up by walking his fingertips up the middle of his face. He was shadowing Tobias’s head with his body so was backlit by the sun, a halo shot white through his loose hair. He marched Tobias away from the house and up the hill by the hand chattering brightly about scandalous managerial hearsay amongst the carpenters and what beach Jean-Christophe wanted to take him to during the mass vacation that all of France fucked off on during August.

Serenely the radio dial swung top right to bottom right.

“That’s nice,” said Tobias. The font in the comic book panel was red.

“Yeah,” said Gabin cheerfully.

“Want to come to Osaka with me?” he asked. “The street food’s unbelievable. They make a hotpot from that fish that kills you with its spines and put the fins in a sake that’ll make you pick a karaoke song you could never have conceived of in your home time zone.”

Gabin slowed nearly to a stop. Tobias hauled him along, pulsing. At the sight of the car he got the same look as at the table.

“It doesn’t come with a roof.”

“This is a…” Gabin trailed off, staring into the belly of the Jaguar.

“It’s okay.” Tobias got the door for him. “My sister taught me to drive stick in tenth grade.”

Gabin sank into the passenger seat with his eyes fixed on Tobias’s face like he was looking through a rose window. Really he was built for that sort of thing. Whether the object be a looted monstrance or the skirt of an ancient Gallic queen or a poster of Baryshnikov in White Nights or a scattered choreographer who couldn’t speak his language was up to the vicissitudes of fate. So that was just Tobias’s luck.

“Seatbelt,” he said as he turned on the engine. It growled; the leather rumbled.

With a click like releasing the safety on a dime store pistol, Gabin strapped himself in.

The drive back was…humid. Through the goodness of his heart, or as a condition of his parole, Gabin didn’t literally take Tobias’s hand off the stickshift but he didn’t need to imperil the anonymous lives of French pedestrians to get hot: Tobias had a whole other arm. At every stop sign—and they said “stop,” in English—red light, or innocent nanny pushing a stroller, Gabin would lean over and apply himself to the right side of Tobias’s face, kiss down the vein in his throat, lick the side of his mouth, bite and suck his earlobe until the blood in his face was pounding an ancient war drum rhythm and Gabin had to reach up and pretend to steer with his pinkie to get him to proceed into the intersection. Really as the certified adult he should have said something but for the nth-millionth time he indulged instead the ticking film canister down the middle of Gabin’s brain, his joy in the staging of their own Cinema Paradiso montage to revisit in lonelier hours. Whatever he wanted Tobias would do it. Sitting at a red behind a thrumming Citroën the color and fluorescence of the chrome spray in Fury Road he finally let—he finally gave in and with his foot crammed flat on the brake met Gabin’s face on his side of the stick and kissed him back thick and slow, cupped his jaw with both hands, wet like the gutter and galvanized by whatever lightning had woken up the Bride of Frankenstein. Gabin purred into his mouth, slipped his hand under Tobias’s waistband, and rubbed him sweetly. Tobias was pressing the pedal almost into the asphalt.

A distant truck honked decorously.

“It’s green, my love,” Gabin murmured into Tobias’s larynx.

“Fuck,” said Tobias, rebooting. You had better believe he still shifted into first without stalling.

When he pulled into the private little parking spot shielded from God by the pink angel tree, Gabin released his seatbelt with a sound like a trebuchet rope and straddled Tobias’s lap before the engine went quiet. He manhandled Tobias with a great and terrible specificity, he knew too much: how hard he could tug the short hair at the back of Tobias’s head and knead his scalp, how far he could yank him back by this grip and kiss him from above at such a sacrificial angle that the muscles up Tobias’s throat ached, that perched on top of him chest to chest he could roll his hard-on against Tobias’s sternum and how Tobias loved it, he loved it, he’d hoist Gabin’s ass up in return with his whole forearm and brace him closer and Gabin would grind against him. His sweat was somehow and so obviously more real than other people’s, his mouth more real, his smell, the Baroque luxuriance of his muscles and his—there was nothing else to call it, his soul, that thing that looked out of his eyes.

Gabin brought him to his feet. He had to negotiate two sets of keys and an unfamiliar garden while the majority of his brain had already shifted into fucking-on-a-stone-cave-floor, but Gabin was a professional at not tripping and eased him up the sidewalk backwards while kissing intertwined. A key turned. Vaguely he noted a pleasant change in air temperature. Gabin pulled Tobias against him at the wall at the base of the stairs and slackened the drawstring of his shorts and worked them down two, three, four inches, knelt on one knee between Tobias’s feet, and licked the strip of his damp pubic hair, and when he rose took the hem of Tobias’s shirt with him and threw it without looking towards the dining room. Tobias pressed his bare chest against sweaty cotton and kissed him into the wall. Clothed in no way that mattered his skin was hair-trigger sensitive and when Gabin dragged his nails down Tobias’s back he jerked tight and Gabin laughed, smushed into the soft blue paint.

“Nice house.”

That chemical had flooded his thighs now. It felt like he’d been hit across the legs with a plank. “I didn’t want any shared walls.”

Gabin exhaled like another laugh hot into Tobias’s mouth. “Okay, what’re you telling me?”

A plea for dignity. Geneviève had already had to help him pick the most appropriate flower-language bouquet to send to Colette, the lady on the other side of his apartment in Paris who’d had to listen to the intensification of his and Gabin’s special relationship for six months. He could not bear to do this for a floorfull of backpackers on summer break from Yeshiva University.

“You get kind of loud...”

“I get?”

He hesitated. A lot was happening cerebrally and that was before considering Gabin’s ass in his hands. He was too hard to think. The frame was bleeding.

“I got four bags of mangoes,” he said desperately.

The cant of Gabin’s shoulders bowed back as if plucked.

“My man,” he said. His beautiful smile like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, but instead of a sheep it was an altar boy and instead of a wolf it was a filthy witch in a Goya painting offering an infant to His Satanic Majesty in exchange for quads strong enough to do eleven pirouettes. Beneath the same crescent moon as on his arm. “And four whole walls. What can’t he do?”

Almost anything, Tobias should have said, but Gabin had him by the shoulder blades and was steering him up the stairs. The wood creaked and crackled and Gabin pushed him backwards with one hand to walk and pulled him down with the other to kiss and so he felt like a sort of loop of flesh. When the ground levelled out he was walked blindly until the back of his legs met the duvet and Gabin got him on his back in bed. He held onto Gabin’s hair as he was kissed and further undressed. The curls were billowy and downy from the ride and thick in his fingers. When Gabin stood up between his knees and pulled off his own shirt—it was Tobias’s, snug on his frame—Tobias touched the button on his jeans. His heartbeat was like a helmet of sound. Gabin knelt on the edge of the bed and kissed his throat. Surely he could feel it through his lips.

The ceiling was feather-white and textured like tree bark. Tobias kept his hands on Gabin’s naked back which was supple and sculpted for complex and exhausting labor like a pirate galley and counted in his head how long to hold a breath in and out. When Gabin bit and kissed a line down the center of his chest Tobias cradled his jaw to feel it open and close, and when Gabin’s back drew out of reach and he had to spread his legs he stroked his hair again and watched it spiral back, and when Gabin was sucking his cock he pulled his curls syncopated to the rhythm of his tongue because Gabin liked it like that, and when Gabin’s tongue was up his asshole he had to hold his own thigh to one side, and feeling his own skin wasn’t optimal but he stared at the ceiling chanting inwardly don’t drift don’t you fucking drift. He covered his eyes then put this hand on the nightstand then grabbed the fitted sheet and clenched his fist on one two three off one two three and when he was just about to open his eyes to force himself to focus Gabin’s fingers wove through his own and held him down.

The film played on the inside of his eyes. On one side of the partition, scattered across a wooden floor, were hundreds of thousands of dance notation cards, and costume fabric samples and the sound cue library and a book of Basquiat paintings and Sanzo Wada’s Dictionary of Color Combinations and a box of Kandinsky postcards and a candle that smelled like vetiver and amber and his reading glasses and a mug with a thick lip and heavy handle and a down pillow with a foam core and his headphones on full blast and an iPhone video of Gabin doing sink, rise, slide, foot up, half quarter turn to the right, bear the body on the toe in the middle of their kitchen in Paris at half past midnight and on the other side of the partition was the blood thudding in his ears as Gabin in this room right now held his thighs apart.

“Where’s the…”

As he would have in the movie Tobias pointed to the nightstand. His hand shook. Above him Gabin ferreted out the box and the last in the end of the roll and opened it with his teeth. If emotions had been real and if Tobias had known how to parse them he might have felt some combination of frightened, besotted, starstruck, nauseous, embarrassed, astonished, alone, desolate, morbid, manic, ecstatic, euphoric, nostalgic, helpless, homesick, lovesick, desperate, hungry, and in love, but they were not because for him they weren’t so instead the control panel was just lit up solid and blinding left to right and the men in lab coats were scattering.

“Like this?” Gabin asked quietly.

God, hell, the universe, etc. He tried not to blink too much like fluttering his lashes. “What?”

Gabin made a square in the air encompassing Tobias’s stripped torso. “This is always when you flip me over like an ensemble alternate on a casting couch.”

Quick, ferric anger bloomed and extinguished inside his ribs. “I didn’t cast you to fuck you—”

“I know,” said Gabin. “Tobias. I’m asking how you like it.”

Almost casually Gabin’s fingers between his legs smoothed over and kneaded and pressed inside him and his spine arched. Unexpectedly his eyes teared up.

“I have to see you,” he said. “Like—when I get a shot I have to look at the needle…”

Gabin bit down on something inside his own mouth and looked at the ceiling.

“What!”

“Nothing. Just—okay. I’m obsessed with you.” He bent down and nuzzled Tobias’s nose. He smelled like sawdust and grass. Tobias felt his thighs being opened and pushed back. A wave of heat washed down his skin that might otherwise have preceded an atomic bomb.

He pressed his forehead against Gabin’s. A stripe of sunshine was draping his waist. He could still hear the birds. Miraculously he found he could close his eyes.

“Go deep, please,” he said.

Gabin muttered something like don’t fucking tell me twice. And it turned out he hadn’t had to say it even once because Gabin knew no other way to be.

They kissed more than maybe anytime before. Gabin held his temples and fucked him in long, sure strokes and kissed him sideways, easy and assured. The camera lens constricted so fast and tight that Tobias went dizzy: the wide bright world bleached white. It hardly hurt. Even while it was happening he wanted more so badly. As if he could hear this thought Gabin hitched Tobias’s hips two or three inches down the bed and fucked inside him at a new and improved angle and Tobias gasped softly.

“Fuck,” Gabin said into his mouth, “that’s—”

“I want that,” said Tobias. “I dreamt it like that.”

The fingers in his hair ratcheted airtight. Tobias tried to kiss him as nice as he’d been kissed but he could tell Gabin was concentrating and he knew what on or rather who: he was the first man inside Tobias in over a year and so would not let a third person into his bed on pain of death, he would never ask. Did he do it like this?

Tobias’s hand stayed on Gabin’s shoulder and the other on the wall above their heads and he breathed out into Gabin’s ear as Gabin did what he had himself done for a stretch of ten months which was force a rhythm onto the other’s body and he held on, and then something new descended, and the sight line began to contract and then there was not the birds and the sunshine but the pressure of the new thick rhythm inside him and then the wick lit, and his spine singed hot and Gabin lifted his hips and the needle lifted from the record and not on purpose he moaned. Gabin hiked him down again and the room was so bright and Gabin’s skin so hot.

“Fuck,” he said, hearing his own soft voice, “oh my god, more.”

Gabin exhaled very deeply into Tobias’s neck. Some transfer of heat or buried tectonics suggested he was restraining himself from ripping the mattress with his teeth. He rolled his hips, and the light behind Tobias’s eyes went pink. “Here?”

Tobias mumbled yes. He was splitting into slick sweat and hot cotton. The texture of the wall beneath his fingertips. When Gabin was being fucked he’d curve backwards before he came, like an apostrophe, and on his back Tobias was the opposite; he curled upward. Gabin could hold him. And when he came his mouth was in Gabin’s hair, just like he’d dreamed.

He laughed with only his breath, draped with Gabin’s body. The most perfect chord was strumming through the world. It was like this when he landed on his heels perfectly.

“Thank you,” he murmured into the curls. If he’d been standing, he’d have swooned. “I’d forgotten.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gabin said weakly into the sheets.

It was nice. So obviously he had to have it a dozen more times before the Airbnb expired.

Gabin adjusted graciously to the middle of his week being hijacked on behalf of his dick. He asked once if he could shower but otherwise he and Tobias stayed within arm’s reach of each other and were never more than half-dressed. Tobias followed him into the living room as Gabin hooked his phone up to a portable speaker next to the television and queued a YouTube playlist of DJs spinning sets of jazz piano, bootleg Sade, minor key vaporwave, and autumnal R&B mixed before either of them were born, his hands magnetized to Gabin’s waist and his mouth at the pulse in his carotid artery. As ever Gabin allowed himself to be moved under the pleasant auspice of artistic fiction that Tobias knew best how to move him. They fucked again, on the floor. Gabin was wearing Tobias’s sweatpants, blue and fitted through the knee, and didn’t even pull them lower than his ass as Tobias spread himself on the pearl-white wool rug, one heel braced on the fireplace and the other leg curled as if in desperate protection across Gabin’s back, which made him feel delicious and degenerate, like he was a debased piano tutor or something and Gabin was, like, a Soprano. His three pendants bouncing off his chest and collarbones as he thrust. One caught the light and shot a split-second rainbow prism across Tobias’s vision like a spell.

“Oh, you’re wearing it,” he said.

Gabin rolled to a pause at the perfect apex. The necklaces swung up towards his chin in operatic Newtonian momentum and Tobias’s back arched like Gabin had cranked his spine tight with a lever.

“What?” Gabin panted shortly.

“Your diamond.”

He looked down in the vague direction and blitzed through a handful of evocative microexpressions. “I know,” he said, his chest heaving heroically. “I don’t—I never take it off.”

“Not for work?”

“No.”

The air in Tobias’s ears got very loud, like from takeoff engines. The feeling—the chemical bath from the Fire Island rental was back, that cocktail from the hallway: the California sun… “Do you keep it on for boxing?”

Gabin had closed his eyes. “Am I not doing this right?” he gritted out.

Tobias looked around Gabin’s beautiful hovering face. “What?”

“I can’t talk to you like we’re at the fucking bus stop Tobias I have to concentrate—”

“No, I know, just, like—the little outfits you put on—” Gabin repeated little outfits in incredulous desperation. “Okay, keep going…”

In Catholic school punishment for interrupting his teacher Tobias was forced to jerk himself off as Gabin watched and so guarantee himself coming onto his own chest. Then while Gabin caught his breath (he needed a hard ninety after sex before his English came back) Tobias fired up the gas oven and served melted brie on a ripped baguette and they ate on the floor off a wooden cutting board with their feet overlapping and Gabin’s shoulder braced against Tobias’s collarbone. Tobias got pleasantly day-drunk from a glass mug and kissed the back of Gabin’s ear until the goosebumps reached his wrist. He was suntanned all the way down: all the way.

“Where did you go?” asked Tobias, spreading his hand attic-pale in comparison on Gabin’s thigh.

“Antibes,” said Gabin.

“With the other guys?”

He hummed yes, drizzling honey. Tobias drew a sigil above his hip bone and refrained from asking for the cast list. Gabin having at least two friends on this Earth was a net good, mostly for everybody else.

“You can come whenever you want,” said Gabin, scenting this sea change.

“Beaches are for introspection,” he muttered.

Gabin paused to better project skepticism via chewing. The hair on his arms and legs was thick and black. Over summer break he was still shaving his chest. His skin like solid butterscotch. “I thought beaches were for doing shots off my stomach and making out in the pool in front of your ex-boyfriend.”

“Beaches are for shotgunning him in front of me,” said Tobias, ears warm right on cue.

Ye Olde Gabin might have shoved him. The new and actualized Gabin was more dangerous: his wicked Vanity Fair smile, six inches out. “You said be nice to him.”

“You were nice to everyone—”

“I was nicer to him than you were.”

“How d’you know how nice I was to him!”

“You were smoking with him when I got there,” Gabin said airily.

“I wasn’t buttressed across the sand in a pliant London bridge,” Tobias said too quickly.

Gabin laughed, once, not in Tobias’s face but at the cutting board, which was worse. He sucked a bead of honey off the knuckle of his thumb and looked sideways at Tobias’s chest, down his belly, the damp well of his crotch. “Is that what you imagined while you were fucking me into the wall? Him on the other end?”

Something wholly unidentifiable prickled up Tobias’s spine. If he were not a major player in the elegant, enlightened, and esoteric American ballet scene, it might have been territoriality. “No I wasn’t.”

Gabin took hold of his chin. He had the power to push Tobias off a cliff and simply, up to this point, had not. “Did you dream about it, maître?” he asked.

With the slack allowed by Gabin’s grip, Tobias shook his head.

Gabin pressed his thumb between Tobias’s lips. Tobias opened his mouth. When it was just far enough across his teeth he bit the nail.

“I know you didn’t,” said Gabin. “That’s only me. You’re making a ballet for me and I’m all you think about.”

Tobias blinked slowly like he’d been struck between the eyes and nodded. Gabin stroked the inside of his lip.

“You’re going to get me hooked on this, aren’t you? And in two days you’ll fucking leave.”

“I’ll come back,” Tobias said at once.

Gabin pretended to sigh like Joan Crawford, cocking his shoulder. “Men always say that.”

Tobias took his hand, squashing his fingers together, and kissed his palm deeply. In some ancient Greek time saturated with olive oil and blue waters they were already life companions. As it was Tobias loved him like—a year ago he would’ve said his body couldn’t do it.

They kissed on the floor until he got so woozy he couldn’t think and Gabin escorted him back to bed where he fed his cock to Tobias by inches. Their eastward-side hands stayed occupied with logistics but the westward side clasped together tightly. Gabin’s curls bounced as he worked and his skin glossed with sweat glowed overbright and saturated like the colors in afternoon sunshine before a blistering storm. When Tobias started to curl Gabin cupped the back of his head and held him taut and chanting beyond his ability not to make noise ah ah ah ah ah. Sickeningly this single time Gabin didn’t collapse and when Tobias sloughed into a puddle in the center of the bed he grinned and lit a cigarette and made Tobias watch him stroll to the balcony without him and smoke naked infinitely out of reach. Then they ate opera cake and watched À plein temps on the mounted TV while Gabin gave him a hickey that could be seen through the Hubble space telescope. That evening while the pasta water was boiling Tobias got him on his back on the lovely cerulean sectional and rode him until he turned the sweetest shade of sultry rose and said through a romantic sheen of crescendoing tears will you just fucking CHOKE ME ALREADY TOBIAS. So he did what you were supposed to do, which was constrict not the trachea but the veins on the side of their neck, and Gabin held his forearm with both hands and came gasping wet with his Adam’s apple jutting into Tobias’s palm. Tobias had to dismount in counts of three.

“I love you,” he said, by way of saying thank you. Gabin was batting blindly for his cigarettes.

They didn’t go to sleep until half past midnight. Gabin reset his alarm for an hour later than usual and texted his ride (someone else on the crew, who was “not a threat”) that he didn’t need one until Friday. Out of habit Tobias handed him some sweats and Gabin scooched down to nestle in the nook of Tobias’s waist. The sheets were white cotton embroidered with a thin black line along the edge, which was pretty, and Gabin pulled them up to his elbows. He craned his chin up and held his hair back so one by one Tobias could take out his earrings.

“It wasn’t for the dance,” said Tobias quietly, maneuvering the tiny clasp.

“Hm?” Gabin said sleepily.

Tobias put the earrings, the little hoops, in the catchall by the digital clock and turned off the lamp. The room fell into navy blue darkness. He found his way down along Gabin’s body. “To be—out here. Not everything’s, y’know, the thing. I mean I’d have still wanted to if I was like, a cartographer.”

“What’s that?” Gabin asked in his arms.

“A mapmaker.”

Gabin mulled this over in the soft quiet of the ceiling fan. His eyelashes brushed Tobias’s chest when he blinked. Then he thrust his top arm straight up in the air like he was wielding a cutlass. Tobias startled. “And I’m a pirate captain,” he said with lusty relish.

Tobias burst out laughing into his hair.

The next morning Gabin rolled out of bed, did a plié to check his ankles, and griped that he didn’t have any clothes.

“I don’t have any clothes,” he said loudly, inspecting the drawers in just his tight boxers for something Tobias would allow him to borrow or a handsome previous tenant had left behind.

“Don’t wear clothes,” Tobias said quietly, plucking the comforter.

He shoved out a short Gallic sigh. “If I go back in the same shirt, they’ll know you’ve just been fucking me all night.”

Tobias weathered with dignity a vision of Gabin scowling in a high-resolution Bruce Weber beneath a hazard sign that said whatever French was for “used.”

“Everyone on the planet already knows that,” he said.

Gabin looked impressed. Tobias felt himself warming back into ON territory. Good God, was he some kind of animal?

“It looks good on you. The back’s signed by Elizabeth Berkley.”

Gabin said fine and put it on: arms all the way through, then over the head. Then he did the thing where he walked back to Tobias’s side of the bed with his shoulders and hips twelve percent more like a velvet-lined taxi dancer at the Fandango and braced himself on the comforter to lean over Tobias’s legs. His cleavage beneath the gaping neckline could have started a war.

“Make a dance for me to wear it,” he said.

He had a lethal sexy Kubrick stare and on pain of live burial in the Parisian catacombs Tobias could not let this on.

“I’m not a Pez dispenser.”

Gabin put his hand on Tobias’s shoulder as a fulcrum and swung himself up, mounting Tobias around the thighs. Staring straight ahead he got an eyeful of the tattooed collarbones and his Tiffany Solitaire. “Make a dance for me to wear it onstage.”

“Not every single thing you say or do necessarily translates into a blockbuster ballet, Gabin,” said Tobias, which was one hundred percent a lie.

Gabin lowered his lashes to make fun of the concept of demurring a compliment, then leaned in. Tobias’s aching heart jumped. He put his mouth to the soft hair at Tobias’s eyebrow. “Make me wear it onstage,” he said softly. He kissed Tobias’s temple. “Make me sweat through it. Get me all wet and stretched out.”

Oh my god. “Is that for them or for you,” Tobias asked. His heart was throbbing so he kept very still. On top of him Gabin like a lit rocket on the launch pad saturating the air with boiling-point dew. Even at rest his body emitted radiant heat, and he was never at rest.

“Coincidentally,” Gabin said, “it’s for you.”

A tender point. That every dancer in Paris minus literally Gabin had known that Tobias was desperate for him was retroactively mortifying, mostly because Tobias hadn’t known either. The force that had compelled him to a public sitdown with Kevin had just felt like neatness. But he’d been on the giant video billboard the entire time. Again.

“I’m not really in charge,” he said, a little hoarsely.

“No?”

“It’s an illusion that benefits the entry price of classical elitism. Made by.” Gabin’s hands were pulling the waistband of his shorts down his hips. “Made by. Western monarchical hierarchies and…capitalism…”

“Up,” Gabin murmured.

Tobias’s empty breath shuttered as he lifted himself as bidden a few inches off the mattress and Gabin pulled his shorts down his thighs and tossed them out of frame.

“What else?”

“Uh,” said Tobias, watching the halo descend, “the story of the despotic dance instructor being a remnant of—” He had to take a very deep breath. “Literal despotic cultures. And. Also. Thepictureeveryonestillexpectsfuck.”

Politely Gabin hummed Oh? around the sopping mass of cock in his throat.

He tried to talk fast: “You know it would probably help if the general public’s idea of ballet graduated from the nineteen-fifties or the eighteen-hundreds to contemporary aesthetics and—politics but American—American audiences only show up if it looks like—the top of a fucking oh my god—”

Gabin did something with his tongue that he’d learned from Tobias, who’d learned it from a story from Pamela Anderson at the afterparty for August: Osage County, and Tobias crumpled like a cut marionette.

“The top of what, treasure?” asked Gabin, his fingers up Tobias’s ass and one leg bobbing lazily in the air behind him as if at a slumber party.

“Can you fucking not that please right now don’t stop.”

Gabin made an Okay with his free hand and pumped with the circle, smiling behind Tobias’s dick like a billboard for a midcentury glass-bottle Coke. “Does this go in my mouth or in my ass?”

“Mouth,” said Tobias, his fingertips in his eye sockets. “Mouth. Mouth.”

“Ah, you will miss my conversation,” Gabin said sweetly. “Can you do…what is it—pick up the slack?”

“Please,” said Tobias, as carefully as if the wrong consonant would blow up the whole arrondissement, “don’t make me talk.”

He peeked through his nails as Gabin licked the length of his cock, the tip of his nose smushing dreamily against it. Gabin took blowjobs very seriously, perhaps more seriously than ballet. They were a chance to demonstrate his precision and musicality.

“Never,” he said. He repositioned himself on his hands, the width of his knees, perched closely, his shoulders; tucked his hair back. And he lowered his head, watching Tobias watch. “But you have to look at me.”

It was sweet torture. One of the slivers of vicious and painful delight that the honeymoon of your first love afforded you was learning—Gabin was learning, and he could pick up a spin or swirl or step in seconds, so what more challenge was there once he’d mastered Tobias’s brain? All that was left was the man himself. Gabin got into his rhythm and his eyes opened and drifted up Tobias’s stomach and his chest and his throat up to his face and his eyes and Tobias had to stare back and it was intolerable white-hot agony and he could not stop because it was so, so, so good. The eye contact was like an arrow rebounding or a closed chamber trapping the reverberations of the devil’s chord until it turned into sound. Gabin’s tongue and his bloody, blazing attention. Where was this, on the map? Was it good/evil? Tobias couldn’t tell. Gabin was getting him to buck and keep looking. Gabin was getting him to moan and keep looking. Maybe when you were on enough there was no difference. Maybe his construct of the world wasn’t real. Maybe dance wasn’t real. Gabin’s eyelashes and the flush in his cheeks tanned by a sunset he had shared with another man were real, and his insistent fingers, and the terrible truth that he could make Tobias make a sound.

And so what if there was at times no curtained stage? Or rather the true fear that for thirty-five years Tobias had moved through his emotional construct of the world with increasing certainty that he was doomed to forever stand as the only true director of the circle as wide as the circumference of his arms and that it wasn’t doom because it was nice because it was not frightening, because fright took so much from you, except now he looked down in his hand and it was empty because Gabin had taken the fine-lined felt-tip pen and was halfway across the room with it in a pile of blank notecards and now Tobias had to listen to him and do what he said because he was the other director. Maybe he was the only real one. He wasn’t afraid. He could do anything. And with Tobias in his crosshairs like a stag.

“Fuck,” Tobias said raggedly, blushing. He put his hands over his face. “Your eyes.”

Gabin took him down his throat and hummed in quiet rapture. Tobias had to look again: hazel and huge, naked, exacting, almost stinging. He had said he was obsessed with Tobias. Tobias couldn’t move without stargazing for Gabin.

He went even deeper. Tobias’s hips did as he bade them. And afterwards he stayed still and low, kept Tobias’s cock in his mouth as it softened, suckling and bathing until Tobias had to shiver and arch his back and fix Gabin’s hair where he’d yanked it. Gabin blinked up at him languidly at his perfect leisure until Tobias’s thumb dallied at the corner of his mouth—that thing, it got him into so much trouble—and Gabin pretended to wince and got up on his knees and pressed the flat of his hand across Tobias’s eyes, pushed him back gently. “Okay, you can’t look at me like that.”

Tobias lifted his bangs out of his eyes with his wrist to see. Gabin was getting out of bed, searching the floor for his jeans. “Like what?”

He busied himself with his belt loops, flushing rose gold, his face pointed at the floor. “Like I’ve found life on Mars.”

Indeed, Tobias thought.

“It’s just my face,” he said. He kept enough of a real smile up that the dancers could know he was happy and Jack zhuzhed the back of his neck and hauled him away from the stage, where the curtain was down again and stagehands darting in to take away his table and put on the third act’s particulars.

“Okay, what’d I tell you? What did I tell you? I swore I wouldn’t say ‘prodigal son’ because that’s not really what this means, and Balanchine references still piss you off, but c’mon!” Jack spun him into the corner of the busy wing and gestured towards the sound of the chattering crowd, alight in the dark. Probably Tobias wasn’t fainting only because Gabin’s ambient exhales were powering him like an iron lung. “That’s New York!”

Tobias could only look as high as the knot in Jack’s tie. “Was it okay?”

“Yes! They just did three curtain calls, Tobias. It was a great premier.”

Tobias looked back onto the stage. The next piece had no scenery but had the floor blocked in separate boxes of light.

“You can still do it without him,” Jack said more gently.

God, please. Please do not let that be the real thing. If the real thing was not stage fright or wounded pride but rather that terrible pit. How lucky he had been to find this single other creature and the evil tendrils of preapocalyptic life had taken him away.

“Okay,” said Tobias. “Can we watch the next one?”

“Yeah,” said Jack, sounding pleasantly surprised, and he brushed a dusting of rosin off the prop box and he and Tobias sat down as the next flight of ballerinas gathered themselves in the wings, jumping and swatting their calves.

He had written it down, before flying out over the summer, though he hadn’t mailed it yet when he’d gotten on the plane, but he tried to say it once before he inevitably—but he would try. He was going to try so fucking hard.

Dear Gabin,

Hi. I’m reorganizing my closet for the autumnal transition and sweetheart. Is it possible you have repossessed not only my Hysteric Glamour arcade game sweatshirt but also the T-shirt of the Tom of Finland cowboys touching dicks?

Can you even wear that in Paris? I thought you people don’t wear logos. Or is that for the girls in one of your get ready with me’s where you and Mishi get drunk while getting dressed to go out and drink as a clue for their aberrant detective work to back-date the last time I was in town?

You know every time you do one of those I have to hear about it because all the dancers come up after and accuse me of lovebombing you in absentia. And what I want to do is be like actually he’s an incurable thief and I want my stuff back. All the girls think you’re dreamy because you smoke and look like a Mugler model but they don’t know what I know. That you’re an alley cat.

Speaking of you never told me how the end of wet hot French summer went. I think you don’t want to tell me because you think I’m jealous of other men seeing you sunbathe naked all up and down the Corsican coast. I’m not. When they can watch you fit an entire slice of Two Boots into your mouth and piqué en arabesque on a can of tomato sauce, you can stop telling me. Scenes such as being what I cling to when the nights get long. Did you smoke with any handsome men? Did you see any nice wallpaper?

Actually when I think about you I think about some other time completely which you might not remember. Not because you don’t remember things but because it was so normal. It was a Tuesday and you were making dinner and while you cooked you plied me with white wine which you know is my kryptonite and had me wet on the floor for you in record time. You made me grate parmesan anyway which I did lying down and would not let me bite your calves even though I was being so handsome and I said something to the effect of you being cruel to your devoted subject and you laughed and said pardonnez-moi maestro? And I got hard there flat on my back because you were pretending you weren’t master and commander, and I was I think literally panting. You fed me the first bite off your fork, which is the part I think about.

Other times I think about you, you can imagine what I think about. Four-fifty back squat you say. Of course you maneuvered the universe for there to be an ocean between us when you dropped this mid-season finale reveal. You know you’ve split me down the center of my brain—two consciousnesses—to the left the Apollonian ideal which when you dance parses geometry and physics and the Pythagorean theorem (you would not like the stories of how I passed high school math) searching for the perfect point upon which to center your arabesque; the light is white and warm amber, etc.—versus the filthy Dionysian CBGB in the deepest Bowery circa ’76 where I am pressed against you in the anonymous crowd as Television plays some final apocalyptic set and through no force at all because it is no force you have me on my knees, and the music becomes conscious of itself as soundtrack to the sacred mindless devotion (this is Catholic, for you) of your cum in my mouth. Result being it’s dangerous now for other people even to be in the room when you practice with me. Or do the French not mind?

Do you ever dream about that night? Sometimes I scare myself on purpose thinking would he have let me do XYZ to him… And on the giant LED screen for the world too… I have a lot of dreams about it. You told me you only seem to dream so you can practice fighting. This breaks my heart because your capacity for delight knows even fewer bounds but hardly ever gets to stretch. If I could fold into your dreams Inception-style I’d drop you into a humid French Quarter apartment in hurricane summer—rain dampening your jazz records, wallpaper unpeeling at the edges—feed you oysters and dirty rice and beignets and Sazeracs where you couldn’t see the bottom of the glass for the cane sugar and I play ragtime on our (red) piano and you dance on the furniture in a white undershirt, eternally one in the morning…we can hear the party outside, you sweat and sweat and never get thirsty…I fuck you on the balcony…fade out to end credits.

Do you know I miss you? I miss you. I miss you, I miss you. I know you know I hate saying useless things which is itself useless, as if usefulness is the only metric of worth, but before I had only cared about the things that would get me to the end, which incubated ruthlessness and I think a cruelty that helped no one but the art. As if the art itself could feel something in the room as the actors around it dropped dead. Through the lens of your own atomic energy I now know the virtue of pure galvanic feeling and it’s finally killing me. You’re nowhere and I see you everywhere, you’re on me because now I move differently—my clothes singed, my hair, my fingertips—I miss you because I can hear your voice when I can’t listen to you and I still see you when you aren’t here and I can still feel you when I’m almost in tears because it’s so close to being with you to fuck the idea of you but it isn’t—this is the phantom limb they talk about in movies—I miss you like I would miss my heart. Skip this paragraph if it hurts you. I don’t know how to say it—I’m sure it feels like I’m practicing intimacy on you sometimes and that must hurt. I wish sometimes you weren’t the first person I could ever really be with front to back so that I could have gotten this terrible skinned knee practice over with before meeting you. I wish I didn’t make you have to be so patient. But you are kind to me to be patient. If it helps, I know you do it. Or I come to realize it usually thirty seconds after you’ve started.

It’s funny because when we first met I would never have said you were kind or patient. Of the true heights and depths of your power I worry I still don’t know. You’re incredibly obvious and still sometimes I don’t! That you can still love me with me sitting on the floor of this giant—museum of movements and feeling—and your shapes and colors all over the walls, and I’m filling in a coloring book at your feet. And you still love me. If you ever get sick of me they’ll have to shoot me in the street like a dog. You know that quote from Hill House—nothing living can exist sanely for long under conditions of absolute reality—I was so content dreaming, because I didn’t know that I was, and then you crashed a pair of cymbals over my bed and now I’m crazy and absolutely awake. All I can do to explain it to the wary layperson is gesture towards you inside a dance, or away from the blast site like a weathervane, to decode the flotsam in your wake…the pinch marks on my arms, circles under my eyes—“Gabin was here.”

My hand has cramped. How did people do this every day? Abigail Adams was insane.

You know I’m kidding about my stuff. It’s all yours. I’m grateful I get to wear whatever’s left.

Will you tell me when you start to feel lonely. Including when I’m there?

Please [ ] ← kiss here. Je t’aime.

Soon—
Tobias

Gabin had not responded in kind but called a week later in tears. Tobias had kept his headphones on while puttering around the kitchen and murmured mhmm whenever Gabin took a breath inside his Annie Baker monologue, only cooling down when Tobias invited him back to New York for Christmas, which he was gonna do anyway.

He would not break this thing. He’d broken more than half of the others, but he wouldn’t break this one, not out of stupidity or selfishness or avoidance or mishandling or derision. If he broke it, it would be because his muscles were flaying from his bones: turning back into dust, and Gabin couldn’t do that yet, Gabin still had work to do.

The third set was beautiful. The music was so soft and wispy like worn cotton that he could hear Gabin’s skin inside his sheets.

He had to say it. He could start—now. When the piece was over, he leaned over before the audience had quite started to clap.

“I’ll do it.”

Jack bent his head to hear over the applause. “Do what?”

Saying it while Gabin was on the line but unable to hear was a sick pleasure. He looked, on purpose, into Jack’s eyes. “Next season. The Gershwin. I’ll do it.”

Jack stared at him with two parallel lines of confusion tented between his eyebrows which fell like Clark Gable’s walls of Jericho when he caught up. “Tobias—”

“I want him here. For the season, the whole season. You can pay him like a corps member and take the rest from my paycheck. He’ll live with me, so you won’t have to shell out for housing, and you can market the hell out of him. Put him up on the Nasdaq screen in Times Square if you want. When he wears his hair loose he looks like Timothée Chalamet.”

“He looks like Tom Cruise,” said Jack, starting to smile very broadly.

Deeeeep breath. “Great. Cross-generational appeal. Like Kate Bush and The Social Network.”

Jack spread his hand in the air equidistant between them, like to calm a nervous horse. “Fall or spring?”

“Spring.”

“May? The last show?”

“...sure,” said Tobias. Yes, the brightest possible spotlight.

“All sixteen minutes?”

“All sixteen.”

“How many leads?”

“Two.”

“A man and a woman? Or—”

“It’s not the story of my life. Yes, a man and a woman.”

“Full company? —wonderful!” he shouted, leaning back to wave to the girls in their jubilant tutus. “Julie, just wonderful! —full company?”

“I don’t need to throw bodies at it,” said Tobias. “...maybe. At the middle part.”

“Narrative or abstract?”

“Abstract narrative.”

Jack reached out and nearly took Tobias’s arm before old habits stopped him. “Have you told him you’re doing this? Does he already know his steps?”

“He doesn’t know anything. He’s still getting his legs, I don’t want to distract him until there’s paperwork for him to sign.”

Jack pointed with sudden, broadly fake severity. “What if you break up? I don’t doubt your devotion, Tobias, I’m just saying—he’s a young man in very good shape, he might still get the bug to sow his wild oats up and down the Riviera. Would you do it without him?”

A montage from the 8mm porn of Gabin being forced to fuck a line of Swiss trade delegates on the side of the Monaco Grand Prix instead of blocking an adagio phrase with Tobias would probably play well on the American Eagle screen. “I’ve got his oats pretty well siloed,” Tobias said levelly, headphones burning on his skin. “I’m basically his Quaker guy.”

“This is great news, Tobias, this is huge, this is—this is fucking excellent—this is fucking excellent!” He pointed at the stage, where the dancers had scattered and lined back up for the third and final bow.

“Mine?” Tobias clarified mildly.

“All of it!” Jack leapt to his feet. “Christ, I love ballet!”

“Can you get her to let him come?”

Jack put his hands in his pockets. For a wild moment Tobias considered sharing his headphones: Listen to that—he’s real!

Slowly Jack spun on his heel. Tobias stared up at him. And he raised his hand.

Tobias got to his feet and shook it. Jack grinned, dipped his head like he’d doff a cap. Started clapping with the crowd again. Someone to the left of the edge of the stage shouted BRAVO!

“Thank you,” Tobias said under his breath, and he adjusted his headphones, put his hands in his pockets, and walked out of the wing into the cool air of the hall and Gabin’s sleeping breath. He took a wrong turn inside the lobby and instead of the doors to the sunny rose garden he found himself inside a sitting room. It was bright but empty, except for a host of half-drunk champagne flutes on a small table and Kevin, in front of a little mirror in his tuxedo, yanking at his bowtie.

He glanced up at Tobias’s stilled reflection at his shoulder and looked back at himself. He was very tan in the blazing sunshine, his hair combed back from his forehead, and his jaw set firmly to Not Panicking. Without preamble he said, “I think your people refer to this as a wardrobe malfunction.”

Tobias wandered over. “Where is everyone?”

“Outside,” said Kevin tersely. “We’re ten minutes late.”

“You can’t really be late.”

“I can if the invitations say one time and I’m walking down the aisle at another,” he said in escalating sing-song. Tobias brushed a single blond coil off his shoulder.

“Nice suit.”

“Thanks.”

“Make sure you return it on time,” he said, raising a wise index finger.

“They’re about to bury me in it,” said Kevin. Tobias squinted at the knot.

“Who tied that?”

Kevin dropped his hands in preemptive—something. “I did.”

Tobias adjusted the air at his hip to tweak the ghost angle. “For practice?”

He dropped his hands. “Jesus Christ, Tobias, please fix it,” and Tobias hooked his heel around the leg of a chair and pulled it to face the mirror and directed Kevin into it.

He stood behind him and leaned over his shoulder to untie the knot in silence, or rather the ambient buzz of a hundred people on the other side of the wall in summer formal wear. Kevin kept his chin high but Tobias pushed his forehead back to rest against the back of the chair and Tobias’s shoulder when he started retying it anyway.

“The betrothed still making up his mind?” he asked.

“He’s at the other entrance,” said Kevin, breathing deeply. “His niece has the rings.”

“Heard you met at a strip club.”

“We did. I invited you. I know you love them.”

“Any of the girls throwing in some party favors?”

“I was actually hoping Gabin would do something pro bono.”

Tobias threaded the silk through the loop. “Off the clock? That’s a union violation.”

Kevin closed his eyes. The weight of his head on Tobias’s shoulder was warm and smelled like sandalwood and pine. Same as it ever was. “Are people being nice to you?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah,” said Tobias. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know if—did you say something in the thing about it?”

He started the delicate tug and re-tug tightening cycle around Kevin’s throat. “What thing?”

“Your Vogue spread.”

“Vanity Fair. Oh—did you not read it?”

“Don’t get mad,” said Kevin. He was now opening and closing his hands. “I didn’t totally think I could handle the tales of you two making out at the—”

“No, that’s excellent,” said Tobias, nearly standing up straight. He felt himself start to smile, to beam. “Really?”

Kevin peeked out with one eye and laughed at Tobias’s expression. “Really. I thought you hated interviews.”

“I do!”

“Well, the grapevine told me you brought him, anyway. My mom thinks it’s tacky.”

Tobias bent back down and smirked at himself in the mirror. “Whatever Patricia wants.”

“Tobias,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Tobias.

“Tell me it’s okay to be happy.”

Tobias looked at the real Kevin’s face. Kevin glanced at him sideways.

“It’s okay,” he said. He flicked the bottom of the bow tie, now fluffy, taut, and perfect. “And this can stop an impact up to forty miles an hour.”

“Thank you,” said Kevin, his lovely shoulders wilting in cinematic relief.

He walked Tobias most of the way to the correct doorway, turned to double back for his own exit, then stopped in his tracks, jumped a few times on his heels.

“Jee-zus,” he enunciated, decisive with anxiety, “how do you DO this five times a year? What d’you say to your dancers so they don’t trip?”

Tobias considered. “Don’t trip.”

Kevin raised his hands to Episcopalian God. Tobias took the two steps back to him and adjusted, mostly pretending, his lapels. Jack was the pep-talk guy. But this was one of those times, probably, where people appreciated that you even pretended.

“It doesn’t matter if you trip. Just don’t—” The first notes of a slow swing song began to emanate from the windows as if from Architectural Digest heaven. Tobias raised his eyebrows. “—miss your cue.”

“Oh God. Okay. Thanks. I love you. Good luck. Or—getting back to your seat,” said Kevin, and Tobias smiled at his feet and said okay you too and kissed him, and Delaney called his name from the counter. He put the Count upside-down on the dictionary to save his places. He was eighty percent sure he understood eighty percent what was happening. Gabin loved hearing him recite his progress, anyway. He’d call later: he was getting a lot better at phone calls. Gabin had a wonderful voice for the phone.

The wedge. The needle. The graph. Whichever metaphor worked in the moment—sometimes he couldn’t place it. He got his coffee, weaving through the yoga pants and skyscraper ponytails, and stirred in a single packet of real white sugar. The croissant shell shattered, and he got an idea.

He found the very back of the book, after the novel ended, the blank pages. The front had some, too. Carefully he ripped one out, precisely along the seams. This was a good first step. Gabin had probably never gotten a letter, handwritten and posted from New York.

He lifted the earpieces off his head and looked around, leaned sideways towards a table where two girls sat in pink and yellow, laughing. “Hi, excuse me,” he said, um, do you guys have a pen?