Chapter Text
Spring, 1945
Patrick is just getting ready to leave when he spots him across the bar. The man has his head thrown back in laughter, the lines of his neck long and graceful. His smile is its own gas light, cutting through the smoke of the bar like sunshine off the Seine, a literal impossibility at this late hour. Patrick can’t hear his laugh over the music, but he doesn’t need to. He’s so busy watching, he doesn’t see the waitress set another scotch on the table until it’s too late, and she’s already moved on to serving the next table. Now that it’s here, he’s not going to turn it down.
He sinks back into his chair, the roughspun wool of his uniform pulling on an invisible splinter in the wood. The table is ringed in dark, ageless water rings, the grooves and burns and discolorations that decorate all bar tables across the world. It’s a grounding, settling thing, and Patrick traces along a deep gouge that runs underneath the cut angles of the highball glass, the ice clinking gently as it melts.
The woman onstage is singing a French chanson ditty, something sweet and soft and as bright as the sparkles of her cocktail dress, the light catching on the ice in his glass. Her voice is crisp and clear and so beautiful, for all that he can’t understand a word, but even the curves of her body and the shine of her smile are a pale shadow to the man sucking up all the light in the room. Patrick tries to focus on the peaty, dry smell of the scotch as it washes over the back of his tongue. It burns, and he makes a hissing sound deep in the back of his throat as the singer draws out her final note.
That keeps happening to Patrick, little shocks of beauty that catch him off guard and make it feel like his brain is rattling around in his skull, the reverberations of a different kind of mortar shell. It’s not that he’s not used to seeing beautiful things — he’s come half way around the world and has yet to see something as beautiful as a midsummer sunset over the placid waters of Lake Nipissing — it’s just that he’s not used to the volume on the beauty of things he keeps seeing. They’re too loud, too sharp, too colorful and brash and present, and it cuts Patrick off at the knees. The paintings, the music, the architecture and smells and people.
Maybe most especially the people.
Patrick can feel the gentle pressure on the back of his head that means someone is looking at him, but he keeps his focus on the singer; on the single drummer behind her dragging his metal brush across the taut drumskin, the susurration settling over Patrick like a mediation. He lets his eyes drift closed so he can better dig into the meaning behind the music, and he keeps them closed until the song is done, even as he feels the waitress brush by him, hears the sharp, thin clink of glass on wood that means she’s set down another round.
When Patrick finally opens his eyes, the singer is saying her “merci”s and making her way off stage, and the drink at his elbow doesn’t look anything like the short two fingers of amber liquid he’s used to. The glass is tall, and thin, but what’s inside looks nothing like a Collins. It bubbles, and Patrick thinks he can maybe smell it from here. When he picks it up and sniffs at it gently, the champagne tickles his nose and he sneezes, splashing the tiniest bit over his hand and table. He shoves the stretch of skin between his thumb and forefinger between his mouth on instinct and sucks off the bittersweet liquid. It tastes of lemon and simple syrup and — god, he really does hate gin, but even so.
His eyes scan the bar, his hand still locked between his lips, until he lands on the one person he already knew he was looking for.
The stranger lifts a single, broad eyebrow and raises his glass in a toast from across the bar. And Patrick Brewer was raised well enough to know that you never refuse a toast.
The man looks like this drink tastes, sparkling bubbles at the back of his throat, sour citrus notes, the earthy tones of gin. The composition shouldn’t work, from his wide lapel to his dark brows, to the hair— teased up in a style Patrick has never seen before, high off his head and swept back in a mockery of current military regulation. His jacket is cut to accentuate the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his waist, and ends almost three inches too short from the wrist. It makes Patrick hot under the collar, that flash of pale skin stretched taut over angular wrist bone, and he takes another drink before he makes the space to think about why. He should look ridiculous, like a teenager wearing last season’s church jacket before a summertime growth spurt. He doesn’t. He doesn’t look ridiculous at all.
Before his life was demarcated by war and food rations and heavy wool and drab olive cotton, Patrick had taken Rachel on a trip to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where the art director at the time had held a retrospective of Pablo Picasso’s major works. Looking across the bar, Patrick feels a little bit like he did then. It’s called Three Musicians, Rachel had said, her warm brown eyes laughing at him, and with him. Trust Patrick to narrow in on anything to do with music, even in an art museum. The composition shouldn’t work but somehow you feel movement, you hear trombones and drums. You can almost smell the cigars and perfume. The deeper you look, the more you see.
Patrick is a sensible, practical man raised by salt-of-the-earth parents, but even he recognizes art for what it is. And the man, with the little smirk on his face, fingers glinting with silver rings, is a Picasso in a room full of pastoral landscapes. Patrick drops his hand from his mouth just as the man’s dark brown eyes, nearly black in the lighting of the bar, land on him with a startling intensity that makes his breath catch in his chest. The thin, delicate glass of his drink is starting to sweat in the warm air of the bar, and almost slips from his hand as he brings it to his mouth.
In the years to come, when there are few positive memories he can pull out and play on his mental reel-to-reel, this is one of the ones that will never lose its color. No matter how many times he plays it back as the world around him falls into chaos and pain and an eternal and crushing sense of grey, the sharpness of this moment will never fade.
He’ll sit in the dirt and the dark and pray and remember: the bitter, effervescent flow of bubbles, the underlying bite of lemon that somehow both grounds and elevates the earthy juniper that makes the back of his nose burn. And at the bottom of it all, a sweetness that spreads across his tongue as the man at the bar watches his every move, follows him with his eyes, traces the trajectory of the glass as it leaves Patrick’s lips, empty, and remains clutched loosely in his hand.
In the months to come, when the bullets fall and adrenaline chokes him, Patrick will remember this moment in perfect detail: his legs stretching to stand, his stomach echoing the swoop of a bomber roll with every slow, deliberate step that closed the space between him and this stranger.
Patrick sets his glass down on the worn bar next to the stranger, using the edge of his middle finger to ease the transition and muffle the sound, although no one would be able to hear it over the Andrews Sisters-eque trio that has just arrived onstage. Patrick’s chin tilts back and his eyes travel up the expanse of skin that caught his attention from across the room. From this close, he can see the subtle imperfections that make humans beautiful in all their forms — a small scar that must be left over from shaving, a tiny patch of dark stubble, perhaps missed during that same bathroom visit, a fading crescent of deeper red just peeking out from behind the button band of his wide-lapeled dress shirt. Patrick has a long moment of not being able to tear his eyes away from that one, and by the time he does, he’s caught the attention of the mystery man.
He turns from the woman he’s talking to, a shorter, dark-eyed brunette beauty who wears an air of practiced indifference that immediately makes Patrick feel comfortable, and rakes his eyes slowly down Patrick’s body, pausing to take in his rank insignia at his shoulder, the pressed line of his pants as they trail away from his thighs and down over the front of his calves. He quirks an eyebrow at the polished, sturdy military boots, and Patrick’s never seen a human face that can do that, whose muscles spring and coil and wave in minute fractions that seem a Morse code that Patrick doesn’t have the master key to yet.
The other man clears his throat and the space between that noise and when he speaks stretches like taffy between the two of them. “Well. Hello, stranger.”
The man’s voice is husky, growing from a whisper so that Patrick has to strain to catch the first word he says. It puts his body that much closer, forces the other man to shift backwards on his heel, his eyebrows rising on his face. Patrick wants to do it again, wants to shift like a lodestone just to watch all the ways this man’s face would follow suit. But the stranger has spoken now, made the first foray into conversation, and it would be rude for Patrick not to return the gesture.
“Hello. Thank you, for the drink.”
“What drink?”
“The…” Patrick gestures towards the empty glass, realizing for the first time that he’d drank the entire thing without ever learning what it was. “The lemon-gin-whatever this was. It was delicious.”
“It’s called the French 75,” the woman pipes up, her mouth folded into the kind of smile that Patrick has seen before, and rarely means anything but trouble. “You know, after the —”
“Artillery, yeah.” Patrick finishes for her and holds out a hand, taking her fingers in the warm wrap of his and shaking them once, firmly, bowing his head in her direction. “It's a pleasure, Ms…"
“Stephanie,” she returns, and the mystery man beside her snorts into his cocktail. Patrick glances over in just enough time to see him roll his eyes, and there’s something in the action that worms it’s way under Patrick’s skin, lodges just underneath his fourth rib, towards the back where he feels it every time he takes a breath.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Stephanie. I suppose I should be thanking you for the drink, then?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t suppose that,” she says smoothly, her eyes sliding to the mystery man, who has his lips wrapped over his teeth and is glaring daggers at Stephanie.
Patrick looks between them and feels a wave of exhaustion beginning to well up from the soles of his feet. He nods a few times, and shoves his now-empty hands in his pockets. He fingers the edge of his pocket knife on the left, a small book of matches on the right, and wishes he hadn’t stopped smoking the day he’d said goodbye to Rachel.
“Well, then. Whoever it is I should thank — thank you,” and he turns, his boots squeaking against the planked floorboards. He’s three more steps away than he thinks he’ll get when he hears a frustrated little groan behind him and the mystery man calls out.
“Fine! Fine, yes, you’re welcome. I’m glad you enjoyed it.” His voice is soft enough around the edges that it makes Patrick stop walking for fear of stomping it back out into silence. But he’s still glaring at Stephanie, not looking at Patrick, and so Patrick also doesn’t return, doesn’t go any closer. “I’m David.”
And that’s all it takes. Patrick closes the distance with sure, small steps, though something keeps him from closing the last foot between them, a pocket of space where all of society’s expectations live. He opens his mouth to speak but David shakes his head quickly, his dark eyes warm and laughing, fanning out from each corner like peacock’s feathers dusting over his olive skin. “Nope, no. Let me guess, okay? This is the best part of meeting new people, especially people you never expected to meet.”
Patrick smiles - he can’t help it, like it’s been pulled right up from the protected, warm little spot where his heart has taken shelter. He hasn’t felt the urge to smile like that in months. “Guess what? My name?”
“Mhm,” and Stephanie snorts out loud, and it’s the most unladylike thing Patrick has ever heard. She follows it up by pushing the stool beside her out with a foot, and Patrick catches a clue, taking a seat. “This is a thing he does. Like a party trick, but not at all like that.”
“Oh- kay,” David says, glaring at Stephanie as she raises her hands, palms forward in surrender. There's a lived-in quality to their relationship, whatever it is, and there's a softness to the edge of the way they look at each other. Fleetingly, Patrick wonders if they're here together, or waiting for their significant others. That is, until David reaches for his hand at the same time that he says, "May I?", answering his own question before Patrick has a chance to consider the answer himself.
Not that the answer would've changed his mind. He looks down at his hand cradled palm-up in David's much broader one. David's staring at the lines on Patrick's palm like they're map coordinates, and it makes Patrick look at his hand with a renewed closeness. There are oil stains he missed when he'd fixed up his bike earlier, and a small paper cut on his middle finger he doesn't remember getting. It's a strange sensation, looking at your own body like you would a stranger’s, cataloging it's small pains and permutations like they don't belong to you, don't add a harmonic layer to the orchestration that is life and all it's mess. Patrick looks at his hands and sees a life that feels comfortable, and homey. He thinks maybe David really can figure out who people are this way.
"You work with your hands." It's like David pulled the words from his brain and he makes a small noise of assent. "Your last name is something...productive. Something you make. Taylor, or Fisher, or Smith." The pads of his fingers twitch against David's where he's gently pressing them flat. "Did I guess it?”
“Brewer,” Patrick says, shocked. “My last name is Brewer.”
“First try,” Stephanie says, tipping her drink to David with a pleased hum.
“Brewer, then,” Daivd says. “So, Mr. Brewer. Your first name has...two syllables, nothing long, nothing fancy. Something you could shorten when you need to, but leave long when you're feeling adult." The word tumbles out of David's mouth with a lascivious roll and Patrick feels chills spike up his back. David flicks his eyes up, and Patrick doesn’t know how he missed the length of those lashes, the shadow they cast on high cheekbones. “It’s dark in here, but there’s something about the light. You’re a bit ginger,” and David brushes his thumb over Patrick’s temple, brazen and bright and without a care in the world for how it could be interpreted. Patrick can’t help the instinctive pull back, startled enough that his knee knocks into Stephanie’s stool, and they both burst out laughing.
Patrick hates being laughed at during the best of times, and he pulls away, makes to stand, but David tightens his hold, shaking his head even as he snorts. “No, no, I’m sorry, we’re not laughing at you.”
“We’re laughing at you a little bit,” Stephanie says, but her smile is warm, and she nudges his ankle with the toe of one pointy high heel. “You military boys are always so unflappable, until you’re flapped.”
“I don’t think that's grammatically correct,” Patrick says, because he simply can’t help himself, and the smile on David’s face is like starlight, dark and mesmerizing and so painfully sweet.
“A bit ginger,” Stephanie prompts, glass hanging from her fingertips with the casual ease of a woman used to holding cocktails.
“A bit ginger,” David agrees, stroking ever so gently along the big vein on the back of Patrick’s hand, the fine bones of his wrist. “Second generation. Your father came over before the first war. Scots. Or Irish. You’ve got the build.”
“Short?”
“Solid and well-built. Strong. And yes, short,” David says, and his eyes are laughing, and Patrick startles himself with wishing he could get closer to count each line at the corner of David’s eyes. “Hmm. Connor? No, Connor’s tend to be pricks.”
“I might be a prick.”
“You’re not a prick, Brown Eyes,” Stephanie says, and Patrick tries not to notice how short her dress is when she recrosses her legs - short even by Parisian standards, and with a run up her nylons that looks anything but accidental. “David, he’s a prick. Me, I’m a prick. You came over to thank this one for buying you a drink like the gentlemen your mother brought you up to be. You’re not a prick.”
His pride is wounded, because he’s an idiot, but David is humming low under his breath. “Maybe you’re an Aidan. Solid, strong name, Aidan.”
“If you spend the next fifteen minutes listing every Irish name you know, I’m leaving,” Stephanie says with a cutting glance at David. He languidly rolls his shoulders, and it matches the roll of his eyes as he huffs out a little breath.
“Fine. Not an Aidan either, then.” He refocuses on the skin of Patrick’s palm, tracing along the crease through the center of his palm with the edge of his fingernail. It’s just on the edge of hurt, a scratching little thing that reminds him of a sunburn, and it makes a strange sort of heat flush up the back of his wrists. “Hm. Something Biblical, maybe. Joseph?”
“Or Peter?” Stephanie offers, bored.
“Don’t tell me you’re a Saint Patrick or some such thing,” David chuckles into the heavy air of the bar, and Patrick feels it dust across his palm and pulls his hand back. He doesn’t say anything, but he can’t help the curve of his mouth, can’t pull all forty-three muscles in his face back under his control.
“Holy shit,” Stephanie whispers, a real sense of awe in her voice, and Patrick looks at her with his eyebrows nestled in his hairline. “It’s never, I mean. He’s only actually done that, like. Three times.”
“Really?” Patrick’s eyes fly back to David, whose mouth is slack as his eyes sparkle, and he’s looking between Patrick’s face and the place where Patrick’s hand just was. “I thought that was your big party trick!”
“It is!” David’s hands immediately fly through the space in front of him, his voice defensive. “And Stephanie here is forgetting the time I did it with Midge and that man she was seeing, whatever his name was. But — you are.”
“Am what?”
“A Patrick?”
“A Patrick? Yes, I’m a Patrick. Patrick Brewer,” he sticks out his hand and feels David’s fingers wrap around the back of his palm and even though the stretch of time between presses of flesh has been minutes, it feels different. To place his hand in David’s with his name no longer a game, or a mystery. To be known as Patrick Brewer. “It’s nice to meet you David…”
“Rose,” he says, and he says the word like it’s an entire sentence. Like he’s used to a spark of recognition flashing when he issues the name like a password. But — it’s a beautiful name, as beautiful as the man sitting in front of him, looking like art in a world made drab by war and suffering. He shouldn’t be real, David Rose, but here they are, in a GI bar in Paris surrounded by boys in uniform, drinking bad champagne and wishing they were anywhere but here.
It’s the first time since he got drafted that he doesn’t wish he were somewhere else.
Patrick’s never been one to really believe in fate, but it sure feels like something brought him right here to this moment in time, one filled with promise and excitement and the sparkle of a man with laughing eyes and a smile so full of mischief that something Patrick has ignored his entire adult life goes tight inside him.
A crash – one of the musicians has dropped something behind them, in prepping for the next set. Whatever moment he and David had been hanging in snaps like cheap thread, and David looks away first, rolling his eyes and tossing back the rest of his cocktail. “No. Nope. Not tonight. I cannot deal with her shrieking Stevie, you promised she wasn’t playing tonight.”
“I’m sorry — Stevie?”
It’s Stephanie’s turn to roll her eyes, as she knocks back the rest of her drink in a long, slow pull. She meets his eye and sort of lazily dips one eyelid closer to her face, in what Patrick thinks is supposed to be a wink. “It’s what my friends call me. What’d you think, Brown Eyes? You wanna call me Stevie?”
There’s a gentle slur to her words, a drag on the sentence that makes it feel like she’s pushing the words out of her mouth, and when she stands she seems to unravel from her chair, liquid and slow, her hand bracing on David’s forearm. There’s a not-exactly-small gem on the ring wrapped around her middle finger, and a thin band of gold wrapped around her wrist, and there’s an easiness to the way she rests on David, letting her body weight fall against his under the press of dual weights of alcohol and gravity.
He’s a million miles away from home, from girls who act like Rachel, and from, well. He doesn’t know that there’s anyone else in the world who quite fits the mold David Rose came from. And he does. He wants to be this woman’s friend. For tonight, at least, he wants to be in their world.
It’s not a decision that makes sense, but very little about his night has made sense since he opened his eyes to a drink he didn’t order, and he’s not about to start digging his heels in against the universe now. That’s not how Marci Brewer raised her boy to be.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says, reaching out and plucking her small beaded handbag off the center of the table. “Drop the ‘Brown Eyes’, and I’ll call you whatever you’d like.”
Stevie smiles and wraps her fingers around the other end of the clutch, her eyes shooting to David as a wicked smile spreads across her face. “Oh, I like him.” She turns her gaze on him, “I like you.”
David’s eyes are creased and warm and he doesn’t say it, but Patrick thinks David might like him, too.
She loops her arm through Patrick’s, pressing her palm to the back of his wrist, and Patrick feels a bubble of warmth in the pit of his stomach. He’s not used to people who touch easily, and freely, and it throws him for a moment, especially when David’s broad hand brushes across his lower back as he opens the door onto the cool Parisian night, escorting him and Stevie into a night of low-hanging stars and the flicker of possibility.
*
Patrick has been stationed in Paris for two months, and on leave for a full 24 hours, and has still never seen the Paris that David Rose walks in every minute of his day.
The first thing Patrick does once they clear the doorway of the bar is slip the olive green, stiff military wool cap over the back of his head, pulling the front peak over his forehead and letting the back dip down towards the nape of his neck. It’s a tight fit, and he catches David watching him as Stevie pulls a slim cigarette case out of her handbag and slides one between her lips.
“What?”
“It’s just — is that hat regulation?”
“Of course it is. Why?”
“No reason! Just.” David turns and starts to walk, and Patrick wishes he didn’t feel a tug behind his navel, a push behind his kneecaps as he starts to follow him.
“Just what,” Patrick says at his elbow.
“Well. It doesn’t quite reach your ears, does it?”
Patricks hand flies briefly to his cap, feels the space between the band and the shell of his ear, which feels hot to the touch in a blush he can’t see. The laugh that startles out of David sounds like that dropped drum in the club, bright and brash and loud like it’s been shocked out of him. A long time ago, before he stepped over the line that divided his life from the Before to the After, Patrick had loved being teased. David’s smile brings him back to that simpler time, when he was just Patty Brewer playing Friday night football, working at the general store to save money for college. For the first time since Canada put a gun in his hands, he feels wholly and completely himself. It’s been such a long time since he remembered what that was, and the unexpected suddenness of emotion makes his throat tight.
He can’t get misty in front of the glamorous, gorgeous David Rose —not when he’s still looking at Patrick waiting for a reaction, the corner of one mouth ticked up. Luckily, Patrick can’t help himself. “This, from a man wearing a jacket three inches too short in the sleeve.”
Stevie bursts into laughter, the red point of her cigarette wobbling in the dark, and David’s grin broadens even more. “Excuse me, I’ll have you know this is a prototype from Lelong’s first men’s line.”
“You’re sure you didn’t find it at the Salvation Army?”
“Not with what he paid for it,” Stevie says, blowing a thin stream of smoke into the night. She loops her arm through Patrick’s and pulls him down the street, in the direction David is already headed in. Neither of them seem to mind the crisp fall air, and they both look utterly at home in the light of street lamps and restaurants.
Patrick will never get used to the press of people at night in Paris, the sound of voices and music and laughter spilling through doorways, coming from outdoor dining tables. There are people walking everywhere, with dogs and partners and children, smoking and laughing, and the air smells like food, like bread and garlic and all of the delicious flavors of home.
It’s hard to believe that this city had been occupied by the Germans just last year, not when the French had so determinedly taken back everything that had been stolen from them for almost five years.
David turns to walk backwards without a care in the world for the people all around them, smiling at Patrick with all the delight of a kid in a toy store. “Alright Stevie, dealer’s choice.”
“We’re not going back to that shithole with the drummer you like,” Stevie mutters around her cigarette, reaching down to tug on the ankle strap of her heel. Patrick stops to lend her his elbow, and Stevie looks pointedly at the offered arm, then to David, as if to say, et tu? She takes Patrick’s elbow gratefully and tugs at her shoe until the buckle sits right on her ankle. “I hate that place. It made my hair smell like booze and cigars for a week. Also, this one’s stomach just made a very rude noise, and we all know food lets you drink more.”
“Oh, food ,” David says on a sigh, with the same tone one would use to describe a sweetheart back home. Patrick concurs, because food is one of the greatest pleasures in his life. “Yes, let’s eat. Pierre’s?”
“Absolutely not, I had the shits for a week,” Stevie says, and Patrick jerks from his head to his toes in an effort not to laugh out loud at a lady. “How you eat that garbage, willingly, and pay for it, I’ll never know.”
“It’s Asian-inspired French seafood,” David tells Patrick, dimple at the corner of his mouth.
“We’re not giving Patrick the shits for a week. He’s a — what branch do you serve in, anyway?”
“I’m a captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force,” he says, because it’s the safest answer, if not wholly the truth.
David stops in the middle of the street. “You’re a captain?”
“Yes?” Patrick looks between him and Stevie. They’re staring at each other, wide-eyed.
“Twyla doesn’t know half of what she says on a good day, much less when reading cards,” Stevie says, though there’s a note of wonder in her voice. “Stop it.”
“He’s a captain,” David says, and bursts into such loud laughter that he startles the couple passing them on their left. “You’re a captain.”
“Last I looked,” Patrick says with a flash of annoyance because he hates not being in on the joke, and David has set Stevie off so that she’s hanging onto his arm to keep from collapsing to the street.
But David is so warm when he falls into step beside him, the wide shoulder of his silk jacket brushing against the rough wool of Patrick’s. “Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid,” he murmurs, in the most flawless and beautiful French Patrick has ever heard. Patrick has been here for two months but he’s picked up very little, aside from merci and salle de bains, relying on the French phrasebook he was issued for everything. It’s tucked in his front breast pocket, close to his heart, and he wonders what David would do if he were to pull it out now, jot down what he just said, so he could keep this moment forever.
It sinks on him, the gravity of such a thought. This feeling that tickles down his spine, spreads through every nerve and scratches at the back of his throat, has no place in his world. He thought he’d been building his life on a solid foundation of concrete, with stones made of certainty in who he is.
Instead here he is, in Paris in the fall, arm-in-arm with a firecracker of a woman and shoulder-to-shoulder with the most dangerous man he’s ever met, and the foundation under his feet is crumbling where he stands.
“What does it mean?” he asks, softly.
But David just smiles, something warm and too personal for their evening stroll. A smile not personal enough. “It means our night is just starting, Captain Brewer.”
Patrick bites down on the inside of his cheek and trains his eyes on the pavement, watching where the worn leather of his boots crosses with the slick patent shine of David’s wingtips and Stevie’s heels, their banter settling in around him like the comfortable buzz of another language. They’re discussing people and places he’s never heard of, a patter of the wealthy that Patrick thought only existed on the silver screen, but instead is here beside him, in the small silver glint off the wide bands wrapped around four of David’s fingers.
He follows them up the Rue Monge, his hand in his pockets as Stevie flits between him and David, picking her way around the small piles of bricks and gouges in the concrete, the small scars of a war raging around them, pushing in even here, into the warm cocoon of a night that wraps around all three of them. At the corner of Rue Censier, Stevie stops at an old man, sitting with a basket of carnations. It’s well past ten, and his eyes look tired, but he speaks in a rounded, kind voice and giggles at whatever it is Stevie says. Patrick thinks again of his phrasebook, at what it would be like to live enough in another language to have it roll off his tongue like water.
When she turns, she’s got three carnations in her hand, two red and a white. The white she tucks into the high pile of her hair, the other two she holds out to David and Patrick. David just stares at her, as Patrick takes a step forward and plucks the thin stem out of her hand. It’s surprisingly damp and cool to the touch, and he rubs the pads of his fingers together after slipping into the corner of his buttoned chest pocket.
David cuts him a glance that Patrick can’t read, before rolling his eyes and taking the flower. He doesn’t put it anywhere, though, instead beginning to spin the small flower in his broad fingers, faster and faster until the petals blur and the whole thing is just a tiny mass of red.
Stevie slips her arm back through Patrick’s, and this time when they resume walking, there’s space between he and David, a gap that he would have previously described as small but that suddenly feels insurmountably large. “Thank you for the flower, Stevie,” he says and his voice sounds too loud in the air, even as the sound continues to spill out of dim bar doors on either side of the street. “Don’t tell my mother I let a dame buy me flowers? She’d never let me forget it.”
David makes a little sound, one that could be a laugh or a choke or a sob, but is out of the air before Patrick can begin to pick it apart. Stevie slaps out at him, reaching across Patrick’s body, even though she falls several inches short of making contact with David’s arm. “Don’t you worry, Pat. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Oh, no, we are not doing ‘Pat’,” David says with a scoff, and it brings a rush of heat to Patrick’s face. He blames the cocktails finally settling into his bloodstream, and the thin haze of damp that always seems to hang in the air on a Paris night, but he wants to hear David speak again. About him.
“My girlfriend used to call me Patty.”
“Oh God, that’s worse,” David answers immediately, and Stevie’s laugh is clear and bright in Patrick’s ear. She squeezes his forearm, and he presses his fingers into her hand and remembers how fond he is of people who smile. He sees fewer and fewer of them in his daily life anymore, and it buoys something inside him as they turn up the Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and Patrick realizes they’ve made their way to the Jardin de Plantes.
The wall in front of them is a pale cream stone for a few feet before it soars up in a verdant shade of green that makes Patrick think of the hills of home, and his fingers itch to bury themselves in something vibrant and alive. “Girlfriend, huh,” he hears David ask from a step behind them, his hand reaching out and trailing through the green like Patrick only dreams of doing.
Seeing David’s fingers disappearing into the foliage as they walk opens something inside him, springing a lock long since rusted over, and he lets his body do what his body wants to do as his fingers make contact with the cool, silky leaves and his voice finds a way around the words. “Former girlfriend, actually.”
“She leave you for Jody, then,” Stevie says, a deep mock sadness in her voice that rankles something in Patrick.
“No,” he says quickly. “I was the one doing the leaving, actually. I just — things changed in the world, you know?” For once neither of them fire back a response, and while Patrick has no idea what they’re thinking, a cloud of something immediately falls over both their faces. It’s the kind of intrinsic grief, individually unknown but shared across the masses, that provides the tracking beat of their new world. “Anyway. Things in my life were about to look much different than what she signed up for, and I couldn’t do that to her.”
They walk on a bit in silence before Stevie leans her head forward and, across the expanse of Patrick’s chest and the gap between them, says pointedly to David, “See. Not a prick.” David smiles at that, a small smile that starts at one corner and doesn’t stop until it reaches the series of crinkles around his eyes.
“Not a prick,” he repeats before pulling up short and staring across the street, his head darting left and right with a sort of manic fervor. “Shit.”
“What?”
“I think we might have missed it,” David says, his hand over his eyes like he’s blocking out a sun long since set.
“Where did you say this place was, again?” Stevie’s walking up and down the same stretch of cobbled pavement, craning her neck to see into the darkened doorways between neon signs, Patrick’s hands deep in his pockets as he bounces his weight from foot to foot.
“You are literally the most impatient person I’ve ever met in my entire life, and that’s saying something because my sister,” David replies. “What’s the time? Is it ten thirty-two? It has to be ten thirty-two.”
“I have no idea,” Stevie replies, and gives him a stink eye so sharp that Patrick feels it in that sensitive place low in his gut, where all the women in his life have been able to prick him. “I swear David, if you’re relying on Twyla for your information you’re losing your touch.”
“What’s happening, exactly?” Patrick asks.
“Excuse me, it was Sebastien, and you know his information is always good.”
“Sebastien is a creep, a true rag masquerading as a person,” Stevie tells Patrick, no-nonsense. “But, he’s also never wrong,” she adds with a sudden smile, as the lights come on in the darkened windows of the storefront before them, and a man opens the door in full black tie.
“By day, a respectable dressmaker’s shop,” David says, and he tips his imaginary hat to the man as they’re invited inside. “By night, not a dressmaker’s shop, and nowhere near the vicinity of ‘respectable’.”
*
David’s right. The club is, by its very definition, not respectable.
He knew, in theory, that these kinds of places existed. Jazz was jazz was jazz, everywhere it touched the lives of people, but put it in the middle of Paris, where the wine flowed as freely as the Seine and skirts were shorter than anywhere else in the world, and jazz became a different thing, the embodiment of culture and youth and a new world making room for itself.
He hears the wail of trombones and saxophones before they even get to the staircase, and the lower they descend the louder it gets. The wooden staircase doesn’t feel very sturdy under his boots, and he knows he’s following David’s tread a little too closely, but he can’t help himself and he can’t explain why. David’s big shoulders take up all the room in front of him, the entire world, and Patrick lets himself look at the back of his neck where his hair curls just a bit from the humidity, the slick part of his bouffant, the fragile shell of his ears. He smells as good as Patrick expected him to, the rich oaky tone of his cologne, the lavender of his washing powder, the salt of his sweat.
Unbidden, he has the sudden thought of how David would smell in a different scenario, how he’d look, and he shies away from the thought so suddenly that he almost trips Stevie behind him. Thankfully she’s light on her feet, heels and cocktails aside, and she steadies him with a hand on his shoulder as they go down down down, one flight of steps, two, three.
He says, “Where are we headed to, the center of the earth?” and Stevie starts laughing even as David throws a look over his shoulder that’s nearly his undoing. The coy smirk is one thing, but it’s his eyes, dark and shining with laughter, that soften the joints of Patrick’s knees. “You ready?”
“No,” Patrick says, and David reaches up, plucks the hat off his head, and presses it gently into his chest until Patrick takes it. Their fingers brush and Patrick feels it like a bolt of electricity down the column of his spine.
“Smart man,” he murmurs, and with one last look over Patrick’s shoulder to Stevie, he opens the door.
The wall of sound bombards him.
It isn’t the basement of a building, moldy and damp - this is a full night club, complete with an enormous, curved stage back lit with velvet navy curtains, and a full bar with more liquor bottles than Patrick’s ever seen, packed two-deep on wide glass shelves. Two dozen tables are crammed into the room, along with people, so many men and women that Patrick is immediately overwhelmed. A thick fog of cigarette smoke hangs overhead, haloing the spotlights, the heavy crown molding. They’ve walked in mid-number, and a flush crawls right back up his cheeks at the scantily clad woman singing her heart out on stage, the slit of her dress so high that he can see the band of her nylons, the clips holding them up. She’s dancing with a man wearing nothing but suspenders and a sleeveless white undershirt tucked into skin-tight trousers, and Parick has been in some bawdy places before but he’s never seen anything quite like this.
He’s suddenly sure, as sure as the nose on his face, that he shouldn’t be here. That if he’s caught here he’s going to get more than a talking-to. He’s an MOS 807, special forces trained cryptographer, but if someone reports him for being here it won’t matter if he’s special forces or a gunnery private. His eyes dart to the corners, the places where the shadows pool, and his stomach twists when he sees couples perched at high tables, women draped over women, men with hands pressed to the backs of other men. At several tables, he sees black women and white men, or the opposite, heads bent low together, and Patrick’s skin flushes. These are things he’s read about, that his parents warned him he might encounter abroad, and there’s something about it that’s illicit, that makes his mouth dry and his palms twitch. But his feet continue to carry him forward, to the bottom of the steps and off of the landing and across the River Styx into this underground underworld.
“If you keep staring, your eyes are going to fall out of your head,” Stevie says, her voice loud in his ear.
He swallows and his eyes immediately drop. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be,” David says over his shoulder as he begins to push through the crowd, his body angled towards a booth in a far corner that’s suspiciously empty given the surrounding press of bodies. “You should have seen this doll here when I first brought her out. You’d have thought the whole world had its knees rouged and it’s garters out.”
“From what I remember of that night, that’s not far off and I wasn’t the one with my garters out.”
Unbidden, an image of David, thigh wrapped in a garter where it presses against the impeccably stitched inner seam of his suit, flies into Patrick’s mind, and his feet trip over smooth cement floor. He crashes into a table and feels David’s hand wrap around his bicep, pulling him to rights and making a smooth set of apologies at the same time.
“You doing alright, Captain?” David drawls, eyebrow quirked and smile bitten back. It’s a face Patrick is beginning to find familiar already, and he nods so that he has an excuse to break the eye contact David insists on so brazenly.
It’s a lie, because he isn’t okay. The sequins on the singer’s gown flash under the stage lights, and the room smells like cigarettes and alcohol and danger. He wishes, desperately, that he wasn’t wearing his uniform, not because he’s worried he’s going to get in trouble – though he is, terribly worried – but because he wants to fit in here, in this place.
Jazz brings out the most beautiful in people, their deepest and most authentic selves, but Patrick has only ever been an observer of that truth.
They get to the table, sit down, but Patrick can’t tear his eyes away from the woman on the stage, the man she’s dancing with. She’s singing about heartache and joy and growth, because that’s the heart of jazz, but he’s never felt it so keenly as he does in this moment.
Patrick is steady, and practical, and has lived his entire life looking for something to satiate the hungry pit of him. And now, for the first time, he’s found it.
It makes him feel reckless. It makes him feel dangerous. And when he meets David’s eyes over the ring-marked table, he thinks maybe that hunger has finally been answered.
David’s eyes dart down to his mouth, for just a second, and a brand new well of heat opens up under Patrick’s ribs. The woman on stage wails, C'est lui pour moi, moi pour lui dans la vie, and Patrick wishes he could live here, right here, forever. He’s never been so scared in all his life, or so excited. This wasn’t what he was expecting when he got his 7-day Liberty pass.
“I just. When I got my pass, I didn’t think — I just wanted to come eat cheese and drink wine,” he says, and watches David’s eyes crease with mirth.
“Paris is the city for eating cheese and drinking wine,” he says, and a waiter in a black waistcoat and shirtsleeves stops by their table.
“Good evening, Mr. Rose,” he says in heavily accented English. David nods his head and tugs on the cuffs of his own dress shirt, and Patrick catches a glimpse of the dusty silver cuff link — a rose, of course, open in full bloom.
“Good evening, Michel. The usual?”
“Ah,” Michel sucks his teeth, “je suis desole, monsieur, I’m afraid we’re out of the Moët, have been for several weeks now. I have a cabernet franc that’s absolutely parfait as well as several bottles of a riesling that I swear by.”
“Hm,” David runs his hands down the front of his suit jacket. “Where’s the cabernet from?”
“Château Latour,” Michel answers quickly.
“Ugh,” Stevie makes a small sound in the back of her throat, pulling another cigarette out of the silver case. Patrick watches the way she passes it between her fingers, the paper white in the dim light. “The Latour boy is such a creep.”
“That’s true, but his family makes great wine,” David muses. “Patrick? What do you think? Red or white?”
Patrick swallows and shrugs. “We mostly drink beer on base.”
David looks at him and smiles like he’s just admitted to still sleeping with a teddy bear. “In that case — bring us a bottle of each, Michel. Oh, and while you’re at it,” he glances at Patrick with an indulgent smile, “bring us a half — no, a dozen oysters on the half shell and some of that good crusty bread you had the last time I was here? With a big pile of those kalamata olives, feta and manchego cheese. For the table.” He adds the last sentence like it’s almost an afterthought, and Patrick’s never met an adult who makes a meal out of snacks before. “Put it on my sisters tab.”
“Oui,” he nods succinctly, spinning to leave, before he turns and seems to hesitate before speaking quickly. “And how is Mademoiselle Alexis? We were expecting to see her earlier this week…”
“She’s had a change in plans,” David covers glibly, looking down at his cuticles until Michel nods again and spins, cutting through the crowd with an efficiency that Patrick admires.
“Who’s Alexis?”
“My sister. She’s a menace.”
“I’m going to go dance,” Stevie says, pushing herself to a stand as her eyes lock on a woman in the crowd, the fringe of her dress barely grazing the middle of her thigh. She’s looking back at Stevie with a gaze that Patrick recognizes by gut feeling more than by sight. David shrugs his shoulders while Patrick tries to pick apart all the whys and hows of that familiar look between a stranger and a woman who, for all intents and purposes, might as well be.
“Do you want us to track you down for wine?”
“It’s two bottles, David. You won’t be able to finish before I get back.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“Only if you’d like it to be.”
“...no, not tonight. That doesn’t seem wise. Go, tell Madeline I said hello.”
“You don’t want to tell her yourself?”
David glares at her until she leaves on a laugh and David crosses his arms, leaning back in his chair and letting his gaze drift over the crowd. Patrick does the same, forcing his breaths to come slow and even through his nose. He feels like he’s barely pressing back a wave of panic, like he’s going to shake apart at the seams. Every sense he has is firing on high, and it makes the world feel too loud again, colors too bright and smells too potent.
It’s akin to the front line, every instinct he has shouting to keep him safe, and he’s drumming his fingers against the table in a staccato beat that barely matches the music filling the space around him.
He notices David watching his fingers a split second before he stops the movement, his leg picking up a frenetic jiggling instead. David just shakes his head, a fraction of a movement as he reaches into the interior pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a rose gold cigarette case of his own. He slides out a thin, filter-less cigarette and catches Patrick’s eye as he lights it, taking two shorter, firmer drags before he holds it out to Patrick.
Patrick’s a small town guy, but he’s not a complete square — he knows a jazz cigarette when he sees it. But seeing one and taking one from the broad, steady fingers of a man he’s known less than four hours, in the dark corner of a subterranean jazz club, is an entirely different playing field. He reaches out and takes it, the paper thin where it’s pinched between his fingers.
He watches it, the smoke an almost steely blue as it curls from the small, hot heart of red. He watches it and thinks of his parents, and his bunker-mate Tommy, and the shape of his life that up until now he’d thought drawn in stone. But that stone had never made space for a world that looked like the one Patrick was now sitting in, and the effort it’s taking him to carve a new life is exhausting him faster than he’d even thought possible.
David clears his throat, and Patrick’s not sure exactly how long he’s been staring, but he knows it’s been too long, so he presses the paper to his lips and inhales twice, forcefully, like David had done, before coughing so hard the sound tears from his lungs like mortar fire. He leans forward, his face so red it’s almost purple, and David is pounding him on the back while laughing so hard, he’s got tears on his cheeks to match Patrick’s. David reaches out and plucks the paper back before Patrick drops it, letting his breathing slow before he takes another drag, longer this time, continuing the inhale even after he pulls the cigarette away from his mouth. He holds it out to Patrick, who has never been one to give up on a challenge. He mimics David again, a long slow drag that continues after he passes the hand-roll back to David. This time, he’s able to keep the smoke trapped in his lungs, to fight the burning and the scratching heat that claws at his throat. He exhales slowly, the smoke snaking out from between his lips in an opaque trail. He notices David’s eyes on his mouth again and wonders what he’s doing wrong this time.
“I’ve never done this before,” he blurts, because he’s the boy his mother raised him to be, brutally honest in all the ways he’s tried so hard to stop being since he stepped into the recruiter’s office in Elmdale. David’s eyes are so dark in the shadow of the club, but somehow also the brightest damn thing in the entire room, and when they meet his Patrick wants to crawl into them and never leave.
“Not many queer jazz clubs where you’re from?” David asks, and he’s laughing even as he pulls from the cigarette.
“Is that what this is?”
“No,” David says, and leans forward to hand him the roll as he slowly, slowly blows out the smoke. It curls around his cheekbone before slipping up, away, overhead. “And yes. We’re playing by different rules here, Captain Brewer. Everything you think you know doesn’t apply, not here and not now.”
Patrick clears his throat and rolls the quickly shrinking cigarette between his fingertips. It’s damp with saliva and small enough that the heat from the ember presses painfully into the pads of his fingers. He takes another lungful as Michel appears with a large silver bucket, two gold-foil wrapped bottles nestled into a bed of ice. Another waiter has brought the platters of cheese and olives, bread and spreads. Michel deposits the bucket at David’s elbow with a small smile, and David nods and pulls a roll of bills out of his pocket, sliding one palm-down to Michel, who takes it with a small bow and a click of his heels.
Patrick speaks on the exhale, his eyes glassy and the military precision of his words dulled into something rounder, and softer, and closer to the elongated Canadian accent he grew up surrounded by. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means, Mr. Rose.”
“David. Mr. Rose is my father.”
“If you insist on Captain Brewer, I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on Mr. Rose. It’s only polite.”
“Ah, and we wouldn’t want to be impolite when the world is falling into chaos.”
“No, we wouldn’t.” He says it sincerely, earnestly, and David does almost a double take at the sincerely in his voice. David takes the cigarette back and finishes it with one final inhale, stubbing it out in the small metal ashtray on the table, sticking the tips of his fingers in his mouth briefly as his other hand reaches out for one of the bottles of wine.
“Well then. Patrick. Which bottle shall we crack into first?”
“I don’t. I mean. Whichever you’d prefer.”
“I prefer both. Which is why I asked you to choose.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You mean other than the fact that one is red and one is white?” There’s laughter in David’s voice again, but laughter that isn’t aimed at Patrick, a skill Patrick is quickly realizing David has honed to an art form, the ability to laugh near someone, adjacent to them, in a close enough vicinity that it pokes, but never cuts.
“Yes. Outside of that.” Patrick’s tone is stern, frank, and he sounds like his father in his head. But it makes David sit up a little straighter, makes his shoulders turn almost imperceptibly towards Patrick.
“Hmm. Well, first of all, they’re not that different. Grapes, picked from different places, stomped to juice and barreled until the liquid turns alcoholic.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me wine...is an alcohol?”
David laughs, and Patrick notes the sound, writes the music of it into this soft tissue of his body, feels it in his gut like it belongs there. “Okay, hotshot, we’ll skip the basics.” David pulls the soft cork stopper out of one bottle, pouring a finger's worth into the glasses that have been sitting empty on the table since they arrived. The liquid is such a dark red it looks almost black in the low light of the club, and Patrick almost misses as he reaches to take the glass from David, a fuzziness in his muscles that makes him sigh, his eyes drifting closed for the smallest second.
“Ah,” a burst of oxygen escapes David’s lips, his eyes glued to Patrick’s face. “There it is.”
“There what is?” Patrick peels his eyelids up and feels himself falling into David’s eyes, his body leaning forward until his forearms brace on the table, the fragile stem of the wine glass tapping against the wood.
David just shakes his head and swirls the wine in his glass. “Swirl the wine, Patrick.”
Patrick follows orders, because he can, and he’s used to it, and he’s good at it.
There’s a lassitude in his joints that he doesn’t recognize and has never felt before, and the world has gone soft around the edges, the brass notes of the instruments on stage mellowing into something warmer, the smell of cigarette smoke and too many bodies in too small a space less aromatic. The only sharp thing in his world is the cutting edge of David’s smile, and Patrick thinks he would willingly throw himself on it until he bled, if he was even half as brave as he made other people think.
He wants, deep down in the parts of him that are base and instinctual and uncaring of the rigid rules he lives by. He swirls the wine and lets himself think about what it would be, even if he could never, to take David by the hand and pull him out on the dance floor where dozens of couples in every permutation are dancing their night away. David would let him lead, he thinks, because he’s a rake and a rogue but he contains multitudes, hidden in the shadow of his dark eyes, his self deprecating smile. He’d let Patrick lead, and he’d like it, and Patrick’s skin itches with the thought of what it would be, to feel those wide shoulders under his palm, that big hand in his. The thought comes to him, unbidden and sharp: Patrick letting David lead, and liking it, in the circle of those long arms.
It’s dangerous. It’s so dangerous. He has no idea why he’s thinking these things, or where this pit of want came from, but it’s an ache low in his belly, fisted in every tendon and muscle leading between his legs. He’s never felt like this before, not ever, and certainly not through his courtship with Rachel. The intensity of his arousal terrifies him, for so many reasons, but the most terrifying thing right here and right now is that David is going to walk away from him tonight and not know the gift he gave Patrick without even realizing it.
Patrick isn’t brave, but maybe he’s brave enough for this.
He lets himself reach, just a little, across the table, to brush his thumb lightly along David’s pinkie ring. The shock of David’s skin tingles all the way up his skull and behind his ears. He traces the line where cool metal meets the second joint of his finger, then a little, just a little, along the side of his palm. He can’t look up, can’t, can’t, but then David murmurs, low under the pounding brass music, “Take a drink. Tell me if you like it.”
Patrick’s never really liked wine, is the truth, but if David asked him to jump in front of a moving train right now, he thinks he might consider it. The thought makes him smile into his glass, and he takes a sip.
The flavor of the wine explodes on his tongue, crisp notes of blackberry and plum, with a deep tang of loamy earth. The sharpness of the alcohol tickles the back of his throat, his nose, and when he swallows he feels it curl like smoke down his throat. There’s an after-taste, spicy and light, that makes him want to take another drink. He makes a noise, faint with surprise. “Hey, this is good.”
“Red is delicious, and these days, my preferred wine,” David says, and turns his hand over, slowly, to catch Patrick’s roaming fingers in his own. Patrick wants to jerk back, wants to look around the room to see if anyone is watching, but he feels so good, weightless and warm and daring, and he isn’t thinking about the uniform code at all. He’s thinking about the rasp of David’s hand against his own work-rough skin, about the length of his fingers. David’s hands are huge, and soft as butter. Patrick’s hands are small in comparison because Patrick is smaller than David, and that’s never been a thing he felt before, to be smaller than someone he - someone he -
“The cigarette was good,” he says, and David’s eyes crinkle up with mirth, his thumb dragging slowly, carefully, along Patrick’s knuckles, along the scar that he split on teeth just a few months ago.
“Liked it, did you.”
“I feel really good. Right now.”
“You keep saying ‘good’, so I’d have to agree,” David says. He leans forward over their hands, so close into Patrick’s space that something instinctual crawls down Patrick’s body. His thighs go loose in a way he’s never felt before, not ever , and they spread of their own volition, just a little, under the table. The arousal that shoots through him makes his nipples tight, the hair stand up on the back of his neck, his belly throb down deep and low.
He’s never felt like this before in his life, and he’s so embarrassed he straightens up immediately, clears his throat, ignoring the soft little smile curling on David’s mouth.
David takes pity on him, taking his hand back to cut into the bread on the table between them, and Patrick wants to grab it back, pull it close, into his lap. It’s a sudden yearning, and David - he thinks David knows that because he pushes his lips to the corner of his mouth, some of the impish delight receding from his face, softening his amusement into something warmer and sweeter. “Tell me about yourself. There’s only so much I can guess, though I have guessed a lot.”
“Have you?” Patrick asks, accepting the fork he’s handed and spearing up some of the cheese immediately. It smells like the inside of a sweaty sock and tastes of pure heaven. The bread is just as good, flaky and delicious, and something Patrick expects to find in a cute French bistro, not a sub basement jazz bar in the middle of Paris.
“Have we already forgotten my amazing name trick?”
“That was pretty good,” he says, because it was, and because it makes David wrinkle his nose at the ‘good’. He pops an olive into his mouth. “How did you do that?”
“I’m the kind of man who has a barrage of useless talents only good for showcasing at dinner parties and nights out on the town,” David says, and Patrick can’t help but laugh.
“I don’t know, guessing my name was a great trick.”
“Ugh. Also, I may have heard the bartender mention something or other,” David says, completely without guile, and Patrick laughs again, rubbing his mouth and looking at David over the top of his fingers.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“Oscar Wilde?” David asks, and something settles warm and fond at the heart of him. David is gorgeous, and David is smart, and Patrick should be much more alarmed than he is about what’s settling over him like a blanket. “Really?”
“Seemed appropriate,” Patrick says, and intends it as the double meaning it is. Oscar Wilde would have liked this place, he thinks. Oscar Wilde would have also found the courage to take David’s hand in his and lead him to the dance floor. “Are you a reader of Wilde’s work?”
David’s smile is like sunlight, a little pocket of warm gold in the dark bass of the club. “Are you? Somehow I don’t think they’re passing out armed service editions of The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“Excuse me, I’ll have you know that bunburying is a classic military strategy.”
The warmth of his pleasure at making David laugh should not feed all the hungry parts of himself like this, but it does. It does. “Is the Army collectively making their excuses, claiming they’re going to the country to visit their sickly Aunt Maud?”
“Great Aunt Bea,” Patrick corrects, with a sage nod. “Mother’s side. Has terrible arthritis, getting on in years. Needs help with the chickens and goats, you understand.”
“Poor Aunt Bea. You’re good nephews, bringing her cake from Town and helping her fix fence posts.”
“She doesn’t even mind the ballistic canons we park behind her house.”
“Why would she? She’s got strapping boys helping her patch the roof.” David pops the 'p's l on strapping and it's like sparks across Patrick's skin. He hums and repeats David's 'strapping boys', which makes David chuckle as he smears the olive oil spread across another flaky slice of bread. "But. We're not supposed to be talking about Aunt Bea. We're supposed to be talking about you."
"I'm afraid Aunt Bea is a much more interesting discussion," Patrick deflects, taking another long sip of wine, pulling it over his tongue and counting the flavors that he finds.
"Somehow I very much doubt that, Patrick Brewer." David is staring at him like he's seeing something special, like there's more to Patrick than Patrick knows there to be.
"Well," Patrick drains the last of his glass for one last moment to gather his thoughts, and then he launches into the abridged life story he's gotten used to rattling off to the myriad of new people the armed services has shoved him into the company of. "I'm 28. From just outside Toronto. Ontario? It's in –"
"–Canada," David interrupts. "I'm aware of the world map." Patrick blushes but the hard, rounded tip of David's shoe presses gently into his shin bone and he sees a smile playing on David's face. David Rose communicates in gentle barbs, a stem with thorns, and Patrick wants to learn to dance around them. "What do you miss most about home?"
"The space," Patrick says without thinking, because he's thought about it so much already. "Here there are so many people. Always. And they're nice people, mostly, in beautiful places, I just. When I was little I used to run for miles in any direction, without seeing a person. I miss that."
It's more words than Patrick's spoken consecutively all night, but David doesn't look bored yet. He tilts his head like he's studying Patrick as he pulls the second bottle of wine out of the bucket. He pulls out the cork and pours a second finger into the other clean glass on the table. It’s thinner than the other, with a squared off stem and almost rough cut base. The dim light in the club bounces off the rim, and the pale yellow liquid inside, as David yet again swirls, sips, and swallows. Patrick watches the line of David’s throat, but doesn’t manage to pull his eyes away before David catches him looking.
“As someone who hasn’t ever fancied themselves a runner, I can’t say I do understand but. Space sounds nice.”
“What about you, then?” It’s Patrick’s turn to swirl the wine around the glass, watching the way the liquid seems to fold over itself as it follows its circular path. He lifts it to his lips and sips, pulling air over his tongue alongside it, and — it is so much different than the red. It’s sharp, and sweet, sweet enough that he feels his lips curling over his teeth. The liquid flows over the back of his tongue and down the column of his throat, and he’s reminded of pears and lemons and fresh-picked summer daisies. There’s almost an acidity to it, like fruit just about to turn, and he darts out the tip of his tongue to chase the flavor, smacking his lips together loudly and sets the glass back down. “What do you miss most about home?”
“I don’t.” David’s staring at Patrick’s fingers where they remain wrapped around the stem of the glass, and he’s twirling a silver ring around the second knuckle of his middle finger.
“Don’t what?”
“Miss home. Not as a habit, that is. So. What do you think?”
“About not missing home?”
David shakes his head slowly and Patrick wants to run the pad of this thumb across the corner of David’s mouth, that little bit where lip meets cheek and David seems to keep all one thousand permutations of a smile he possesses. “About the wine.”
“Oh. I. Um. The red?”
“Are you asking me?” David leans forward and puts his chin in his hand, his elbow resting on the table.
“The red,” Patrick says, leaning forward and reaching for the bottle, a sudden surge of heat up his spine as his brain screams at him to pull back, to be less brazen, to take a step back from the ledge he’s already balanced on too precariously. He leans back quickly, so quickly that he rocks backwards in his chair and teeters, hand coming to clutch the edge of the table at the same moment that David wraps his hand around Patrick’s bicep and pulls him back upright.
Patrick smiles, wary, and feels an odd combination of flushing heat and rushing chills as he catches his breath after the sudden adrenaline spike. His hand shakes, the tiniest movement, and he forces himself to breathe through his nose as he tips the bottle and pours a hefty glass for himself. He looks at David, who nods, and Patrick refills his red wine glass, even though there’s still a drink of white he hasn’t finished.
“The red is a good choice,” David says, clicking his glass against Patrick’s before Patrick picks it off the table.
“So it’s yours too, then? The red? Your choice?” The words seem to get lost on the way from Patrick’s brain to his mouth, coming out in a different order than they’d started, and he’s not sure if it’s the wine, or the cigarette, the dark press of bodies and music and desire suffusing the air around them.
He’d like to blame all three, but is pretty sure the culprit already has a name, and a face, and steady hands lifting a thin-stemmed glass to lips more beautifully fit on a face than Patrick can ever remember seeing.
“I like the red,” David says with a nod. “I like the white, too. I also love a good rosé, or a port. Champagne, of course. Something that’s been sitting in an oak barrel in a dark basement,” he pauses to take a long drink, and the corners of his lips are stained a delicious, dusky pink when he places the glass back onto the table. “Or something newly put away, still piqued and tart and figuring out how it wants to taste.”
Patrick swallows around a sudden dryness in his throat that the wine is doing nothing to chase away. “So you really just like all wines then.”
“I’m interested in the wine, less so the label, if that makes sense.” David finds Patrick’s eye and holds it, letting the sentence fall into the space, landing on top of the others in such a way that Patrick knew they weren’t strictly talking about the wine anymore.
“I….that makes a certain sort of sense,” Patrick hedges.
“But, you know, I’ve always admired those who had a more...dedicated palette,” David adds. “There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you like, when what you like is of quality.”
Patrick nods, but is thankfully spared from having to generate a response by an out of breath and slightly sweaty Stevie, crashing back to their table. She snatches David’s glass of white and drains it, then takes Patrick’s and drains that one too, in three long swallows.
Sweat has dampened the hair around her ears, curled down her collarbones and over her chest. She grins like a mad woman, her lipstick smeared across the corner of her mouth to her cheek, and throws a look over her shoulder capable of murder, sly and smug and so sexual that even Patrick feels it in his belly. The woman standing at the edge of the crowd staring back looks like she’s been taken out at the knees.
Stevie smirks and reaches across Patrick to pluck her handbag off the table, no doubt to give her mystery woman a chance to see all she’s missed out on. Patrick feels like his entire face is on fire, and he knows for sure that his ears must be bright red, if David’s smile is anything to go by. “Hi,” she chirps, and fluffs her curls up, her earrings sparkling against the black curtain of her hair. “Lets go, boys.”
“But, we still have wine,” David says petulantly. Stevie just laughs and tosses one last look over her shoulder before she gives David a little shrug.
“My work here is done.” She says, draining his glass of red for him and pulling him out of the chair by his wrist.
“Have fun?” David asks, but Stevie just laughs, like he’s ridiculous for even asking.
The air is cold when they finally spill out of the dressmaker’s shop, but it’s just because they’re so overheated. Patrick hadn’t even realized sweat had gathered under his arms, down the line of his back, until the cool air slipped under the wool. Stevie shivers, full body, and David says, “Every time. Every time! I told you to bring a jacket,” and he shrugs out of his, so annoyed that Patrick can only smile. His waistcoat is an outrageous riot of pattern, black and white gypsophila flowers sewn in startling, beautiful bunches up his chest and shoulders. It’s gorgeous, clearly expensive and impeccably made, and fits him like it was made for him. The gray buttons invite the eye down, down, to the pearled red one at the very bottom, just above the line of his belt. It’s evocative and utterly without guile, much like the man wearing it.
It’s time to say goodnight, Patrick knows that, but something stops him, shutters his tongue. Before, before, maybe he could have walked away with his heart whole and the foundation firm under his feet. Maybe he could have had his R&R and enjoyed the sights of Paris in the fall, eaten cheese and bread and drunk all the wine he could before being sent back to the war, The War, gray and bleak but for the red of blood. He could have written to Rachel - she’s sent him so many letters since he joined. He could have called his parents, and slept as long as he wanted under the fluffy down comforter of his bed at the hostel where he’s staying, and allowed his mind and body to rest for the first time in almost six years.
He doesn’t want to say goodnight.
He doesn’t want to walk away from this man, this man who has opened a part of Patrick he didn’t know existed, who had effortlessly and without malice shown him another path forward. He doesn’t want to say goodnight, but he has to. He has to. He’s in uniform, and his obligations lie elsewhere, and the path David is showing him is fraught with peril, for both of them. It doesn’t stop him from wanting it, more strongly than he’s ever wanted anything in his life.
He offers his hand, and David, eyebrows furrowed, takes it. “Thank you both. For tonight.”
“Thank you? Really?” David says, even as he shakes his hand, firm and strong. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes.” They’re still shaking hands, and Stevie’s laughing eyes are peaking up out of David’s jacket collar, where she’s wrapped up like a bug in a rug. “Back to my hotel. I can’t thank you enough for tonight. It was more fun than I’ve had in a long time.”
David, Patrick has learned, is a man unable to hide anything on his face, but whatever flashes across his mouth is there and gone again so quickly that he can’t hope to read it. He drops Patrick’s hand and tucks both into his pockets. He should look ridiculous because nothing he’s wearing matches, except that it effortlessly, beautifully, does. This beautiful man, who likes red wine and white wine, and who’s been asking Patrick all night to follow him into the dark.
David is offering him a choice, he knows. All he needs to do is reach out and take it.
The problem is that if he does, David will break him down to all of his component parts, heart and lungs and eyes and mouth, and remake him into a different man. The man who's been waiting, so patiently, to come free of the snarl of a lifetime of bad decisions tempered by duty and sacrifice.
He wants to reach out. He wants to take everything David is offering. He wants it more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life. And that’s how he knows he can’t.
“Thank you,” he says, softly, and has never meant something so much. “Stay safe, both of you.”
“Likewise,” David says, and Patrick feels the steadiness of his gaze on his back all down the street, until he turns the corner and the Parisian night swallows him whole.