Lie With Me: A Novel

by Philippe Besson

I remembered the name. Thomas Andrieu. I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity.

To him, I’m a stranger. I’m in this state of one-way desire. I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

This boy is obviously not for me. And not even because I’m not attractive or seductive. It’s simply because he’s lost to boys. He’s not for us, for those like me. It’s the girls who will win him.

been there done that

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

He says: I know a place.

he can host

His hair continues to drip water, the wet strands sticking to his forehead. His beauty is devastating. He kneels down on the mattress. I do the same.

And then silence comes. Our looks shift, shyness and desire masking them. The kisses come. Carnivorous kisses.

In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

I say: Will you take me for a ride one of these days? I expect the raised shoulders and the smirk, reminding me of the rules. Instead he says: You want to? I believe that yes, definitely, something is changing.

He will keep his promise. A few weeks later he’ll take me for a ride. He’ll pick me up at the edge of town, with a helmet this time. I don’t know if it’s as a precaution, to respect the law, or so that we won’t be recognized, but I get on the back of the bike and hold on to him.

We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters...

In the meantime, he takes off, walks down the stairs, barely saying goodbye before leaving. When the door closes, the silence is heavy enough to make your knees buckle. The trace of his scent, an intimate mixture ...

The rest of the time we stay in bed, kissing, sucking, and fucking.

(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)

Kisses on the body. Love in my bedroom. Everything in this room that belongs only to us. Everything that is incommunicable to the rest of the world.

Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?

It’s clear that the man was his lover (the son pronounces the word without wavering, without judgment) but that they did not live together.

He writes that he wants to live with Thomas in broad daylight, that he does not want to go on hiding anymore, that it eats away at him like a disease, both the love and the silence.

Philippe, I’m going to Spain and I’m not coming back, at least not right away. You are going to Bordeaux and I know it will be only the first step in a long journey. I always knew you were made for somewhere else. Our paths are separating. I know you would have liked for things to be different, for me to say the words that would have reassured you, but I could not, and I never knew how to talk anyway. In the end, I tell myself that you understood. It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue—you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.

nooo no no no please dont let me finish the book like this. oh.... my heart...