Lie With Me

by Philippe Besson

They say that I “prefer boys.” They say that I move like a girl sometimes. I’m not any good at sports, incapable of lifting weights or throwing the javelin, and completely uninterested in soccer and volleyball.

There are things one knows how to do even as a child.

this union crystallized my difference. So I would not resemble the others after all. In this one regard, I would stop being the model child.

But I will never change. I will never think: It’s bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they’ll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.

I wish Thomas was in a position to feel this way too.

desire is visible.

I think of it as the perfect little crack in an extraordinarily brief window of opportunity.

Love, it’s mouths that seek, lips that bite, drawing a little blood.

When Thomas disappears around the corner of the gym, I am seven years old again.

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

Whenever he mentions this question of the forbidden I will try in vain to show him that he’s wrong.

All of a sudden I see a sort of admiration return to his face, but it’s a painful admiration; what he likes about me is also what keeps me separate from him.

Here is the crux of this love story.

I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fervor.

I explain that in general it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression.

Very relevant to this particular novel. Is it autofiction? A memoir? Does it matter?

It’s something that comes from using the body. From stirring up desire, sharing oneself with another, finding victory over a kind of solitude.

The trace of his scent, an intimate mixture of cigarettes and sweat, is the only thing that saves me.

I slip down the straps of his tank top. It seems to me that there is no other gesture more sensual, more stirring.

Sharing their happiness makes them even more happy, makes them expand with joy. But we’re left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.

I’m not possessive, figuring no one should have exclusive rights to someone else, as if a lover were a piece of property. I respect everyone’s freedom too much (probably because I can’t bear to have mine undermined).

I’m ashamed of my body and its weakness. But so what, we dance on volcanos, as the expression says.

You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that.

It feels like Lucas is disappearing; even the scenery is becoming blurry, like the melting watches of Dalí.

That singular moment. The pure urgency of it. There were circumstances—a series of coincidences and simultaneous desire. There was something in the atmosphere, something in the time and the place, that brought us together.

A scheduled meeting absent of all chance can’t help but take on an air of gravitas.

Or did he simply hold on to this fundamental truth: that in the end, death is only a matter between you and yourself?

No matter how much you want to respect someone’s freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with.

In that first moment, when he heard me say that I had seen you, he didn’t move, but I swear he lost his balance. At that exact moment I was certain that he had been in love with you.