When You Are Young They Assume You Know Nothing

by Lily_Padd_23

Summary:

But Paul knows John.

There’s something about Paris, though...

Paris, 1961

From his nose-pressed-against-the-window vantage point, Paul can’t really see too terribly much of the city as the train approaches the station. It’s kind of a gloomy evening, and the sun’s well on its way down. But he can make out the lights just beginning to twinkle and he thinks he might even catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower through the clouds, but before he can decide for sure, another train comes whizzing by. Paul suddenly becomes aware of his own sleepy reflection looking back at him and he wonders if there’s a pair of Parisian lads on the opposite train headed to England, but he doubts it. He likes the idea, though.

The train begins to churn to a halt, and the ticket chap is coming through the car to announce the stop. Paul nudges John where he’s fallen asleep with his head in Paul’s lap. John had pretended to take a kip about an hour ago when a middle-aged woman from Brussels with a headscarf and an accent so thick Paul could barely understand her at first had plopped across from them and proceeded to give them the unsolicited family history of her father who fought in both wars. John had let out a loud fake yawn and made a clamour about not having slept in hours, and as he’d adjusted himself, Paul had looked down at him and made his eyes as wide as possible to try and silently say don’t you dare abandon me, Lennon, to which John had simply closed his eyes and nestled back against Paul’s leg, raising his eyebrows to say you’re on your own. John had nodded off somewhere around when the woman was explaining that her second cousin on her mother’s side was the one who went to law school and the one on her father’s side who had the bad knee.

“We’re here, I think,” Paul says softly. John slowly twists awake with a groan, giving a few muddled blinks up at Paul as he tries to remember where he is. “We’re here.”

John’s hair is sticking up funny in the back as he sits and rolls his neck from the bad angle, and Paul is about to reach over to fix it, but John shoves his hat back on and looks over at Paul, “Allons-y!” he says, flubbing the vowels with overdone Scouse. Paul isn’t certain what it’s supposed to sound like, but he’s pretty sure it’s not that. They collect their little duffles from overhead and come tumbling out into the station, which is quite grand compared to Lime Street, really. John a step ahead, Paul grabs the back of his leather jacket to keep from getting jostled apart. It’s not too terribly busy, though, Paul realizes. That is, not once they’re past the bustle of people crowded on and off the train, falling into step side-by-side.

Looking around, Paul tries to orient himself, taking in the tall green columns and shiny wood floors and lamps along the platforms. They’ve just missed the after-work crush it seems, but there are still some people shuffling back home for a late dinner with their brief cases and jackets. Others looking all dolled up for a meal at some fancy restaurant, he imagines with low hanging chandeliers, eating snails or whatever it is French people eat. He wonders if that’s even true or just one of those things kids say.

Suddenly, John is shoving his hat and glasses into Paul’s free hand, “Wait here.” Paul watches as he slinks off towards what appears to be an information stall and starts chatting up the cute, plump bird behind the desk until she’s giggling into her palm. On the one hand, Paul finds himself rolling his eyes because leave it to John, but on the other hand, neither of them have any idea where they’re going. After a few more minutes of flirting, John returns, map in hand. They huddle over it as John messes about unfolding it, and he points to where the girl behind the desk circled some of the cheapest places to spend the night and starred the train station where they are now. “What d’ya say, Macca? Pick the nearest one and head?” John asks. Paul agrees, noticing quickly where the girl scribbled her telephone number in the corner.

Hiking his duffle onto his shoulder, Paul follows John out into the late afternoon haze on the Paris street. He can feel himself looking every bit as much of a foreigner as he feels with his mouth dropped open as he stares the buildings up and down, the pale brick and regal trimming and matching roofs. He quite literally has to hold onto his hat in the damp breeze as he gapes up and around him at the intricate detail on every building, seeming to go on and on. John’s frustration with the map pulls him back from an internal train of thought about how many pigeons live in the grand arches over the entrance of the train station behind them, and the two of them fumble about with it until they’re able to match a street name to a little plaque on the corner across the road and take off in that direction.

The nearest cheap hotel is only a few blocks away, and stretching his legs and getting some fresh air is more than welcome, Paul thinks. He can practically smell himself through his leather jacket. It’ll do well to have a stretch and a scrub. They pay closer attention to the map than their surroundings, but every now and then, Paul brushes against a particularly suave looking Frenchman or well put together Frenchwoman with a hat like he’s never seen, or hears the tail end of a hurried French chat exchanged between passersby, or catches a glimpse of the awning of a café that looks just like something out of some old movie and he is struck with how surreal it is to be walking such famous cobblestone.

They triple check that the name painted on the sign of the little brownish pink hotel matches the one the girl at the train station circled before they step through the little door with the loose brass knob. The room is dank with the smell of old, old wood and cigarette smoke, but it has a certain kind of character that Paul instantly finds charming. There’s a small bar attached to the equally small lobby and the low ceilings are covered in chipping red wallpaper that may have once looked posh when it was new.

“It’s not the Ritz,” John says at the same time Paul says, “This isn’t half bad, y’know!”

The incredibly old man behind the counter with terribly poor hearing, despite speaking fairly good English himself, struggles for a solid five minutes to understand their accents. Paul fleetingly suspects he might be doing it out of spite. John’s selective memory for his primary school French lessons eventually gets them checked in for the night and the information that breakfast is served at the bar until half past ten.

Once up the creaky back stairs, they find their little room at the far end of the hall. A twin bed had never looked more like a King’s quarters. Paul can’t even be miffed about the shabby decor and drafty windows.

“Looks like a brigade little old grannies was let loose,” John jokes good-humoredly tracing a finger tip over a large flower on the wallpaper.

“We’ll have to keep an eye out for ‘em,” Paul says, finally letting his duffle drop.

An effort is made at washing off, but the water is running freezing cold, so they decide to head down to the bar for a bite and a drink instead. The bar is almost as dingy as the room. It’s dark and crowded, but they find a seat outside the window on the cobblestone street. When they sit down, a raven-haired waitress brings them a basket of crusty bread and salty butter that is a bit stale and melted, but still tastes nice. John orders them a bottle of Pinot Noir because it sounds the most French. It doesn’t taste that different from wine back home, though they only admit it under their breath. But they drink it all anyway.

“Seems an alright spot, this,” Paul says around a mouthful of the crusty bread. John gives a conciliatory nod, agreeing that it’ll do for the night.

Plans for the next day flow between them along with the wine, discussing the dance joints they’ll frequent in Barcelona and if the weather will be right for spending any time at the sea, Paul lights a cigarette, and basket after basket of bread is dropped on their table and the chatter around them rotates as the evening passes. They stop to eavesdrop on a small group of English-speaking tourists who sound like they may be from Australia sharing irreverent jokes about the Queen over huge steins of pilsner, which they both find amusing.

“Come to Paris, the number one destination for German beer,” Paul says in a low fake radio voice that makes John laugh.

“Best German beer in all of Europe,” John adds, taking a swig of the wine neither of them bothered to find out if it actually came from France.

Their bread basket is switched out again and John launches into a monologue about some French artist he’s supposed to be all geared up about for how he pushes the boundaries and all. Paul doesn’t really have much to add, not having ever seen one of these bloke’s paintings, but he tends to take John’s word for it on these sorts of things because they have such similar taste. Across the street, somebody’s got a record of melodramatic French ballads on, or for them, Paul thinks, just regular melodramatic ballads, and someone in an open window a few stories up is practicing the clarinet.

The moon is out and bright by the time John pours the last dregs of red into his glass. With all the off-white buildings and long façades to bounce off of, the moonlight almost makes the whole street brighter. Paul’s never been in love. Not that he knows of. But he understands why everybody always goes on about this place, everything the poets have said. He thinks that falling in love here would be the easiest thing to do.

John gives him an expectant look like he’s just asked a question, and is waiting for Paul’s answer.

“Hmm?” Paul says, “Oh, yeah, yeah sure.” And John orders them each another glass of wine.

 

John gets to the bed first while Paul’s brushing his teeth and waiting for the water to get warm enough to give his face a scrub. It doesn’t get warm, so he just splashes some on his face and then wipes it off with the sleeve of his black jumper. He pads in sock feet to where he’s dropped his duffle in the corner, seeing John in the silvery warm glow beaming through the window from the streetlight outside. John’s draped himself across the duvet, lying on his stomach with a leg hanging off the side. It’s a small bed and low to the ground, so his foot is still dragging on the faded brown carpet, like he started to get in the bed and then gave up. Paul rolls his eyes at John for being that knackered when all he did most of the day was sleep on the journey over.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Paul tells him, changing into the flannel pajama bottoms in his duffle. John mumbles out a joke about Paul being a prude, but it’s lost in the pillow. Once he’s decent, Paul grabs John’s leg by the ankle and hoists it up onto the bed before climbing over him and sliding beneath the duvet by John’s feet. The sheets are scratchy cotton and they smell like the inside of a musty old cabinet, but as soon as he’s tucked in, the exhaustion of the full day of travel hits him, and suddenly John crashing so spectacularly makes sense. Barely even opening his eyes, John adjusts himself to get under the duvet, too, and throws one of the pillows over at Paul weakly. It barely makes it halfway down the bed, and Paul makes a sound of put-on petulance as he lifts himself up to grab the pillow where it landed. He bunches it behind him and drops back, folding an arm beneath his head. Closing his eyes, he lets out a long exhale.

Even squeezed between the two of them, the bed is surprisingly comfortable. Or maybe he’s been in need of a good night’s sleep more than he thought he did after such a long series of crammed cars.

The distant sounds of the city outside begin to filter into his ears along with John’s not-quite-asleep breathing. The hotel is sort of tucked on a side street, so it’s not particularly noisy, but in the quiet of the room, he’s able to pick up muffled cars from the main avenue and the occasional click of heels on cobblestone of someone passing beneath their window as well as the faint, late-night comings and goings within the hotel. A door opening and closing a few rooms over, someone laughing a floor beneath them, the low conversation of the couple on the other side of the wall. He isn’t sure why he can’t keep his eyes shut, maybe just the excitement of being somewhere new. But he’s watching the way the old worn out lace curtains make shadows of themselves on each other in the light from the street lamp.

“Are you gonna ring that bird?” Paul asks, “From the train station?”

“No,” John replies, not seeming to move or open his eyes, “Doesn’t make much sense with us leaving tomorrow, like.”

“That’s true.” Before he can say anything else, he’s overtaken by a yawn, and smacking his lips a little, he settles further back into the pillow. Just as he’s pretty much down for the count, there’s a distinct creaking of the bed and soft moans coming from next door. John lets out a low laugh, and Paul chuckles, turning his head into the crook of his arm, and the last thing he registers before he’s fallen asleep is John’s muttered “Welcome to Paris.”

 

Paul wakes up three times before he’s ready to relinquish his slumber. He knows that as soon as they’re up, they’ll have to get ready to hit the road again, and as gear as Spain sounds, he’s just a little too comfortable to be quite ready to be stuck on the train again.

He hasn’t a clue what hour it is the time that he wakes up and finally has to slug himself out of bed for the toilet. John lets out a persecuted groan at the disruption as Paul crawls over him. Paul laughs and gets himself ready, whistling something that sounds French until John grabs the pillow and pulls it over his head. Paul plops back on the foot of the bed to put on his boots, intentionally jostling the mattress just for the grumpy sounds it gets out of John from beneath the pillow. Increasing the volume of his whistling earns him a kick to his ribs, to which he overreacts with a fall back across the bed, his boots only half done. The funny thing is, he could fall back asleep right now. Instead, he shakes John’s legs and says, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” When John does not move, Paul starts singing “Wake up little Susie, wake up,” nudging John’s legs on beat, “Wake up little Susie, wake up little Susie!”

Lugging himself up at last, John sings back, “Well, what are we gonna tell your mama?”

“What are we gonna tell your pa?” Paul sings to the ceiling as John moves sluggishly to the toilet.

John sings “What are we gonna tell our friends when they say…” and Paul looks over at where John is making one of his faces with overdone suggestive eyebrows and joins back in to find a harmony and terrible French accents for “Ooh la la!”

John’s laughing over his toothbrush, and Paul just lets out a snort and drops his head back and keeps whistling the song without being completely conscious that he’s doing it. For the first time, and perhaps a little too late, he wonders what their friends are actually saying given that they’re missing gigs for this trip and didn’t exactly tell anyone. Well, he’d told George. But it was all so last minute that they hadn’t had time to handle any of the booking blokes or anything. He has no idea why he hadn’t thought about that until now that they’re all the way across the channel and there’s nothing they can do about it.

“Johnny, you don’t suppose we’ll have upset too many people back home by not showing up?” Paul asks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees John coming back over giving a shrug. “You don’t think we’ve burned any bridges, d’you?”

“It’s not as if we’re playing Carnegie Hall or something,” John supplies, reaching for his trousers from his bag, “They probably put up with worse nonsense than this. They’ll figure something out.”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right.”

Paul is peripherally aware of John changing into his trousers and makes a point of staring at the ceiling even harder. He starts whistling the Everly Brothers again, thinking about the fact that he could really go for a cup of strong tea and that John has nice thighs. Belatedly, it occurs to him that’s an odd thought to have. Must be something in the air.

John’s kicking on his boot and grabbing his glasses, “Come ‘ead, Macca. I’m starved!” he says, “What’s taking you so long?”

They make it to the bar downstairs just in time before they stop serving breakfast. Which is really just a plate of fruit and dry pastries with tiny little jars of jam. There’s a big pot of lukewarm black coffee which John excessively sugars as Paul halves and butters his croissant. In the light of day, the place seems almost sweet compared to last night. It’s got a flavor of nostalgia that makes you smile and sticks to the roof of your mouth. Something Paul quietly likes. He likes it when he can imagine decades of different people coming in and out, sitting at the window or at this very spot at the bar. Conversations between regulars on their way to work and tourists seeing the sights on the cheap all over the map that’s folded up in John’s leather jacket and talking about them in accents from all over the globe. Day in and day out of men with newspapers and women with long coats and teenagers with packs of smokes they nicked all under the same dusty little white light fixture awkwardly hanging from the low ceiling with most of its bulbs burnt out. He likes it when something simple and mundane like stirring cream into his coffee sort of feels as though he’s being folded into a tradition, folded into an unremarkable history of just another place like the thick brown stitching at the edge of the upholstered stools.

“You know, by the time we finish up here and make it back to the train station, it’ll be after noon,” John comments with his mouth full, flakes of pastry littered down his black turtleneck. Paul is trying to finagle the tip of a too big knife to get at the strawberry jam out of the bottom of its tiny jar, and John goes on, “That puts us in Barcelona, at what, ten or eleven tonight?” Paul scrunches his nose at the prospect. They wouldn’t get to see much of the city, and by the time they’d gotten settled in it would be too late to enjoy much of the nightlife for a weeknight anyroad. Popping the rest of the croissant into his mouth, John suggests, “What say we take in a bit of Gay Par-ee and get an early start tomorrow?”

“Suits me,” Paul drags the knife over his pastry. “That is if you think you’re physically capable of getting an early start tomorrow.”

John narrows his eyes and sticks his tongue out, and Paul hides a laugh by biting into his croissant. As he’s chewing, Paul takes a napkin to dab the corner of his mouth and says, “So you can give that bird a ring now.”

“What bird?” John asks, trying to brush the pastry off his shirt.

“The one who wrote her number on the map.”

“Oh,” John pauses, “No. Not with you here.” He leans over and takes a piece of fruit from Paul’s plate, “What, were you wanting to share?”

Paul lets out a laugh through his nose and shakes his head, “She was dead gorgeous, though.”

“Mmm,” John acknowledges as Paul swats his hand away from stealing another grape. He finishes up his food, and John grabs their empty jam jars and reaches across him further down the bar for a few of the leftover ones at the empty place next to Paul. As John begins the task of placing each of the little jars on his fingers like giant thimbles, Paul extracts the map from John’s jacket pocket and spreads it out across the bar in front of them, nudging his plate out of the way with his wrist.

They find a route to the Eiffel Tower and head out, John tossing coins on the bar, licking his sticky fingers, and saying, “Seems like soon enough we’ll be able to see it and walk in that direction, like.”

It’s colder today even than it was last night when they arrived. Not uncomfortably so, but there’s a nip of fall in the air today making itself known beyond just the tinges of yellow in the trees. Light rain comes in fits and starts, backdropped vaguely by the distant sound of occasional thunder but it isn’t enough to deter them.

The streets prove to be longer to walk than they seem on paper, but the novelty of being in Paris still hasn’t worn off on either of them, not yet caring that with their camera and map their status as tourists is no doubt painfully obvious to all the posh birds they pass by. They finally determine that they are headed in the right direction of the river, and they’ll likely be able to see it from there. It takes just shy of an hour to make it to the river, but they aren’t going particularly quickly. Paul glances down at the map to figure out which way to the Eiffel Tower just as John says, “That way!” pointing over Paul’s shoulder. Paul spins around, and indeed, there it is looking somehow shorter and taller than Paul had always imagined it, and suddenly life feels very surreal for a few long blinks. It doesn’t quite seem possible that one day you could be sitting at home in Liverpool without a clue that a few days later you’ll be looking at the Eiffel Tower. That’s just never been how the world works. He remembers to start walking again when John nudges his back with a firm hand, “Come ‘ead then.”

Once they cross the nearest bridge, it’s pretty much a straight shot past a few trinquet stalls for foreigners and an increased number of postcard racks. Paul is glad he remembered to grab the camera. He pulls it up from where it’s hung around his neck and snaps a picture of John with the tremendous legs of the tower behind him. They aren’t letting people up cause of the weather, so they spend some time strolling around the base of it. They eventually find a spot to sit in the grass looking up at it and share a cigarette. It takes sitting with his boots in the grass for Paul to realize there isn’t much greenery in Paris. The grass is slightly damp, but John sits next to him, mirroring him as the both lean back on their hands and cross their ankles out in front of them, wrists criss-crossing behind them.

“What d’you reckon, Paulie?” John asks, “Stick around a bit and see if they start letting people up?”

Paul shrugs, “May as well.”

So they sit for a bit, Paul with the cigarette between his lips, fumbling with the film in his camera to try and get a good picture with the whole of the tower in it, but can never quite manage from here, while John waxes on about something he’d heard on the radio before they got here comparing the Shirelles with that newer group they’d heard a bootleg record of behind the Cavern last week, the Supremes. When pressed, Paul shrugs and says “I don’t know, I like them both.”

With a little scoff, lighting up another cigarette, John goes, “What a Paul McCartney answer that is, like.”

“I dunno,” Paul gives another shrug and lifts the camera to take a picture of John lighting up with the Eiffel Tower behind him, but it goes a bit blurry and not in an artistic way, “They’re different. They’re both good in different ways.”

John rolls his eyes and kicks Paul’s boot with his, “But if you had to pick one?”

“Shirelles, I suppose,” Paul gives in, “I just know more of their music, is all.”

Now John passes Paul the cigarette and says, “I personally don’t see any point in comparing them to each other just because they’re the same sex and race.”

Paul blinks, and when there is no hint of irony in John’s face as he stands up, Paul takes a puff of the cigarette and then balances it between his teeth to get to his own feet. He’s known John long enough now to know anything resembling “that’s what I just said” is futile. He’s learned to pick his battles with this one. To let the bait for a pointless tiff roll off his shoulders like water off a duck’s back. There wouldn’t be time to enjoy each other if he spent the whole time challenging every one of his contradictions. He’s watched before when someone takes him on about something only for John to turn around and argue their point back to them until they’re defending John’s original statement, and he’s not sure if even John knows what he just did and nobody walks away knowing what John actually thinks on the matter. He’s certainly not bothered to hold his own tongue from time to time, but unlike anyone else, he isn’t actually intimidated by John. Not anymore. Not since he first suspected that John was intimidated by him, too. Or at least wanted to impress him just as much. Though neither of them would ever tell each other that in so many words.

He also knows that John knows that he knows that John is an ass. And he knows that John knows that he knows that John knows he is an ass. And neither of them have to prove that they aren’t anymore.

John’s laughing now, and Paul looks around, cigarette still clung in his teeth spinning his head round where John is pointing to his trousers, lighter than John’s, which Paul now realizes are damp from the grass. “Looks like you’ve gone and shat your knickers, mate.”

“Fuck!” Paul mutters around the cigarette, trying his best to reach and wipe away some of the wet dirt.

After watching him struggle in vain, John comes up with a quick swipe to the seat of Paul’s pants and says, “There, now anybody who is looking closely enough to see is a derelict.”

It starts to drizzle again, so they abandon hope for being let up and amble off, taking a last look at the tower over their shoulders. It only takes a few blocks from the river before it starts tipping down, rain pelting on the stone, John crying out, “Uh oh, here she comes!” Paul zips up his jacket to protect the camera, and they make a dash for the nearest awning.

Paul rushes to snag them a table in the corner of the little patio, and John heads inside, promising to return with tea. Shuddering a bit at the feeling of the rain between his collar and his neck, Paul tugs his jacket closer and looks around. It’s a cozy place even with the loud thumping of the rain on the olive green awning. Brick with white trim and hand-painted letters on the window listing specialties Paul is starting to recognize. Though he realizes he hasn’t an idea of how far they’ve walked or where they’ve ended up. He opens the map on the little round table, which is so comically small that the unfolded map doesn’t even fit so he has to hold it up to see the whole thing. As Paul trails his eyes along the river to try and retrace their wanderings, he notices a steady trickle of water from the awning above is landing on the corner of the map where that girl left her telephone number. He watches for a few seconds as the water blurs the digits, not sure why he isn’t pulling it away and rather finds that he is angling the paper in his hands so that each subsequent drop lands right down the number. Only once each number is obscured does he tip the map out of the path of the rainwater and continue scanning for a sense of where they are. It’s not as though John was going to use that number anyway, he already said so. They’ll be other birds, he thinks to himself just as John reappears balancing cups and saucers in his hands.

“You hungry?” John asks, and Paul nods and fights the map back into a pocket-sized square. John sets their tea down and sits across from him saying, “Good ‘cause I ordered sandwiches. Figure out where we are?”

“Sort of,” Paul says. He blows the top of his cup and relishes the warmth of it in his hands.

 

When they’ve finished their lunch and the rain subsides, they realize that if they make a big triangle rather than heading straight back to the hotel, they could see the Arch de Triumph. Paul isn’t too terribly sure he cares about the Arch de Triumph, but it’s one of the things he’s heard people talk about and he doesn’t want someone to ask him about it when they find out he spent a day in Paris and not have an answer. So they head that way, meandering a bit, popping in and out of shops, wandering down side streets, and taking their time for anything else that looks compelling. Walking about with John is a bit like trying to take a puppy for a walk in that nearly everything piques his interest and one minute he’s by Paul’s side and the next, Paul is spinning around to follow him into a book store or a record shop or a patisserie that catches his eye.

They’re just stepping out of a corner store after Paul stopped at the little rack of postcards out front to pick out one to bring back home to his dad, a simple painting of the Eiffel Tower, when they spot a small crowd gathering around a shop window across the way. John gives him a curious look behind his glasses and says, “Shall we?” and they dart across the busy avenue, dodging cars and laughing like secondary schoolers. They’ve got such momentum that they almost come crashing cartoon-like into the group huddled there, but they manage to come to a halt in time to avoid a domino effect. But they’re still catching their breath and stifling laughter as they peer over the shoulders of men in black coats coming from their lunch breaks and others in workers caps all pressing for a better look. Paul takes a step back and glances up at the sign above their heads that says Television just with lots of those little dashes and things over some of the vowels, and glancing back, he’s able to make out the antennas and things. As they move closer, the long antenna and stacks of display television sets come into view. They’re all playing the same somber-looking uniformed man behind a desk.

“Oh that’s the Prime Minister, innit?” John says to Paul.

“President,” Paul says back.

“Prime Minister.” John protests.

“President!” Paul retorts, hushed but with wide eyes, “I’m ninety-nine percent certain he’s the President. I remember ‘cause me Da was reading about him in the paper just a couple weeks ago, and called him the President and I said, ‘isn’t he the Prime Minister?’ and Da said ‘used to be, now he’s the President.’ He’s the President.”

In response, John just reaches over to flick his finger against Paul’s nose.

“What do you suppose he’s on about?” John asks after a minute or two of pretending like they understand.

“He’s announcing that as of today, an additional three silent letters will be added to the end of every French word,” Paul replies.

“Five for words over three syllables,” John adds.

“Now he’s demonstrating.” They both lean their heads into mime concentrating closely. “Like that.”

When they burst into giggles and a man with tiny spectacles shoots them a dirty look, Paul bites his lip and lets John drag him away.

 

It’s nearly sunset by the time the Arch De Triumph comes into view. The light splashes over the city in the pinkish purple-blue of the sky with the golden glow illuminating the golden curve of the arch before them. Once they’ve reached the front of it, Paul throws his hands up victoriously and cries, “There it is!”

“It’s an arch!” John exclaims in the same exaggerated grandeur.

“And it is…” Paul sniggers, “Triumphant!”

“Indeed!” John agrees, “Properly triumphant that is.”

“What did it triumph over, Johnny?”

“Syphilis,” John says matter-of-factly, “And an addiction to barbiturates.”

“Explains why it’s been moving so slowly,” Paul says.

“It’ll be back on its feet in no time now.”

They stand, shoulder to shoulder, looking up at it for a while. It’s very beautiful, but Paul isn’t quite sure what else he’s supposed to get out of it. How long is the right amount of time to stand here looking at it? How will they know?

The answer comes when John slaps a hand to Paul’s back and says, “Right, well, I don’t suppose it’s going to change or anything.”

 

They have a beer (or two or three) when they get back to the hotel bar, rain pouring outside, and John gets it in his head that he should call Stu and let him know where they are. He asks the waitress if there’s a telephone and she proudly points to a shiny dark green phone lopsidedly affixed to the wallpaper in the little hall, proudly declaring that it is brand new. As John hops up, an artsy bird with a long cigarette and a pair of white trousers sits down in the seat John left empty next to Paul. In an accent he doesn’t recognize, she asks him how long he has been in Paris.

“It’s our second night” Paul replies, half focused on her, half focused on watching John on the telephone.

“And how long do you intend to stay?” she asks, taking a drag of her cigarette. Maybe she’s from Norway?

“Erm, we’re leaving in the morning,” he replies, “For Barcelona.”

She asks him what all they have done in Paris, and he tells her they saw the Eiffel Tower and the Arch de Triumph, and she begins shaking her head and waving her hand as though to wave off a cloud of smoke, “You cannot leave until you have seen the real Paris.” She reaches into him, up into his personal space, noses nearly touching, wrapping an arm around him to retract the folded up map from the back pocket of his trousers, and he suddenly realizes he should probably be embarrassed of the grass stains from earlier. It’s a slick move, Paul notes to himself as she spreads out the map on the counter in front of her, leaving him flushed from the lingering cloud of her perfume and the sustained proximity that had allowed him to see the way her raspberry color dipped into each tiny crease of her lips. As she begins to point out different more interesting and artistic neighborhoods, he has no idea what’s gotten into him that his body isn’t pulling himself to come stand pressed behind her, leaning closer and closer to the big pearl clip-on earrings she’s wearing until he breathes “Why don’t you show me some more places to see up in your room?” and winks at John across the bar as he follows her up the stairs. He has no idea why instead, he’s stuck staring at the way John’s smile is getting rosier and rosier, his voice lower and lower the longer he talks to Stu Fucking Sutcliffe.

 

The two of them are a little tipsy when they get back to their room and flop onto the bed in unison. Paul closes his eyes for a second and wonders if he’d regret it in the morning if he just slept in what he’s been wearing.

“I need a wank.” John announces, apropos of nothing.

Paul lets out a sigh and throws his arm over his face, “Go ‘ave one, then.”

John lifts his head to look towards the shower, but seems to give up on the idea as he drops back down.

Now that he’s off them, Paul is keenly aware of how sore his feet are. They must’ve walked miles today. And if they’re going to make the seven o’clock train, they haven’t really given themselves as much time to sleep as he thinks they meant to. He’s trying to count backwards to figure out how many hours until they need to wake up, something that his tipsy brain is finding a bit arduous, when he hears the sharp zip of John undoing his trousers beside him.

Paul groans, “Oh bloody hell, John, are you…?”

“What?” John cries, “It’s been days!”

“Couldn’t you save it for the shower or something?”

“Come off it, Macca, it’s not like we haven’t…” John interrupts himself with a hitched breath, and Paul suddenly feels heat between his own legs.

“It’s different, though, with the other lads,” Paul’s voice sounds a bit high in his own ears when he tries again, “Y’know, it’s like a game.” He thinks distantly of the times they’ve done this together, elbows knocking into each other uncoordinated and breathless in somebody’s den in front of a dim television screen, too much whiskey, somebody passed out on the sofa behind them, the few of them still awake calling out names, John cracking jokes in his ear. Whatever reason he had for going along with it or not feeling like it was all utterly ridiculous at the time has completely escaped him now.

“So play along!” says John, who is nothing if not utterly ridiculous.

“You’re daft,” Paul shifts to kick John hard, not lifting his arm from where it’s draped across his eyes. John makes a startled sound and catches himself before he falls off the bed, and Paul says, “Get off!”

“I’m trying to!” John gives a tight, winded laugh.

“Of the bed, you tosser!” Paul kicks him again, and John stumbles to his feet holding up his hands before pulling his waistband back up to his hips. Paul watches him from between his fingers as he clamours towards the sink, trying and failing a few times to get the door closed with his foot. Paul lets out a long, exasperated exhale and drags both hands over his face. Water starts running and Paul does not think about what John’s doing on the other side of the cracked door. Instead he pulls himself up and gets changed, folding his damp socks and trousers on the window sill to dry. He could use a shower, but after such a brisk, rainy day, he can’t quite face water that won’t heat up. Maybe they’ll have hot water in Barcelona.

John comes out to change, looking a bit pink, and Paul rolls his eyes, pushing past him to go wash up and brush his teeth. The tile is like ice beneath his toes, and he finds himself shifting his weight back and forth, something that John sees and apparently finds incredibly funny.

“Laugh it up, Lennon, but you’re the one sleeping upside down tonight after that display!” Paul says. He hears John grumble and move to the opposite end of the bed. The water is still cold despite how long John was running it, but Paul lets a pool of it collect in his palms and throws it against his face. Three times. It gives him chills, but he needed it. He comes running back into the room, gritting his teeth at the chill as the rain continues outside, and tugging his arms from the sleeves of his jumper to wrap around his torso.

John laughs, “You look like a penguin!” from where he’s lying on the pillow at the foot of the bed

“I feel like a penguin!” Paul replies, shimmying beneath the duvet, playing up on the fact that he can feel his teeth chattering.

“It’s not that cold.” John says, and Paul promptly takes a bare foot and slides it up underneath the hem of John’s jumper. John yelps and kicks him, and Paul kicks him back. With a huff, John rolls onto his front and closes his eyes.

“Goodnight,” Paul sing-songs.

“Fuck off.”

Paul chortles as he adjusts the pillow against the wall for better head support and nestles down, tugging at the duvet and waiting for that snug feeling to come flooding over him, like when he was a kid and he’d had a cup of cocoa after a good romp through the snow. Yet, he tosses and turns, but finds that he can get neither comfortable nor warm. In a burst of energy, he jumps to his hands and knees and crawls beneath the duvet down the bed along beside John. He pokes his head out from the bottom of the duvet, drops backwards on John’s pillow, and scoots his side against John’s back to try and trap his body heat.

“What are you doing?” John asks, not moving.

“How are you warm?” Paul asks almost at the exact same moment, still squirming about.

John starts, “The restorative properties of a good orga–”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Paul shudders and finally hunkers down in a space that he thinks can absorb as much of John’s body heat as possible. Before Paul can close his eyes all the way, John’s up on an elbow moving the duvet and the pillows about. Prying an eye back open, Paul watches John in the rainy street lamplight, humming loudly as he busies himself with turning the entire bed into a cocoon around Paul. He tucks the duvet corners high up around Paul’s head and folds the edges in around him, all the way down to his feet, and Paul is laughing and trying to hold still at the same time.

When John is done, he drops back down where he was with his back to Paul beneath the duvet, shifting against him for optimal heat-retaining purposes. Upside down and all tucked in like this, Paul feels a bit like they’re a pair of large bats. He tells John this. John tells him to go to sleep. He can’t sleep because he’s still thinking about being bats. He tells John this, too. John doesn’t say anything, but after a long silence, they both begin to chuckle at the same time. He thinks John likes the image. It’s the kind of thing that John would think up.

 

By the time they finish their breakfast the next day, they’ve pretty much agreed that Spain is a bust and that they’d rather just spend out the rest of the time here. It’s a lovely day. The sky has that dewy sort of golden sparkly freshness that comes after a rainy day. It’s balmy and blue and full of the softest white clouds. Warm enough that they don’t need their leathers, but they are both a little too vain to go without them. They actually finally each had a shower, even though there was only ever about three minutes of warmish water split between the two of them, but even still. Coupled with a good night’s sleep, it was just the kind of refreshening that gives one a spring in the step. They’ve resolved to go check out the parts of the city that artsy bird was talking about at the bar last night.

Montmartre is mere blocks from their hotel and turns out to be exceptionally gear. The streets are cobbled and hilly, and it feels different than the other places they’ve been exploring. Not nearly as many tourists or signs in English for their ilk as there were the closer they got to the river. Ivy-covered facades next to pastel-pink buildings pop out amongst the crisp white architecture they’ve been seeing all along, windows full of rolls and rolls of the most expense looking fabrics and people bustling about like a movie set, only it feels distinctly less curated than it did around the Eiffel Tower.

The first thing they do after breakfast is climb the never ending stairs to Sacré-Cœur. The tourists are back, but it seems they’ve made it early enough to beat the crush. It’s a glorious lookout over the city, and the cathedral itself is very pretty. They try to click a few pictures of each other, and then sit on the steps of the cathedral, sharing a smoke and taking in the view. It all kind of feels like an old painting come to life.

It’s a warmer day today, and the higher the sun gets in the sky, the more they have to squint against the glare. John finally suggests that they head back down to the shade.

Funnily enough those stairs don’t really feel any shorter going down.

“We’ve gotta get ourselves some of those,” John says when they pass the third or fourth couple passing by in trousers that flare absurdly wide at the bottom. “Then we’ll really blend in.”

So they begin poking into all the little boutiques, searching through rows of oversized checkerboard patterns, sleeveless dresses, and crisp block-colored coats until they find what they’re looking for with a price tag John could stomach.

The hipness they felt upon exiting the shop in those new trousers is quickly proven to be hubris when they find they can’t make it down the street without tripping over the flares. Ducking into the first haberdashery they can find, they buy a travel-size sewing kit with needles, tiny scissors, and little fat spools of navy, white, and black thread.

After a couple hours in the hotel stabbing their thumbs with needles and swearing trying to get thread into eyes, and sewing wobbly lines along the seams to downsize the flares, they’re headed back out in their trip-proof trousers to find something to eat. From a distance, Paul is sure, no one is noticing their slightly uneven hems and imperfect stitching, just seeing how trendy they look in their Parisian trousers. Much more at home amongst the fashion set of Montmartre now.

As they round an inclined corner in the hunt for an open place to eat, having spent the lunch hours poking holes in their fingers, Paul is convinced he sees a familiar figure with a familiar gate ahead of them.

“Is that…?” Paul asks at the same time John cries, “Jürgen!” to the lad with a camera case strapped to his shoulder, a pencil between his lips and another making sketches in a big notepad and he looks up and down the alley.

Jürgen looks up, confused until he spots them, his hair different from the Hamburg days, but his face just the same. He smiles and waits for them to join him by his side, explaining that he’s doing some concept work for a photoshoot he has to do for a workshop tomorrow with a model from the dance academy and he needs to find places where you can see the cathedral in the background but that still have proper lighting. He says this like it couldn’t be more hum drum.

“Your hair!” John exclaims, reaching a hand out the crown of Jürgen’s head, adopting a tone as though he may not know, “It’s gone all lopsided, y’know.”

“What do they call that do?” Paul asks, “The Fuhrer?”

In an atrocious German accent, John goes, “Zat vent out of style in Deutschland, oh say, around 1945.”

Jürgen’s face remains deadpan, but Paul can just glimpse the fraction of an exasperated sigh, long-suffering on behalf of his former self who had endured the pair of them in Hamburg. “What brings you to Paris?”

“John’s birthday!” Paul answers as John says, “Mein birthday.”

Further discussion leads to the realization that Jürgen has not had his lunch, and he offers to take them back to his place on the Left Bank and show them around and get food.

“Bit of a long walk that,” John says.

“That is why we will take the train,” Jürgen brushes his hair out of his face, closing his notebook and heading off. John and Paul fall into step behind him. They arrive at the station, which dips underground and then back up to a platform above the street; Jürgen is very patient with them, showing them how to use coins to get the little tickets and to read the spider web map of criss-crossing tracks to figure out which train to take and where to go. Paul is only about half sure he understands, and completely sure he wouldn’t be able to duplicate the effort alone, but they make it onto a fairly uncrowded train car and are bustled off back underground.

 

Jürgen drops his things in his room, and they pop down to a café on the corner of the same block that Jürgen strolls into like a regular. Perhaps he is a regular. The barista seems to know him and they chat in French. Once they’ve taken a seat and lit up, John and Paul find themselves lingering on every inhale of smoke, overly casual to enjoy the way it feels like they might just be hanging out like locals, off the coattails of Jürgen’s familiarity and their own new threads. They’ve half convinced themselves that passersby will take them all as hip photography students as Jürgen snaps pictures. Everyone there looks in competition with each other to see who can look the least impressed. A striped-shirt guy with a ponytail strums a mandolin through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and if the other students clap, they do so as though they are bored with the mere notion. They are even snootier than John’s art school friends, probably because they are actually in an artistic place instead of just talking about artistic places. Privately to each other, Paul and John’s eyes are gleaming with it, biting their lips to keep from laughing at each other as they ham up their own indifference.

The rest of the night is a rather drunken blur of wandering the streets Jürgen refers to by name without looking at the signs, of finding their way back to Jürgen’s hotel room in bleary dusk, of singing too loudly along with the radio until someone bangs on the wall, of convincing Jürgen to cut their hair like his, of watching John’s auburn tufts cascade to the tile of the tiny powder room, of snips of scissors sounding overly loud by his own gin-addled ear.

 

When Paul wakes up on the floor the next morning, it’s barely even light out and it takes him a solid thirty seconds to figure out where the fuck he is before he remembers he’s sleeping on the carpet of Jürgen’s hotel room with his head rested back on a bunched up blanket. It takes him another thirty seconds to figure out that the reason his left leg feels all heavy and full of pins-and-needles is that John is using Paul’s thigh as a pillow. It’s still too dark outside, and Jürgen is still snoring too loudly, and his head is still too foggy and sour to think about getting to his feet or trying to kick John off, so he just closes his eyes again and none of them wake back up until just after noon.

Paul’s back is killing him, but he’s able to get Jürgen to let him shower off with his working hot water, and the steam soothes his stiff joints easily.

Off to a late start, and feeling a little murky, they aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. Jürgen had practically forced stale coffee and dry butter toast down their throats before blustering them out the door on his way to some sort of photography seminar, so they’d found themselves wandering around a bit just trying to adjust to the notion that it’s the middle of the day. They’d poked their heads into the Louvre out of a sense of obligation, but got kicked out about fifteen minutes later when John tried to touch a statue’s boob.

So after going to the cinema, now it’s nearly evening again, and they’re only just now starting to feel hungry, so John orders them each a ham and cheese crêpe off a little cart and they watch, transfixed as the man brushes the batter in thin sweeping circles.

They eat in comparative quiet on a little bench. Paul looks at John closely. The new haircut doesn’t look anything like Jürgen’s. It’s just sort of laying a bit flat on his forehead without the hip sort of slant across the brows that made Jürgen’s look so fab. But there’s something about it that brings out the shape of John’s face differently than his Teddy cut quiff. There’s something… well nice. About seeing what his hair looks like, silky and smooth, instead of pushed up with grease. He thinks that maybe it makes John look a little more like. John. Instead of John trying to look like Elvis.

“Y’think letting Jürgen cut our hair was a mistake?” Paul asks, running a hand through his own fringe, feeling the spots where it won’t curtain over his forehead like it’s supposed to.

Looking up, mouth full of gooey cheese, John asks, “You saying my haircut looks bad, son?”

“No!” Paul says, “You saying mine looks bad?”

John shakes his head and says, “Fuck no. I think we look fab.”

“We can start a new trend back in Liverpool,” Paul says, “Everybody’ll think ‘hmm who are those two with their flares and fringe?’ and they’ll say, ‘they just got back from Paris, y’know,’ and suddenly everyone will be like, ‘hmm I better go get me a haircut like that if they just got back from Paris. Real fashionable folks, the Parisians. They must be onto something.’”

John laughs and stands, wadding the brown paper from the crêpe and throwing it to land in a nearby bin, “My head’s throbbing. Let’s go drink.”

The first pub they pass by, they loiter at the window for a bit, but from what they can make out, it’s mostly older folks with big pints of ale. Someone has an accordion. It looks like the kind of lively but cozy place that Paul wouldn’t mind, but it’s not what they have in mind for a Friday night. They exchange looks, agreeing wordlessly to skip it.

“There are some birds headed in there!” John points out a place across the street where two girls in matching white coats are clipping through a large wooden door by what appears to be a dress shop. Crossing the nearly empty street, and going through the great big door, they find themselves in a rather dreary looking hallway. It’s dimly lit, but he can hear cheerful music in the distance. They wander past a door with a sign for the milliner’s and another neither of them can make out, the music growing louder when they get to the end of the hall and see a round sign that reads Le Monocle with a little wine glass next to it.

“This is all very mysterious,” Paul notes as they open the door. There’s a long steep staircase and they can see the girls in white coats at the bottom going into what sounds like a club.

“Bit like the Cavern, this,” John notes as they make their way down. They pass by two more birds on the landing smoking cigarettes, one in red one in yellow. “Ketchup and mustard!” John exclaims as they pass between them, ignoring the looks they give him.

Almost as soon as they’re through the entryway, John stops, putting his hands on his hips and looking down at his feet with a sheepish laugh. Paul looks around, taking in the sleek black bar, the eclectic colorful walls, the bustling dance floor, and asks, “What’s the matter?” John is still trying to compose himself so Paul takes a few more steps in, scanning the crowd. “There are a lot of birds here, aren’t there?” His observation makes John laugh harder so he turns back and asks, “What? There are!”

John tips his head in amusement, his eyes glancing back and forth between the dance floor and Paul’s face, “Yeah, Macca, just birds.”

“Oh?” Paul looks out to the sea of dresses and bows for short hair and suits, and while he does find short hair and suits, he doesn’t spot a single bloke. The realization hits him, and he snaps his head back around, “Oh!” John laughs at his no doubt comically surprised expression. No wonder they got such funny looks going inside. “Really?!” Paul mouths, trying to be subtle as he looks back over, “All of them?”

“What else would they be doing here?”

It’s a good point.

One of the women from outside, the one in the red blouse with the chestnut bob and tan skin, strolls through the doorway in her high-waisted trousers. She spots them right away, a highly entertained smirk on her narrow face. She sticks her cigarette between her lips, throwing an arm around each of their shoulders. When she speaks, her accent is not remotely French. Maybe Greek, Paul thinks. “You are welcome to stay, of course, but you may have to dance with each other.”

Paul feels himself laugh a bit nervously, giving a nod and an over-polite, “Well, thanks very much, miss. But, you know, we’d hate to intrude.”

“Nonsense!” she blasts, and her breath is so potent with liquor, Paul is pretty sure it would set the whole place on fire, “I buy you alcohol!”

She corrals them to the bar, and Paul catches John’s eye behind her back. Both shrugging in a may-as-well kind of way. The truth is, Paul finds that he is a bit curious about this place. They played places with folks like this back in Hamburg where the queens came by and all that, but it was usually a bit more more of a wink and a nudge than something anybody said out loud. He isn’t sure when the last time he would have sat down and had a conversation with somebody queer would’ve been.

He and John sit down when the girl in red pushes them to stools at the end of the bar, waving above their heads and calling to the bartender in French that sounds as good as fluent. She then plops beside Paul with a chummy arm on his shoulder, crossing her legs and lighting another cigarette. Up close, Paul gets a better look at her face. The slight circles under her blue eyes make him think she probably isn’t younger than they are, but her countenance and everything else about her makes her seem like she can’t be more than four or five years older. She asks, “Where do you come from?” over the sound of chatter and a record of a French Elvis knockoff playing on the radio.

“Liverpool,” Paul answers, “And yourself?”

“Bitola,” she says.

“I’m Paul and this is John,” he puts a hand to his chest and nudges John with his elbow, “Where are you from?”

“Bitola!” she repeats, “Bitola, Yugoslavia!”

He hears John snigger in the back of his throat, and Paul kicks his ankle under the bar. “Ah yes of course!”

She introduces herself as Rina and asks how long they’re here. Paul answers for them, explaining that they hitchhiked here for John’s birthday, that they were trying to get to Spain, but decided to stay here instead because they’d never been to Paris, blurting out “And we’ve never been to a bar like this before, either!”

“This sounds quite the adventure!” and then she says to John, “And bon anniversaire!”

“Why thank you!” John says in fake posh. He points a finger upwards and asks her, “Pardon, what’s this band?”

“Les Chats Sauvages,” she replies, her French flawless, “They’re new.”

“They’re not bad!” John says, mostly to Paul, who nods in agreement.

“You like French music?” she asks them.

“Don’t know much French music,” John admits, “But we play.”

“We’ve got a band, y’see,” Paul says.

“Rock and roll?” Rina asks, that look of polite indulgence on her face, her thick brows raised. They nod. “Are you any good?”

Paul says, “I think we’re alright,” at the same time John says, “Yes.”

“We’ve just got signed with a fella while we were in, uh, Hamburg in Germany playing all the hot spots, you know, Indra Club and Kaiserkeller, those places,” Paul adds, “And we were on the front page of Mersey Beat this summer!” Rina nods blankly at the complete lack of knowing what Paul’s just said. “It’s a music paper. Circulates around all of Liverpool. You follow the music scene much?”

Rina gives a shrug, “I play the viola.”

“Are you any good?” John asks in his lighthearted one-upmanship tone.

“I was scouted by top French symphony director when I was seventeen,” she says casually as the bartender, who seems to be the only other fellow in the entire establishment, brings them each something clear in elegantly cut shot glasses. John opens and closes his mouth. It’s Paul’s turn to hide a laugh at his expense and get a kick in the ankle under their stools. Lifting her glass towards them, Rina toasts, “To new adventures.” She counts them in backwards from three in French, “Trois deux un!” and they throw their shots back in unison.

It’s strong, and Paul makes a coughing “Hoo!” as it goes down. John’s cheeks go red. Rina is unphased, immediately gesturing for another round.

“So that’s why you’re here in Paris, then?” Paul asks her once his throat stops stinging, “Bach and Mozart and Handel and all that lot?”

“Yes, this is the reason I come to Paris,” Rina replies, “But the reason I stay is because I fell in love.” As if on cue, the bird in yellow pops up by Rina’s side. “Ah! En parlant du loup, on en voit la queue!”

“It’s Mustard!” Paul cheers, surprised at how quickly the shot has him sounding too loud and too loopy.

She just tips her head in confusion and then turns back to Rina, “Viens danser avec moi,” and Paul is only able to pick up the word “dance.”

“I must go!” Rina tells them, standing up and dramatically slamming her shot glass down on the bar. The other girl smiles at them with just the bottom half of her face, grabbing Rina by the hand to pull her towards the dance floor. Rina calls over her shoulder, “I will listen on the radio for you, John and Paul from Liverpool!” before becoming lost within the joyous dancing crowd.

John and Paul from Liverpool look at each other and burst into laughter.

“Bach and Mozart and Handel and all that lot?” John parrots back to him, and he laughs harder.

“We should probably go,” Paul says. But before they can stand up, the bartender drops the round of shots Rina ordered in front of them, and Paul shrugs, “Would be a shame to let these go to waste.”

“Downright disgraceful, that would be!” John agrees. They each take one of the dainty little glasses, and John counts them in in his intentionally mispronounced French, “Twat doo one!”

It’s a good burn going down and it keeps him too happy to remember that they meant to leave. They find themselves lost in conversation about the songs that are playing, the art on the walls, their funniest Hamburg memories, and increasingly poor Brando impressions. They’re so engrossed and laughing so hard that they practically forget where they are, starting a tab to order Scotch and Cokes off the bartender when he comes back around to collect the two empty shot glasses in front of them.

Paul stops counting after his second Scotch and Coke, and he loses track of time, too. Though he’s pretty wrapped up in talking to John, every now and then, he finds his mind and his eyes wandering around the place, watching how comfortably these women dance with each other, like there’s nothing to it. He can’t find Rina in the bustle, but he can’t help but wonder if he would know if he saw her on the street. He can’t imagine what exactly would give it away, but at the same time, he can’t imagine not knowing.

Paul’s finishing up his drink when a familiar voice comes on the radio. John’s eyes click in surprise at the English words, and he cries, “Fuck me! It’s the Starliters!”

They both jump up out of a force of habit, quickly sliding their glasses, empty but for the ice, along the bar. That’s when they notice the third, untouched shot that had been sitting between them waiting for Rina to come back. For a moment, they look at it, considering. But then Paul glances over each shoulder, and with still no sign of the person for whom it’s intended, he grabs it in his fist and tosses it back.

“Hey ho, Paul!” John whoops, and they find a corner of the dance floor to do the Peppermint Twist. They laugh and twist and try to stay out of everyone’s way, but a couple of the birds come over and shimmy back and forth with them a few times for a laugh. A short gal in a three piece suit takes them each by the hand and spins them at the same time. They have to duck to make it under her arms. Paul’s laughing so hard he has tears in his eyes. They can’t hear or understand each other, but it’s good fun, and everyone’s too drunk to care that John and Paul stick out as much as they do. It’s a completely foreign feeling, both the being in France of it all, and just being around this many birds and not thinking about them in that way at all. Not having to think about impressing them or whether or not he’s smooth. Not having to focus on anything, really, other than having a good time and John.

They topple back into free chairs in the corner when the song fades out to order another round to the table. It becomes a joke that for the rest of the night, any time a song they know plays, they drag each other up to dance. So much so that the girls nearby look at them expectantly when certain songs come on. The French hit parade, Paul assumes, or the songs they grew up on. Always baffled when these two uncultured British boys just shrug in their seats and keep drinking.

After a French ballad comes on that has everyone slow dancing pressed together, they have to hop up for a Chuck Berry tune, glasses in hand, shoulders bumping every now and then as they get less and less steady. It’s followed immediately by Blue Suede Shoes, with John milking the hips, buckling his knees, and swinging his hands from side to side, leaving Paul in stitches. Though he’s never been more grateful for a reprieve that comes in the form of a French crooner so he can sit down before the walls start spinning. John’s ordering more drinks and closing out their tab when Paul realizes that he’s well and truly drunk. But it’s a Friday night, so when the next Scotch and Coke appears in his hand, he doesn’t think too hard before taking a long swallow.

“Hold on, hold on,” he hears himself shout, “This Scotch and Coke has more Coke in it than last time, doesn’t it?” He holds it up to John’s face, but pulls it away before John can take a sip.

“The bartender probably did that on purpose,” John slurs his words just the slightest bit, and it makes Paul laugh so hard he thinks he’s going to pee, “He probably did that on purpose because the last time he was over here you called him your cherished friend and said he was a gentleman and scholar and that he was missing out for never having heard Berry even though the reason you were talking about Berry was because Too Much Monkey Business was on.” Paul laughs again because he remembers none of this. When he opens his eyes from laughter, everything is bleary in that sort of giddy way that means you’re either gonna collapse or jump up and do something a bit bold.

Louis and Ella start singing Cheek to Cheek and John pulls Paul up with both hands. The room seems to follow about a beat behind as he moves. He lands unsteadily on his feet, swinging into John’s chest. This throws John off his balance and he stumbles back a small step or two until Paul grabs John’s right hip to keep him steady just as John’s right hand lands on his shoulder. When they realize what’s happened, John extends his other hand, and Paul takes it with a laugh and they dance side to side. Stepping without much coordination to the music, laughing at arms-length as Paul sings along with the trumpets. He gives John a spin on the last chorus and John spins him back, which is a terrible idea because his stomach flips and he remembers how drunk he is when they crash back together and he feels John press his cheek to his as the song fades out, laughing and singing along to the words like Armstrong.

Paul is stuck where he is as the melancholy violins of the next track and Ella Ftizgerald’s gloriously satiny voice is still in his ears for My Romance. He lets his head fall to John’s shoulder and finds that they’re suddenly very close together. He doesn’t recall how this happened, but his eyes shut, and he’s afraid he might fall asleep right here before the song ends. So he pulls his eyes open to look out over the dance floor behind John, who’s facing the wall and sighing against Paul’s neck.

“Johnny…” he whispers, his heartbeat accelerating. John’s hand is moving slowly down his shoulder and making purchase at the plane between his shoulder blades, and he can feel John’s boozey, soft breathing and his eyelashes on his skin. “Johnny,” he says again. He feels his own breathing, hot and labored against the side of John’s face, heightened awareness of the goosebumps that go creeping up his arms. It doesn’t register at first when John gets beneath the stiff collar of Paul’s leather jacket and starts nibbling and kissing at the space between his neck and his shoulder. Paul just keeps swaying to the music and leans into the way John’s mouth feels on him.

He doesn’t know why he isn’t pulling away. They’re too drunk, and nobody can see. Nobody’s watching. John’s not thinking. Paul gasps a little when John sucks a bite of skin at Paul’s neck, running his tongue over it, and as the room goes dizzy, it’s as if he can feel the blood from every part of his body coursing to meet John’s teeth. He’s breathing heavily in John’s ear now, and John’s leaving open-mouth kisses behind his collar, across his jaw, and at his Adam’s apple. Too drunk to comprehend it fully. Feels too nice to want it to stop.

In a moment of madness that defies not only Paul’s inebriated state but also everything he’s ever known about himself, he swiftly spins them around in one clean motion so that now he’s got his back to the dancefloor and John has his back to the wall, and he lets his hand slide downward and downward from John’s lower back, into his back pocket. For a split second, he thinks John might slug him or laugh, but his teeth just sink back into the spot on Paul’s neck beneath his collar and he lets out a sound so soft that Paul can hardly hear it.

They’re sweaty and the room feels balmy and too bright even through Paul’s barely open eyes. Through heavy lids and the tips of his lashes, he can see pieces of the shadows from the dance floor on the plum-colored wall almost in slow motion. And the side of John’s face against his. The delicate precision of John’s mouth on his neck feels like a miniature miracle, and Paul tips his head ever so slightly to tug John’s earlobe between his lips. Staggering forward against him, John makes a choked noise, moving to grab onto Paul’s biceps to steady himself. Each touch, each movement is so small, but it feels like traversing mountains, or making it back up from the depths of the sea. Paul scoops his head down to kiss and suck at the patch of creamy skin above John’s jumper, peering up to watch the way John’s neck is thrown backwards, his eyes fluttering closed, and his lips parting in black-out bliss.

He thinks they’ll snap out of it once this song is over, but they just pull apart and stare at each other for the entirety of the first verse of the next French twist.

“Christ,” John says. And with no further communication, they tear towards the door, Paul a step behind, clinging to John’s sleeve. All Paul can think about is the back of John’s head, the way he can still feel the scrape of his five o’clock shadow on his jugular, and whether or not they paid for their drinks. He thinks they must’ve done. He’s so fucking hammered that the staircase seems ten times longer, ten steps replacing at the top for everyone he takes. Like the dragon thing in that story that sprouts three new heads every time you cut one off. He thinks he wouldn’t be surprised if he sprouts three new heads.

Once outside, the street lamps look streaky and they keep getting closer and farther away. He and John have arms around each other, their laughter echoing off the sidewalk through the street, walking into each other and almost stepping on each other’s feet. They stop to catch their breath beneath the flickering glow of a lamp post.

“What way?” John asks, his brow furrowed seriously.

“Back to the hotel,” Paul answers.

“Yes, but what way?”

“That way!” Paul points ahead.

“Y’sure?”

“Not really.”

“Macca!” John groans. And his face looks like a pout, and Paul thinks it’s funny so he turns his head in that bobble-head way you do when you’ve had too much and he pecks John’s cheek because that seemed like the thing to do. “What’d you do that for?” John asks.

“Wanted to,” he says, “So I did.”

John startles them both with a pulse of cohesion that lasts long enough to take Paul’s lapels and push him against the column of the streetlamp to kiss his lips fiercely. Paul kisses him back, and it’s sloppy but they find a rhythm when Paul gets his hands to the small of John’s back beneath his jacket. A firmness when Paul moves his chin just a few degrees to one side for leverage. A spark when John’s tongue touches his. He isn’t thinking about what’s happening. His head is completely empty, a needle on vinyl once the last track’s played, and John’s mouth keeps coming and coming and he doesn’t really think he wants it to stop.

The quiet of the street in the middle of the night is shot through by the sound of a motorbike, and Paul hears someone shouting something in French. He’s in possession of just enough of his faculties to make out something that sounds a bit like “poofters,” but lacking the right amount to not be able to do anything other than laugh at how funny it sounds in a French accent as John whips his head around shouting, “Vous êtes le prochain, mister!” as the motorbike passes.

When John turns back to face him, eyes wild, Paul laughs out a breathy, “Wha?” deliriously giddy and scanning John’s face.

John responds, “Just told him where he could stick it,” and they’re both laughing when, in the next half beat, Paul opens his mouth to catch John’s bottom lip between his teeth.

John sinks back into the kiss for a few more perfect seconds, and Paul doesn’t know how this is the only time they’ve done this or will ever do this because it’s just like everything else they do in that they know every centimeter of each other so intricately that it feels practiced and spontaneous at the same time. Because even though they probably won’t remember this tomorrow, they remember how to talk to each other now. Even through the drunken fog of whatever ridiculous impulse they’re riding.

John pulls away, his eyes closed, and Paul chases his lips for as long as he can, but John shakes his head a little and says, “Paul...” in a raspy voice, “Paul, I need to...”

“You alright?” Paul asks, feeling John let out a long, Scotch-soaked breath through puffed cheeks, “You need to be sick?”

“Drank too much,” John slurs, as if what they’ve been doing isn’t enough proof of that, “Too, too much.”

Paul manages to guide John to the side of the bar where there’s a narrow alley between buildings with an arm around his back, saying “Alright Johnny, alright,” over and over. He lowers John to squat down by the brick wall with a pained sound, bending over him as he coughs and sputters. He rubs the back of John’s jacket, and lifts pieces of sweaty fringe off his forehead with a, “That’s a good lad, there we go.”

John wheezes out a “Fucking bloody Christ,” so Paul asks, “Is that it?” and John shakes his head, “More?” and John nods. Through slow blinks, Paul manages to get John’s jacket out of his way and keeps patting his back as John makes a few shallow breaths. He tries for a few more grueling minutes to be sick again, but nothing else comes up. Paul finally encourages him onto his feet, and John’s going, “Easy does it, easy does it,” under his breath.

Paul thinks he could use a smoke, but right now the thought of acquiring and lighting a cigarette feels like the equivalent of assembling a bicycle or doing calculus. So they just start walking again, arm in arm, Paul’s head turned down so he can concentrate as hard as he can on the toes of his shoes as he makes himself put each foot in front of the other.

 

Paul doesn’t remember getting back to the hotel, but he thinks there may have been a cab because he has this picture of John diverting back into his horrendous Brando and trying to convince a cabbie that they were disgraced Vaudeville stars from New York. Though that may not have actually happened and Paul may be making that up completely.

John goes to brush his teeth, and Paul falls into bed, far too drunk to be able to stop himself from going for his fly. He gasps lightly in relief when he has himself in hand. Starting slow, his mind circles through images of bitten lips and flushed cheeks and the sensation of thick thighs on either side of his face and tightens his grip. He feels dizzy. Everything is a bit hazy and he loses track of how long it’s been.

It’s too dark to really see much as John climbs up the bed beside him, breathing heavily and laughing at the madness of it all. Their arms bump as John settles at his left. Paul can feel his heart jump double time in his ears, and his head spins, almost drowning out the sound of John’s clamoring belt buckle and low, “Fucking hell.”

Paul slams his eyes shut and arches his back as they match each other’s pace, and he tries to remember the last time he got any skirt. It couldn’t have been Dot cause she’s having one of those spells where she’s taking a while to return his calls. Red hair springs to mind, tight ringlets of it, and he recalls that redhead after a gig. He quickens the movement of his hand around himself as he pictures the way she swore like a sailor into her arm once they got going, her curls bouncing in time with their movements. The way she’d felt when he’d gotten on his knees for her at the side of the bed. A green kitten heel dug into his shoulder. He’s too murky to come up with her name. Which, to his drunken brain, suddenly feels absurdly cruel. But the next second, he realizes that he probably only heard her name once, twice at most, and he is completely and fully sloshed, and she probably wouldn’t remember his name if she was this drunk, either, if she ever thinks of him at all, and he’s made his peace with it. The half-remembered sound of her moans mixes with John’s beside him. He tilts his head towards John and whispers through a breathy giggle, “Sophia Loren.”

John shifts a bit to face him, and Paul can just make out in the light from the street lamp as John opens his mouth to respond, but with a flick of his wrist, all that comes out is a broken-off gasp of Paul’s name. Paul moves onto his side, and they hold eye contact through the grey darkness, barely a foot apart on the mattress, breathing in unison and speeding their rhythm. He can practically feel John’s labored breath, minty and hot. This is mad.

Paul’s getting closer and closer, and his mouth parts open around an “oh fuck, oh fuck,” eyebrows twisting in concentration. John’s muttering, “Paul, Paul, Paul.” And when Paul can’t help but stick the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, rapt and focused, John throws his head back in blissful agony, his left hand flying to brace himself against Paul’s sternum as he finishes. Paul reaches for John’s hand at his jumper and squeezes it, unable to peel his eyes away from John’s throat, bobbing as he swallows. In this light and in Paul’s state of inebriation, John’s skin looks almost soft and slightly out of focus like a photograph. He’s blurry around the edges. His lips are swollen and puffy, mouth slack as he tries to catch his breath, and his eyelashes, black black black, seem to go on forever. John sighs headily and licks his lips, and the corresponding shiver that starts at Paul’s neck where John had his mouth no more than an hour ago sends Paul careening to the breaking point. His climax pushes him onto his back and he lets it spill over his hand, still seeing the shadows at the hollow of John’s throat behind his eyelids. The way John’s auburn fringe lays on his brow is all blending together with tight red curls.

Trying to steady his breaths, Paul’s white-knukle grip on John’s hand loosens as he returns back to his body from his uncurling toes up. His chest rises and falls as heavily as though he’s just belted out Long Tall Sally as he looks up at the ceiling. There’s a water-worn splotch in the corner that is kind of shaped like South America. John is still panting next to him, and their breathing is practically harmonizing. He’s incredibly drunk because the longer he looks at the South America splotch the more it looks like a hand and he thinks of John’s hand on his chest before and on his hips at the club. He thinks about sitting up to try and clean up, but his head swims at the very notion. For the length of three inhales, he’s convinced he’s going to throw up. The splotch just looks like a splotch now, and he can’t remember how he made it look like a hand.

“Shit,” Paul finally manages, “We really need to get laid.”

“Didn’t we just?”

Paul tips his head on the pillow to face John who’s already looking at him with burning eyes through the gloom. Paul opens his mouth to join in the joke, but he forgets what they were joking about when his heart does something remarkably like skip a beat at the intensity of John’s stare.

They fall asleep with their foreheads pressed together.

 

John is already up before Paul. The sunlight feels harsh as Paul rubs the heels of his palms on his bleary eyes. His head is absolutely throbbing. He can barely remember last night, but pockets of it return to him at the same time he is aware of the door shutting loudly and John’s body weight at the foot of the bed. Paul groans.

“It’s alive,” John says.

“Fuck,” is the only response Paul can manage.

John gives a sleepy grunt of agreement before saying “Alright, come ‘ead,” and Paul pulls his hands from his face to see John has a mug of coffee from downstairs in each hand.

“You get those from downstairs?” Paul asks, propping himself onto his elbows.

“Mmm hmm,” John reaches a cup towards Paul, “Now take it before it spills on your lap and you can never get it up again.”

Paul carefully sits up and takes the coffee, slowly bringing it to his mouth for a sip. It’s black and hot and almost burns Paul’s tongue, but it churns through him with a sharpness his hungover body needs. With his free hand, John retrieves smushed pastries and one of the red cloth napkins he squirreled away in his inner jacket pocket. He ungracefully spreads the napkin across the duvet with one hand and places the pastries on top.

“They let you bring all this up?” Paul asks after another sip.

“I sweet-talked the bird behind the counter.” John informs him.

Something in Paul’s stomach twists, and he tries to remember if he threw up last night. Maybe he still needs to.

“I didn’t even hear you leave,” Paul tells him.

“You were not among the living,” John takes a sip from his cup and rubs his temple, “I considered drawing something profane on your face, but I couldn’t find me pen.”

Paul raises his eyebrows and says, “Thank fuck for that,” and takes another sip.

They finish their coffee and the sad pastries in relative quiet out of respect for each other’s heads. The funny thing is, it doesn’t feel as strange as it should, to sit here together without any false pretense of embarrassment. It doesn’t feel strange at all, really.

That’s the thing about their friendship, Paul figures as they get ready, they’re so comfortable with each other that not even something as foolish as all that could make them feel strange.

It helps that John is impossible to shock. Not much of a pearl-clutcher is John. About anything. He’s somebody it’s easy to tell your secrets to because he might pick on you, but he isn’t going to judge you. Not in that way. Not in a way that will change his fundamental opinion of you. It’s not difficult to set him off, but Paul can’t think of a time when John has been truly shocked. Well, when his mother died. Even then, John was just very quiet. Same as Paul. Maybe that’s why they are the way they are, like how no matter the distance between them, it would never truly be distance, rather just the space of each other’s orbits.

Maybe it’s because when you’ve felt a lifetime of grief at the start of your life, a world-ending amount of grief and then the world keeps not ending, a life-altering level of grief and life just keeps going, maybe that fixes your threshold to truly feel a sense of a paradigm shift at such stratospheric heights. Maybe that’s why their center of gravity has been somewhere in between them since the day they met. Because they could find each other on the other side of the void between where they were and the rest of the kids who had yet to experience their first big loss. All the kids for whom loss still just meant a flushed goldfish or a distant elderly relative seen once every few years at Christmastime, unsure if you even knew how you were related when you were shuffled to the service. Maybe that’s why the two of them are so are unflinching in regards to each other. There aren’t conditions or terms with them, anything goes, no limits. Because they’re too connected. Too connected to be startled by the other, their trains of thought coming to too many interwoven intersections. Like how effortlessly they are able to navigate the winding turns of a song, melodies becoming harmonies and harmonies becoming melodies until there’s no clear way to distinguish separate parts. They can look each other in the eye and know that the other hasn’t drawn a line in the sand somewhere. How could something feel like crossing a line when they are just stepping further into each other?

Which is all a very convoluted way, Paul realizes, to blame not feeling weird about having gotten off together on the fact that their mothers are dead. But it’s as much of an explanation as he can muster by the time he’s in the mirror with his shaving cream.

“Oh, bloody hell, John!” Paul cries as he gets a look at his reflection. On his neck, a rosy, mouth-shaped bruise has sprung up. John appears behind him as he’s examining it and starts laughing. “You were insatiable.”

John reminds him, “I was drunk.”

After trying and failing to make the redness go down with cold water, they resort to John tugging off his turtleneck in exchange for one of Paul’s black t-shirts. And Paul’s head goes a bit woozy when he sees the beginnings of a pale pink bite just above John’s clavicle that he doesn’t even remember leaving.

 

They make an effort at the underground to try and figure out where to go and how to get tickets, but as Paul suspected, they’re both too stumped by the French map without Jürgen’s guidance and too cool to ask for help, not wanting to damage their newly cultivated air of local students in their fashionable flared trousers, so they just decide to walk instead and end up back at Montmartre.

They lose nearly half an hour in a fromagerie making the shopkeeper cut them little samples of everything, eyes as big as the giant wheels of all different shades of cheeses surrounding them. Then they leave without buying anything, Paul giving the fellow a chagrined face over his shoulder as he’s dragged off by John who doesn’t want to fork over that much cash for a lump of cheese they’d have to carry around all day only for it to go bad in their hotel room with nowhere to put it.

 

“You know what we really need?” Paul posits from their bench, shadowed by the cathedral, passing back and forth a little napkin full of fat strawberries he couldn’t resist buying off a lady with a cart.

“Hmm?” John’s mouth is full of a particularly fat berry.

“Well, y’know, now that we’ve got our new Parisian trousers and our new Parisian hair, I reckon we ought to y’know, take ‘em out for a spin.”

“We’re spinning ‘em now,” John says, and then when he sees Paul waggle his eyebrows he scoffs.

“No, I mean take ‘em on a night out,” he counters, “A real night out.”

“You mean try ‘em out on the local talent?”

“You looking to pick up?” Paul wipes some of the strawberry away from the back of his mouth.

“Are you?”

“We may as well see how the French birds respond to our new looks, y’know,” Paul shrugs.

“The birds who flock together seemed indifferent,” John chimes, and it takes Paul a second to get the joke. But they eventually agree to make a night of it, and go back to the hotel to freshen up and find a spot that Norwegian with the white trousers had recommended.

As usual, they meander their way slowly back through Montmartre in the direction of their hotel, winding along the hilly streets and taking every back way to poke their heads into any little shop that seems remotely interesting. There’s a used book store where John makes a fuss poorly and intentionally misreading French titles just loudly enough to get irritated glares from the locals.

“Look here!” Paul says through a giggle after John bastardized Les Miserables, picking up a dusty copy of a French translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other works by Lewis Carrol. It’s a faded, deep red with the White Rabbit on the cover and golden lettering.

John takes it from him and reads, “Less Adventures Dallas Au Pays Des Mer-veil-lees,” and Paul snorts. They’re tempted to buy it, but instead they perch on a window seat and look at the pictures, John’s leg pressed up close to Paul’s through their fancy new trousers in a way that makes Paul have to concentrate extra hard on the watercolor sketches of the walrus and the carpenter and the little rows of oysters.

Upon leaving the bookstore, they stumble into a girl in a short skirt with a tray and a short skirt outside what appears to be a barbershop from the glance of men getting their shaves Paul can see inside. She guesses they aren’t from around here right away and asks in squeaky English, “Free sample of our finest cologne?”

One second, John and Paul are giving each other a look, and in the next, just as John is turning his head to respond, she’s got a tinkly bottle in hand and has sprayed John nearly in the face with a mist of it. Paul is laughing so hard his stomach hurts as the droplets settle on the dark lines of John’s eyebrows and eyelashes and the bird is falling over herself apologizing.

“Do not worry,” she’s saying, tugging at the hem of her blouse to try and wipe John’s face, “It is gentle on the skin.”

“Gentle?!” Paul’s wheezing, “As a firehose!” And he can see the way John’s shoulders shake trying not to laugh in her face.

“Well,” John says once he’s been thoroughly scrubbed, “What do you think?” Suddenly, he’s tilting his neck and leaning towards Paul. An offer.

“Oh um, well, let’s see…” Paul stammers, before somewhat awkwardly leaning in for a whiff. It reminds Paul a bit of varnished wood and the big white flowers people sent after his mother passed. But there’s something sharp underneath it all that makes him have to fight a baffling urge to lean closer. “Yeah, that’s uh… that’s not bad.”

“Would you like?” the bird asks holding the bottle up to Paul.

“None for me, thanks!” he tips his head, a brief moment flashing before his eyes of getting blasted in the face with the stuff, too, and both of them having to wander around Paris blinded. He already has had to pull John out of traffic on numerous occasions for refusing to wear his glasses.

 

It’s nearly evening by the time they make it back to the hotel and John decides to have a quick pre-dinner kip while Paul looks at the map to see the places that Norwegian bird had pointed out. He sits on the foot of the bed as John snores gently on the pillow in the fading light. Without giving it much thought, Paul pulls out his camera and snaps a picture. He leans back against the wall and briefly shuts his eyes, thinking to himself that he could fill a novel with everything he’s learned in this city so far.

By nightfall, John’s awoken from his kip and they’ve had their dinner at the bar downstairs. They settle on a place in a little neighborhood nearby that neither of them can pronounce, but find themselves, from the main street, glancing down side streets with neon signs just beginning to flicker on. They can’t read all of them but it reminds Paul of the seedier parts of Hamburg. The parts that come in and out of his memory from too much booze and too many uppers and too many girls whose names he isn’t even sure he ever knew.

They’re led to the bar by a cocktail waitress in a shimmery dress with dark lipstick. John leans into her unnecessarily close to order their rum and Coke, and she puts a black-gloved hand on his arm before disappearing for their drinks.

“Alright place this,” John nods around.

“Mmm hmm,” Paul agrees.

“There are other blokes.”

Paul laughs.

When the waitress returns, she practically glues herself to John’s side. John turns into her in magnetic habit that, by their third or fourth drink, Paul finds he’s talking to John’s shoulder.

Paul makes himself busy ordering another drink off the chap behind the bar and tearing the little stirring stick into smaller and smaller squares until there’s a stack of them.

It’s not particularly busy here tonight, but there’s a slow hum of people getting drunker and drunker in a thin fog of cigarette smoke. It’s one of those bars that is sparse in decor but nearly every inch of the walls are covered in black and white photographs. The crowd’s on the older side of their age, not many teenagers or the type who threw their panties at them in Hamburg or toss each other off in the alley behind the Cavern. He assumes they’re all off dancing somewhere. But everyone is loose and laughing and there’s something like an ad hoc dance floor beginning to sprout up as a handful of couples start twisting badly to the radio and spilling their drinks. This would normally just be the start of a regular night out, but Paul realizes that he’d be out like a light in minutes if his head hit the pillow right now.

“Another round, son?” John asks him cheerfully over the too-loud French music.

Nodding vigorously, Paul says, “Strong!” to the cocktail waitress who peels herself away from John with a lingering hand sliding down his thigh.

He thinks the weird knot in his throat might be jealousy. But that doesn’t make sense because the waitress isn’t even really his type. Not that she isn’t gorgeous, but she’s much more the kind of girl John normally goes for, all puckered lips and do-me eyes under long lashes, round cheeks and round... well, Paul certainly can’t deny the appeal, but his head tends to be turned by cheekbones and slim frames, alabaster features and far off looks, that blasé sort of no big deal sexiness always really does it for him. John tends to be a bit more impressed with preening than he himself is, big hair and big tits and big eyes. All things Paul appreciates, but he finds himself equally intrigued by collarbones and the way wrists move when flicking ash off a cigarette.

The point being, that the waitress is gear, but there are other girls here he’s more attracted to, so there’s no reason for him to be jealous that she’s talking to John. He could go talk to the bird in the mint green cloak who’s been looking at him sideways since they came in. She’s holding a glass of white wine, and her strawberry blonde hair is falling loosely over one shoulder as she occasionally glances at him with a combination of interest and ambivalence that would normally have him quietly planning the timing of his approach, but he keeps getting distracted by the way John licks his lips after he takes a sip of his drink. He needs a smoke. He needs a smoke and some air. He pats down his pockets and hops up, nudging John and nodding his head in the direction of the door, making a vague smoking gesture with his hand. John nods absently and turns back to the waitress.

Paul makes his way through the crowd and out the door. The cool night air feels like a sudden oasis, and stopping to close his eyes and fill his lungs with it is the first time he realizes he was practically holding his breath. He lights up and notices his hands are a bit shaky. Maybe he didn’t eat enough today. But as he’s pocketing his matchbook and cigarettes, he thinks of the giant spread they had at the bar of their hotel just before coming here and all the snacks they ate throughout the day in and around Montmartre, stuffing their faces with too much cheese and fruit and pastries. He takes a drag and concentrates on the fact that it’s a beautiful night with music from inside pouring onto the twinkly street. He can see the steps to the Cathedral glowing in the distance, and the dark brick of the sidewalk glistening with bits of streetlamp, and he lets his eyes scan the street nearby. He feels his lip curl around his cigarette when he spots the silhouette of a couple kissing right in the middle of the street, acting like the world is a fucking romance movie just for them. Which is exactly what you should do when you’re young and in love and in Paris, so he isn’t sure why he’s rolling his eyes. It’s the kind of picture that would normally have him trying to compose accompanying lyrics in his head, but now it just makes him suck in a long drag of his cigarette. Maybe he’s just tired.

When he finishes the cigarette, he drops it to the ground with an abrupt flick and watches the way the ember lights up orange before it hits the patio. He stomps it out excessively. He contemplates going back inside, but his face feels hot and his skin feels cagey, so he lights up a second one and moves down the side of the pub a bit to lean against the wall. After a short, steadying drag, he hears the door jingle open, the sounds from inside getting louder and then fading again followed by John’s boots on the stone.

“Paulie!” John cries upon seeing him.

Paul raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement, taking a drag of his cigarette, “Where’s she, then?” he asks through the smoke cloud that leaves his mouth. He has no idea why his voice sounds so bitter.

“Inside.” John replies with a nod in the direction of the door.

“If you want to take her back to the hotel, I can stay out of your way,” Paul says, “Have a walk or something.”

“Don’t be daft,” John comes closer, and Paul feels himself tense up, crossing his free arm across his chest to prop up his elbow as he takes another drag.

“No really, I’m sure I can find something t’do,” he says.

“I’m not taking a bird to that dump,” John snorts, “I’ve got some sense.”

“Fine, so go back to hers,” Paul flicks a burning ash off the end of his smoke and watches it closely, not sure why he can’t look John in the eye.

“Not with you sulking.” John says.

“I’m not sulking!” Paul protests.

“You are, y’know!”

“I’m fine!” Paul swings his cigarette hand in a dismissive gesture, “Go ‘ead! Have fun!”

“Well, I’ve not been invited.” John points out.

“Oh, come off it, John,” Paul makes an exasperated sound, “That’s a sure thing if I’ve ever seen one.”

“She works here, Paul, she can’t just leave,” John reminds him.

“So wait up for her.” Paul forces a casual shrug like it’s no big deal. It isn’t a big deal.

“I don’t want to wait up for her.”

“So go pull some other bird,” Paul takes another puff.

“I don’t want to pull some other bird.” John says in the same cadence as before.

“I thought the whole point of tonight,” Paul schools his voice back down when he realizes it’s coming out a bit shrill, “I thought the whole point of tonight was that you wanted to pick up,”

“I do want to pick up.”

Widening his eyes, Paul tips his head forward to say so?  John just looks at him like he’s the idiot of the world, and right now that’s not too far a reach from how he feels.

After a beat John throws his hands straight out on either side of his body dramatically and yells up towards the murky black sky and cries, loud enough as though he’s calling on the strength of the Lord himself, “PAUL!” and then abruptly looks back to Paul with a flat expression.

In his peripheral vision, Paul is aware that the couple coming into the bar has jumped in startled surprise at John’s bellowing. A cab driver leaning against the car door has also snapped his head up to see what’s the matter. Ordinarily, he’d give the strangers a quick reassuring smile and an apologetic nod, but he’s caught in John’s eye contact, keeping his gaze locked with John’s like a magnetic force he can feel down his back and into his shoes. It’s clear and intentional and there’s absolutely no use pretending like he can’t hear exactly what John is trying to say. Or that he can’t hear what his own body is trying to say in response by the way his pulse is hammering in his ears like reverb on a bumped mic. And in these short seconds that flicker between them, he isn’t sure why it doesn’t scare him, but it doesn’t. Because right now it isn’t anything more than just John, and he feels like he might simply cease to exist if John ever stops looking at him exactly how he’s looking at him right now. Simply drift away on the night time breeze. With the grime and dirt and bits of old fraying newspaper clippings collecting in back alley corners and filling up the lines between the bricks on the ground.

Finally, Paul lets out a sharp breath through his nose and sticks his tongue in his cheek, flitting his eyes just about above John’s head as he tries to make sense of what is happening. But it’s just music in his head now, loud and slick and a little out of key, the way it would be in Hamburg when the set was just going to keep going and going and going even after it stopped sounding good and they were playing just to play and he could feel it in his bones. He pushes himself up from against the wall and moves in half-time to the cacophony in his head, not looking at John but pressing their shoulders together as he passes him. The leather of their jackets makes a sound like a groan as his pushes past, and with eyes latched on Paul’s profile, John swallows thickly, his mouth near Paul’s ear. And then John’s hand is on the small of his back and they’re making a bolt for it, John just half a step behind him, hailing the cabby who gave them a funny look and tumbling into the back of the car. John immediately crowds into Paul’s space, kissing his lips and his neck where they’re hidden in splotched light as the driver circles the front of the car to get behind the wheel. Paul kisses him back just long enough to taste the booze on his tongue, musky and sour, and feel the subtle scrape of John’s cheek. It takes more restraint than Paul ever knew himself capable of to get a hand between them to push John away when the front door clicks open. In melodramatic defeat, John collapses against Paul’s shoulder, burying his face in Paul’s lapels.

“Uhh,” Paul tries to the cabby as he sits down, “Sorry for my friend, he had a bit much.”

The driver just laughs, “As long as he is not sick in my car.” He’s a stout old Frenchman with a fat grey mustache and the kind of eyes that make Paul think of long, droopy dogs. “Where are you going this evening?” his accent is cartoonishly thick, but Paul’s getting used to it. So he gives the address as best he can, all while John slowly creeps a hand between Paul’s back and the seat.

They pull away from the curb and the driver asks, “You are from England, no?”

“Si!” Paul squeaks as John starts nibbling at his neck, “I mean, oui! Aye! England!” he feels John laugh against his skin, and Paul wants to slap his face.

“What part?”

“Up North,” Paul replies, and John travels his mouth higher, “Town called Liverpool.”

And now he’s getting the personal backstory of the cab driver’s sister who married a fellow from Manchester, and how the family thought she’d never find a man because she was such a bad cook, so it makes sense that she married a Brit because he didn’t know the difference. And Paul’s laughing because it is a funny joke, but he’s also quietly melting into the seat because John’s hand is making circles on the small of his back beneath his jumper, and John’s mouth his making him dizzy with whatever that is he’s doing with his tongue and he honestly had no idea how far away this bar was from the hotel because he’s pretty sure this drive is long enough to have gone ahead and gotten them to Spain.

When they finally pull up, they run inside so quickly, John practically forgets to pay the cabby. But he does, giving him a too-big tip that has the guy thanking their backs from the window as they make a tear for it. As they storm up the two flights of stairs, John’s just behind Paul with his fingers in his belt loops. When he’s sure they have the stairwell to themselves, Paul turns around in a confused burst of electricity, a stair above John who crashes into him. Before John can finish the “oof” he makes, Paul catches John’s face in both hands and tips his chin up and kisses his mouth. John kisses him back and his hands go to Paul’s chest to keep pushing him along, and Paul’s stumbling backwards up the next step before he breaks apart and bounds up to the last landing taking two stairs at a time. Their slightly drunk laughter echoes in the tight walls of the stairwell.

They make it to the empty hallway and John gets right up beside him, hanging off Paul’s side and sucking his earlobe in a way that makes it nearly impossible for Paul to fumble with the key to their room. Paul’s whispering “Oh fucking hell, Jesus fucking Christ, fucking bloody fuck,” and John’s vibrating laughter in his ear has him nearly done for. When the lock clicks, his whole body lurches momentarily at the notion of what’s about to happen, but he finds that he doesn’t even pause for so much as a second before pushing the door open.

 

Waking up slowly, Paul is aware of the smooth, cool skin of John’s chest beneath his cheek and hand before his eyes even open. A sleepy sound leaves his lips, and he swallows thickly, the sunlight through the curtains just starting to reach them, and he clocks the scratch in the back of his throat, of which he’s trying not to remember the origins.

But he does remember. He remembers every moment with stark sobriety of the way John felt in his mouth, laughing and sputtering without a clue in the world of what to do, so much so that John was laughing one of those laughs that came from his stomach and filled his whole face with a smile. And seeing John’s blooming smile sparked a sudden determination to get it right. Like when they’d all be noodling and goofing around with some song, and John would suddenly clap his hands together and shout, “Right then!” and they’d all buckle down and do it for real. And it took a while, and it was a bit messy, and he had to stop to catch his breath and laugh into the side of John’s leg a few times when tears pricked at his gag reflex, but it hadn’t mattered because, all the while John’s fingers were making loops around the sweaty hair by Paul’s ears, grinning affirmations down to him.

John had practically wrung him out to dry in the course of a couple minutes. He’d pressed Paul against the door the instant it had closed and dropped to his knees before Paul could even register what was happening. Paul had just grabbed John’s shoulders and clung on for dear life until John had him so strung out, his knees were buckling and he’d slurred out, “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, fuck, I can’t stand up with you doin’ that!” John had popped off and looked up at him with vibrant eyes, squeezing his hand as he’d wobbled to the bed where he found himself tipped back beneath John crawling up him. Scrambling to undress each other, they’d laughed in hysterics as their hands, shaking with the buzz and adrenaline and anticipation and booze, crashed into each other, getting in each other’s way in the tangle of fingers and zippers and belt buckles until they’d finally wrapped around each other, skin clammy in the freezing little room. Paul would’ve sworn there were billows rolling off where their bodies touched like rain on hot pavement. And when, half an hour later, he was finishing against John’s thigh, with the taste of John on his lips, John’s blunt nails dug into his back, he thought he was going crazy cause he could hear the banging of the final chords of a triumphant piano echoing as bright and vividly as though it were in the next room over. And when he’d collapsed against John’s chest and John had murmured, “You hear that?” and Paul had managed a short “Mmm hmm,” and John had said, “Somebody’s playing music.” Only nobody was.

Paul wants to want to push away, to recoil in regret and excuses and put as much distance between them as possible. But instead, he nuzzles closer against John’s chest because it’d never felt like that before. With anybody. And he hasn’t the faintest notion what that means, but he can’t push it away just yet. Not here. Not in Paris. Maybe they’ll get home and laugh about it. Or it’ll be the kind of thing they don’t talk about unless they’re drunk and then they reference with hushed jokes under their breath. The kind of thing John will threaten to reveal at parties with a “You’ll never guess who I shagged across the pond,” and twinkle in his eye while Paul shoots him frantic death glares, trying to figure out if he’s actually going to say it and just when Paul thinks he might, John’ll say something like “One of Hitler’s nieces. Straight up! In Hamburg! What? It’s true! She said so herself. Least I think she did, she was speaking German, y’see.”

Before he opens his eyes, Paul can hear John’s heartbeat against his face. He has this distinct and strange image of tucking himself into John’s chest, curling up like a squirrel in a tree for the winter and making a home there. Of building himself a tiny replica of the city in John’s ribs. Of waiting for a tiny John to wake up and come roam through the tiny streets with him.

John’s hand in his hair pulls him out of this groggy dreamland imagery. With a sharp inhale through his nose, Paul blinks his eyes open and tips them up to meet John’s.

“Hello,” John whispers.

“Hello,” Paul mouths back. John looks so soft and sleepy in the dappled morning light that Paul’s whole stomach swoops with syrupy affection. Lazily, Paul lifts his head and places his chin onto his hand on John’s chest, “That was an unexpected turn of events, wasn’t it?”

John, whose hand is still in Paul’s hair, lets out a laugh, scratchy with morning, and says, “Unexpected?”

They lie together for a while, indulging in the languid vulnerability that seems to have settled around them like morning mist, John stroking Paul’s hair with the tips of his fingers, Paul humming and tracing shapes beneath John’s collarbones. They quietly talk about what they might get up to that day: head back to Montmartre and poke around a little, walk along the river, see if that café with the funny sign on the door is open. And Paul thinks, quite clearly and unintentionally, that if there is such a thing as heaven, which he thinks there must be, the atmosphere would have to be something akin to this.

They’re off to a slow start, and they’re about to miss breakfast anyway, so Paul decides to go ahead and shave, lathering up his face and listening to John babble about Gladys Horton. John shaves after him, and they chat and laugh and Paul tries and fails again to get his hair to fall like Jürgen’s did in his reflection in the metal doorknob.

As they head out for the day, John goes to light up, but realizes he’s out of smokes, and Paul hasn’t got any left, so they take off in the direction of the nearest convenience store. All the while, Paul can’t stop thinking about how it should feel like something has changed between them. You shouldn’t just be able to blow somebody you’ve known for nearly five years and not feel any differently about each other the next day than you did before. Particularly when that somebody is a bloke and that bloke is your best friend, and neither of you have ever been the type to feel about blokes that way, let alone each other. Paul can’t figure out why, then, it’s exactly the same.

They pop into the cluttered little corner store they’ve been passing by all week and John struggles to ask the bird behind the counter for Woodbines in French, so he ends up just pointing to the packs of cigarettes and taking whatever she hands him. Paul pokes around for something to eat so he doesn’t have to watch her bat long lashes, grabbing them each an apple, a pack of crisps, and orange soda in round bottles.

“Tide us over ‘til lunch,” he tells John when he drops it all at the register. He notices that John hasn’t taken off his glasses.

John pays and takes the smokes and his portion of the snacks and lopes out the door humming something. Paul nods to the bird, a cute brunette with crooked teeth, and says an awkward, “Thanks! Merci!” and she giggles back an “Au revoir!”

He catches up to John, who is just returning his matches to his jacket pocket. They walk and talk until they come across a sort of shady green square near a looming Catholic church to sit and eat. With no luck finding a free bench, they opt for dropping their jackets on the grass and sitting criss-cross opposite each other, throwing the occasional bits of crisp to passing pigeons.

John finishes his apple and licks off the tips of his fingers, and Paul can’t stop thinking about the way his tongue felt on him once they made it to bed. The way John had started so tantalizingly slow. The way Paul had practically screamed at the feeling and sight of John fitting all of him into his mouth. The way John hadn’t broken eye contact when Paul had involuntarily began to buck his hips up. The way John had gotten him almost there and then pulled off, leaving him breathless and gasping, so they could keep going. The way it had felt for John to pull Paul on top of him. The scent of John when he’d taken him into his mouth the first time. The way John had practically purred “that’s it, love, just like that” and “oh fuck” when he’d gotten his rhythm. The pull and drag as they moved together. John’s low sounds and mesmerized eyes with each thrust. The way they looked pressed against each other between their stomachs. The tremor in John’s voice, his hands, his lips, his whole body when Paul got him there. Paul has to press his fingers into the corners of his eyes until he sees stars, otherwise he’s afraid that he’ll spend the rest of the day picturing John’s mouth on him.

When his eyes blink open, he sees John’s confused expression sitting across from him in the green and quickly fibs, “Just got something in me eye.”

John proceeds to do the least helpful thing imaginable and leans in close, raising his eyebrows and nodding his head up a miniscule amount to tell Paul to look up. So Paul glances upwards at the pale blue sky, John centimeters away and squinting to see if there’s anything there, which Paul knows there absolutely isn’t.

“Which eye?” John asks.

“Er…” Paul says, “The left?”

“Don’t see anything,” because there was nothing there, “You must have gotten it out.” John sits back, and Paul has to quite literally bite down on the inside of his cheek against an urge that is alarmingly like an urge to kiss him. Paul jumps up and gathers up their rubbish, extending a hand to tug John to his feet.

“Where to?” Paul says, wiping his hands on his trousers once they’ve binned everything.

And John says, “Anywhere!” so they start walking with no destination in mind. Which Paul has decided is perhaps one of his favorite things to do.

 

They make it to the river just as the little splashes of rain sprinkle across the water. Ignoring it at first, they wander along the bank until the downpour really kicks in and they find themselves skirting from awning to awning, catching their breath before making a break for the next one. Finally, John’s shouting, “I don’t think this rain is letting up any time soon, Macca!” and they decide to go back to being tourists and dip into the first museum they see.

Trying not to make too much noise as they huddle at the entrance with their tickets, Paul shakes off his hair onto the doormat as John wipes his glasses. It’s a big, echoey place, Musee D’Orsay, though not quite as sprawling as what they’d seen of the Louvre.

They look about for a good long while, John bounding about beneath his bowler hat, giving the occasional commentary about a piece to comment that it was “pretentious” or “bloated” or “just someone we’re all supposed to worship because he’s dead.” And yet he can’t hide the glimmer of excitement when he’d spot the work of a master he recognized from some old art school textbook or a piece he recognized. He goes shuffling off through art lovers to get a look at a Van Goth up close or pose in front of The Clown Cha-U-Kao to make Paul have to stifle a laugh.

As they make their way through the tall, endless rooms and rooms of paintings, Paul finds himself having to swallow back a bad taste in his mouth every time he lacks a coherent assessment to add to John’s side comments besides nodding in agreement. He’s sure Stu would have something to say about Cézanne. Stu would probably get why John says “postcard for granny” in the direction of a snowy village about which Paul’s only thought is that it’s pretty. Most of what Paul knows about art could be summed up by his drawings in primary school, doodling on napkins, and at most, a budding interest. But he’s sure Stu would be able to keep up with John imitating the art scholars with a fake posh accent waxing about the Dega’s brushwork. Instead, Paul lifts himself onto his toes, extending his arms like the ballerina. John’s laughter echoes in the stark silence gallery as he mirrors the motion with a flourish of his hand and a deep, dramatic bow.

Every now and then, Paul loses track of John and finds him a few minutes later in front of a painting of a dog or a naked lady. Or a naked lady with a dog. Once when Paul is trying to decide if this print of the Notre Dame was a painting or a photograph, he turns over his shoulder to ask if John can tell, but he’s wandered off again. Paul sighs and traipses off to find him, in vain. After poking around a bit, he finally decides that if he stays in one place, maybe John will come to him, so he parks himself on a bench in a gallery full of impressionists. He sits for a bit, casually scanning the paintings. A woman in a red coat gives him a look like he’s just thrown an ice cream at one of the paintings and he realizes he’s whistling. He makes a quick zip-lip gesture and settles for restlessly drumming his fingers over his knees.

Paul’s eyes land on a painting a bit to his left of soft red poppies cascading down a green slope under a sky full of white puffy clouds. He finds himself standing up to move to it without thinking. The closer he gets, the more little details he notices. A woman with a blue parasol in the field. Her child nearly lost in the tall grass, smelling a poppy nearly the size of his little face. Another pair at the top of the hill in their hats. The splashes of yellow wildflowers springing up among the poppies. He isn’t quite sure why he’s as drawn to this scene as he is. But something about it strikes him as looking very peaceful. He can almost smell the air. He can imagine the welcome scratch of the fresh grass at his ankles on the long meandering walk from the grand house all the way off in the distant line of trees. He’ll not be twenty for many months now, and he doesn’t often find himself daydreaming much about anything besides the band yet, really. Life on the road, living out of suitcases, glistening, sweaty nights of loud music, strong booze, and pretty girls. The thought of having a family feels very far away. But he can almost imagine, in this one fleeting moment, what it would be like to walk through the flowers with the mother of his child, smiling at each other at the sound of their kid babbling away in the grass. He isn’t sure it’s for him, but he can see the appeal of a day that slow with someone he loved that much.

“There you are,” even though Paul didn’t hear him approach, John’s voice in his ear barely even startles him.

Paul asks “Where’ve you been?” though he doesn’t particularly care, just to ask, not moving his eyes away from the painting.

“The loo,” John answers. “You like that Monet then, do you?”

“Is it bad?” Paul asks, because he doesn’t have enough background knowledge to be able to produce an educated opinion. Not that he trusts John to have paid particularly close attention in his art history courses, but he knows more than Paul simply by virtue of having been in an art history course.

“No!” John says, the smile on his face soft and almost a little surprised. “It’s just very you.” Paul isn’t at all sure what John means by that so he blinks a few times, and John says, “It’s nothing! It’s…” he pauses and strains for the words, squinting behind his glasses. “It’s deceptively simple.” Paul doesn’t have time to ask him to elaborate before John adds, “It’s lovely,” and does a little hop-skip away to say, “Think the rain stopped if you want to head.”

Paul nods and follows behind him, sure the serious patrons are pleased to see them go.

“I’m famished!” John announces when they’re outside. He throws an arm around Paul’s shoulder, “Let’s eat!”

Paul still can’t figure out why John touching him now feels a bit like static electricity, but why it doesn’t make him flinch at all. But he can’t think about it too hard or it’ll give him a headache. He can’t think about the way that John had gone “Unexpected?”  Because if he thinks about that for too long, he might come to the conclusion that a more applicable word would be “inevitable.” And if he comes to that conclusion, that poses too many unanswerable questions about who he is and who John is and what they are and what they’ve always been and crucially, what they’re going to be. And he’s just not sure how much of his holiday he wants to devote to existentialism.

So he decides not to think about it anymore once they get to a little sandwich shop playing loud French revolution music on a gramophone.

“Eyes peeled, Paulie,” John leans across the table to whisper when they find a corner booth, “They could roll out the guillotine at any second.”

“Maybe for you,” Paul jokes back, coyly opening the menu in front of him “You’re the one paying for all this lark.” And John laughs so hard he has to hold onto his stomach.

They order and Paul just watches him for a while as he messes about folding and unfolding his little paper napkin into various shapes. It’s not that he’s frightened of what the answers would be if he really thought about it. Because John isn’t frightening. Maybe he comes across that way to other people because he doesn’t suffer fools as gladly as Paul often feels obligated to. In the past half a decade, Paul is the only person who can make John shut up simply by raising an eyebrow.

As they finish their food, John’s sweet tooth gets the better of him, and he can’t stop eyeing the desserts on display over Paul’s shoulder. When the last of his Coke is gone, he hops up and Paul watches as he steps over to go get a closer look at the case full of rows of tarts and cakes of all different sizes and colors. Paul rolls his eyes when John leaves handprints on the glass. After a few words to the man behind the counter, John returns to the booth, rubbing his hands together gleefully.

“What’d you get?” Paul asks.

“No bloody clue,” John tells him, “Just what looked good.”

What looked good turns out to be a tart covered in berries, a shiny slice of chocolate cake, and dollops of jam and cream stacked between crisp pastry and covered in swirly decorations. Both of their eyes go wide when the waiter brings them along with two forks. John snatches both forks and digs into the chocolate cake cake with each of them. Paul’s trying not to laugh, but he manages to give John an unimpressed look as he munches his two forkfuls of cake in his cheeks like a cartoon chipmunk until he relinquishes a fork to Paul. It only takes one bite for Paul to look up at John with even wider eyes and eyebrows twisting at the taste of the pastry and a rather impolite, “Mmmm!” He holds his right hand to his mouth to add, “Fucking hell that’s good.” It’s the first and perhaps only thing they’ve done that’s felt rather decadent. That is to say, a trip to Paris in and of itself is a rather fancy concept and John hasn’t been the least bit stingy, but they’re not going anywhere high-end. Wonderful, but nothing particularly glitzy. They’ve ordered the cheapest wine and hung out in the artsier spots where things aren’t all polished and perfect. The restaurant itself is not remotely lavish, but the spread of French desserts in front of them look like a banquet on their little crammed booth table, and the flavors are more luxurious than anything he’s ever tasted. “Bloody fuck!” Paul exclaims.

John laughs in agreement, reaching to pluck the biggest, fattest raspberry between his finger and his thumb. When John takes a bite, Paul suddenly feels his skin tingle where John’s bite marks are blossoming on his inner thighs. He feels himself inhale sharply at the visceral memory, and forces himself to take another sip of his cool drink to counterbalance the way he feels his palms go hot. Even so, he crosses his legs to feel the friction of his trousers against the bruises there.

And bleeding Christ, he knows it was a one-time thing, but right now he thinks he would swallow John whole just to get a glimpse of the way his face looked when he moaned Paul’s name though his climax. A turning kaleidoscope of split-second expressions. Eyebrows twisting the lines on his forehead, lashes fluttering, cheeks turning colors like flower petals unfurling, mouth parting around inarticulately, beautifully, messy sounds. Paul could get lost forever like songwriting.

 

In the same spirit, that evening they treat themselves to something adjacent to a fancy dinner. There is a drippy candle on the table and violin music playing and they’re incredibly underdressed, but everyone there is speaking English and once they leave, it occurs to Paul that it was probably a tourist trap. Probably not somewhere really posh people would go. But the food was good and not enough for what John paid, and the wine was delicious and overpriced, and they both feel a little bit spoiled as they make their way towards the river. They abandoned using their map a long time ago, and have been just letting Paris tell them where to go for days now, but a sign labeled Saint-Jacques Tower looks familiar from the map when Paul notices it.

“Should we go up?” Paul asks. John nods vigorously, and they wander through the little gate. There’s a surprising amount of green space here, and the tower itself is sort of tucked into some yellowed trees, intricate stone catching warm gold light of the city.

It’s quarter to seven, and the short salt-and-pepper fellow out front tells them he can’t let them up because he has to close the gates in fifteen minutes. Paul opens his mouth to start smooth-talking about how it’s their last night in Paris and they won’t breathe a word, and they’ll be back down as quick as a flash. But then John’s doing that thing where he licks his lips and looks away briefly to take off his glasses, before turning back, eyes somehow cool and warm at the same time and just says very abruptly, “That’s a gear necktie.” Paul has to bite the inside of his cheek. “Reminds me of Cary Grant,” John goes on leaning across the chap’s stall to run an inquisitive thumb over the grey silk, “You know Cary Grant?”

It doesn’t take long from there before they’re winding up the empty, tight staircase towards the top. Stopping to catch their breath every few minutes, they’re panting and laughing in the echoey dim light that seems to twist up forever. “You sure you didn’t bring us here to murder me, Macca?” John asks through a long huff when they think they’ve reached the top but there are still dozens more steps to go.

“If I was going to murder you, I’d have done it by now,” Paul says looking up at him from a few step below where the shadow if his profile splashes behind the old worn stone.

“How?”

“I’m not telling you, mate!” Paul blurts, shoving him along to pick up the pace. With a hand on the rail, John dips over backwards, forcing Paul to reflexively reach out to catch him so he won’t lose his balance and fall back down to their certain deaths like those cartoon characters that hit every step on their way down with a different sound. “Christ, John, are you trying to kill us?” John howls with laughter and bolts up the remaining steps as Paul calls after him, “Fucking daft git!”

Paul’s legs are groaning with resentment by the time they reach the top, but he immediately sees that the view is worth it. Paris at dusk spread out before them. If he looks closely enough he can retrace their steps of the entire trip. The Eiffel Tower glittering in one direction. The streets they’ve wandered together…. Paul thinks in brief and perfect clarity that he’ll be writing songs about this trip for the rest of his life.

John is looking at him when he looks over at John and neither of them say anything to each other for a long time. There’s no one here who could hear them, too high up to be seen or overheard, but he has no idea what he could possibly say. It’s all just…

“Cut it out.” John tells him, instructive but playful.

“What?”

“Oh like you don’t know!” John gives an eyeroll.

“I don’t, though,” Paul says earnestly, feeling his own eyes going wider.

There’s a smile on John’s face when he says, “You’re doing it again!”

“What?” Paul laughs, “I don’t know!” John looks dubious, so Paul adds, “Honest.”

“Looking at me like that!” John cries.

“Like what?”

“Like that!” he gestures vaguely at Paul, bursting into a grin.

Paul feels himself blink a few times and tilts his head in confusion. John throws up his hands and makes a tortured sound, but his dimples are flashing as he says, “Fucking Christ, Macca, you can’t just do that.” They’re laughing bubbly, and Paul’s head is swimming. He feels like champagne.

But there isn’t an ounce of alcohol in his system when he lets the feeling float him to close the distance between them, placing a hand on the back of John’s neck and kissing him like laughter. John’s arms go directly around Paul’s ribs to pull him in closer, and Paul’s hands are in John’s hair and they’re kissing and kissing, and John angles his head to slip his tongue against Paul’s. His whole body shudders. It makes Paul think he might actually be drunk off of the moonlight on the city. He exhales through his nose and lets his hands slide down John’s shoulders and to his chest, feeling where John’s heart is pounding through his jumper. The bridge of John’s glasses is digging into the bridge of his own nose, but he can’t even bring himself to care. In this moment, it feels as though the entire city of Paris was constructed from the ground up for centuries specifically so they could kiss each other like this right now.

Paul’s hands get to John’s hips and he tugs their lower halves together, eliciting a broken-off moan from the back of John’s throat that Paul swallows down like a shot of something sweet and strong, sucking John’s tongue further into his mouth. On a steadying inhale, John breaks himself away. He tosses his head up a little like it’s taking every last inch of composure he has, still holding each other tightly, his tone almost like a warning, “Paul…” When his eyes flit back down to Paul’s face behind his glasses, Paul can see all of Paris on John’s lenses and then himself, parted lips and wide eyes, staring at John like he’s something in the Louvre. And John’s smile goes crooked and toothy when he says, “Fuck you.”

Paul doesn’t know where the flirtation in his voice has been all this time when he responds, “Promise?”

John barks out a laugh, and they go tumbling back down all those steep dark stairs, hands rarely far from touching. Once they get to the bottom, they thank the fellow with the gray tie profusely as he closes up behind them. He’s grumbling a bit, but seems begrudgingly charmed by John’s sweeping bows and declarations that if he’s ever in England, he has a free place to stay.

It’s too nice a night for either of them to be ready to go sit in a pub or something, so they light up a cigarette to pass back and forth as they walk along the river. They’re chatting quietly, zigzagging back and forth across various bridges. Paul feels as twinkly as the lights and as still as the water every time John’s fingertips brush his. He thinks that maybe this thing has always been below the surface and Paris allowed them to get it out of their systems. Or maybe Paris is what got into their systems. And like changing time zones, they’ll be able to set the clock back when they get home. Right?

Cause nothing as mad and giddy as this could hamper the fact that he and John have always talked about their futures as one future. And he knows it’s true. They could be separated by an ocean, by time, by whatever comes their way, and he’ll still look for John in the way the leaves look at the start of autumn. In every crowd. He knows that whatever happens, they’ll always wind their way back to each other, inevitably. They could never stay apart too long. Maybe they’ll come back here. Some time when life has kept them busy, they’ll say meet me in Paris and they’ll topple back in step. But he knows deep down like an instinct he doesn’t have to think about that John will never be too far from his peripheral vision. A soft smoke cloud that leaves its scent on his favorite jumper.

“Hey!” John’s voice snaps him back, and they’re looking at each other from either ledge of Pont Marie. “What’re you staring at?”

“You,” Paul admits, sticking the cigarette back between his lips and striding ahead towards the bank. After a few steps, he hears John breaking into a quick pace coming up behind him, catching him by the sleeve and passing him at the shoulder, darting ahead with intent, dragging Paul along.

John gets them all the way up under the bridge then, pressing Paul into a damp corner and kissing him hard. Paul lets his hands wander more now, finding their way to John’s back pockets, and they take the time to explore each other’s mouths.

In the minutes that lap around them like the river on the stony bank, their kisses ebb and flow from exquisite tenderness to untapped and rough and wanting. Taking gentle sips of each other with featherlight touches wherever they can find exposed skin to sinking teeth in swelled lips, fistfulls of hair, and rutting against each other until the stone on Paul’s shoulder blades bruises. Everywhere Paul’s hands go, his mind cycles through the surreal unvoiced thoughts of I’ve touched him there and my mouth has been there and I know what sound he makes when someone bites him there.

He’s so caught up in the Paris of it all that he doesn’t even flinch when John gets a hand to his lap, slowly stroking him through his trousers. He pulls his lips away to bury his face in John’s neck with a hitched moan, and a breathless, “John,” his fingers gripping tighter on the back of John’s jacket. John smells like cigarette smoke, the hotel soap, leather, the café from earlier, the fancy French cologne, and maddeningly, Liverpool.

“John,” he says again when John palms him harder. “John, not here,” he chokes out. Though he thinks if this goes on for another second he’d simply have no other choice but to fall to his knees on the hard, wet ground and bring John’s trousers with him. Paul’s hips stutter forward into John’s hand, “John, please,” and he can’t remember if he’s asking for more or asking him to wait. Because for half a second, Pont Marie head seems like the best idea anyone’s ever had.

John’s eyes are black and wild when he pulls away, and Paul wonders how anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of this gaze is still alive. He reaches his hand to John’s face, running the pad of his thumb across John’s pink lower lip. The dark want in John’s eyes gets twisted up with a wanting that looks almost soft. Almost tender. Open and longing and trusting. What’s the survival rate, Paul wonders, of those who get to look at John looking at them like this? John sucks Paul’s thumb into his mouth and Paul feels his own eyebrows arch with the surprise of the simple, sensual intimacy. His voice is barely above a breath when he mouths, “John.” And John closes his eyes and sucks, and Paul can hardly even hear himself above the roaring of his pulse, “John, love.”

Paul moves his hands to cup John’s face, shadowy in the darkness of their hideaway, but still bright and full of, of everything. John’s lips just move around an attempted, “Oh, Paul.”

Upon hearing footsteps above them on the bridge, they emerge together and hail a cab for the quick ride back. Paul thinks they deserve a Nobel Prize in restraint for the fact that they’re able to keep their hands off of each other. Though tonight, somehow, it feels a little less frantic. They have all night. Not to mention they’re starkly, crystalline sober. They sit on opposite sides of the back of the cab, looking out the windows as the city sparkles by. Paul can almost hear the soundtrack in John’s head.

They make their way up the stairs and down the hall at a respectable distance, smiling sideways at each other. And when the door closes behind them and the curtains are drawn, they find each other in the dim light of this little space that feels so incredibly theirs now, and they kiss like they have all the time in the world.

The night is long and liquid. Paul feels like they’re moving through water. John’s hands on his body are warm and wanting. Paul is left lightheaded by the dark fan of John’s damp eyelashes, the landscape of freckles across his sweat-slick shoulders, and the gravity of his kisses. They roll over each other like waves. There’s a brief negotiation mumbled against each other’s skin, concluding with Paul surprising himself by how quickly he whispers, “Yes please,” into John’s ear. John opens him so gently he feels like he’s dying. He didn’t know calloused fingers could feel that soft. All he can do is cling to the sheets and gasp for air. He feels a tear slip down his face, and John asks, “You alright?” and Paul says, “Don’t stop.”

It happens like a slow song and Paul can barely breathe. When they come, John’s fingers are interlaced with his. When they fall asleep, John’s back is pressed against Paul’s chest, knees bracketed together, Paul with an arm around John’s middle and his nose buried in the auburn hair at the nape of his neck. Paul is a little bit in love with the way this feels.

 

Waking up on your last day somewhere, it’s always different. Like the goodbye starts as soon as your eyes open and hangs over you like a smoke cloud. That’s what Paul thinks anyroad. John rolls over, and they find themselves in a tangled laugh as they unwind their limbs.

“G’morning,” Paul feels his face flush.

“Mmm...” John replies, gravelly and smiling, “You look...” his eyes lazily go to Paul’s mouth and back to his eyes.

“Spent?” Paul offers, running a hand through his mussed hair.

“Like you’ve had a good shag.”

Paul hums his approval and folds himself into John, “Let’s not leave.”

“We’d run out of money, son,” John reminds him.

“We could make more money,” Paul argues groggily.

“We could do,” John says.

“Playing music on the corner,” Paul says, “Lay out our hats.”

“I’ve got an extra kidney lying about that I’m not using, could probably turn a few quid,” John jokes through a yawn. Paul laughs and nestles closer, nudging his head against John’s hand to get him to scratch his hair like yesterday without having to ask.

Easy minutes pass and pass, Paul fighting the lull of sleep with John’s fingers in his hair. When he peers up at John, he’s already looking down at him with warm amber eyes. The space between the curtains has drawn a line of sunlight across the bottom half of John’s face. This close, Paul can see the little freckles at the corner of his cupid’s bow on his upper lips, and he tips his head up to place a kiss there. It’s closed-mouthed, and they both taste like morning breath. But they also both let out long, smiling exhales at the same time. And they’re grinning at each other when they break apart, Paul feeling his nose go crinkly when they press theirs together. And John’s dimples are the sweetest thing he’s ever seen. And oh, he doesn’t think he wants this to end.

They shower together under the guise of both getting a chance at the hot water. But Paul doesn’t even mind as the water gets colder and colder because John’s taken him in his mouth again, one of Paul’s hands gripping the curtain rod and the other in John’s soaped up, wet hair. And despite the fact that they slip and nearly take each other down about a dozen times, how can he think about anything else when John starts humming Little Richard, and Paul can feel every note all the way through him to the ends of his fingers? He returns the favor immediately, standing in the stream, with a hand between John’s legs as they kiss through the water. It gets in their eyes and in their mouths and isn’t particularly sexy as they sputter soapy laughter. But it’s fun and funny, and when John’s climax comes, his legs go weak and his hand goes flying to grab hold of the shower curtain just as Paul catches him in both arms.

After they get as dry as they can with the continuously too damp and too thin towels, they gather their things to pack up. Not that there’s much to gather. John shoves his toothbrush and things from the sink and the couple of clothes he’s strewn about into his duffle and then tugs on his outfit for the day in less than a minute flat. Paul takes the time to fold and replace everything into his bag, washing and drying off everything from his shaving kit, making sure not to bend the card for his dad or wrinkle his clothes, and tucking the camera between layers of softer garments to avoid it getting crushed. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he whistles along as he goes. John waits for him at the window. Neither says much, both a little tired, neither ready to leave, but he’s comfortable in the feeling of John’s quiet, pensive presence.

As he’s finally zipping up his duffle, Paul looks up and has to pause. He takes John in, long and lean and, well, frankly rather beautiful with the pale shadow of the lace curtains making flowers on his face. His neck bent just so and his slender hands on the window sill. Paul suddenly can’t recall what it felt like to look at John and not want to kiss him. Even though he’d done so every day before now. But he squints his eyes and strains his mind and tries to remember what that felt like, gazing at John without the impulse to reach for him, to place his own lips on his, and he simply can’t remember. As if there is no backlog to cycle through. It ought not be a difficult memory to access seeing how recent it ought to be. But he can’t. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t remember. He has the whole train ride to remember. Or.

“Better get cracking, Paulie,” John snaps the silence.

As they check out, Paul watches John at the counter stumbling through his bad French and his thinning wallet. He wonders when was the last time John looked at him and didn’t want to kiss him, too. John hikes the strap of his duffle higher on his shoulder and turns to ask, “Ready?” and Paul wonders if it’s happening right now.

They make it to the Gare du Nord just as their train is huffing away from the station. They chase it for a few metres down the platform, laughing at the way their duffles slam against them with each step, but they give up when Paul’s right bootheel lands funny, sending his ankle out a bit jagged. His duffle throws off his counterbalance and he puts too much weight on it, wincing at the lightning bolt pain it sends through his foot.

“Shit, wait, fuck, bollucks!” he hisses, catching John’s sleeve. John turns back, wide eyes behind his glasses darting from Paul’s face, to the vanishing train, and down to where Paul’s foot is in his hand.

“Whoospy daisy, Paulie!” John cries with a sympathetic laugh, coming a bit closer so Paul can better use his shoulder for balance. Paul takes a second to adjust his boot, and John asks, “Can you walk on it?” Paul nods and makes an effort to stand up straight, but there’s a twinge of pain that makes him take a quick suck of air through his teeth. “Uh oh!” John exclaims, a hand going to anchor Paul’s waist.

“I’m fine,” Paul says, because this all feels a bit much, and they’re in people’s way. He lifts his foot again and tries rolling it a few times until the sharpness lessens before trying to stand on it again. He has to favor it slightly for the first few steps, but it subsides mercifully quickly the more he walks until John can let go of him entirely.

They look over at the empty tracks and the caboose of the train getting smaller and smaller in the distance and then to each other.

The next train doesn’t leave for another few hours. They decide to get food. Walking back out into the street, they head to the first café Paul sees, which has fat yellow flowers heaping out of the window baskets. Only every fourth or fifth step bothers him, and he’s largely able to ignore it, but he still makes sure to cross his right leg over his left when they sit down at the little table by the door.

“Sorry I made us miss the train,” Paul says as they look over the menu.

“We were going to miss the train either way, Macca,” John says with a dismissive shrug. And he’s probably right. “I have no idea what any of this bloody says.”

It’s a sunny day, but they end up getting warm bowls of potato soup with leeks and broccoli and crusty bread to drag through it. They eat and chat, and when the food is gone, they still have an hour and forty minutes, and Paul can tell that John would like to spend it walking about from the way he shifts restlessly in his seat and looks around, eager to wring out the last chance to explore. But after a moment, John tips his chair back on two legs and nods in the direction behind Paul’s shoulder. Paul turns in time to see a woman picking out aubergines at the greengrocer’s next door with a bow in her hair that matches the one on her Yorkshire terrier, and he covers his mouth to hide a giggle. John orders them coffee, and they contentedly people-watch from where they are, saving Paul from taking steps, spinning mad speculations about every remotely interesting passerby. A Russian exile, a couple they decide has eloped because their parents run rival crêpe companies, a gaggle of nuns who moonlight as opium dealers.

“What about that bloke?” John asks of a passing fellow with striking silver hair, a perfectly pressed suit, and the ugliest polka-dotted tie Paul has ever seen.

“Oh, him? He’s in the SIS,” Paul folds his hands and nods seriously, “He’s currently undercover as a traveling circus clown.”

“Mmm,” John nods, “Not a particularly transformative disguise, that.” Paul snorts and John goes on, “You’d think they’d go for an alias that provided a contrast to their real identity.”

“Aye, that’s what they want you to think,” Paul says, tapping his finger to his temple. And John laughs.

 

They make it back to the platform with five minutes to spare, and the pain in Paul’s foot is so faint that he only really notices it now on the stairs. They clamber onto the train and find seats much like they were before, only facing backwards this time, Paul tucked by the window and John stretched out into the aisle. With a weary puff, the train heaves away from the station and Paul watches as the platform slips out of view. He’s a little sad to see it go. In a way it sort of feels like the time they had here was so full that he can’t imagine getting back to Liverpool and so little time having gone by. But it also sort of feels like they just got here. Like they were just getting started. Like he was on a train headed one way, hopped off, and got on a train headed back.

They don’t say anything for a while. Just the chugging of the tracks in Paul’s ears as France slideshows by out the window. He’s trying to decide if he’s the same person he was before when he feels John’s chin on his shoulder, breaking the quiet between them, “Ask me what I’m thinking about.”

Paul turns a bit to see him, placating him with a cautious smile, “What are you thinking about, Johnny?”

“That we’re gonna make it, Macca,” he says with an abrupt and quiet urgency, “Ask me how I know.” He sits up fully and looks at Paul’s eyes behind his glasses, and Paul shifts to face him, going along with his low intensity.

“How do you know?”

“Cause you and me, we’re once-in-a-generation,” John declares, “Y’know that? What we’ve got going on… the world isn’t ever going to forget it.”

“Well,” Paul says, and it’s the biggest thing he’s ever said to anybody, “I’m not ever going to forget you.”

John’s eyes narrow at him in that way they do that makes Paul feel both utterly known and wholly safe and as if feeling those things at once is entirely unremarkable and ordinary. It’s comparable only to walking through the front door of his childhood home. John then gives one of his little smirks before kicking his feet up onto his seat and letting his head fall back into Paul’s lap, crossing an ankle over a knee and tipping his hat over his eyes, “Wake me up when we get there.”

Notes:

This is a complete and total work of fiction.

Title is obviously from Taylor Swift’s cardigan.

Hope you enjoyed this meandering journey, and so glad to finally be done with it after having it in the back burner in various forms for nearly two years (during which I had my very own much less oblivious lesbian version of running away to Paris with my love). You can find me on on Tumblr @lilypadd23

Happy LDOP (last day of Pride)

<3

P.S. This has a little collection of snapshots from John's POV now if you want to see what he was thinking here: So In Love That I Might Stop Breathing

P.P.S.

Lovely art by the lovely @PoisedWalrus <3