escort

1.5

THREE YEARS LATER

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love,

and how you gave me everything you had

and how I offered you what was left of me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Troye wonders if he'll ever get used to this, to seeing the words that were once scribbled into his Moleskine committed to paper. He almost doesn't recognise them, the neat black letters somehow not his any more, like passing a friend he hasn't spoken to for years in the street. But they are his, even if they don't look like them. It's only when he reads them aloud that they become his own again. When he hears himself saying each sentence and remembers why he had to write it down. That's something only he will know. And while his editor will shuffle them about and the reviewers will look under them for things that aren't there, only he knows what each one means.

So he doesn't need to read from the book, but that's something he still isn't used to, either, to reading to a roomful of people. Maybe it's a crutch, the perfect paragraphs steadying him when his heart gallops and the words wobble. Or maybe it's something to look at so his gaze doesn't wander, looking for a flash of black hair, because there never is. Troye was sure that he'd hear from Jacob when the book came out, that he'd see the review in the Guardian or see it at an airport as he was killing time before a flight. But then Troye was sure that he'd hear from him when he got injured, then after the divorce, then when he moved back to Bradford to start working with the kids from his old neighbourhood. He never uses his real name, but every time he talks about the book, he's talking to Jacob, talking to anyone that will listen in the hope that it will somehow get to him, a message - a novel - in a bottle. But it hasn't and it's a terrible thing, to write a book because you can't move on, while the person you wrote it about does.

So it's an exquisite torture, talking about it every day, but as each one passes and the memory of Jacob gets a little blurrier, the book reminds him that it did happen because sometimes he's not so sure. The funny thing is, he wanted to forget. At first he forgot just enough to get him out of bed in the morning - the smell of him, the soft hair on the nape of his neck, the tiny mole on the bridge of his nose that looks like a dot of ink. Then, when that wasn't enough, it was the little things, his shirt that was the colour of Parma Violets and the pendants on his necklace that Troye would press between his finger and thumb when they kissed. Finally it was the big things, the things only Troye knew, like the way he said his name. But now, when he lies in the middle of his bed, staring into the dark, Troye wants it all back. He wants to remember everything, because to forget, to feel anything other than the unreachable pain in his chest that can't be written away or kissed away or fucked away, would be a betrayal. He wants to wrap each memory in tissue paper and put it in a drawer so on those nights, when he's mad with it, when his heart won't settle as he pictures Jacob, sleeping soundly, he can take them out and look at them. Turn over each one in his hand until he's assured that it happened. That for those few months, he was loved. That's why he wrote the book. Not just because he had to, because those things are all he has left, but because he wants his happy ending.

Even if he has to write it himself.

+++

'Hello, I'm Troye Mellet,' he says with a small wave, trying not to look too closely at the crowd huddled in front of him. 'Thanks for coming. I'm going to read to you from my book, Paper Hearts, but my French is appalling so I'll stick to English, if you don't mind.'

There's a polite chuckle and when Troye stops to lick his lips, his heart is beating so fast that he feels almost superhuman, like he can hear a hundred different things at once. The chatter floating up through the open window from the street below, the wooden stairs groaning grumpily as people go up and down the staircase with handfuls of books, the boats chugging along the Seine as the guide points out Notre Dame and tells the story of how it was rededicated to the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution. He's even sure he can hear the pink geraniums in the window box swaying idly in the breeze, but he can't, of course. All he can hear is his heart in his ears and the shuffle of shoes as more people squeeze into the tiny back room.

He's sure it's just curiosity, the tourists lingering to see what's going on as they take photos of the sign over the door. Troye took a photo of it as well - BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE - the first time he came here, the summer before he went to Cambridge when his heart felt brand new, like a new pair of shoes he was yet to wear in. He checked where his book would sit on the cluttered shelves (between Darin Strauss and William Styron) and sure enough, there it is. It's moments like that, when his heart sheds its skin so it feels brand new again, that Troye feels like he can do anything. He doesn't know when he forgot that. When he stopped checking bookshelves to see where his would sit, but maybe Jacob didn't break him after all. Maybe he showed him a way to make the broken bits of him fit back together. Perhaps that's love, fighting the urge to fix someone because they have to fix themselves.

'I wonder if this is growing up,' Troye reads aloud, the words swaying slightly as he stops to lick his lips again. 'Waiting until I'm home to press my cheek to the bathroom floor and cry. For the first time in a long time, I don't shove or shout. Don't try to leave a mark. But I hope I do. I hope that there are nights when he can't sleep and he doesn't know why. That there are songs that he finds himself listening to on repeat at 4 a.m. when everyone else is asleep and he's smoking a cigarette he makes last until he feels the burn of the filter. That's where I am. Not in any photographs. Not in a shoebox of things he can't bear to throw out. Things other couples have - cinema tickets and seashells. I am a name it hurts to hear. A bruise that will never heal. And I know this is growing up: being kind enough not to remind him.'

The applause is warm, his agent beaming as someone issues directions on where to buy a book if they want it signed. It's all a little overwhelming. This is something he isn't used to, either. Every book he signs is different - sometimes he signs it Troye, sometimes Troye Mellet, sometimes just TM - because he never thought to practise it. He wonders if he ever will. If in five years he'll be so blasé about it that he won't even think, just write a squiggle before reaching for the next book. And he isn't used to the photographs, either, people wanting to pose with him as though he's a pop star. Today it's a couple who can't be much older than he was the first time he came to Paris that summer before he went to Cambridge.

'We couldn't get tickets to see you at the Edinburgh Festival,' the taller guy explains. 'So we decided to come here. Make a weekend of it.'

They exchange a glance and Troye has to look away because it feels like he's intruding.

'I made my mum read this,' he goes on, clutching the book to his chest. 'She cried and said that as long as he,' he nods at his boyfriend, who rolls his eyes theatrically, 'loves me as much as Damien loves Rav, she's happy.'

'Thanks.' Troye smiles clumsily, so stunned he doesn't know how to respond.

But then the guy smiles knowingly at him. 'I hope you find your Rav.'

He means well, but Troye still feels it like a punch, smiling kindly as he signs the book. His hand shakes as he gives it back and it shakes for the rest of the signing, his signature messier than usual as he fights the tears needling the back of his eyes. But he holds it together, smiling for photographs and not spelling anyone's name wrong until the crowd thins and his hand begins to ache.

As usual, it's a blur, Troye barely looking up, so he sees his hand first. Sees the deep creases in his knuckles and his smooth, almond shaped nails, and he's scared to look up in case it isn't him. But he does and it is and Troye almost laughs.

'What are you doing here?' he asks, staring at him as though he's devouring him, gobbling him up in case this is all he gets. These few minutes. He looks the same, but different, all at once. He's thinner, his cheekbones sharper, but he somehow looks softer, too. All big eyes and eyelashes.

'It wasn't enough,' Jacob tells him with an elegant shrug and Troye's heart does that thing, the thing it does every time he looks at him.

He almost drops the book when he takes it from him. He must have seen the dedication - This isn't about you - at least a hundred times, but at last, under it he can write, Maybe it is. Because it's just like Troye to say in eighty thousand words, what he could have said in three.