Chapter Text
I’m so sorry, Lu. I saw them together while I was leaving the bar.
These two sentences have been replaying in his head for three days now, and he just can’t seem to get them out. Neither them, nor the picture that printed itself in his head. He’s been imagining them, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing on that fucking balcony with no fucking care in the world, as if they were reenacting some dumb romantic movie, and every time he wants to throw up a little bit more. Problem is, he hasn’t eaten anything in hours, probably since the day before, and for the better part of the last three days he’s been shutting himself from the rest of the world, putting his phone on airplane mode, and crying himself to sleep every now and then — at least until this morning.
Now? Now he’s angry, and he’s coming for blood.
His whole world came crashing down when he met with his friends at a bar. His boyfriend Benji had left that very morning for some business trip that was supposed to keep him busy out of town for about a week, and while Lucas wasn’t a 100% rejoicing at being separated for so long, he wasn’t usually giving it too much thought because these kind of things happened every once in a while. How fucking naïve. His best friends didn’t even dare to look him in the eyes, too ashamed, too embarrassed, too aware, perhaps, that they’ve been crappy to him for keeping this information for weeks now.
“We were just hoping Benji would come through,” they pleaded.
Well, guess fucking what, Benjamin fucking Carron hasn’t. Not for a lack of trying to get in touch on Lucas’ part, though. Not only is he getting cheated on and betrayed by his closest friends, he’s getting ghosted by his very own cheating boyfriend.
Business trip my ass.
He’s going to murder him.
Not with his bare hands, of course, because as much as he’d like to, there’s so much strength in his body he can use at once, and he’s leaning towards the average/short side of population, and his fucking, fucking boyfriend happens to be on the other side.
He should have fucking known. Hot guys date hot guys. Sometimes they date cute guys. They don’t date people like him. His area is somewhat cute looking nerds and hot guys who haven’t realized yet their potential, and he should have stuck to that instead of trying so fucking hard to change things that can’t be changed. Five years, that’s how much of his life he’s dedicated to this relationship, only to find out after literally everybody else that his boyfriend, his boyfriend of five years, has been banging some asshole on the side for weeks now.
Lucas’ eyes are stinging by the time the elevator reaches the designated flat, but he chooses to believe it’s just because he’s angry, angry enough to make his vision blur and his jaw tighten. He can’t cry now, it’s too damn important. He needs closure, he needs it like he needs his next gulp of air, and he doesn’t care if it makes him seem small and petty and ridiculous even — not a flying fuck given. The elevator rings and the doors roll open. It’s fucking show time, he thinks bitterly, and he blinks hard to keep the tears at bay. With a furious gesture he grabs the trash bag and snatches it off the ground, dragging it out of the cabin carelessly. It’s all Benji’s fault. It’s his fault if he’s down to this, his fault if he’s playing that part, his fault, his fault, his fault, he thinks bitterly as he strides through the hallway until he’s facing a black door with the number 40D on it. There’s a doorbell on the frame, and it only makes his anger intensify, skyrocketing through the roof of common sense and making it shatter in a bajillion pieces.
He can’t believe he’s fucking some doorbell-kind-of-guy — in every meaning of it. Him, Benji, the guy who rolls his eyes every fucking time Lucas vetoes eating from the pizza container, and yet here, with this guy, he’s probably getting pizza delivered from a much more expensive takeout service order and drinking wine in those stupid, ridiculously tall glasses that always threaten to shatter whenever you have the fucking audacity to clink them a little too hard together. It’s fucking hysterical, really, being betrayed and seeing his happiness (or the closest fucking form he’s known so far) thrown by the window for a doorbell and fancy glasses.
Lucas tightens his grip onto the trash bag, and in an ultimate act of rebellion, ignores the doorbell and starts hitting the door with his fist — once, twice, ten times, the loud thumping echoing in the hallway until there’s a voice shouting from the depths of the apartment 40D, somewhere behind that stupid black door. “Benji, you fucking piece of shit,” he yells without stopping.
He hears the sound of the lock turning, and only then he lets his hand rest and takes a step back, planting his feet deeper in the floor, squaring his shoulders just enough to try and mend his broken confidence as the door flies open.
Fucking show time.
There’s a guy in the doorway, who, of course, isn’t Benji — that in itself doesn’t make him bat an eye, but the fact that Lucas is there at all does make an invisible hand squeeze around his heart. Judging by the wet hair and the towel around his hips, he just got out of the shower, and he could be a match in a glaring contest, in the ‘freezing cold eyes’ category. From what he read on the mailboxes and the scarce information he got from his friend, his last name is Demaury, which is convenient because he doesn’t want to fucking know what kind of name his very own boyfriend is moaning at night when he’s pretending to be working.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!”, Demaury spits out furiously.
“I wanna see Benji, I know he’s in there,” Lucas yells back, and he stands a bit taller on his tiptoes to try and peer inside, in the small space left by that Demaury guy and the door. “Benji-”
The guy eyes him like he’s crazy. “He’s not here!”, he snaps. “What the fuck do you want and who the fuck are you?”
Lucas’ eyes widen, probably comically in any other given situation, and for a second he deflates a little bit under the enormity of the insult. “Who am- I’m the fucking boyfriend of the guy you’re sleeping with!”, he exclaims.
“Wha-at?” Demaury’s angry face falters for a second, and okay, maybe Lucas takes a little pride in it, but soon he’s back to glaring and coldly throwing daggers at him. Worse even, there seems to be a fucking hint of disdain as he snarls: “Nah, I don’t believe you.”
Unbelievable. Reality isn’t fucking up for grabs, he wants to yell. That guy doesn’t get to decide what’s the truth and what isn’t. “I don’t give a shit that you believe it or not!”, he bites back. “Benji and I- Benji and I we’ve been together for five fucking years, we have an apartment together!”
He wants to add more, to elaborate, but any sane person would just roll with what he just said and admits their mistake and foolishness. No one cares that he and Benji have their habits at a couple of restaurants. No one cares that they’ve been each other’s dates at weddings. No one cares that they’ve got a shared Netflix account and that they share a phone charger more often than not. They have an apartment together, that should be fucking enough to sum it all up, to Lucas at least. It should be enough of a clue that what he has — or maybe had, he doesn’t really know anymore — with Benji is true, and real, and fucking exclusive.
But instead?
Instead the guy snorts.
He fucking snorts and shakes his head as if Lucas had just come up with a particularly stupid theory on why the fucking Titanic crashed into a fucking iceberg. “See? No, I don’t believe it,” he says again, and Lucas wants to hit him so fucking bad that his hands start shaking. “I’ve been to his place, I was there literally three days ago, and there’s no trace of anyone else in there.”
Three days ago.
Three days ago, Benji was already out of town.
He was already supposed to be out of town, supplies an unhelpful voice in his head. And three days ago Lucas was home because it was fucking Saturday morning, in his fucking sweatpants, on his fucking couch. The first thing that comes to his mind is that the guy is lying. He’s lying, because in their apartment there are pictures scattered around, pictures of Benji, pictures of him, pictures of him and Benji, clothes belonging to the both of them hanging off the rack in the entrance and his shoes stacked along Benji’s in the closet next to the front door. He’s everywhere, they are everywhere.
They are everywhere in their fifth-floor apartment in the 11th, and it’s another horrible feeling that snakes its way up his throat as he starts putting the pieces together — or at least when he thinks he’s starting to get a grip on what the fuck is going on.
“What’s the address?”, he grits out.
Demaury squints his eyes a little and huffs haughtily. “I’m not giving you his address!”
“Is it in the 10th?,” Lucas asks blatantly. “Rue Tesson?”
Something in the guy’s face slips a little, just like the first time. Lucas doesn’t need him to answer because his eyes do it very well on their own: there’s a flash of discomfort and betrayal in his grey eyes, and it’s enough. He doesn’t say anything at first, and Lucas only feels mildly happy about it, for a split-second — half the time he felt satisfied the first time. He thought it’d be a lot funnier to shatter someone’s heart but as it turns out it just feels terrible.
It’s his turn to huff and to shake his head, and to make it sound like he’s the one holding the cards. It should feel good and freeing to be right, but it really doesn’t. It just feels like he’s watching himself a minute ago. “It’s his old apartment,” Lucas says, quiet, almost tiredly. “He was supposed to rent it when we moved in together. Well, at least he told me he did.”
Maybe the people who lived there just moved recently, and he took it as an opportunity to bring along his fucking lover, Lucas thinks. That’s what he wants to believe, at least, and he hopes wishful-thinking takes him somewhere less painful than where he’s standing right now, on the fucking brink of bursting into a hysterical laughter that would definitely put him up and ready for a psychiatric ward. It’s easier to believe that Benji only lied for a few months than for the entirety of their relationship. Or so he thinks. He doesn’t know very well anymore, and the trash bag in his hand seems ridiculously out of place now.
The guy’s eyes fall onto it as soon as Lucas’ fingers tighten a little bit more around it, making it rustle faintly, and he’s surprised to find no trace of pain or despair in the guy’s face anymore. That flash of pain? Gone and long forgotten, judging by the intensity of his glare. That’s some eyes he’s got there, Lucas mutters inwardly. He doesn’t have much trouble finding ten reasons why Benji would cheat with a guy like that — he’s so ridiculously handsome that every new detail he notices about him cuts yet another deeper wound in his already shattered self-esteem. His eyes are clear too, but much greyer than Lucas’. He’s got brown hair too, but it’s already drying off by itself and he can already tell it’s gonna look good. He’s taller. More athletic looking judging by what he can see.
Better. Better, better, better.
He feels like a fool all of a sudden. He came to throw a fit but he’s just embarrassing himself at this point. The guy’s right, he misread the situation. Benji did cheat. Benji does cheat. But he’s not going to stick around long anyway when there’s someone else like that guy waiting for him to get home at night. At best he stayed just long enough to land back onto his feet. He doesn’t want to think about the possibility that maybe, just maybe Benji stays because he pities him.
Fuck his eyes are stinging again. No, no, no, he thinks helplessly as he looks down, blinking hard to prevent the tears from falling.
His heart jerks in his chest when there’s a hand snatching the trash bag from his loosening grip. “It’s his stuff, right?”, Demaury says, demanding and cold, and Lucas doesn’t know if it’s sheer hope or not but it seems like he can hear a hint of bitterness and resentment too.
Technically it’s not his stuff, because there’s so much of it back at the flat that it would never fit in a single trash bag, but Lucas nods anyway. It’s just a couple of things he had grabbed to make his point crossed. He’d planned it all. He’d planned it all, he’d planned to throw it all one by one in Benji’s face, photo frames, a bunch of underwear and jeans waiting for laundry and a sweatshirt Lucas claimed as his own early in their relationship, but that he can’t suffer the view of anymore. He’d planned to yell at his face, to punch him even, if he got the chance, but now he’s left congregating with his boyfriend’s almost naked lover in the middle of a foreign building.
How much more of a fucking failure can he be?
Demaury peers at the content of the bag, then without saying anything he just spins around, and for half a second Lucas expects the door to fly shut right in his face — but it doesn’t. Instead, he’s striding further inside the apartment, and Lucas’ eyes trail absently behind him as he makes his way through his living-room. Demaury chucks the window wide open, and Lucas’ eyebrows shoot up when he reaches for some paper sheets hanging on the wall, tearing them apart a little bit as he doesn’t pause to take the pins down to shove them all in the trash bag. Next thing Lucas knows the bag is flying out the window. Demaury motions to close it, then he pauses and grabs something on the coffee table that he sends out as well. There’s a faint crashing sound when it meets the pavement down the street, and Lucas thinks he might have just witnessed the brutal murder of Benji’s beloved iPad, but he’s not sure.
The window slams shut and Demaury stares at him, hands to his hips, from the entrance of the living-room. “Want something to drink?”, he asks after an agonizing minute of silence where Lucas actually thought he might just be about to receive the same treatment as Benji’s stuff.
“You just- threw everything out,” he says flatly — he’s a bit stunned by the turn of events, to be honest.
“And I’ll be an A+ ecologist for a month to make up for it, yeah,” Demaury sighs. “You want a drink or not? I could use one.”
Lucas considers his options. He’s got nowhere to be, theoretically. “I guess I could use one too,” he admits, a little bit warily. He shoves his hands in his pockets as he dares to step in.
Shit like this only happens to him.
“Good. Make yourself comfortable while I’m dressing,” Demaury says dryly. He motions to leave the living-room then turns back. “By the way,” he adds again, almost like an afterthought, “if you find anything belonging to him, feel free to throw it out.”
Lucas gives himself a second to think about it, his eyes still following him as he’s retreating towards another room to dress up. “Can I smash it instead?”, he asks, because there’s so much they can throw out the window before getting in trouble. The last thing he wants is to get arrested or fined on top of things.
Demaury doesn’t turn back. “Whatever you want,” he says, gesturing dismissively, and Lucas stares incredulously around him after he disappears out of sight, leaving him alone.
He fidgets for a hot minute before sitting down onto the black couch, uneasy, unsure, out of place. He doesn’t want to think about the things this couch might have seen, and he doesn’t want to think about the evenings Benji supposedly stayed at work and ended up spending there instead, and when Demaury walks out, dressed in black skinny jeans and a black hoodie and with a bottle of Tequila in his hand, he suddenly feels better.
Alcohol. That he can do.
*
“Benji was really it for you?”
Lucas’ eyes trail up from the bottle of Tequila sitting empty between them. Eliott (his name’s Eliott), is staring at the ceiling, lying flat on his back, with an unreadable expression on his face. Lucas isn’t sure whether or not he looks sad, or, like, regretful. He just looks… thoughtful. Apparently alcohol gets him thinking, Lucas notes bluntly.
Or maybe sex does.
Sleeping with the lover of his boyfriend isn’t his finest moment in life so far. It really isn’t. But he doesn’t feel guilty, and judging by Eliott’s entirely too laid-back demeanor, he doesn’t feel a hint of regret either — which is always nice when you sleep with someone new, Lucas guesses. He looks up too, trying to pinpoint what exactly Eliott is seeing, but the ceiling is completely white and Lucas’ having a little bit of troubles fixating his eyes on a particular point, let alone an invisible one. The sun is up and bright, pouring in the bedroom through the high window, and it makes him blink and squint a little.
“Maybe,” he says, and he reaches up to rub his eye with the heel of his hand. “I guess so. I mean, we have- we had an apartment together.” He forces the past tense because he doesn’t think there’s anything left to save with Benji, if the last few hours are any indication. They still have an apartment together technically — they are still renting the walls. But the intimacy of living with someone else? Gone. Shattered. Buried. He’s not sure how he feels about it just yet, and he tries to push the thought away for another time.
“Doesn’t mean you would have spent your life with him,” Eliott says, still looking at the ceiling.
Lucas shrugs, more to himself, and he eventually sighs before rolling over onto his side. He shifts his knees a little bit up, and he can feel the warmth of Eliott’s leg nearby. “Dunno. I was happy with him.”
Eliott hums in response and Lucas peers at him discreetly, averting his eyes every now and then to avoid being caught staring. He doesn’t know if it’s the Tequila talking but each passing second makes it more difficult to look away — to pull away. “Was he?”, he asks after a while. “For you?”
To his surprise, Eliott snorts and shakes his head. “I’ve known him for four months. A bit early to form an opinion,” he says, and Lucas makes a noncommittal sound in agreement. Eliott heaves a sigh and turns his head towards him. “I just got out of a long relationship when we met, I guess I didn’t look too much into it. Everything was new and refreshing, you know how it is,” he concludes with an evasive gesture of his hand.
No I don’t know, he wants to say. He doesn’t know because before Benji his longest relationship had lasted for a year and all the others were just a matter of months, sometimes even weeks. He’s just not good at relationships, no matter what it is that guys are looking for, they never seem to find it in Lucas — Benji was the only one who made him feel otherwise, who made him feel like he had finally understood the basic rules. He doesn’t say it out loud, because it’s pathetic enough to think about it, he doesn’t want to word it out for some hot stranger he had sex with once to snicker at him and tell him he overthinks it. After all he knows nothing about Eliott, aside from the fact that he’s outrageously handsome and ridiculously good at whatever he does once clothes are off.
“So, my long-time boyfriend was just your rebound guy,” he says darkly.
“Four months is a bit long for a rebound guy though but, yeah, I guess that’s close enough.”
The worst part is that he doesn’t find it in himself to hate Eliott, even though he’s pretty sure he’d feel better hating a stranger than to hate his boyfriend of five years. He eyes the empty bottle of Tequila with a sad look. He’s not nearly drunk enough to think about what’s going to follow. When Benji will come back in town and they will have to talk. Fuck the grand gesture this time. He’s just going to yell at him and probably cry, and it’s going to be ugly and pathetic, but he doesn’t give a fuck — he’s not sure if he wants Benji back at this point, if he wants to make up with him. If given the chance he doesn’t even know if he would go back to the way things were before Benji decided to bang Eliott. He just doesn’t know anything anymore.
“You’re better than he is.” Lucas glances at him absently, interrupting his train of depressing thoughts to focus on Eliott. “In bed.”
A few years back he’d have blushed and awkwardly laughed it off, but on the other hand, a few years back he would probably not have received a compliment on his prowess in bed. As it is, it just makes him snort and shake his head. “Right. Thanks,” then he mutters: “I can cross it from the list of things that might have driven him in your bed then.”
He’s not aiming to be an asshole or to hurt Eliott’s feelings, and spectacularly enough it goes as planned — Eliott even spares him a huff that resembles a laugh. “Ever thought that it might be on him? And not on you?”
“That’s not the first thing that comes to my mind, no.”
“Well, you should.”
“Right.” They stay quiet for a moment, and Lucas focuses on the label on the empty bottle that he circles absent-mindedly with his fingers. “I should go. Believe it or not but- that’s not what I came here for.” He already can’t believe something like that would happen to him in the first place, it’s not like he could possibly plan it beforehand.
“Unbelievable, really,” Eliott hums sarcastically.
Lucas rewards him with a kick in the ribs and a grumbled ‘shut up’, and after another minute, he braces enough courage to sit up. He feels like he’s overstayed anyway, at this point he really wants to get five minutes to register what the hell happened today. He grabs his discarded underwear and slides them on, then starts putting his clothes back on one item after the other. For some reason, the sound his fly makes when he zips it up makes the whole ordeal seem almost obscene, where being naked in bed with a near-stranger didn’t a second ago.
“You’re gonna kick him out I hope.”
Lucas glances behind his shoulder, halfway through putting his shoes on. “Hopefully.” He ponders his next question. “So that means you’re going to kick him out too?”
“There are other guys in Paris,” he says after a moment. “I like him a lot less since this morning, for some reason.”
Lucas huffs and stands up from the side of the bed to grab his hoodie. “I guess it’s a big enough town for us to never find ourselves in a situation like this again,” he eventually says after putting it back on. It feels somewhat awkward that Eliott hasn’t moved at all, still looking perfect between those anthracite sheets that have seen far too much of Lucas already.
“I guess so, yeah,” he nods.
Lucas presses his lips together, hesitating, and with an awkward wave of the hand, he pulls himself further away from the bed, stepping outside the bedroom. He still needs to pick up his phone, but he thinks he might have left it on the coffee table before they jumped each other on the couch after downing three quarters of the Tequila bottle in fifteen minutes.
“Lucas?”, Eliott’s voice calls out as he’s nearly in the living-room already. Lucas backtracks diligently and glances in the bedroom to find Eliott sitting on his bed. “There’s one thing we can’t take from Benji though. He’s got great taste.”
It should be hurting but somehow it’s not. He’s not over it. Not anywhere near. He still wants to smash things, he still wants to yell and scream and shout until Benji realizes he’s been an asshole, and he still holds a grudge on his friends for hiding the truth. He still doesn’t know how he’s going to deal with the apartment thing, where he’s going to live from now on once they’d have settled it all, and how he’s going to rebuild everything Benji managed to turn to shreds because he just can’t keep it in his pants.
But at least- at least he doesn’t hate Eliott. And as insane as it may sound, he doesn’t regret today. He doesn’t regret meeting him. And the sex- Well, no, he can’t bring himself to regret it either.
Lucas gives him half a smile, which turns into a full-on smile when Eliott grins back at him. “He really does,” he says, and he’s almost contrite as he makes his way to the front door after getting his phone back, because it’s not like they’re supposed to meet again and he’s not sure why this particular thought has even a place among all the others.
*
They do meet again.
A couple months down the road. They meet when Lucas is no longer the deceived boyfriend and Eliott is no longer the unintended other man.
And they meet again.
And again.
And many more times after that.