When Nicolas lay on top of me, I thought of Axelle, and how it felt when we kissed, when her soft mouth moved against mine. Her lips. Our kiss ebbed and flowed and, when Axelle slipped her fingers into parts of my body, and I into hers, we absorbed one another.

This act with Nicolas was repellent. His rough face, his darting tongue. Penetration was a demolition. With hammer and chisel he tore away at my walls, filling the air with the dust of me.

After the first time, Nicolas wasn’t satisfied and so I was summoned again and again, half a dozen times at least, always under threat of exposure. Each time, I would leave the apartment with a stack of newspapers to sell, my alibi, and then there I would be, unresponsive beneath this boy-man who was scrawny and sweat-damp and quaking, with a body practically hairless and clammy skin that smelled of cold ham. His penis was like a blind, infant bird.

My body remained in the bed, but I. I sailed out of the window and over the slate rooftops of Paris, where the long buildings looked from above like an armada of ships adrift. I passed over Sacré-Coeur and the glass houses of La Villette where strawberries and cucumbers and cabbages grew in winter, warmed by beds of horse manure. I continued east, beyond the fortification wall, where horses cantered in the cropped and frosty winter fields and crystal ponds mirrored the sun in fractured light. Stands of leafless trees cast their skeleton shadows on the ground, bones scattered, and I.

And I. Smoke billowed from village chimneys and I flew right through it, cleansed.

Eventually, I would find the river again. Find it and follow it back into the city. The clanking, clopping, chuffing, dancing, steaming, caterwauling city. I wheeled and tumbled, spat, swore, leapt from chimney pot to chimney pot. I hovered by a balcony where a little girl sat, plucking white petals off a daisy, reciting the prophetic verse: Il m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout. The daisy head was scalped bald and the girl dispassionately flicked the limp, unadorned flower over the balcony railing, as it appeared the object of her desire loved her not at all. The naked, dead-body flower turned slowly as it fell to the maelstrom below, where it was caught in the hooves of a passing horse and stamped into the shit.

The last time we were together in that hotel, Nicolas cried, pressing his beak into my neck, claiming his tortured love. He was going away. The Compagnons had decided to give him another chance, and were sending him to Marseille. I almost felt sorry for him, his cheeks grisly with spots. Trembling, he promised that when his tour was complete, he would come back to Paris and marry me. I remained silent and kept my face to the wall, while he sloppily pecked at my ear. And when we parted that day, I walked home through the streets of Montmartre, elevated above the city, thinking I would never have to see him again. Thinking, like an idiot, that Axelle might love me if I told her what I’d done for us.