PARIS IS PERFECT. DAN will look back on the two nights and three days and know he experienced true happiness and will always be grateful for that.

Atticus has been before, of course, and whizzes him round galleries and cafés, filling him with culture and coffee as dark as treacle. They hold hands and kiss in public places. Dan has never been touched so much in his life. Atticus constantly has a hand on his knee, or the bottom of his spine. Dan jokes that he isn’t going anywhere, but Atticus doesn’t laugh, just holds him tighter.

On soft sheets in a breezy hotel room, Atticus asks Dan how often he’s counted since they’ve been away. Dan says, ‘A bit,’ and tries to tell him how counting helps him, how it keeps him on the grid he likes to live in. When Atticus asks what his own number is on the map, Dan tells him he’s no number, he’s the winning coordinates in a board game of Battleships. Row C, line six. Hit.

‘You sank my floating fortress, Atticus.’

He’ll have to make up for the missed training sessions and the croissants when he gets home, but it’ll be worth it. The crème brûlée and the tartes framboise, sweet and sour on his tongue, will always remind him of Atticus.

Atticus buys Dan a scarf that costs more than Dan makes in a week. He finds it in a shop full of scented candles and things that no one needs but people desire anyway: peacock feathers, glass coffee-tables, sheepskin throws. Dan tries to refuse but Atticus is adamant. He tells Dan it’s to keep him warm when he can’t, and there it is again, a brief acknowledgement of their impending doom. Dan doesn’t have words to show what the scarf means, can only clutch Atticus to him by the Seine and think of how falling in love is a bit like drowning.

They wander until their feet ache, smiling at strangers. Dan wonders what they look like together. He sees them as an odd pairing, but when they lie together, their curves bend and fold into one another, as if they were two spoons cast from the same mould.

In a moment of bravery, Dan stops a pretty girl with long red hair and asks her to take their photo. They push their heads close together for the shot.

Just before the flash goes off, Atticus turns his mouth to Dan’s ear and whispers, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t die before I met you.’

In the photo, Atticus’s hair is blown back by the breeze, and although Dan’s smile is slightly wonky, it is also wonderful.