(belated valentines post for two of my favourite little wayward shits. be warned for: harsh language, slurs, mentions of drug abuse, sh and suicide, and most of all toxic and abusive relationships)
February 14th, present day, 3:14AM
Montmartre, Paris, France
“Ça va, chéri?”
The young man turned to the woman standing in the balcony’s doorway, clearly a little startled. “Hé oui, ça va,” he replied, after taking the slim cigarette out of his mouth and blowing out the smoke. He leaned back on the railings.
The woman approached him, ruffling his curled hair. She sighed.
“Marcel… T’es sûr? Il y a un carton entier de cigarettes dans le cendar.”
“Y a rien.”
“Eh bien, si tu le dis.” She lifted up Marcel’s chin, planting a gentle kiss on his forehead. Positioning herself next to him, she held her partner’s hand over the railings, tracing around his knuckles through their intertwined fingers.
Thin smoke emitted from Marcel’s cigarette almost separated the two, the ashen grey adding to the distance between them. It was cold outside, yet fairly lacking when it came to wind, so the screen stayed a little longer before dissipating.
It was clear neither of them were dressed for the night chill. A simple peignoir hung over Marcel’s shoulders, with only his boxers underneath. With the sleeves rolled up above his elbows and his chest bare, it didn’t leave much to the imagination in terms of his naked body.
Although the appearance of bruised skin and pin-prick scars was something he found unsightly a few years -a few decades- ago, nowadays he felt like mistakes of times past and their marks on him were too banal to care about.
He wished that his school of thought worked out more often, though. Even if his breakdowns over the simplest of things had been on a steep decline for a long time now, whenever he was aloof and anything which reminded him of his messiest years happened, he couldn’t help but feel like tearing himself apart.
He glared at his partner through the smokescreen. With the blur, she was still as beautiful as ever. Diane, he thought, how did you ever end up with me? Through her thin nightgown, he was able to see the thin outlines of her body, an effect he could best describe as tastefully nude. Her blonde hair draped over the curves of her body accentuated them further.
“Mais tu fixes!” Diane giggled.
“Ah ouais. Désolé.
“Vas-y,” she continued, taking a step back, “je m’en fiche.”
Marcel laughed, and turned away to hide his flushed face.
“I know what you like after 30 years of being together, hm? Now, melancholy man, since I’ve got you to laugh, let’s be sincere this time. What’s bothering you, dear?”
Marcel sighed, he’d been had. He crushed the cigarette butt in the ashtray, fixing his hair with his other hand.
“Look, Diane,” he leant in close and whispered, “I really, really hate Valentine’s Day.”
February 14th, 1990
Le Rayol, Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, France
“Are you just going to sit there and not even say anything?”
“No.”
“After what you just f- you know what? If you don’t want to be here, how about you just leave?”
“Maybe.”
The mood in the room was tense, to say the least. Diane watched the erratic movements of Marcel through her overgrown bangs while she remained on the couch. One of the best parts of living in a small seaside town was the amount of people living there, a calm bunch who tended to be just as malleable and easy-going as the sea itself; yet it also meant that getting what you needed wasn’t always possible from the town’s marketplace, like a nice haircut -the only barber was an old man who spoke in some unintelligible dialect of French, and she wasn’t too sure if she wanted to trust him with her hair at the moment- and she often had to drive to the nearest city. Getting things mailed was too much of a hassle with how isolated her home was from the others. It was a refurbished, two-story hostel that only required a five-minute walk to get to the beach, but the town was another story.
Oh, and, of course. The distance kept her from being separated from her boyfriend, well, was it “boyfriend” anymore? She didn’t know, and didn’t want to. In fact, she wasn’t sure she had any feelings for him anymore. What a goddamn piece of shit, she thought.
Normally, when Marcel freaked out like this, it meant that he was having another depressive episode. Although exhausting, she had decided that it was worth it to live through them together. After all, while he was stable, Marcel was one of the most loving guys she’d ever known. In fact, he was the only man she had committed to. So that’s why Diane took care of him throughout the months he’d been here. Taking him out to the beach, letting him isolate when he needed it. Sometimes a breath of fresh air was the last push he needed to help him get out of a slump.
Unfortunately, it had been absolutely pouring that day, so going to the seaside was out of the question. And on top of that, this was the worst he’d been in years, easily. She was aware that Marcel was acting out of character lately, being more irritable and snappy, all that. When she’d asked him about it earlier, she had been shrugged off. And now look at where they were. This was the last drop, making her realise that she really didn’t want him around anymore.
As Marcel paced about the room, albeit slowly, due to his crutches, Diane noted him stopping and picking away at his scabs, and the bloody stains they left on his fingers. “Stop that,” formed within her lips, but she stopped herself just as quickly. If he wanted to leave scars that badly, who was she to stop him? The sound the crutches made on hardwood formed a click-clack beat, and she found herself somewhat fascinated by him.
His hair, which he used to straighten regularly while they still lived together in Paris, stood upon his head like a bird’s nest. He had taken whatever he had left in that old crackhouse of an apartment that he lived in, and his clothes reflected that- an ill-fitting tank top and loose sweatpants. This was one of the sorrier states she’d seen him in, which wasn’t saying a lot; but when doubled with the crooked frown on his face and his shaky movement, it definitely drew a lot more attention than usual.
“Look at yourself. You’re terrible.”
Marcel perked up immediately at her remark, wiping away the blood on his fingers.
“You know what I’ll do? I’m going to call Lucien, right now-“ he said, hobbling over to the landline, “-and telling him all that you’ve done to me.”
Diane realised that she might’ve seemed taken aback, as Marcel rolled his eyes and turned to dial a number with his hands trembling, either out of rage or withdrawals- she didn’t know anymore.
“Oh, yeah. Just don’t forget to tell your stupid faggot boyfriend that you casually threatened to kill me and then yourself. Let’s see how he takes that.”
“If it weren’t for you being a bitch, I would’ve never said that! I… I fucking hate it here… Mais il fait quoi, le salaud? Espèce de merde!” Marcel slammed the receiver on the stand, as the call went straight to voicemail.
“He isn’t picking up. Because he’s a retarded junkie like you. He’s tripping right now, I bet, at some shitty house-party, and you don’t even know.”
“Me? Him? What about you, you… you… coked-up slut? Everybody knows, everybody- and you think you can talk about me so easy? You haven’t been in my life in months, you don’t know anything!”
“Trust me, I do. After picking out broken hypos from inside your arms, I know! If it isn’t the needles, you’re gonna get AIDS from that fag and the thirty men he passes around as his dates.”
“Shut up, dyke.”
“Bloody hell…”
“You’re nothing, Diane. Fucking nothing. You’re nothing to me. Sale pute…”
Diane sighed, and got up to leave. Her hands searched blindly for the cigarettes in her cargo pants, stained with paint and ink. She’d have to wash them soon, she remarked, alongside cleaning up all of the mess that the fight between them had created. Like the ashtray she had swept off the coffee table in a rage. It all happened so suddenly. Marcel was his normal self, if not a bit jumpy, but she’d just assumed he was going through another one of his withdrawal symptoms.
They’d had a few laughs together, watching a shitty game show on the TV, and he’d suddenly got… very confrontational, unnaturally so. And before she knew it, he’d let go of her hand, and refused to speak. When she demanded to know what the hell he was doing, he laughed in her face and started listing off nonsensical things: from years bygone and recent, all of them equally forgettable and partially made up. He’d offered it to her like a list of offences that she had no idea of.
Maybe I was unreasonable?
Well, she was the one to get it physical, for sure. She knew that Marcel couldn’t compare to her in terms of physique, but… just in case. She had jumped up and knocked the table from between them. Which in turn, rightfully caused Marcel to get more aggravated. And it was downhill from there. Insults, this, that… In the end, he’d said the whole thing about killing himself… Diane wasn’t sure of how serious that was. He was having a breakdown, sure, but something seemed really off to her. Not to mention that this was the first time he’d held it over her head.
No, not at all…
“Quand je te regarde, je vois un salopard, qui a été toujours un salopard, et sera probablement toujours un salopard.”
“Ne me menace pas, espèce de salope incompétente.” Marcel shot back. Diane, from the side of her vision, could see him sitting on the floor with his crutches fallen to his sides. He had opened the liquor cabinet and was scrambling through the bottles neatly stacked inside. He noisily dragged a half-full bottle of whisky out, before slamming it shut.
“Tu vas boire tout ça?”
“…” Marcel remained silent. There was one thing Diane couldn’t see, and those were the tears slowly forming at the sides of his eyes.
“On dirait un toxico qui attend sa prochaine piqûre… tu te défoncerais avec n’importe quoi, hein?” Diane wondered if she had gone too far, now, upon realising the impact of her words. Marcel was hunched over the bottle, trying to get it open through teary eyes and shaking hands. She almost… wanted to help him. Almost. She held onto the door frame with one hand.
“J’espère que ça va m’assommer.”
Upon getting the bottle open, Marcel struggled to get up to his feet. Dragging himself back on the couch instead, he took the heavy thing of whisky to his mouth and drank what Diane could only assume was a heavy dose. Yeah, that’d get him very drunk, very fast, and likely terrifyingly hungover by tomorrow.
She wished she could take the damned thing from his hands and just put him in bed instead, where he could calm down a bit, and they’d cuddle, and everything would get better. But her mind said otherwise, with the hate and grudge she’d held onto, and she muttered angrily under her breath: “Tu mourras avec une aiguille dans le bras.”
Marcel hadn’t even heard her, as she left quickly afterwards for her room. Everything hurt, his joints ached, and it felt like his head was being split. And the routine all-over trembles he got did not help the situation one bit. To satiate the dryness in his mouth, he chugged more from the bottle- and then some more. He thought he could see Diane’s silhouette looking inside from the far-end of the corridor. The taste of alcohol burned his throat and blurred his vision.
He had told himself that he’d persist, not break down and cry, just for once. Yet here he was, useless and fucked up as ever, the smell of whisky melding with his thoughts, and tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t stay here anymore. This wasn’t his home, and it hadn’t ever been.
A junk-head does not drink while on heroin. As expected, Marcel hadn’t drunk in a good, long time, and it didn’t take much for him to start fading out. He tried to choke down his sobs as he let the empty bottle go out of his hand, and spill whatever little was left inside on the carpet. He reclined on the couch and put one arm over his eyes to hopefully soothe his aching head.
Just then, Diane walked back inside- partially out of worry. She tapped the shoulder of the disaster laying on her couch. “Tourne-toi.”
“N…non.”
“Vers moi.”
“…”
“Va juste au lit. Tu fais beaucoup de bruit.” And with that, she left once again, and Marcel did not make a single effort to move to his bedroom.
February 14th, present day, 4:38AM
Montmartre, Paris, France
“Is that better?” Diane asked. Marcel’s face remained buried inside his hands and he nodded. The two had moved into the living room, where she’d allowed him to lay on her lap and let everything out, while she held him and played with his hair. “It’s not like I care much, either,” she continued, “Valentine’s… it’s not a thing we celebrate. We haven’t, and we won’t.”
“I feel bad when I see those people going by, hand in hand, you know. It’s like I’ve failed you. The only thing I remember, ever, is that day.”
“Marcel, p’tit cul, when have we ever been a normal couple? You worry too much over these sorts of things.”
“I guess you’re right…”
“Don’t give me those haphazard answers! I want you to know, I don’t care, and you shouldn’t either. I’m glad to have you, and most of all, to have an honest you that comes clear about his feelings.”
Marcel buried his face in her chest, cradling her from the back, and locking her in a sloppy hug. “I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you… and you’re the best for me.”
“Oh, sappy bastard.”
“This is what I get when I’m nice for once?”
“No, stupid. This is what you get-” She pulled him in for a kiss, which was something he couldn’t refuse at this point, and as the two embraced, everything was a little better, even for a glimpse of a moment. They kept going until they felt out of breath.
“That was the best kiss I’ve had in years.” Marcel pulled back, grinning. His hands rested on her hips, and neither of them could deny the tense warmth anymore. Diane reached over and caressed his cheek with one hand, with the other one resting dangerously close to that certain spot.
“Mm… do you want to put on some music, since it’s time for dirty dancing?”
“Vas-y.” he responded, sultrily.
And with that, hidden smiles marking the corners of their lips, the couple had their first proper Valentine’s in years.
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