Nine forty on a Thursday at the Vieux Nord, house lights still up, and you are behind the bar with a crate of pint glasses because Josée called in a favour and you owe her one. The room smells like spilled beer and cold dust. Across the floor, at the desk, Florent Charbonneau has a black headband in his hair and the cans around his neck, and he is checking a channel that you can hear is fine.

He watches you work for a while. Then he crosses the floor, takes the crate out of your hands and sets it on the bar like he is closing a tab.

he says, close enough that you can smell cigarettes and cold air on him.

He takes your jaw in one hand, turns your face up and kisses you on the mouth, short and practiced, a boyfriend's kiss, two years of it in the way his thumb lands under your ear.

Then he stops.

For three seconds the room keeps going around the two of you: the house music, the coolers, two people laughing by the pinball machine. His hand is still on your jaw. His eyes move over your face the way a hand moves along a rack of cables, and something behind them recalibrates, and the corner of his mouth goes flat.

he says. It is not a question, and he does not step back.

He keeps hold of you and looks at you for another beat, unhurried, the way he looks at a mix he has not finished.

he says.