O QUE RESTOU DE NÓS

Claim Me

Adrian

The following day, Julian called at four in the afternoon, just as Adrian finished reading the same paragraph of a contract for the third time, pretending he was doing it out of diligence.

“Have dinner with me?”

Adrian looked out his office window. Below, the city was slowly lighting up, and somewhere in that city was a baby's room with just the right lighting and a name printed on a page.

“Where?”

Julian named the restaurant, one of those places where the tables were so far apart that no one could overhear anyone else.

“You've been impossible to get hold of lately.”

“I've been working.”

“You've always worked,” Julian replied, with the low laugh Adrian had known for more than twenty years. “Eight, then.”

When the call ended, Adrian noticed that Léo's magazine, which he had borrowed without asking, was still in his briefcase beside the computer. He didn't open it. Instead, he tried to think about Julian, and what came to mind was a corridor.

An afternoon in the weeks following the divorce. The executive floor almost deserted. A conference room door standing slightly ajar. A man on the other side, speaking quietly on the phone, his back turned, his face hidden, carefully keeping his voice low enough that his words wouldn't carry through the wood.

I paid for what I asked for. Things got out of hand.

Adrian had walked past without stopping, a folder beneath his arm and his mind occupied with something else. The words had only returned to him later, when Camille, speaking over the phone in the dry tone of someone presenting a bill, told him the rest: the dressing over Mael's eyebrow, the bandaged hand Adrian hadn't seen because he hadn't turned around.

Two men went after him. He ran.

She had said ran, and Adrian had heard the verb as though it belonged to a language he had once studied and forgotten.

Adrian closed the file on his screen. There was nothing connecting the two incidents, and he knew it. He had dealt with enough contracts to distinguish evidence from something he merely wanted to believe.

But since the early hours of the morning, the two memories had insisted on arriving together, arm in arm, like two people who knew each other.

---

Julian was already at the restaurant when Adrian arrived, seated at a table near the back, his back to the wall, an empty wineglass before him.

“Two minutes late.”

“You'll survive.”

“I'm not sure. I'm feeling neglected.”

For most of the meal, they talked the way they always had, which was the easiest way: work, mutual acquaintances, the absurd story of a businessman who had bought an island only to discover it was a sandbank.

Being with Julian was easy. It always had been. Perhaps that was why Adrian took so long to notice the conversation changing direction.

“Are you going to the Beaumonts' dinner on Friday?”

“Probably.”

“Alone?”

Adrian looked up. Julian was cutting a piece of fish with the careful attention of a man who had no interest in the fish.

“I hadn't thought about it.”

“I have. I want to go with you.”

“Then go.”

“With you, Adrian.”

The distinction was in his tone, and they both knew it. Adrian picked up his wine, took a longer sip than necessary, and answered, “All right,” the word he used when he wanted to buy time without promising anything.

Julian watched him for several seconds before setting down his cutlery with a delicate clink.

“That's not the same thing.”

“What's the difference?”

A short, humorless laugh escaped Julian.

“Are you really going to make me explain?”

“I'm asking.”

“Since I came back, we've had dinner together, gone out together. You come to my place, I come to yours. When we're alone, everything seems perfectly clear. The moment someone else walks into the room, it stops being clear.”

“My personal life has never been anyone else's business.”

“I'm not asking for an interview. I'm asking to stop having to guess where I stand.”

He leaned forward, his voice dropping to something almost intimate.

“When I came back, you were still married. I understood, genuinely, that things would be complicated. But Mael signed the papers. The divorce is final. He's left your house. So I want to know what we're doing now.”

“We're together.”

“Are we?”

Adrian frowned.

“You think we're not?”

“I think we are when we're alone. I came back believing there was still something between us, and you made it perfectly clear I wasn't wrong. But now I don't know whether you want to build something with me or whether we're simply picking up the pieces of what existed before I left. I didn't come back to be a convenient memory.”

“I've never treated you that way.”

“Then tell me what I am to you.”

His silence lasted longer than it should have, and Adrian heard his own hesitation as though it belonged to someone else.

“You're with me.”

“Then why doesn't anyone know?”

“Because I don't go around announcing who I sleep with.”

Julian's expression hardened.

“I'm not talking about sex.”

“I know.”

“Are you sure?” Julian drew a breath. “I want to arrive at a dinner with you, Adrian. Leave through the same door. I want you to stop finding an elegant way to change the subject whenever someone asks whether we're together. You do it all the time.”

“I never—”

“You do. I've noticed. I'm not asking for publicity. I'm asking not to feel hidden. Acknowledge me as your partner.”

The words fell between their plates, simple and bare, and Adrian recognized something in them that unsettled him more than the demand itself: they were reasonable.

There was a difference between public exposure and having a place where one belonged. And he knew, without admitting it, that during three years of marriage he had offered Mael very little of either.

“I want to know whether there's something waiting to be resolved before you decide you can be with me,” Julian continued.

“There isn't.”

“Good. Then why does it feel as though there is?”

Adrian had no answer. Julian looked down at the table again, and when he spoke, he seemed to be talking to himself.

“While Mael still hadn't signed, I understood.”

It was a small remark, almost an afterthought.

But Adrian remembered the messages Julian had sent during those weeks, one after another, each containing a brief question.

Has he signed yet?

Any news?

What's he waiting for?

“You were in quite a hurry for him to sign.”

“Of course I was.” Julian looked up without hesitation. “I'd just come back and found you trapped in a marriage you yourself said was over. I left while I was still in love with you, Adrian. Then I came back and discovered you were married to someone who'd loved you even before I left. Yes, it bothered me.”

Adrian held his gaze.

“I knew Mael had feelings for you back then,” Julian continued. “I'd known for a long time, before you married him. So I come back, find the two of you together, and you expect me to look at that without feeling anything?”

“I didn't expect anything from you.”

“But I felt it. Jealousy, anger, maybe even resentment. Pick whichever word you prefer. I wanted that marriage to end. I wanted you free. I wanted to know whether there was still a place for me. I'm not going to lie about that just to make myself look better.”

The frankness surprised Adrian more than a denial would have.

It was a plausible explanation. More than that, it fit everything he knew about the situation.

Julian had left. He had returned years later. He had found Adrian married to a man who loved him, then discovered Adrian still wanted him.

Why wouldn't he have been impatient?

“You wanted the divorce too,” Julian said. “You're the one who put the papers in front of him. So I don't understand why you're talking as though I did something wrong by wanting him to sign.”

“I didn't say you did.”

“But you're thinking it.”

“I'm trying to remember.”

“Remember what?”

Adrian raised his eyes.

The corridor returned in its entirety: the man with his back turned, the half-open door, the low voice.

He could ask.

He could say, Someone went after him on the day he signed, and watch Julian's face.

He didn't.

“That time.”

Julian waited for more, but nothing came.

“You've been acting strangely.”

“You've already said that.”

“Because you still are.”

Adrian poured wine for both of them and said perhaps he was tired.

Julian repeated, “Perhaps?” with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

They returned to other subjects, but the ease that had marked the beginning of the evening never fully returned.

---

Outside, Julian walked with him to the car. The street was damp, the sidewalk lights blurred in small puddles.

“Think about the Beaumonts' dinner.”

“I will.”

“I'm not asking you to marry me,” Julian said.

Adrian stopped with his hand on the door handle.

Julian noticed.

“It was just an expression.”

“I know.”

“I just want to stop looking like someone you meet when no one's watching.”

There was some truth in that, at least in part.

Over the years, Adrian had imagined more than once what it would be like if Julian returned. The problem was that none of those imagined versions contained an afterward.

Julian came back. Adrian had him again.

And the scene ended there, with music.

Reality continued the next morning, with schedules, board meetings, and people watching.

“I'll think about it,” he repeated.

Julian stepped closer and kissed him.

Adrian kissed him back, neither out of habit nor pity. He wanted that kiss. He knew Julian's taste, the way his hand lingered for a moment on Adrian's coat collar afterward.

“Let me know when you get home.”

“I will.”

He got into the car. Julian remained on the sidewalk until he drove away.

At the first red light, Adrian rested a hand on the steering wheel and tried to picture the Beaumonts' dinner: the reception hall, the camera flashes, Julian beside him, his hand resting in the crook of Adrian's arm, the conversations that would begin in whispers.

Not hiding anything.

That was what should happen.

Perhaps it was what he'd wanted ever since learning Julian was coming back.

The light turned green, and Adrian drove on.

A few blocks later, Julian's words resurfaced.

I wanted that marriage to end.

Nothing strange about that.

Adrian had wanted it too.

But alongside those words came another sentence, and his hands tightened around the steering wheel.

I paid for what I asked for.

No.

One conversation wasn't connected to the other simply because his mind had decided to place them side by side. If he started suspecting Julian because of half a dozen words overheard out of context, he would be making exactly the kind of judgment he had spent his life despising in others.

He kept driving.

In the building's parking garage, with the engine switched off, he sent Julian the word he'd requested.

Home.

The reply arrived before Adrian had lifted his thumb from the screen: a small, tired heart, like someone who had just won an argument he hadn't known he was having.

Adrian didn't go upstairs.

He remained in the car, the phone glowing in his hand, and opened his call history without consciously deciding to.

He scrolled backward, week by week, until he reached the night Mael had signed.

There it was.

A single entry, with a name that had never needed an explanation.

Julian — 11:16 p.m. — 41 minutes.

He remembered the front door opening in the middle of that call.

He remembered the sound of someone entering slowly because every step came at a cost, Mael's reflection in the window, standing at the threshold of the living room, his mouth moving to begin a sentence.

He remembered his own shoulder, which hadn't turned.

And his own voice, so calm, so occupied.

Later.

Julian had heard the door open from the other end of the line.

He had heard later.

And not once during the forty-one minutes that followed had he asked who had come in.