# Writing > Short Story Sharing >  Cheat (a short-story)

## DieterM

Céline wished me good luck for the meeting. 'You look a bit tired, honey,' she added.

'Do I?' I asked with a fake pout. 'I suppose it's because I really don't like Mondays.' That made her laugh. She tenderly touched my cheek.

'I'll call you at lunch-time,' I said. 'I'll tell you what is what, okay?' Then, I kissed her on her lips. She smelled of oranges and jasmine.

***

It was one of those treacherous January mornings. A soft, warm breeze sweeping though the dusty streets brought the false fragrance of impending springtime. I knew our hopes would be deceived as soon as the temperatures would drop again to the normal, seasonal cold. Yet, I couldn't help but enjoy the current warmth, the deceitful magic floating in the air.

Magic such as this couldn’t last.

***

The métro was crammed, as usual. I took a place in the corner. A fat, blonde woman stood by my side. She was talking loudly and endlessly on her phone. I increased the volume of my IPod. 'By the mountain / I feel nothing,' PJ Harvey was singing. I silently cursed myself because I had forgotten my book at home. Reading always distracted me from these unpleasant surroundings. Reading took my mind off the problems ahead. That darn meeting… I didn't want to think about it. 

'The first tree will not blossom', I heard over my headphones. I stared out through the dirty métro door pane. The station moved on, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Finally it disappeared, replaced by a dark tunnel. Black walls and tiny lamps swept past my eyes. 

What would we talk about, Garnier and I? Garnier was the head of department. We would talk about my performance last month, certainly. It had been okay but not outstanding. But he had announced that we were going to discuss my future within the company. My career was at stake this morning. I knew it. Promotion or blame? Nervousness began to rush through my veins as PJ finished with 'Since you betrayed me so' and started her chilling wail.

***

At Chatelet, even more people rushed in. I felt like a sardine in its tin coffin. An older man, expensive Armani-suit, musky perfume (Dior? I wondered), snooty attitude, pressed his umbrella into my ribs. My gaze wandered over the fellow passengers in the métro. If curiosity really killed the cat, I’d have been leading the life of a zombie for many years now. Curiosity kept me alive, though. What else was there to existence?

The atmosphere was subdued, tired. People read the newspapers, people were shielded from the noisy reality with headphones, music, whatever. Everything looked so typically, unexcitingly Monday-ish.

***

There, right in front of me, almost upon me, a young man with long, curly hair. All I could see was his bare neck. He had pinned up his brown curls with a pair of chopsticks. I had to admit that it was a very graceful neck. Its skin looked white and young and lush and delicate. A beautiful curve led from the shoulder-bones up to the lower hairline. Had it been a woman's neck, why, I could have been tempted to place my lips on that smooth yet taunt surface. But it was only a young man's.

Beautiful, still. Inspiring. I shook my head in disbelief as soon as these thoughts had echoed through my mind.

The young man turned his head and I discovered a handsome, calm profile. He must be in his early twenties, I guessed. Soft, full lips; a determined, angular chin; masculine cheeks, clean-shaven yet faintly shadowed by an already re-growing beard's stubble. How young he looked! Young, unwrinkled, unworried.

‘She’s running to stand / still…,’ I heard Bono’s voice.

I leant forwards and studied my own, pale reflection in the door pane. A thirtyish man in a suit and a grey coat looked quizzically back at me. Hair short. Brimless glasses. Was that really me? I knew my face by heart but it looked so different, this morning. 'You look tired,' Céline had said only half an hour ago. I couldn't distinguish the pale man's exact features but he did seem a bit… weary perhaps?

My thoughts and my gaze became unfocused. Then, I felt the stare of someone else. A magnet. My reflection locked eyes with the young man’s in front of me. After a second or so, his mirror-image smiled broadly at mine.

An uneasy hotness crept up my face. I tried to look elsewhere but my eyes were drawn back again and again to his eyes, those inviting eyes reflected in the door-pane. They seemed to laugh at me, seemed to sparkle, seemed to glint. The young man’s expression was set, not smiling anymore, yet I thought I detected the traces of a smirk. Stations went by, people stepped out, people rushed in, songs and singers’ voices changed in my headphones. We gauged each other, repeatedly, silently, like two competitors. As if our glances could lead us somewhere.

I didn't even know why I felt like that.

***

At La Défense, I harshly said 'Pardon!', pushed past the young man and stepped out. The train left. With determined, powerful, fast steps, I walked out of the station. I stood on the unsheltered concrete plain, with the familiar, huge skyscrapers around me. I had the impression that they attempted to tickle the low-hanging grey cloud-sky, this morning. I took out a cigarette, inhaled the smoke with what? Relief? Disappointment? I didn't understand my reaction; I didn't even understand what I was reacting at.

Marylin Manson was singing 'But all the drugs in this world / won't save her from herself…'

Then, I felt someone lightly touch my shoulder.

I turned. The young man with the curly hair and the delicate neck stood before me, smiling, saying something. Wisps of his hair were dancing around the frame of his serene and beaming face. 'Huh?' I mumbled and took off my headphones.

'Marylin Manson? That's neat…,' the young man laughed. 'You must be the only yuppie who listens to Marylin Manson, I suppose.'

'Yes? And?' I asked, so baffled that my voice sounded impolite, hostile.

He continued smiling. 'And? Nothing,' he simply stated. 'I wanted to talk to you. I watched you in the métro. I saw you watching me, too.'

I just stood there, said nothing, stared at his full lips, his pale face, his smile.

After a moment of awkward silence, the young man added, ‘I liked what I saw. Still do.' Another broad smile. He was obviously coming on to me. Still, his face looked so innocent that it smoothed things.

'You work here, too?' I finally managed to ask.

'Not at all. I only wanted to look at the buildings,' the young man nodded vaguely in direction of the Arche de la Défense. 'I'm a student,' he said as if this was meant to explain it all: his métro trip, his gazes, this bizarre encounter; even the inhuman, un-Parisian ugliness of the place; even the warm wind that made his long curls flicker over his face.

'Well…,' I said. 'I gotta go.' I tried to lighten up. ‘Earn cash. Just, y’know, the average yuppie’s lot.’

'Okay,' the young man shrugged. 'Have a nice day, then.'

Couldn't he have been a bit more disappointed?

I held him back. 'What's your name?' I asked. To my own astonishment, I noticed that my voice was slightly trembling.

'Cédric,' he said.

Without thinking, I wrote my phone number on my métro ticket. 'That's my mobile number. You can call me,' I said.

He nodded, a long finger caressing the ticket's salmon-coloured paper.

'Call me,' I repeated. Then, I entered the office building. I still felt him gazing after me. But when I turned to look out of the glass door, he had already disappeared in the morning crowd.

***

I had braced myself for bad news. I had prepared myself, psychologically, for victory or defeat. Oh, such irony! Life would never cease to surprise me.

At 11 a.m., I took the elevator to the ground floor and stepped outside. The office building rose behind me, forbidden, never-ending, a modern citadel made of concrete and glass and false hopes. I lit a cigarette and called Céline. ‘Hi, darling,’ I said.

‘Hi, honey,’ she answered.

‘How’s work?’

‘Well,’ I could hear her shrug, ‘so-so. You know… work. Monday. And you? How did it go?’

‘Garnier’s sick. Our meeting has been postponed.’

‘Oh, poor darling! Now you have to wait some more!’

We chatted on until I had finished my cigarette. I told her that I loved her. She told me she loved me, too.

***

On my way back up to my office, I saw that someone had left me a message. A number I didn’t recognise. ‘Hi handsome stranger,’ the message said. ‘It’s me, Cédric. You asked me to call you. And now, you don’t answer your phone.’ I heard a giggle. ‘Such a brave yuppie you are! Anyway, I’m free this afternoon. If you want, we can… have a drink together?’ Then, he gave me an address in the 4th arrondissement. ‘It’s up to you, man. Either you want to be braver than the average yuppie. Or… whatever. See you. Maybe.’ He had hung up in the middle of a warm, full laugh.

***

I left the office at 3 p.m. Still not really knowing why. I pretended I had forgotten a very important appointment with one of our partners. Nobody asked further questions, anyway. They were busy getting on with their own lives, their own jobs, their own careers.

***

Fewer people in the métro at this early afternoon hour. Radiohead on my IPod. 'We are accidents / Waiting Waiting to happen,' they sang. I felt much too nervous to listen to music and finally switched them off. Yet Thom Yorke’s voice whining ‘Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there…’ wouldn’t leave my mind. Just 'cause you feel it, I was thinking. Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there…

My hands were sweaty, my heart was pounding. Why that? I had strictly no idea. I sat there in the métro, passive yet upset, gazing at the stations pass by without seeing them. 

What the hell was I doing here? What strange drive decided me to go and see that young stranger again? I tried not to think of his voice, his laugh, his delicate neck. I tried to persuade myself that, objectively speaking, a drink would do me a whole lot of good.

Was that really all?

Did I believe me?

And how was I to know?

I didn’t understand myself anymore. Would I grasp it, one day?

The métro tunnels had that feel of some dark and delicious danger looming ahead.

***

Hôtel de Ville. While I was walking down the rue de Rivoli, I sent an SMS. ‘I’m on my way. Still ready for a drink? L’étranger. The stranger’.

Barely a minute later, the SMS-answer bounced back. ‘Waiting for you. I live on the third floor.’

I had been hoping that we’d take a drink in one of the bars.

At least, that’s what I thought I had been hoping.

***

'I'm as good as married, you know,' I said. We were lying on the futon, still naked, sheets crumpled, soft Jazz wafting through the flat. Cédric’s body looked like a Greek marble statue. Toned, hairless, sheer perfection.

'Yeah,' Cédric answered offhandedly and shrugged. 'Thought so.'

'I love my girlfriend,' I said. Then, I added emphatically, 'I'm happy with her, you know…' I propped myself up on one elbow. 'I've never done this before.'

He dragged on his joint and looked at me with sleepy eyes. 'I haven't asked you any questions,' he replied slowly and blew out a fat smoke-cloud. 'And to be honest, I don't really want to know all this, okay?'

'Are you always so…' I searched for the right word. '…so unworried? so carefree?'

'Who says I am, man?' he asked back, genuinely surprised.

'You seem to be,' I said.

'Perception,' he answered after thinking it over for a second. 'I am what you want me to be, right?'

I wasn't sure I understood what he was trying to tell me. 'Will I see you again?' I asked to cover up my perplexity.

'If you want to,' he replied. 'Whatever.' After a short pause, 'Do you?'

I didn't answer and took the joint from him instead. We smoked in silence. Piano tunes fell into the room like teardrops.

'You haven't asked what I was doing for a living,' I finally observed with mild reproach.

'Is that important?' he wanted to know. 'I know you're working in La Défense. You must be one of those Golden Boys, I suppose.'

'And you haven't even asked my name,' I said. His apparently uninterested attitude started to weigh on me. It seemed to spoil everything, somehow.

'Names…,' he simply muttered. 'What can your name tell me about you? I mean, you know, you've shown me all that matters. No?'

I couldn't find a pertinent answer to that one.

***

When I turned the key to my flat, I felt shaken. Stunned. As tortured, melodramatic, contradictory as a Muse-album. I hoped that I didn’t look too transformed. That I didn’t smell of Cédric. I had taken a shower. But didn’t they say a woman could scent betrayal from far away?

I tried to compose my facial features. I breathed heavily, sighed, then opened the door.

Céline was in the kitchen cutting onions. Tears were streaming down her sweet, familiar face. I took her in my arms and kissed her.

‘You’re early,’ she smiled through the tears. ‘And I’m a mess. Sorry, but you know, those onions…’

‘I know,’ I answered, smiling too. ‘And you’re still very pretty!’

‘Nutter,’ she said lovingly. ‘Now let me finish these…’

‘Do you want to marry me?’ I asked.

She turned around, beaming. ‘Wow,’ she gushed. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in marriage!’

‘I love you,’ I said. ‘So? Do you? Want to marry me, I mean?’

‘Oh darling! Of course!’ She kissed me. Then, suddenly very serious, her big green eyes boring into me like x-rays, ‘And you? Do you really want to marry me?’

She was right. I didn’t believe in marriage. Yet, I said, ‘Yes I do,’ my voice steady and convincing. Only then did I felt like an utter jerk, a complete cheater.

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## Jack of Hearts

Ok. J'ai la lit.

Reading this forced the reader to encounter his own homophobia- indeed he was encouraged to quit when he sensed that the story was indeed committed to that particular turn. It seems like that part has been told, only with the role of the young man re-cast from the role of the young woman. But whatever distaste, the reader made it through to the conclusion and was rewarded with a powerful close. It begs the question was the infidelity the cheat or the extreme, insincere reaction to it on the narrator's part. A worthy meditation.

But the meat of this critique is that, as interesting as the conclusion is, the reader feels that the story there is self indulgent and well tried. The young man in this version (and the young lady is so many others) scarcely seems like little more than an object of the narrator's lust (and the author's, by extension) rather than a person. One supposes there are all of these perfect young people out in the world who have some philosophical view of 'no names, no commitment', who move with great beauty and poise, who breathe in the art of zen... and have no personality or dysfunction whatsoever. The character is in the story to be a sex object of two dimensional intrigue. 

The prose itself is largely readable. Perhaps a thinning would help the story a bit. For example:




> ‘Do you want to marry me?’ I asked, out of the blue.


It is probably implicit enough in the conclusion that you could delete 'out of the blue' altogether. There are few spots like this, some worse than others. That sort of clean-up is just an edit away, though. 



J

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## hillwalker

I didn't flinch quite so much as your previous reader - homo-erotic literature is not exactly my favoured genre either but this was subtley written if a little predictable.

The apres-sex scene on the futon came straight out of Hollywood - the yuppie's object of adoration obviously had to have the looks of either a Greek god (though a Norse one would have been a little more original) or a Greek marble statue (presumably of an Olympic athlete rather than Aphrodite)... ok, I'm being a little facetious.

The plot was a little hackneyed - and I'm guessing the narrator was cheating on himself as much as on his wife-to-be. But you did a great job conveying the emotions running through his head (although the internal dialogue did tend to go on at times) and it was possible to sense that the heterosexual relationship was a little strained by the lack of such loving detail when describing Celine.

As Jack says, it would not suffer a degree of trimming - 

*tenderly fondled*, and *kissed her fondly on the lips* : a pair of redundant adverbs if ever I saw one.

Overall, an interesting piece.... and P J Harvey is always good to listen to so why on earth would he need a book to read as well??

H

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## DieterM

@ Jack of Hearts: hm, interesting bit about your homophobia. To be honest, I didn't expect to encounter a disgusted reaction. What I tried to tell was the story of someone cheating, whether it be with a person of the same sex or a person of the opposite sex was rather unimportant to me. Of course, the story is self-indulgent – that was the goal. I'm no moralizer so I simply wanted to describe a scene out of today's life. Having been the victim of someone cheating on me, I've always wanted to come to terms with that old demon of mine. Oh, and talking about all those perfect young people out in the world, well, there are plenty, at least here in Paris. And the almost daily come-ons I encounter have surely triggered off the story I was telling here. As for the critique concerning the form, I will certainly edit the story sometime soon.
@ hillwalker: thanks for the 'subtly written'; and predictable – well, yes, I hope so, with a title like the one I have chosen! lol ;-)
Hm, the Greek marble statue was important to, as Jack of Hearts put it, transform the young Cédric from person to lust-object. This was meant to be the counterpart to the narrator not really being someone who decides but who rather goes with the flow, never analyzing too much what he's doing, never really questioning his actions and reactions, or if so, only superficially (hence the name with which he signs his SMS to Cédric – 'l'étranger'; remember the narrator in Camus' novel 'L'étranger', who seems to be lacking motivation, memory, anything that makes us human, and who feels so very human precisely because of that).
You made me laugh with your comment about PJ – she sure deserves to be listened to without one doing anything else as well. I'm absolutely unable to listen to music AND read at the same time. But hey, the narrator is not me – he's just one of those zillion people I see every day in the métro and who do the two (music + book) plus sometimes they talk on the phone, too. I suppose they don't listen to PJ or similar quality music but rather to muzak; Lady Gaga mabe? ;-))

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