Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!
A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.
Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.
What turned my gaze on its head, that night?
I trace it back to your elixir. Liquor-fueled impulsivity. I mean to say that it was definitely you who’d made the cocktail I was drinking: rum, pineapple juice, Batida de Coco. It wasn’t the first cocktail you’d prepared for me, adapting the recipe to my tastes. Wasn’t the first time I’d gone for a drink there, where you work, or that we’d crossed paths on a night out. We’d even gone for a stroll in the forest together one Sunday. You came back to mine to have dinner with some of my friends. At the time, my perspective of you was still hazy.
But there was one thing I already knew, before I began to see you differently: I liked that you changed the recipes on purpose when you made drinks for me, and I liked that you offered them to me like that. I felt like more than a simple client or a friend in passing when I came to see you. Something about the way you treated me was touching. I didn’t know exactly what. Or rather: I did know, but a part of me knew what would happen if I ever admitted it to myself, and so I didn’t dare.
For seven years, I could see an invitation unfolding in your eyes, clouds parting to reveal an open sky. Something like a door left cracked open, just in case I wished to see what lay behind it. And yet I remained a few steps back from the threshold, immobile. I don’t know why. Maybe I was waiting for you to come to me.
I watched as you changed over the course of months and years, your voice, your appearance shifting, but none of it changing you yourself. As if you were drawing closer, physically, to who you had always been, and in the end all of those changes made you look the most like yourself. That was how it seemed, to me. All the way down to the name you chose, the one that fit you so well. The one your inner circle had taken some time to adopt, but now no one remembered the old one; they would even be shocked to hear it used. That name wouldn’t fit you at all anymore! It had already been unfitting, before your transition…Changing it had seemed so obvious to you, so natural, and yet it cost you your parents’ affection. I recognized the darkness that clouded your eyes at their mention well before the day we talked about children for the first time. Well before that night where my perspective changed.
That night, I would never have suspected that we’d be talking about childrearing in the not-so-distant future. That you would introduce me to your aunt. That I would find myself in the house your cousins grew up in, on a writing retreat up among the mountain pastures, after a journey to the clinic to make this desire for a child a reality…
That night, I drank the piña colada variation you had made me, trying to recover from my most recent romantic upheaval. The last few sips gradually diluted in the icy debris in the bottom of the glass. Night fell across the city, and I headed outside for a cigarette.
You were in front of the bar.
I stepped up beside you. I hadn’t planned out any of what I would say. I didn’t yet know that there would be an after. After this moment. That this was only the beginning of a story. I was still just a patron, a friend who stood in front of your workplace, ready to share a smoke.
Pushed by some force that I still can’t explain, these words came out of my mouth: “Do you believe in it? Love?” My question burst forth into the chill of the night in two curls of white smoke, incongruous, unexpected. You coughed in surprise, unsure of how to respond, and we laughed about it. You had that intrigued, amused look on your face that people get when they know that the intention of a banal, slightly ironic question isn’t to evoke a response, but to build connections in an implicit language, to test the boundaries of possibility. Those trivial words concealed a question that went deeper than banter, and we both knew it.
You didn’t know how to respond, you coughed in surprise, and we laughed together, but your light-gray eyes went as wide as the darkening sky that blanketed the sloping street in front of us. We both fell quiet. A few immense seconds, suspended in the night air.
The moment stretched out like that profound silence that swells during a storm, just before lightning breaches the clouds and thunder rolls, resonating through your temples and drumming against your ribs all the way into the heart muscle. A moment of prayer, for it was a prayer that I offered then, like the child I was, frozen in front of the window, addressing the tempest that rumbled from the mountains over the plains: please do not strike me down. See my childlike heart, and don’t toy with it, for I will not be able to bear it. It’s a fragile organ, even if it doesn’t seem to be. I’d thought it resistant, elastic, resilient, like those stress balls that always regain their shape, even after they’ve been crushed and contorted in every possible way. I had a habit of tossing it up, like a ball in a schoolyard, sure that someone would catch it mid-flight. But each time, I had to put it back in its place in my chest, which I had to slice open with a pocketknife, before plastering it all shut again with the skin of my palm, spritzing the wound with disinfectant and stitching it closed around the keloids. True butchery, repeated countless times. That sort of thing leaves scars.
And yet, despite it all, I was not afraid to play. I threw the ball: “Do you want to kiss me?” This time, you knew how to respond, and we didn’t laugh. Your throat was tight when you murmured “yes.” I heard it in your voice, usually unwavering, as it caught on that sole syllable. And then, hesitantly, our lips met.
All those years, and I’d never noticed how sexy your mouth was. How much it made me want. Want this kiss to last, and for there to be another. My lips brushed you just as the first drops of rain began to fall. I didn’t jump at the first clap of thunder. And I wasn’t afraid. My chest pressed against yours, the rain tapped light fingers over my hair, glided over our faces in a fine mist that dissolved, little by little, any boundary between us. We breathed together in the damp air, heavy with humidity. The seconds stretched, and we lost any notion of time.
A few months earlier, I had come to see you, and you had made me the same cocktail. I’d just come out of a post-breakup open-heart surgery, a particularly quick and dirty one. I notice a posteriori that I made a habit of reaching out to you every time I was in post-op: “I’m in your neighborhood. Make me a drink?” You embellished the glass and held it out to me, offered me a cigarette, and I told you all about my most recent operation. We teased each other like people who meet at bars and parties do, making like nothing was happening between us. For more than seven years I pretended not to see the break in the clouds, the door cracked open. I needed the storm.
After—because there’s always an ‘after’ to a first kiss, an uncertain moment, a silence, a smile—your shift break was over, I went back inside to find my friends, hair drenched and sticking to my neck, the heat of the room robbing me of both my bearings and my composure at once. No landmarks, nothing to help me keep my balance. The kiss still sung in me, calling for another. I felt weightless. Suddenly I was sixteen again.
I wanted to know what would happen next. But it’s here that the story has its reasons, and for ten days and ten nights running, you left me guessing.
***
Fifth day here. I don’t want to leave anymore. I wish you would join me. We could spend the rest of the summer here together. I know you can’t stop working, but it will break my heart to return to the city, the same as it does being here without you.
Instead of working on my novel this morning, I reread the first letter I ever wrote to you, when you were still running from the idea of a romantic attachment, or even just a sexual one. I found the draft — two pages of grid paper covered in blue ink, folded over one another — slid into one of my notebooks. I don’t remember putting it there. But I remember the state of mind I was in when I wrote it to you, three years ago now. I remember the sensation of being on top of a jagged peak, separated from you by a valley of mist. An interior landscape that resembled the one in which I find myself now, facing the mountains. I remember that I wanted to reach you, to be with you, to cross the chasm, the fog, everything that separated us, and convince you to let me in.
You didn’t understand the sudden urge that drove me toward you after seven years of easy friendship. I, too, remember all too well my abrupt and profound conviction that we would love each other deeply and for a long time, from the moment my mouth found yours that night in front of the bar. I couldn’t explain where this absolute certainty came from, after years of seeking nothing but an amicable relationship with you. I still can’t explain it, not even to myself. The reasons for that sudden desire to kiss you, the cognizance that we would become like twin flames, feeding into each other. Maybe I’d read too many romances over the course of my life. Maybe your pheromones triggered something in my brain, when I got close to your skin for the first time. Who knows? Not everything has an explanation. The moment had come for me to desire and love you. I was ready, and that was it.
But I was too late. Almost too late. You had burned too brightly a few years earlier. You told me that I would suffer, wanting you like this. That you didn’t know how to love anymore, and were incapable of burning with desire for anyone. You were an inactive volcano. You didn’t want to hurt me with your inability to be intimate. It would be best if I kept my distance. But I remembered the way you looked at me, over all those years. That gaze like a clearing sky. So I wrote you this letter in a leap of faith, plunging straight off of the bridge and into the torrential current below:
“Every story, when it begins, contains within it the seeds of its narrative thread and conclusion. One only has to pay attention. See in advance where the rift will appear. Watch for the first vibration of the earthquake, see the ground beneath my hands begin to crack.
Observe the fissures the story carves into the earth. Guess at how deep they will tear. For it is from that wound that music will spill forth, and the story will become worth the telling. Because a happy love (assuming they even exist at all, loves of this kind, and are capable of enduring), a completely tranquil love, is not made of the stuff they tell stories about.
This is true to the extent that, in order to write, you have to suffer some. I have to admit, this is something that has proven true every time I’ve found enough material to follow a tale through to its end.
One novel after the other follows this formula: so break my heart a little, and I will make a story of it. Make me uncomfortable. Make me suffer. Don’t worry, I’ll heal, I always have. Don’t make me happy, at least not completely, or I’ll get bored, and I won’t write anymore. This is what I need to feed that demanding blaze from which my creations are born. The insatiable forge, ever unsatisfied, which calls for flesh, for living sacrifices.
A life without writing wouldn’t be worth the effort.
I don’t need something to brace me: it’s in disequilibrium that I find the strength to bring these lines to life. These lines are what hold me up, I weave them into a net which catches me, if ever I lose my balance. I need a love to stumble over. To topple me down into that part of my brain, the insatiable part that needs to write.
This is the prologue. To a potential story.
The story of a being with a burnt-up heart, between the hands of a girl who, searching for traces of an old flame in the entrails, breathes on the embers, revives the sparks, watches them die again. The story of a charred soul moving over flat earth, where lava no longer simmers in any volcano.
Sometimes I detest my internal blaze, my insatiable passions. Sometimes I hate the instinct which told me, the moment our lips touched: this is it. This is what I’m looking for. In the bodies I pull close, in the skin that I breathe in, in the desire that builds deep in my stomach. This is it. This rare substance, which will set me alight, give shape to my phrases, incarnate itself on paper in rhythmic words. A secret song which connects me to the world, connects me to others, gives me a reason, the only reason I hold on to, a reason to exist. The others are all moral obligations, strict duties, necessary compromises. They give no relief, no color, no scent or taste to the prolonged days and the nights that eat away at us a bit more, year after year.
For me, there is one reason, and one alone, to be alive. That is to write with my body. To strip it down to the fibers. To tear up that solid, everyday matter, all of the threads which were pre-written in advance, and make a mess of them, and start all over again.
To all my past loves, who first set me aflame and from whom I learned to heal, because I always heal, I can only give my thanks. They fed the fire from which my writing comes.
Give me a reason. A reason to write this story that could be. Give me what I need to feed the fire. And if I find nothing left in your expanse save for hectares of ash, nothing left to consume, our tale will die out on its own.
I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.”
What followed proved to me that I was right, that my instinct was good. And I was glad not to have let myself be discouraged by the apparent imperviousness of your volcanic rock. We owe our story to this first letter, I think, and to the exchange that followed. I don’t even have to suffer to make the words come, when it comes to you. Maybe I should have written about the myth of love-and-suffering which had driven me up to that point. That overworn narrative about fatal passions in which one’s vital spark is consumed. But that isn’t the story I want to tell about love. I’d like to write a story about a relationship that has the warmth of a friendship, the solidity of stone, the vibrancy of a storm. A sentiment like the one which links us, which gives me strength instead of making me feel I am drowning. It seems to me that your hand, when you lay it upon me, contains as much desire for me as it does care not to do me harm. That you choose your words with the intent of creating a soft bed for me to curl up in. Of course we fight. Of course there have been eruptions between us, and there will be others. But I am certain that what unites us is not the destructive, devouring passions that I have so often known. And yet we do burn, a beautiful, clear flame. You wrote in your response to my first letter a phrase that I still think of often: For the first time, I feel a fire in me that doesn’t consume, but illuminates.
Translated from the French by Kathryn Raver
Wendy Delorme is a French novelist and has written nine works of fiction and autofiction to date. The most recent, Viendra le temps du feu (Cambourakis, 2021) and Le chant de la rivière (Cambourakis, 2024) weave the voices and memories of past queer loves together with hope for a better world. Her most recent work, Le Parlement de l’eau (Cambourakis, 2025) mixes autofiction with realist anticipation as its characters search for the source of a vanished river and fight to survive a fascist, ecocidal State.
Kathryn Raver is a writer, translator, and bookseller currently based in France. Following her studies at the University of Iowa and King’s College London, she now spends her time translating Francophone literature and wandering the streets of Paris. She is an avid champion of translated literature, and is particularly interested in LGBTQ+ stories and speculative fiction.