The salon at Café de Flâneur, tucked modestly behind an ivy-laced bookshop on Rue des Martyrs, was a sanctuary for the intellectually overgrown and romantically underfed. Spring had begun to flutter its lashes at Paris, breathing pale sunlight through the stained windows and sprinkling pollen over poetry.
Outside, a violinist played something so tragic it nearly wilted the flowers in Madame Renaud’s cart. Inside, among the clink of spoons and occasional existential sighs, sat two beings—of that delicate species best described as lovers not yet doomed, but certainly rehearsing.
He was all tweed and collarbone, the kind of man who ironed his newspaper. She, a paradox in ballet flats, wore a scarf like a secret and spoke in paragraphs.
“I am not taking my second shot,” he declared, raising his hands as though offering them up to fate or a particularly bureaucratic angel, “if you don’t take your first.”
She halted mid-sip, the porcelain teacup pausing at her lips. “You,” she began, eyebrows lifting like reluctant curtains, “are absurd.”
“Me, what?” he grinned, a gleam of mischief hiding behind his spectacles like a schoolboy behind a Latin primer.
“Do as you like,” she replied, waving a dismissive hand with all the gravity of Versailles’ last queen.
“Of course I am going to do as I like,” he said, leaning back with the languor of someone who enjoyed arguing more than winning.
She fell into silence.
“What?” he asked.
“What?” she echoed, each syllable landing like a dropped fork.
“Why no reaction? Everything all right?” he smiled, but the smile was brittle, like bone china tapped too firmly.
“Would my reacting make a difference to you?” she said, eyes narrowing. “You are as stubborn as a gravestone.”
“Whatever,” he sang, delighted by her vexation, “throw your tantrums. But I am not taking that second shot if you don’t take your first.”
A breeze from the half-open window brushed her cheek. She exhaled, gathering herself like a woman about to embark on an operatic monologue.
“You know I am not on the list,” she said, “because I am not a resident of Paris. And... and you also know I cannot go back home because London is sealed tighter than a Russian novel. We are only in the first week of March. Please, understand.”
He frowned, not the usual performative kind but a real, cumbersome furrow, as though he were trying to rearrange reality by thought alone. Summer loomed ahead, cruel and golden. Without vaccination, she would remain a prisoner of borders, postcards, and unkissed cheeks.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, fingers curling round his.
Their eyes met—his the colour of melancholy, hers the temperature of irony.
“What say we take a chance?” he whispered.
She shook her head. “You know if I get stuck in London, it’ll be dreadful.”
“Yah, but at least you’d be stuck at home.”
She reached across the table, pinched his nose. “You are a darling. Take your second shot. I’ll take mine when I can.”
But he shook his head with such conviction that even the sugar cubes trembled.
“Not until you take your first.”
“You are impossible!” she cried, half laughing, half lamenting.
And with that, the curtain fell on Act I.
ONE MONTH LATER
A smoky pub in the 6th arrondissement, where the wallpaper had long given up and the gin tasted like regret. The three of them sat there—he, and two companions from university, the kind of men who still used Latin aphorisms in jest and knew the tragic endings of operas by heart.
“So did you take that second shot?” asked Jules, the one with the limp and a fondness for Schopenhauer.
He shook his head, nursing a drink like it owed him money.
“Why not?” Jules pressed.
“Because,” he said, as if stating the obvious to a room full of schoolboys, “she didn’t take her first.”
Jean-Pierre, the other, exhaled smoke like an oracle. “Are you fucking serious.”
He nodded, with a solemnity reserved for dead poets and fallen soufflés.
“And she didn’t tell you,” said Jules slowly, “that she wouldn’t take her first until you had taken your second?”
“Nope,” he replied, the word barely rising above the crackle of pub jazz.
A long pause followed, the sort of silence that usually precedes revolutions or terribly refined insults.
“What fools,” said Jean-Pierre, lighting another cigarette, “what fools.”
And so, like twin stars who refused to shine lest the other went first, they remained unlit. Vaccination—both literal and metaphorical—postponed in the name of pride, poetry, and principles.
Outside, spring marched on unbothered, like a cat past a domestic tragedy.
And the pianist played on.
