Liliane

A little romance, a little peanut.

It turns out that Stella-Molly is Liliane Lestáve, a sociologist tasked with, and this is where Jaufré begins to get skeptical, observing individual cultural susceptibilities to practical jokes. So back in the bar, Jaufré, you are supposed to understand, was her research on the drunken French soldier subset, a subset of which simply had forgotten to surrogate his live ammunition for blanks. But thank you ever so much, Jaufré, for that save, the catch and tuck-and-roll. It was romantic enough, exceptionally executed.

 

That was a month ago, and peering down the length of his lit cigarette like a progressively shrinking gunsight he can see her remember it, the whole month converted into a runaway smile. She withdraws from his side, gliding a come-to-bed elbow against his, into her room, slides the glass door half-shut along the crooked brass railing, pulls on the drapes. He stays outside, contemplating the airspace between the balcony and what is certainly the chief of the tribe of raccoons that administrates the shrubbery on the immediate ground below. Were they native to Europe? Perhaps Liliane knows something on the subject, raccoons aren’t so distant from sociology, especially once one gets into matters of class warfare … He decides against finishing off the last peanut rescued from the armchair inside, and with what he imagines as cold scientific interest drops it, observing it all the way down, taking particular interest in the convergence of its path with that of the chief’s head. The chief, startled obviously but also unmistakably taken by curiosity, curls up the peanut-bomb in his paw and examines its untimely geometry before craning to regard Liliane’s balcony (which Jaufré has timely abandoned for fear of being discovered), eyes squinted with suspicions extending well beyond Earth’s orbit.

 

Back inside Liliane is fussing with the knot that ordinarily keeps rolled up her blueprints of a device that, while still theoretical, clearly is intended to gently stab an unsuspecting individual with – was that a baguette? – before retracting back into some kind of top hat. Jaufré cannot bring himself to scoff at her work, harboring some dark envy to be the butt of one of her jokes himself. He wonders what strange cultural insight that might provide, and if maybe he has been little more than an especially adept guinea pig for the last month, and suddenly sees fit to ask, “Liliane, dear, am I your guinea pig?”

 

The response is practically immediate, through her smile, “Yes, Jaufré.”

 

He drifts to her neck, paints light figure-eights with a brush ingeniously crafted from one of the blonder cascades of her hair, then kisses the soft skin. “That’s fine with me.”