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Courfeyrac has misplaced his hat.
This isn't entirely a sartorial disaster, because he's noticed that he draws admiring looks in the street from women for his windswept curls, even if they come partnered with disapproving looks from those of the older generation, but it is a disaster for his pocketbook, since this quarterly allowance won't stretch to another hat of the best make from his hatter – and he won't allow himself to be seen in public in something shabby.
Therefore: to retrace his steps.
This brings him back via various byways and stopping-points to the Café Musain, and thence to its back room.
There's no meeting today, and it's not a day when the Society gathers. The passage is quiet and empty, and he supposes the back room to be likewise, with his hand on the door and that door an inch ajar – and then he hears a soft sound, and revises his suppositions.
Another.
A third, and the sound of laboured breathing. “Oh,” someone says. Courfeyrac knows that voice, and hilarity and a little disapproval fills him at the same time. Grantaire's indiscriminating amours are always amusing, and he hangs on her words when she recounts them, but to arrange an assignation in the Musain – that's a shade too much and too far. She's permitted there on sufferance, and only because he and others have pleaded her case.
Enjolras does not approve of women at her meetings. It's hypocrisy, of course, but Enjolras doesn't account herself as a woman, and to be fair, neither do the rest of them. Enjolras is Enjolras, and Enjolras is unique. Enjolras wears trousers and her fair hair clubbed back in a severe tail, a masculine-cut coat and waistcoat, collar and cravat to her chin. If she has anything of a bosom, Courfeyrac's never seen a suspicion of it – and he hasn't looked, because Enjolras would dislike it, and because he respects her. She commands respect. She demands to be taken as one of them and as herself, and such is her formiddable presence, and her cutting tongue, and her general impression of sexlessness, that she is accepted as one of them, and simply that.
Grantaire, however, is abundantly and unashamedly and unapologetically feminine as well as fallen. She could not be better composed to get under Enjolras's skin. Is it a personal dislike? Courfeyrac's never been sure. Enjolras has no time for others of her nominal sex. She would rather ignore the matter entirely than fight under its banner. Women's rights mean nothing to her compared to the rights of the worker, the wrongs done to the general populace. Grantaire has consorted with Saint-Simonians, and while she thumbs her nose at their ideals, she can argue them at great length and with every impression of sincerity.
Grantaire wears female dress and rarely troubles with a fichu pelerine. Her curly and unruly dark hair is pinned carelessly. She drinks; she gets drunk. She talks politics, and philosophy, and art, and the law, and then dismisses them together. She smokes. She is every bit as unbourgeois a female as Enjolras, but in an entirely different direction. Renegade daughters of similar backgrounds, but rough where Enjolras is restrained, earthernware where she's paste-porcelain. Grantaire sits on men's laps and winds her arms around their necks; she flirts and kisses and fucks. That is how she first came among their number – a friend of Bahorel's who he thought would enjoy and add to their conversation.
(“Not a mistress,” she'd said, with a roll of her eyes. “Mistress implies master. It also implies a commitment, a general inclination to mend a man's shirts and cook his dinner. I go to bed with him sometimes, but I'm not his mistress.”)
Enjolras had attempted to exclude her from the first, but Grantaire failed to quail under the coldest of stares, or falter under the harshest comments or the most rigorous lines of questioning. She had her friendly defenders – Bahorel, Joly and Bossuet, Courfeyrac himself – and an unimpeachable and disinterested champion in Combeferre, who espoused Condorcet's opinions on the rights and abilities of women. Something Enjolras valued when they applied to her as unique, but less so when they threatened her autonomy and her ability to exclude unwanted personalities from their meetings.
Courfeyrac doesn't know what Grantaire thinks of Enjolras. She seems unaffected by her dislike, and amused by her sternness. Certainly, Grantaire pretends to admire Enjolras, but she returns to the Musain, to talk and to interrupt, and her presence is a deliberate salting of a wound, a deliberate spur pressed into a sore spot, a ruthless feather-tickle of sensitive skin. A private and persistent revenge on a woman who looks down on her, Courfeyrac has thought. Grantaire enjoys their company, and she enjoys argument and intellect – but she doesn't share their aims, and why else return to be snubbed and snubbed again?
Now, to turn this room into a bordel – a pointed desecration of a space Enjolras has attempted to close against her. Courfeyrac may understand the impulse, but he can't approve.
Another sound. “Jesu,” Grantaire says from inside the room, and she sounds breathless. “You're good with your mouth. I thought you'd be – I thought that tongue of yours couldn't be so skilled in one direction without being skilled in another –”
A groan, low in her throat, and then a series of them. Whoever's with her – not one of the Society, surely; Grantaire is the only one of them who'd think to bring a lover here – is quiet, but his silent mouth responding to her must be what makes Grantaire so loud in turn, and the absolute heartfelt sincerity of the noise goes straight to Courfeyrac's marrow.
It's wrong of her to fuck someone here, but there's no denying that the sacrilege gives it a spice. Cinnamon in hot chocolate, heating the blood. From inside:
“Tormentor,” Grantaire says roughly. “Deliberate tease. I should wrap my legs around your neck and smother you between my thighs.”
A murmur, indistinct.
“Oh, you'd be surprised. You can suffocate a man that way, if you have strength enough in your legs. Caught in a honey-trap – No, that's me. You're a honey-hive, guarded by soldier-bees, with your melting honeycomb fenced behind the thousand myrmidons. Do you melt for me?” A sudden turn to something like wistfulness. “If I put my hand to you, will you sting?”
Another low reply. A chuckle, from Grantaire.
“I thought so,” she says. “I promise, then. Hand, and mouth, and then hand again, as much as you can manage. I want you to press your legs together tomorrow and throb when you think of me; I want to take away your sting and give you another – but first, you were engaged – ah, yes –” A pained noise, like pleasure has pierced her through. “God, you'll kill me. I'll take you with me into death; if I pass in helpless paroxysm, I'll bring you with me into Hades, your skull in a thousand pieces between my legs. How do you like that?”
Silence. More rough breaths, rising in crescendo. Another hurt sound, and then, “Give me your fingers, too. Two of them. I want to come on your tongue.”
Courfeyrac shouldn't venture to look – but he does want his hat, and the picture Grantaire paints with her words is as vivid as anything she's ever put to canvas or paper. The door is already a little open. He wants to see Grantaire on her back, spread open on a table, perhaps, or the floor, with her skirts around her waist and some man's head buried in licking her cunt.
A disrespectful thing to think of a sister in arms, but no woman Courfeyrac's taken to bed has ever spoken as baldly, even when kissed in so intimate a place. He's had women who went deep pink and giggled, who shut their eyes and made small sounds but stayed still, women who snapped their knees together and looked at him like he was a monster for putting his mouth there – but never one who encouraged him on with such open unashamed want.
He pushes the door open a little, and then a little more, until the picture he's looking for comes into the frame. Grantaire, in one of the steadier chairs, driven back against the wall. The line of her throat arching, the point of her chin with her head tipped back, the tender underside of the jaw. Her bodice is tugged down and red teethmarks show on the bared white flesh. Her fists are clenched violently, and they clench tighter when she moans again, like that's the only thing stopping her from tensing her thighs tight around the working golden head between them instead.
As Courfeyrac's arrested gaze moves down, and stops, and fixes, he thinks – a mistake. A trick of the eye; a slip of the brain. And then he thinks: Oh, how stupid. And then: Oh, how clever. Of course the worst, the best way to deconsecrate this room, to tell Enjolras to fuck herself where it hurts, would be not only to fuck someone here, but to find someone to fuck who resembles Enjolras. A man, when Enjolras only pretends to be one. What a perfect revenge; what a perfect hurt, even if its object is unwitting. What a thought for Grantaire to hug to herself the next time Enjolras stands here in this room and soars in her untouchable eagle flight far above them, to smirk at in her sleeve when Enjolras next upbraids her with the whiplash of her tongue.
And then, a distant third: No. There are certain things – Courfeyrac has known Enjolras too long not to recognise her in some distant chamber of his brain even when his conscious mind rejects the thought as ludicrous. It's simply not possible for it to be Enjolras on her knees before the chair, with Grantaire's legs kept spread by her hands and her face pressed between them, fucking Grantaire with mouth and face and tongue, but he recognises her.
“Enjolras,” Grantaire says, like it hurts. Like what that mouth is doing to her is eating her alive from the inside out. She bucks in the chair. Her body stiffens, visibly, and then she bucks again, fists uncurling and hands going to Enjolras's head. She holds it in place and grinds against that unseen face for long moments before she collapses, exhausted. Her bitten breasts heave in their bodice.
Enjolras – and it is Enjolras; Courfeyrac can't deny it, however illogical, however impossible – draws back from her. All Courfeyrac can see is the back of her head and the straight line of her back and the perfect steadiness of her shoulders, but she wipes her mouth and face on her sleeve, a gesture obvious even from his vantage point, although whether she does it with derision or not he can't tell.
Then Grantaire pulls at her again, grasping her roughly under the arms, pulls her up to her in the chair.
They're kissing. Hard, meanly. Grantaire's naked legs wind around Enjolras's narrow hips in their boyish trousers and hold her in place. She's still wearing her shoes, and Courfeyrac focuses absurdly on the worn leather sole and the embroidered strap over the instep, the heel pressed into the small of Enjolras's back, dirty against her clean linen. Enjolras's hair pulled back by its black ribbon, the tilt of her head as she slides her tongue in Grantaire's mouth when a moment ago it was in her cunt.
Courfeyrac has never kissed a woman right after kissing her there – not that he's kissed women there so often, unless he can be reasonably assured they'll like it. It's too easy to upset the shyer ones, and easier to simply touch them and make them tremble that way while bestowing a rain of little kisses on mouth, cheek, quivering eyelids. He's never kissed a woman with his face still wet with her, the way Enjolras is kissing Grantaire, the way Grantaire is – allowing herself to be kissed? No; demanding to be kissed.
“Mm,” Grantaire says, sounding satisfied, and the sated quality of her sigh is enough to remind him, despite his shock, that before he recognised Enjolras as her lover he was aroused at the thought of this scene.
But Enjolras – if he had a sister who was more like a brother to him, that would be Enjolras. Enjolras, who is no more woman than she is man, who feels no passions beyond the revolutionary apocalypse; Enjolras, who is untouched and untouchable by such lesser concerns –
Grantaire tugs on the ribbon, and all the shining mass of Enjolras's beautiful hair falls down around her shoulders. “Take your shirt off.”
“Climax makes you lazy,” Enjolras observes, and it's a little breathier than usual, a little softer; but still clearly hers.
“It makes me greedy.”
“I should make you take it off me.”
“A moment, and I will,” Grantaire promises, and winds her hand in Enjolras's hair like she's trying to wrap herself in living chains. Enjolras's head tilts back as more and more of her hair is taken, and Grantaire kisses her throat as it becomes a curve, presses her nose into her collarbone and breathes in deeply.
Then the twisted golden snake unwinds; Grantaire pulls away, and Courfeyrac becomes aware of himself again. Not of arousal, but of self. Of trespass. He has been transfixed by this scene, fascinated, appalled, amazed – but he shouldn't have seen it. Grantaire would have laughed at him catching her if it had been anyone else, but not this. He's not sure why he's so certain about that, but there's something so naked in her face as she looks at Enjolras now.
They shouldn't be doing this; or at least, not here – but he certainly shouldn't be seeing it. His hat will have to wait for another day to be reclaimed, and he will simply have to hope that in the meanwhile, no one appropriates it, or sits on it without looking first, or – once, horribly – uses it absent-mindedly as a receptacle for pipe-dottle.
He can't close the door completely without attracting their attention, but he brings it as closely to as he can. Curious that they didn't bother to check, or to fasten it, but perhaps they were distracted – and as he thinks that, there's another sound that comes clear through the door, and not from Grantaire this time.
Courfeyrac's face heats. He retreats along the passage, quickly, and then quicker.