FAZER LOGINÉricShe stayed in the bathroom for a long time.The water flows beyond the door, like a distant reminder of reality, but here, in the room, everything seems suspended. The sheets still warm from Jade's body. The smell of her skin floating in the air. And me, sitting on the edge of the bed, bare-chested, still quivering.I look at my hands.They tremble slightly.It's not fatigue. It's greed. A lack that returns as soon as the act is over. A new, insidious, silent addiction. It's her. She consumes me. She draws me into a game where I lose every round, and yet, I want to play again.The door opens with a breath. A slight mist invades the room, followed by her body: Jade.Her body still damp, half-goddess, half-demon. Drops slide over her hips, her breasts, her stomach. She has tied a towel at her waist, but it covers nothing. On the contrary, it underlines. Accentuates. Drives crazy.Her hair falls in heavy strands around her face. She doesn't look at me right away. She advances. Depos
ÉricI knew it would happen.I knew it from the moment I left her, five days earlier, still trembling, still marked by her. It wasn't a flight, nor a deliverance. It was only a reprieve.Since then, everything has lost its taste.Coffee.Conversations, Clara's skin.Even the daylight.I wandered through my daily life like a ghost, promising myself I would hold on. But I was already lying. I was lying to everyone. Especially to myself.And last night, I cracked.Two words sent without thinking:"Where are you?"The answer fell like a guillotine blade."Still within reach of a mistake."Then an address.A discreet hotel, almost hidden in an anonymous alley, two metro stops from my place.Room 608.I didn't reply.I didn't confirm.And yet, tonight, I'm here.In front of this door.My hand suspended.My breath suspended.The world suspended.I knock. Once. Twice.And the door opens.She didn't ask any questions.More beautiful than in my memories.But it's not her beauty that overwhelms
ÉricThe office oppresses me.More than ever.Yet I came here to flee. Flee the bedroom. Flee Clara. Flee the memory of the previous night, of her voice soft as a verdict, of her measured breath in the dark. Flee above all Jade. Ironic sordidness: it's her I find again, as soon as I cross the threshold.Not in flesh. In spirit. In scent. In poison.Everything reminds me of Jade. Even here.The smell of coffee, usually reassuring, burns my throat. The noise of keyboards, distant calls, slamming doors… everything assaults me. My body is here, sitting, impeccable suit, tie well knotted. But inside, it's a desert.I think I've become a shell.An illusion of a man.Colleagues greet me, talk to me. I respond automatically. I smile sometimes. I've learned to pretend. I'm a good liar now. But my hands tremble a little when I sit down. And my stomach twists every time a phone vibrates.Because I'm waiting for a message.Hers.And because I dread it arriving.I imagine her, behind her screen, c
ÉricIt's almost four in the morning when I leave the hotel.The corridor is silent, covered in thick carpet, muffling my steps as if even the place was ashamed of me. The elevator descends slowly, too slowly. My reflection in the metal panels sends back a troubled image: red eyes, crumpled shirt, mouth marked by another's kisses. With a swipe of my sleeve, I try to erase what I've become. Pointless.The city sleeps.Lyon stretches in a spectral calm. The rare cars cross my path without stopping. The shop windows are dark. The trees tremble softly in the night wind. Dead leaves slide on the sidewalk like confessions you try to flee.I walk fast, hands in pockets, coat collar turned up. Not to warm myself. To hide.I didn't take a taxi. I don't want to go home too fast. I want to feel my legs burn, my heart pound under my ribs. I want to deserve some of the pain I should feel. But everything is confused. What I feel is something else. A damp torpor, a tension between shame and desire.
ÉricThe door to her room opens before I even knock.She knew.She was waiting for me, naked under a half-open black kimono, like a provocation. No useless words. No pretense. Her gaze pierces through me. I feel like I'm suffocating already, even before entering.I take a step.She slowly backs away, turns her back to me. The fabric barely slips over her shoulders, revealing the perfect curve of her back, her offered nape. She still doesn't speak. She doesn't need to. Everything, in her body, in her slowness, in her way of precisely ignoring me, calls to me.I close the door. There's only us. The air is warm, almost humid. A dim lamp casts a soft light on the unmade bed. A slight scent of black fig and incense hangs in the air. Intimate. Dangerous. As if this room were not a place, but a fault line.She stops at the foot of the bed, puts her glass on the low table, then turns to me. Slowly. She stares at me without blinking.— You came.— I don't know why.— Yes, you do.Her words are
ÉricI can't sleep.The silence in the bedroom is almost oppressive. You hear nothing, except Clara's steady breathing, lying beside me. Or maybe she's pretending. Clara has this way of retreating without a sound, of slipping away without shouting, but her absence is felt like a silent slap. The sheet between us becomes a wall. An invisible frontier. A barrier I haven't crossed for weeks. Since her.Jade.Always her.She haunts me. In my insomnia, in the corridors of my mind, in every vacant space of my body that Clara no longer touches. She's there, like a persistent echo. I close my eyes, and it's not memories of my marriage that come back. It's hers. Her laughs, her hands, her voice deep, slightly husky, that grain in her intonations that drills into my memory.I let her in, worse: I called her.And it all started eight months ago.In Lyon.A legal conference like so many others. Three days of flat presentations, unreadable PowerPoints, limp discussions on case law. I came out of o







