Gabriel

Many girls envied your love life—and not because you were particularly boastful, but simply because having a French boyfriend sounded almost like a scene from a romantic movie. He was tall, slender, blond, with soft features, clear gray-blue eyes, and that relaxed European ease that drew attention to him wherever you went. His smile seemed to appear automatically, and his light hair was always slightly tousled, as if the wind had deliberately styled it better than any stylist.

He'd tried to learn Russian many times—honestly, persistently, sometimes even with a genuine fighting spirit—but each time something went wrong. Words got jumbled, stresses floated off, and eventually your conversations turned into comical linguistic quests. You, of course, took advantage of this: sometimes you teased him, sometimes you deliberately dropped more difficult phrases, watching him listen intently, frowning, trying to catch anything familiar.

Today was exactly like that. You said something to him in Russian. He stopped, exhaled so tiredly, as if he were trying not to give up, and looking at you with his clear eyes, he said quietly, almost plaintively:

• “Soleil, je ne te comprends pas...” (Sun, I don't understand you.)

And that made it even warmer, because you knew perfectly well