by Tony Broad
With hindsight she realised that she remembered him first by his smell.
It wasn’t anything she could name—no brand she could buy, nothing she could clutch to her chest when he was gone.
It was sharp with citrus and shaded in dark amber, like sex and secrets and the hollow spaces of night. When he came to her, Paris folded inward like a glove, warm and close, and her apartment, sparse and always too cold, softened under his presence.
She was his hidden place. Kept but not quite owned. Loved, perhaps, but only between the hours of dusk and discretion.
Every time he entered the room, that perfume preceded him.
It slipped beneath her skin and curled there, intimate as breath, dangerous as longing. She would undress before he asked, because his scent undid her better than words ever could.
But one evening—just as summer broke over the city and the windows stayed open too long—he knocked, and something was wrong.
She opened the door. He smiled, familiar. His hands were the same. His mouth said her name the same way it always had, with the quiet ache of habit. But the air around him was… blank. Empty.
She tilted her head.
It was as though she was seeing him for the first time.
She couldn’t work it out at first then it hit her.
“You’re not wearing it,” she said, not quite accusing.
He blinked. “Wearing what?”
“The perfume,” she whispered. “Yours.”
He laughed, low and careless. “I ran out. I’ll get more.”
But he never did.
Each visit after, she watched him more than she touched him. She tried to summon the old ache, the hunger that once lived in the corners of her ribs. But it had faded with the scent. Now he was just a man. The lines on his face were too sharp. His breath smelled of too much coffee. He was slightly too loud when he laughed.
He noticed the shift. He brought flowers. He stayed longer. He even left a toothbrush once, and she threw it away before the sun came up.
By autumn, he stopped coming. She didn’t ask why.
Months later, passing by an antique shop near Montmartre, she caught it.
The scent.
So faint she nearly thought she imagined it. She turned, heart stuttering.
But it was no one.
She went into the shop and by the door. A box containing old glassware. In it a bottle. It smelled of him. Or rather, of who she’d thought he was.
She bought the bottle.
And every so often, she would take it out and hold it to her nose, just long enough to remember the illusion.
Just long enough to forget the man.