No one is holding each other like we are. Past the crook of T’s neck, I can make out other men lounging on burning slabs of rock. This is real: the sun on our bare skin, the sweat beading where our bodies are touching, his arms around my body, my arms around his. I rest my head on his chest. His heartbeat starts to blend with the waters murmuring against the Marseillaise coastline. I fight the soporific midday heat to look up at him: he slumbers. I want to memorize the promontory of his chin, the valley of his lips, the slope of his jaw. The picture is almost impressed onto my mind when he shifts, eluding the portraitist’s rendering brush. The picture is constantly changing, and holding onto it is like grasping at sand with fists.
There is no sand here at Mont Rose, just swathes of limestone on the very edge of Provençal country. Mons rotundus, eleventh-century texts called it. Round mountain. At 82 metres, it’s more like a stump. What it lacks in size, though, it makes up for in longevity, bearing witness to these same waters for millions of years. There are reptiles whose prehistoric ancestors once crawled amongst these prostrate Aleppo pines, these phryganes, dry bushes whose thorns protect from fierce sun and salt spray. The Roze family, whose name locals adopted for this pocket of Marseille, left their mark with a country house on this stone. Centuries later, at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, factories also emerged. Their remains are still here.
Today, this hill also includes gay nude beach among its laurels. To get here, T drives me a few kilometers east of Marseille’s city center in a rented car. This is what I know: he is 33, he is from Marseille, he runs a bar. The windows are rolled down, and the wind in our hair is a makeshift balm for this late-June heat wave. We talk little, and he rests a hand on my thigh when he’s not busy with the stick shift, leaving my heart racing and heat pricks surging through my leg.
At the foot of Mont Rose, just meters away from a little port with gently rocking sailboats, we climb a path strewn with treacherous sun-bleached rocks, wild rosemary, and poppy. Arid stone and dry bush stretch for what seems like miles, but we inch closer and closer to the ocean. And there it is, all of a sudden—right before the expanse of the water, on sheets of limestone stretching before us, nude sunbathers clustered together. No errant passer-by comes here. We descend gingerly until we find a spot flat enough to lounge.
Here is the moment: we have set down the bags, we have laid down the mats. We know what comes next. I take off my shirt, my shorts; he does too. But my fingers catch on my briefs. I’ve no qualms about undressing in front of everyone else, but in front of this man whose face I had only seen on a dating app until an hour ago, I suddenly hesitate. I think if he sees all of me, he will see beyond my skin and occupy what’s there. Looking at him is too much and I am forced to lower my gaze, suddenly pudique like Botticelli’s Venus.
He senses my hesitation. He catches my eyes, and his lips twist upwards in teasing challenge as he shirks off his underwear. And then my fingers are moving, but I don’t feel them—and now my briefs are off too. There is no time to contemplate. He asks me to rub sunscreen on his back. He cracks open hot beers in his bag, and we drink as our shoulders touch. Slowly, we settle into our positions, lounging side-by-side, not talking, fingers touching, letting the sound of the waves lull us to sleep.
Well, except for me. I am looking at him, and I am thinking that I have never fallen in love, but if I were to fall in love, it must feel like violence. You are mine, I am yours—how can we not speak of love as possession, as occupation? Meet a lover for a night and you share bodies for a few hours, but share your heart with someone else and your defenses must collapse at his knock, and there he resides until he recognizes every contour of your being, until he becomes a part of you. This is more than being naked. This is an invasion of privacy at best, and body horror at worst. This is terrifying—but not as terrifying as realizing that his eyes have fluttered open behind his shades, and it’s too late to pretend that I am not looking at him. His arms wrap around my back, pulling me close. By this point, I can feel everything with a whistling sensitivity: the rustle of the cotton towel over the burning stone, the rhythm of his breathing, the hair on his thighs brushing against mine. I strain past the sharpness of his throat to look at his face. There is no mind reading, no wordless exchange in the eyes. All he does is rest a hand on the back of my head, nestling my hair, gently lowering me down to his chest. My spine releases its tension. My heartbeat is still roaring, but with every passing minute, I can feel it match with his, beginning to blend in with the waters murmuring against the coastline.
No one is holding each other like we are.
I am surprised by his tenderness. In his arms, I am less of a stranger than I was an hour ago, and I like it. I like the way I fit in his chest. I like the way we are curled together so that our bodies are touching as much as possible.
Let’s swim, he murmurs, voice rough with sleep. We rise, his fingers holding mine as he leads me down the beach, up to the point where the rock becomes perilous with barnacles and moss. We jump into the freezing waters, our sweat mingling with the trillions of water molecules roiling all around us, molecules that have never existed in this specific combination except now, swimming as far as we dare. Lips meet as I catch up to him, our legs working to keep us afloat. All is perfect, the sun, the water, his lips—until an errant wave crashes over us. We sputter salt from our mouths. I catch his eyes and can’t help but giggle; neither can he. Back in his arms, we kiss until the current takes us far away from the mouth of the mountain, and the cold is getting to us, so we swim back. Winded, crawling on the rock with a head spinning to the rocking of the waves, I am—dare I say it—happy.
But already I can feel these moments becoming less vivid in my memory. I feel the stone underneath my feet as we walk back to our rock and know that this sensation will fade. I look out towards the sea in a final bid to soak it all in—the sunbathers, the horizon too far to comprehend, the light a mellow amber gold now, a dappling caress over T’s skin that felt so good against mine. Even this I knew would fade, leaving only the memory that I thought to look at one last time.
The stone would remain, though. It always has. We were only visitors—just as factory workers were a century ago, just as the Roze family was an age ago, just as prehistoric lizards crawling over the Mediterranean coast were millions of years ago. Our paths happened to converge, briefly, at this specific time and this specific place; only we held the vignettes, already yellowing and fraying in our minds. I had never felt so small, standing there on the landscape older than history itself. Four hours was not even a millisecond in its lifetime. But this is real: the sun on our bare skin, the sweat beading where our bodies touch, his arms around my body, my arms around his. The others still lounging on the rocks, sparkling like jewels awaiting the sun’s lapidary hand. He reaches out a hand, and I take it, trekking back to the car. I did not fall in love that day. But I did leave a piece of my heart with him, and with Mont Rose.
