Chapter Text
I'm sending him an email for you ok?
It's not the most encouraging message to receive when Grantaire finally pulls out his phone and locks the door behind himself after back-to-back seminars, but he's been friends with Bossuet for a long, long time. He's not going to panic unless he really needs to. He scrolls back up to the start of the block of messages to see if there had been context.
I'm thinking about you dude, and I'm so glad we're friends
I hope this year's so good, like, so good
I've got a good feeling for you! You're going to make it happen
Got high after work btw, there's leftover brownies on the counter when you get home
Same recipe from when you were dissertating but I put a shitload of nutmeg in so hopefully it won't be too whatever
There had been a bit of a break, and then:
Hey remember when you said you were gonna get out there more?
A surprising number of people still post ads on cgslist
I'm not saying you should post one, but like: https://montreal.cr…tner/17246010.html
he seems nice!!
Grantaire clicks the link and lets his phone load it while he still has campus wifi, but he doesn't read it until he's standing at the bus stop, absent-mindedly rolling his bad ankle to loosen it up.
Career-minded failed romantic seeking life companion [m4m]
[age: 29] [body: fit] [height: 5'8"] [status: single]
Version française ici. Hello. After a string of romantic attachments that burned out too fast and ones that were serious for me but not for them, I'm starting to lose hope. Surely it's not impossible to find another person looking for their perfect match, who doesn't want to risk ruining things with sex. If you're interested in starting an egalitarian and supportive relationship with someone intelligent and driven who cares deeply about equality, justice, and the rights of all his fellow humans, please reach out.
Physical appearance not a concern of mine anymore, encouraging non-conventionally beautiful men to respond: I'm looking for a meeting of our minds, not of our bodies. Please include a (clothed) photo with your reply.
Hoping to meet a partner, companion, and comrade for life.
He doesn't reply to Bossuet straightaway; he sends a message to Musichetta instead, Did you condone this?, and types and deletes a couple options for Bossuet before settling on: lol cheers, love you too.
The weather's just starting to turn nippy so he zips his coat up further. Some hypnotically red leaves catch the streetlights in the gutter, and he's just about to decide to start walking when the bus pulls up and saves him from himself. He squeezes into a seat beside a pinched-looking older woman who smells faintly of cigarettes and floral perfume, and opens up his messages again, resting his hands on his backpack. Bossuet and Musichetta have both replied.
M: In his defense I think your weed butter somehow got stronger, and he didn't realise the physical appearance thing could be seen as a dig against you.
B: you're WELCOME and you're HANDSOME and if you end up getting married I get to be your best man XD
B: Have I mentioned lately how beautiful your eyes are?
He's attached a candid photo of Grantaire he'd taken in the park over the summer. Grantaire doesn't look at it too closely, but out of habit his gaze picks up each thing he wishes he could change.
The Grantaire in the picture looks happy, at least.
Everyone's eyes are beautiful, Bossuet. He deletes that, too.
---
There are many reasons Combeferre loves being a postdoc, and he is already mourning the loss of lab time, influx of undergraduate opinions, and difficulty keeping up with new literature that are going to hit him in approximately eighteen months.
For now, though, his beautifully flexible postdoc-ing hours mean that 1) when Enjolras calls him in the middle of the night to ask "This is a good idea, right?" with no further context, he can just turn up an hour late in the morning to compensate for the haunted hour he'd spent staring up at the ceiling trying to psychically intuit what the fuck Enjolras had been on about; and 2) he can take a mid-afternoon break to ambush Enjolras when he comes out of the small auditorium he'd been using to invigilate his midterm.
He doesn't come out to the arts buildings that often. This one's got a musty smell, with nebulous hints of starches drifting up from the Tim Hortons hidden away somewhere in the basement. He can't say he's planning on coming back in a hurry, but no way is he leaving Enjolras's bizarre midnight phone call unquestioned.
The door across the hall from where he's leaning opens, and a flurry of students begins to flee the scene. He catches snatches of what they're saying, "memorized all those definitions and he didn't even," "second short response, what was," "could have been worse."
Enjolras is standing by a podium at the front. He nods at his students when they place exams in front of him, but his attention is clearly on his phone. He doesn't notice when Combeferre slips in, either, timing his arrival between two clusters of exiting students.
The room empties out completely before Enjolras raises his head and the sight of Combeferre shocks a bright smile out of him. "Combeferre!" He glances at the clock above his head, despite the phone in his hand. Combeferre can't help but smile, too. "Did we have plans? It's good to see you."
"We didn't have plans until about two in the morning," Combeferre replies in French, a precaution against the Anglophone rumour-mongering poli-sci majors. "Some seemed to develop around then, though."
Enjolras laughs and scoops the exams into a tote bag. Combeferre squints. He doesn't seem particularly conflicted or guilty, which cannot be a good sign. "As long as we don't go to the student union pub," Enjolras says. "By the sounds of it my whole class was headed there to forget today ever happened."
"Of course."
They ramble vaguely downhill towards the part of downtown with the highest concentration of acceptable bars. It's a little early for a drink, but the more relaxed Enjolras seems, the more convinced Combeferre becomes that he himself is going to need one.
"So last night," he starts, once they're situated at table in sight of the door--Courfeyrac had said he might swing by when he gets off, and it's easier to just be visible than to coordinate by text. "Are you going to make me ask?"
The question gets a merry laugh from Enjolras, and the dread in Combeferre's stomach congeals into a cold mass. "No, no, I'd just been anxious about a decision I'd made. I was afraid I hadn't been thinking too clearly, so I guess I needed a bit of reassurance. Sorry for waking you up."
"Was this about Jason?" Combeferre fervently hopes not, Jason had been ludicrously ill-suited to Enjolras, but he and his improbable physique had still exerted some weird power over him for the whole disastrous month they'd been hooking up.
"Who? No," Enjolras says. "Well, there is a Jason in the pile, but I don't think he's going to be a good fit."
Combeferre nods slowly and smiles desperately at the server when she comes back with their order. "Merci, thank you, perfect." He takes a fortifying sip of his beer before forging on. "The pile," he prompts.
"Hm, that might've been insensitive phrasing," Enjolras says. "The responses to my ad."
The saga takes Combeferre through half of his pint and most of his remaining grip on reality. Enjolras had apparently seen a banner ad last night inviting him to find sexy singles in his area, which had led to some soul-searching, and—here, a less seasoned friend than Combeferre would have lost the plot, but he manages to cling to Enjolras's narrative—the result of the soul-searching was that Enjolras's productivity at work and happiness in general would be served by having a long-term partner with whom he would not have sex. Sex, Enjolras has concluded, is distracting, and just because he loves having it doesn't mean he should be having it. Not if it's going to interfere with his other priorities.
Thus: an ad, specifically asking for respondents who Enjolras would not be likely to enter into a physical relationship with. Combeferre is not feeling sturdy enough to read it himself, but he takes it on faith that Enjolras had been excruciatingly clear on that criterion.
"And you got a lot of replies to this?" Combeferre asks delicately.
"Sixteen so far," Enjolras says. "But I narrowed the list down during the midterm."
Combeferre raises his eyebrows and pointedly does not comment on the image of Enjolras standing in front of an auditorium of impressionable young minds, managing his personal life as they undertake the sisyphean task of deciphering his multiple choice questions. "That seems like a lot," he says.
Enjolras tilts his head noncommittally, his cheekbones casting perfect shadows as his hair gleams in the yellow bar lights. "It's been a slower rate of response than I've seen from other apps," he says. "But I guess there are a lot of people out there looking for matches."
Another sip is needed, and taken. "So you've whittled it down to a shortlist?"
"Yes," Enjolras says, focusing in again. "Here, I'm between these ones," and he fishes his phone out and taps open an attachment.
"I don't know if I can be a part of this," Combeferre says before he gets a glimpse at whatever lonely soul was on the other end of that screen.
"What?" Enjolras asks.
Combeferre closes his eyes and rubs at his forehead. Enjolras, he wants to say. You're going to make yourself miserable. Unless you get a supernaturally accommodating Craigslist hookup, or the asexual community of Montreal has started checking out the personal ads on a website notorious for its niche horniness, you are going to end up in a relationship with someone who's looking for very different things than you are looking for. And even if the guy answering your ad matches up with your stated wishes now, I know you, Enjolras, and I remember five years ago when you swore off sex until you were ABD. Your resolve lasted two weeks, until you hit a deadline at the gazette and your most recent ex texted 'you up?'. You are not actually cut out for a life of celibacy or self-denial.
"Why are we looking at a picture of Grantaire?"
Ah, good. Reinforcements.
Courfeyrac brushes a bise onto Combeferre's cheek, having just done the same to Enjolras, and drops down into their third chair. "That is his name, right? Eponine's friend?"
Combeferre leans across the table to get a look at Enjolras's phone, earlier hesitation banished by curiosity. The photo is of a man a few years older than him with deep bags under his eyes and a smile on his face. Sitting on the grass with his knees bent, he looks neither like the perfectly sculpted pinnacles of masculinity nor the sharp-featured, ethereal beauties Enjolras tends to date. Judging by the emphatic gesture he's been caught making with a can of beer, he's clearly invested in a conversation with someone out-of-frame. He looks vaguely familiar, Combeferre supposes, but he doesn't have Courfeyrac's uncanny memory for faces.
"Who?" Enjolras asks Courfeyrac. "I mean, maybe, he signed his email as R, but why do I know the name Eponine?"
"I don't know," Courfeyrac says, leaning far back in his chair, all affected innocence. "Combeferre," he flutters his eyelashes, "can you shed some light on why Enjolras might recognise the name of the woman whose bar you practically moved into last year because of your huge crush?"
"I decline to comment," Combeferre says with as much dignity as he can muster. He suspects it's not much, but luckily the flow of the conversation is still going inevitably Grantaire-wards, so his friends don't call him on it.
"Oh, this is great!" Enjolras says, and Combeferre does a quick mental translation from Enjolras to reality. This is probably actually a disaster, but…
Well, if Enjolras starts dating Eponine's friend, maybe Combeferre will cross paths with her more often, even without the excuse he'd been using last year. In his defense, he really had been writing reviews for Jazz Fest, and her bar had genuinely been an ideal place to write them up while they'd been fresh in his mind.
"He sent in a response to a personal I posted," Enjolras says, not giving the situation anywhere near the specificity it deserves.
Courfeyrac's eyes light up and he actually steeples his fingers like a movie villain. "You and Grantaire? Oh, I might like that."
"Yeah?" Enjolras is still blithely excited about his terrifying, terrible plan, and there Courfeyrac is, pouring more fuel in its engines.
"Yeah--we only talked a couple times, but he's smart, funny. His friends seem to love him." He takes a pause to wink ostentatiously in Combeferre's direction at the mention of Grantaire's friends. "The only thing is I'm not sure I'd've pegged him as being your type, E."
Enjolras's chin juts out a little more than usual, slightly defensive. "Maybe not, but I think it's time I try something new."
Courfeyrac gives a good-humoured shrug and smile. "Cheers to that!" he says, and swipes a sip from Combeferre's drink.
"I think," Combeferre says, before they go too far down this path, "you might need a little more context." He stares at Enjolras who, having no shame about the wild plan he's come up with, willingly taps at his phone and passes it over to Courfeyrac.
The smile on Courfeyrac's face freezes over as he begins to read. "This is… the ad?"
Combeferre takes the opportunity to reclaim his drink from Courfeyrac, and leans back to watch the show.
Hey, maybe it's all going to crash and burn, but Combeferre had decided in his first year of undergrad that he wasn't going to become an ethicist anyway, so he doesn't have an academic responsibility to be perfectly moral. He's a biologist, he'll be forgiven for just doing his best.
---
"I don't know if that's convincing, either," Grantaire says without giving the image on Bossuet's Powerpoint slide time to sink in. If he stares too deeply into (apparently) Enjolras's shiny white smile he's probably going to become hypnotised, so it's pure self-preservation.
The red pointer indicating Bossuet's cursor circles impatiently around the stopwatch. "You said you'd give me ten minutes to share the fruits of my stalking! No interruptions until the ten minutes are up!"
Musichetta calls from where she's doing something with the compost on the balcony, "Do you need me to grab the gag, babe?"
"What should I tell her, R? Am I going to need the gag?" Bossuet replies with a decent attempt at menace. It's undercut by his watermelon patterned suspenders, but only slightly.
The sooner Grantaire shuts up, the sooner Bossuet shares the Craigslist weirdo's email with him, the sooner he can reply and explain it was all a horrible mistake. The sooner he'll be free to maybe finish marking his first-year seminar's low-stakes writing from one college, and move on to the fourth years' essays from another. He holds his hands in the air in surrender.
"Thank you." Bossuet pushes his glasses up his nose. "We're going to take it from the top of the deck and restart my time because you threw me off."
The couch squeaks as Grantaire pulls his feet up onto it and piles a throw blanket on top of them.
"Okay, so this," first slide, "is Enjolras." Strong nose, perfect eyebrows, intense dark gaze: basically an academic Dev Patel with a shock of shiny, bleached hair. Nobody should look so good in an official headshot, which is apparently what this is. (The text accompanying it reads, Your (Future) Craigslist Boyfriend: An In-Depth Investigation By Bossuet On His Lunch Break.) "As you can see, he's hot stuff, just like you."
With a supreme effort of will, Grantaire doesn't interrupt like he had the first time Bossuet had gone over this slide.
"But looks can only get you so far! What's going on inside that charming head? Who is Enjolras anyway?" The next slide has a screenshot of a faculty profile page from the political science department at the most prestigious university Grantaire's currently adjuncting for. "He's got tenure!" Animations circle the relevant points on his profile as Bossuet touches on them. "Finished his PhD in four years, which, I have learned, is impressive; wrote his dissertation about human rights violations committed by Canadian mining operations in Honduras, so he's probably not a soulless hack despite being in poli-sci; seems to have made tenure within four years as well, another thing that is apparently impressive!"
The asshole hadn't even had to lecture as a contract instructor for a single term, Grantaire is disgusted to note. He really must be hot shit.
"So we know he's smart! We know he's probably earning enough to keep you in the style to which you should absolutely become accustomed! But is he," Bossuet wiggles his eyebrows, "cool?"
Grantaire can't stifle his reaction anymore, but Bossuet seems to take his skeptical snort as encouragement and beams at him as he advances the slides.
"He's a community activist!"
"So, not remotely." Musichetta uses her heel to nudge the door shut behind herself and sidles through the living room with her dirty hands held up out of the way.
"I meant morally cool."
A contradiction in terms if ever Grantaire's heard one, but there are so few minutes left before his promised freedom. Bossuet and his slides inform Grantaire that Enjolras volunteers for several worthy causes, including a food bank and a public interest research group. He might have a secret clone: in addition to the professoring and the volunteering, he finds time to be a regular contributor to a small-scale journal, writing about union drives and land-back campaigns and Islamophobia in Québec. At this point the presentation goes past ten minutes, but Grantaire doesn't mind as now Bossuet's trying to sell him on the merits of dating someone with access to cloning technology, which he can agree would be manifold.
What gets to him in the end isn't any of Bossuet's lovingly-crafted slides. It's the moment afterwards, when Musichetta's climbing down from the couch where she'd been giving a rousing speech to her clone army, when she tousles Grantaire's hair and says, "But R, seriously, it's not about him and his potential duplicates or whatever. It's about you. We know you've barely had a second to breathe lately, and you've had a hard time really celebrating the fact that you finished your PhD, but it's over! You did it. Now you're getting to start a whole new chapter, and we're so proud of you and excited for you."
Bossuet, damn him, reaches over to tangle his fingers with Musichetta's and adds, "We love you, and we think you're the best, and we think that other people will also think you're the best. You deserve someone who's going to be by your side forever, R, and if it takes a weird Craigslist date to kick off that search then hey, why not! Weirder things have happened!"
It's impossible to stay strong in the face of that much concentrated support, which is a bizarre paradox.
So Grantaire emails Enjolras back and tells him about his enthusiastic roommate who'd been Enjolras' actual penpal, but that he, Grantaire, is open to this experiment. He schedules the email for a day when he has to run around the city for four separate lectures from 9:30 until 6, switching from Francophone to Anglophone universities and back. It's a perfectly reasonable way to distract himself from potential rejection and disappointment.
His phone buzzes the next day while he's trying not to burn his hands on a pan of roasted eggplant, and he absorbs the gist of Enjolras's very to-the-point email before he can even psych himself out about it.
He's free Monday; they'll get pie from a place on St-Denis. Well, that settles that.
For the whole weekend, Grantaire finds himself looking forward to Monday night. Monday, and his date with Enjolras. He knows it's a bit of a joke, this bizarre blind date Bossuet had volunteered him for in response to an objectively insulting Craigslist ad, but as he's grating cheese for tacos on Saturday, he's smiling, thinking about what he might order when they go out on Monday. As he washes his hair Sunday morning, he's wondering if Enjolras will have opportunity to smell his shampoo.
He tries to pull back from fantasizing when he feels himself tipping into it and it starts feeling dangerous. Obviously this isn't a conventional first date; maybe Enjolras is a real asshole. Maybe his alarmingly striking faculty headshot isn't enough to make up for a secret rotten personality. Or, somehow worse, maybe he'll be great, but will decide Grantaire isn't what he's looking for (even in a sexless relationship? and yet...)
But the little thrill won't go away, because the root of it is based in truth: Grantaire had been chosen. Enjolras had surveyed the options and decided he wanted Grantaire, at least for one date.
Even if it went nowhere, he'd have that.