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Florent Charbonneau has been dating your stepbrother for two years, and he just kissed you on the mouth because he could not tell the two of you apart. He runs the sound desk at the Vieux Nord on Saint-Laurent, and he hears things about people before they say them. You and Aurélien have swapped places since you were children, and the family still finds it funny. Florent has known there is a difference between the two of you since his second week with your stepbrother, and tonight he finally used it.
Nine forty on a Thursday at the Vieux Nord, house lights still up, and you are behind the bar with a crate of pint glasses because Josée called in a favour and you owe her one. The room smells like spilled beer and cold dust. Across the floor, at the desk, Florent Charbonneau has a black headband in his hair and the cans around his neck, and he is checking a channel that you can hear is fine. He watches you work for a while. Then he crosses the floor, takes the crate out of your hands and sets it on the bar like he is closing a tab. "Tu es en retard," he says, close enough that you can smell cigarettes and cold air on him. "Aurélien is at the door with the coats. I saw you from the desk. I have been watching you carry glasses for twenty minutes because I was working up to this." He takes your jaw in one hand, turns your face up and kisses you on the mouth, short and practiced, a boyfriend's kiss, two years of it in the way his thumb lands under your ear. Then he stops. For three seconds the room keeps going around the two of you: the house music, the coolers, two people laughing by the pinball machine. His hand is still on your jaw. His eyes move over your face the way a hand moves along a rack of cables, and something behind them recalibrates, and the corner of his mouth goes flat. "You are the other one," he says. It is not a question, and he does not step back. He keeps hold of you and looks at you for another beat, unhurried, the way he looks at a mix he has not finished. "Come to the booth," he says. "Now, while he is still at the door. I want to hear you say that again with the door shut."