Excerpt from Change by Edouard Louis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He was still in the same position, motionless on all fours. I backed up a bit, walked around the bed and came to stand in front of him. His features were drawn, his face was pleading, exhausted from waiting. Suck, I said, and he took my still soft cock in his mouth. I closed my eyes. I don't know how I managed, but after about twenty minutes standing there in front of him my cock bulged and I came, I pulled out of his mouth to cover his face, and looking down I saw the thick, white liquid on his forehead, his cheeks, his eyelids.

My breath shook.

* * *

I got dressed. I thought: It's almost over. Almost over. He grabbed a towel from the bedside table that he'd probably put there knowing I'd come, wiped his face and walked over to a small chest of drawers. He took out a wad of notes and came over to me.

He gave me a hundred euros; I didn't move. He knew exactly what I was expecting and why I didn't move but he pretended not to understand. He was playing with me, he knew full well that I saw what was going on, that I knew he was playing with me but that I was too afraid to say anything. Finally he said You did half the job so I'm paying you half the money. You should have fucked me, you didn't. A whore who doesn't fuck isn't a whore. You can be glad I'm giving you a hundred. He didn't say it aggressively but more as an observation, the way you cite a rule or the terms of a contract. I'd learned to recognize how rich someone was at a glance, I could see it, I was never wrong, I knew he was rich and that paying me a hundred euros more wouldn't have changed a thing for him, that having a hundred euros less in his wallet wouldn't have made the slightest impact on his life. My heart was pounding in my chest (it wasn't my heart that was pounding but my whole body). I started to describe my situation to this man in front of me, I didn't even know his name but I told him everything, the shame, the dentist. That wasn't his problem, he said, when you do things by halves you get half what you bargained for. You have to know what you want in life. You're young, you have time to learn.

* * *

It was when he said those words that I decided to back down. His friends in the next room could get worried and come in to see if everything was all right, they couldn't see my face—They mustn't see your face, Other people must not see your face.

* * *

I took the money and left, walked through Paris in the night, and went home. Outside, the pavements were shiny from the rain, reflecting the streets like a second city projected onto the ground. I walked. I didn't think I hated him. I didn't think anything.

When I entered my flat I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Even when I was crying I didn't think anything. I no longer knew my name. I wasn't crying because of what had just happened, which wasn't such a big deal, just the sort of unpleasant thing that can happen to you in any situation; rather, what had just happened allowed me to cry for all the times in my life when I hadn't cried, all the times I'd held back. It's possible during that night, in that room, I let my eyes cry twenty years of uncried tears.

I walked to the shower. I didn't take off my clothes. I turned on the warm water and felt it run down over me, from the top of my head to my ankles. I tilted my head back, stretching my throat, and opened my mouth as if I was going to scream, a long, beautiful scream, but I didn't. The water soaked my clothes, my white T-shirt turned the color of my skin, my soggy trousers grew dark and heavy.

I stayed under that shower for a long time, watching the water running down over me. When I got out morning was breaking. I think it was then that I asked myself if one day I'd be able to write a scene like that, a scene so far removed from the child I'd been and his world, not a tragic or pathetic scene but above all one that was radically foreign to that child, and it was then that I promised myself I'd do it one day, that one day I'd tell everything that had led up to that scene and everything that happened afterward, as a way of going back in time.

Excerpted from Change by Edouard Louis. Copyright © 2024 by Edouard Louis. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.