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A flicker of anxiety reflected in his eyes. A question. If I wanted to back out, now was my moment. Guilt that I’d chosen pleasure over misery clawed at my mind and I pushed it aside.
“Amongst other things, yes.”
“You’re making a simple, innocent salt farmer very happy, Monsieur Heyer.”
There was nothing innocent about his eyes travelling the length of my body. Nor in the way his dry, firm hand slipped into mine as he dragged me to the edge of the tile. “This is the deluxe tour,” he explained wickedly, as he saw me examining our entwined fingers. “Hand-holding is an essential component.”
I wondered if I could persuade him to still be holding it at 3 a.m. Maybe it would stave off my nighttime demons. He motioned for me to stand on a hillock of soft grass, then squatted and pointed to the dark shallows.
“You can’t see it now, but at dawn, the light plays on the surface of the water, here and here, and especially here. It’s magical. An otter lives beneath that overhang. You should come down and say hello to him one morning as he washes himself. He’s the most beautiful thing.”
“You are here at dawn? You strike me as more of an evening person, Florian.”
He chuckled, green eyes dancing. “It has been known, on occasion. Fortunately, my otter friend hangs around at lunchtime too. Anyhow, I’ve brought you to this side of the tile to tell you the story of salt; it’s a romantic masterpiece worthy of the great Victor Hugo himself. So you mustn’t interrupt.”
I made a zipping motion across my lips, and his eyes held mine a little longer than necessary. Silver and green flirted with each other, and the urge to plant a kiss on his generous mouth grew stronger.
“At dawn,” he began, with a stern look. “When the dew has raised the water level, is when we begin to harvest the gros sel. The coarse salt. The salt Belgians such as you, who speak French like dying goats, sprinkle on your frites.” He rubbed the tip of his thumb across my palm. “On some days, if the weather conditions change, or if the salt harvester has enjoyed a particularly lively evening in L’Escale, it is also permissible to begin harvesting the gros sel much later in the morning.”
He passed me a rake, the strange, broad wooden one with holes punched in it, resembling a medieval instrument of torture. “We push across the water, like so.”
Taking up a position behind me, he slipped his arms around my waist, adjusting my hands on the rake, like a tennis coach, and keeping his own hands over mine. “This cuddle is part of the deluxe tour, too, by the way, and only reserved for very special visitors.”
“The sad, lonely ones you kiss at firework displays?”
He squeezed me a little tighter. “Exactement, my friend.” The rake moved under my hands. “We push, we make wavelets. We toss to the side. And repeat. But only in this very shallow section of the tile.”
He pushed the rake at a steady pace through the shallows and back again. Trickles of water washed through the holes, the low scritch of the tool along the floor of the tile echoed around the marsh. Florian’s warmth blanketed my back.
“We do it again.” His lips were close to my ear and my green hummed with pleasure at his rich silvery tone, “And again. Et voila. We have the coarse salt. Fool’s gold.”
The slow-motion careful raking and swirling of the water was oddly addictive. My heartbeat slowed and steadied in the near silence. My breathing quietened too, my existence narrowed to nothing but the feel of Florian’s wiry, strong arms encircling me from behind and the press of the rough skin of his hands over mine. Of his silver cloaking my green. Fascinated, I watched the water percolate through the holes in the rake as I dragged my modest haul of grey salt up from the water’s edge to the nearest small pyramid and deposited it in an untidy heap at the base.
“Exceedingly coarse salt, in your case,” Florian’s chuckle warmed my ear. I had a feeling I no longer needed his hands guiding me, seeing as we’d stopped raking, but he stayed just in case.
“How do you shape your pyramids so perfectly?” I looked down at my pathetic effort. “In such aligned rows, and all the same size?”
“I am an Egyptian,” he teased. “It’s in my blood.” His breath gusted across my cheek. “I’ll let you into a secret, Charles.”
I regretted asking, because he let go of me and knelt by my heap of salt, efficiently brushing at it, moulding it with his strong fingers. “The perfect symmetry is for the tourists. Of course, I could dump the salt however I liked, as long as it dried out. But this looks better, so we play with the mounds when no one is looking. We shape them, with our hands or our tools. For the pretty photographs. See? This is why they call me the Picasso of salt.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, neither did I care. I just wanted his arms back around my waist and for him to kiss me again.
I frowned, remembering something. “You called gros sel the fool’s gold. So how do you harvest the white gold? The fleur de sel?”
In a fluid movement, he stood and squinted at the sky where the sun teetered on the edge of tipping over the horizon. “Come over here. We have a few minutes left. Watch and learn.”
Taking me by the hand again, he led me to the far end of the tile, where the water was deeper, and passed me another type of rake.
“Look, you see on the surface?” Florian’s voice was barely above a whisper. His fingers left mine, but only to travel as far as my hip, where they stayed as he positioned me. “Look with your heart as well as your eyes, Charles. Because this part is the magic. The witching hour when the fleur de sel, the white gold, graces us with its presence.”
Like a layer of caramel on a silky creme brulée, the watery, low rays picked out the light silvery film of fleur de sel, broken in places, thin and fragile. From another angle, it would be missed, but not by me, because the same silvery brightness shimmered around Florian himself.
“The fleur de sel is precious. Rare and sensitive.” Florian’s low voice hummed in my ear. “Like a shy lover, it only comes out to play in the evenings. My harvest is at the mercy of every individual cloud, every single ray of sunlight. Some evenings there is none, sometimes more than I can gather.”
Christ, his voice mesmerised me. Even if it was nothing more than a trick of physics. My mother would have explained it away as a lucky combination of sound waves, vibrating through vocal cords no different from anyone else’s, the air he breathed no different to mine. Regardless, I wanted to kiss it out of him. I wanted to hear him use it to tell of the filthy things he would do to me while his decadent tongue licked a path across my skin.
He wrapped my hands around the rake, a different shape to the one we’d used for the coarse salt—longer, more elegant, yet weighty nonetheless.
