El.

“We’re both weird outsider fairy creatures, you and me, aren’t we?” Marcel said, his voice reducing to a dramatic whisper. Then he disappeared into the shadows of the hallway, as if by a spell.”
― Eliot Schrefer, Charming Young Man

“Do you remember the puzzle that we made years ago when we sneaked into the carpenter’s shed? I have been putting the pieces together each morning as a way to say hello to you.”
― Eliot Schrefer, Charming Young Man

“As he slotted the folded letter neatly into his music theory book, Léon felt a chill flood of something he realized was loneliness. He wanted Félix to be proud of him, and not to worry, but who could he be honest with? Charlotte and his mother were depending on him to keep them from poverty. Marmontel didn’t have an interior life, as far as he could tell. Reynaldo was Reynaldo. Robert de Montesquiou might have become a friend, but that adventure had ended terribly. Could he be honest with Félix? Everything he was going through felt foreign to their life of woodland walks and feeding ducks. How could Félix understand?”
― Eliot Schrefer, Charming Young Man

“As has happened a few times in his life, a moment has so much in it that it locks into his memory. Like he’s had it painted. He knows he’ll be returning to this in his mind until whenever he dies. Happiness isn’t in the future; it is now, in this brief moment: fireflies over a freshly shorn field, plates empty of dinner, three men pushed back from the table, enjoying their conversation, his sister arriving with a box tied up in string, the hem of her simple dress wet from the evening dew, her husband with their wailing child on his hip, the setting sun lighting up the windowpanes of Félix’s house, of their house, inside it a piano with a bitten-down pencil and a half-filled sheet of music.”
― Eliot Schrefer, Charming Young Man