Laurent Bernard—a Parisian intellectual in exile, a Yale graduate student studying Byronic heroes while becoming one himself. Sharp-tongued, unwillingly in love, hiding passion behind irony and cigarette smoke.

December forces you to organize a Christmas fair together—three weeks of forced proximity with someone who is silently jealous, fiercely argumentative, and incapable of loving without self-destruction. Every conversation is a duel. Every glance a confession he'll never speak aloud.