13.
Nate couldn’t sleep the night Thea left, and Ghost Hunters wasn’t cutting it. He lay with his chin tucked against Jacopo’s shoulder, the laptop resting on Jacopo’s chest. Their fingers were twisted together, Jacopo’s thumb idly rubbing over his knuckles, and Nate wondered if he could feel how tense Nate was, the shivery tightness of his nerves. He burrowed closer into Jacopo’s side, trying to calm the beat of his heart.
Jacopo brought Nate’s hand to his mouth, kissing it. There was a dazed little smile on his face, and Nate found himself smiling back. “What?” he asked.
“I just–” Jacopo looked embarrassed. “It’s silly. I just like touching you. Sometimes I still can’t believe I’m allowed to.”
“You’re allowed to do more than that.” There was an ache between his legs as he thought of that morning, and a corresponding ache in his chest. Nothing between them, and the desperate, almost wounded sound Jacopo had made as he came inside of him. Nate felt a thrill go through him. He wanted to hear Jacopo make that noise again.
“I’m dreaming.” Jacopo looked at their hands, still twined together. “I’ll wake up any minute, I think.”
“Speaking of dreaming, I can’t sleep.”
“Hm. I think I can help you with that.”
“Yeah?” Nate snapped the laptop shut, leaning over him. “What do you propose?”
Jacopo laughed a little. “Actually–I’d like to take you to the beach. Do you want to? It’s beautiful at night, when no one else is there. And it’s where I go sometimes, when I can’t get any sleep.”
It wasn’t what Nate had had in mind, but his heart fluttered in his chest as they zipped through the dark on Jacopo’s vespa, feeling like he was soaring, the cliffside indistinct and the lights of distant houses dancing in the night like fireflies. He’d thought it was creepy out here before, but now, locked to Jacopo in this little pocket of warmth, the motor humming beneath them and the air on their faces carrying the last traces of the day’s heat, it seemed like the night was theirs. The surface of the water below was crisscrossed by white veins of foam that stood out in the light of the moon, ever shifting, and the stars spilled out overhead, endless against the hazy backdrop of the Milky Way. It was a different world, a secret world of black and white, of shadows and moonlight, nobody in it but them.
The beach was a glimmering bar of silver, scrawled all over with lines from the tide, which seemed to be going out because the sand was wet when they stepped on it. Nate took his shoes off, scrunching the ground between his toes. Far away, some manmade noise came in across the water, the low horn of a fishing boat. If it hadn’t been for that, he could have believed they were the only people alive. The whisper of the ocean was soothing, rhythmic. Jacopo’s hand traced up and down his back, matching its cadence.
“Come sit with me.” Jacopo led Nate to a pile of driftwood. They sat with their backs to the island, watching the waves curl and topple over each other, the tracery of moonlight across the water’s surface.
“You weren’t kidding,” Nate said. He felt a little silly, disturbing the silence. Jacopo’s body was loose and relaxed, his arm draped casually around Nate’s waist. “It really is gorgeous out here. You know all the best spots on this island.”
“I have to, I think.” Jacopo traced lines in the sand with his fingers. “I’ve spent so many years here, trying to find places where I can be alone.”
“Will you miss it?”
Jacopo tilted his head back, looking at the stars. “I don’t know,” he said. “I always wanted my world to be bigger. But I didn’t really think it was possible. I didn’t think a lot of things were possible, before I met you.” He glanced at Nate, his expression unreadable.
Nate swallowed. He wasn’t really sure what to do with that information. There was a weird squirming sensation in his stomach as he said, “Gracie told me about your dad.”
Jacopo sighed, squeezing his eyes shut. “Of course she did. She’s like Tuesday, that girl. Always in the middle of everything.”
“It’s why you want to leave, right? Because of him, because he blames you for his accident?” Nate put his hand on Jacopo’s knee. His fingers were steady, but his heart was rattling around in his chest like a stray marble. “You know it’s bullshit, right? It’s not your fault. Even if you had been here–”
“It’s not–” Jacopo looked away, across the sea. Something was blinking out there, a red light. Nate saw it caught in his eyes. “It’s not that simple. He never liked me, even before the accident. He wanted me to be more like my cousins. He was always telling me I was too sensitive, too quiet. Pushing me to play sports, to go out on the fishing boat. To–butcher a goat without crying about it.” He laughed, sheepishly and without any real humor. “I’ve never been the right kind of man for him.”
“I think you’re a perfectly good kind of man.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“I mean it.” Nate cupped Jacopo’s cheek, his heart still doing that weird rattly thing. “The whole machismo thing is dumb as hell. The world needs more sensitive men who like cooking and translating books and taking care of things. Plants. Stray cats.” He shrugged. “Clueless dukes.”
“Nate.” Jacopo shook his head, eyes not leaving his face. Nate still couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“You shouldn’t let anyone let you feel less than,” he insisted. “I’ve made that mistake. More than once. And I—I hardly even felt like a fucking person when I was working at that warehouse.”
“I know. You said something about that, the first night you were here.”
Nate laughed nervously, brushing sand off his hands. “Shit. I really bared my soul to you, huh?”
“No. But you did hit on me a little bit.”
“Wow. Brave of me. Score one for Drunk Nate, I guess.”
“I like Drunk Nate.” Jacopo brushed his lips against Nate’s temple.
“I don’t. He’s a messy bitch. And he always binge-eats carbs at like 3am.”
“Well, I like sober Nate, too. And the Nate who draws. All the Nates, really.” Jacopo’s thumb made idle circles on his hip, feather-light.
Nate felt heat rising in his face, and he looked away. It was too easy to get caught up in it all, the starlight and the compliments and the hushed voice of the surf, the way Jacopo’s arm felt so natural around him. He cleared his throat. “So what should we do while we’re out here? Sex on the beach?”
Jacopo made a face. “That sounds–much too sandy.” He straightened up, stretching out his arms. “But we could go swimming.”
“Swimming? I didn’t bring–”
“It’s fine.” Jacopo stood up. His fingers were brisk, unbuttoning his shirt and starting on his pants. Nate watched in amazement. Jacopo was a different person under the night sky, confident, his spine long and straight and his movements fluid as one of the cats’. The moonlight loved him, turning his golden skin to ivory, and Nate couldn’t help but grin at the tan line across his lower back, the bright white cheeks of his ass. All the places the sun didn’t see.
He let out a passable wolf-whistle. Jacopo just smiled over his shoulder, and then Nate was following him, shucking off his clothes and dropping them in a pile next to Jacopo’s perfectly-folded ones.
He had been in the water before, but he caught himself holding his breath nevertheless, still expecting the ice-cold shock of the Pacific. It didn’t come. The ocean was calm, dreamy, warm as the night air around them, and once Nate got out past the breakers, the waves were lazy and undulant, barely disturbing his balance as the water lapped at his waist. He kicked off, into an inexpert breaststroke, and then dove under, suspended for a moment in the inky cocoon of the water before coming back up for air, his hair dripping water into his face. Jacopo was floating on his back nearby, splayed out under the pale moon. There was a peace and a stillness to him that made Nate think the invitation to swim hadn’t just been some scheme to get them both naked, so he paddled around, staying in Jacopo’s periphery, enjoying the stretch of his muscles and the caress of the water on his skin.
Eventually he began to talk, idly, about the ocean back home, about how it was so freezing that even in the summer, you needed a wetsuit. He told Jacopo about the tide pools on the Oregon coast, how the rocky beaches looked like they were studded with opals after the tide went out, how he and Thea, feet numb enough not to register the bite of the barnacles, had clambered around as kids, looking for sea creatures and shells, poking anemones and shrieking at the feeling of their velcro-like tendrils on their fingers. He talked about their tree house, a sketchy construction of ropes and jagged two-by-fours that he had wedged into the crook between branches (Barb hadn’t allowed him to use nails, saying it would hurt the tree), and how it had collapsed one day, resulting in a broken arm and a scar that Nate still had on his shin.
“So you’ve always been accident-prone,” Jacopo said fondly.
Nate flicked water at him. “Mom said I shouldn’t have been up in it anyway. I was fourteen, too big to be climbing trees. And I made it for Thea, really.”
“How much younger is she?”
“Six years. But she’s so confident, she seems like the big sister half the time.” Nate looked at his own hand underwater, a pale smear. “And she had to grow up fast. I think we both did, with mom moving around a lot and never having a steady job and all the shitty boyfriends.”
“Dave isn’t Thea’s father, then?” Jacopo asked. “Sorry,” he added quickly. “If my curiosity is rude.”
“No, don’t be.” Nate shrugged. “Thea’s dad was actually nice, though. When Mom got pregnant, I thought maybe–” He scratched his neck. Beads of saltwater were starting to dry on his nape, making the skin tight and itchy. “But it didn’t last, you know? He left. People always do.”
“Nate–”
“I’m getting pruny,” Nate said. “Can we get out?”
Jacopo made a fire, and they sat in the wash of heat from the flames, half-dressed, their hair salt-stiff and their limbs grainy with sand. In the firelight, Nate showed Jacopo the catalog of his scars, starting with the one on his shin and moving on to the collection of scuffs on his elbows and knees. Jacopo traced his fingers over Nate’s skin, making sympathetic noises. Nate felt a pleasant emptiness come into his head as he watched the shifting colors of the fire, his eyes drooping, thoughts ebbing away. He snuggled into Jacopo’s side, and even though he was filthy and there was a knot of driftwood digging into his back and they weren’t even doing anything, just touching, just existing there with each other, he couldn’t remember a time he had felt more content.
He woke with his head on Jacopo’s chest, his mouth full of sand, the two of them curled up together in a nest of their discarded clothes. The fire was a pile of embers and dawn was seeping up from the horizon and the waves had gotten bigger, coming in to devour the beach, and it was time to get up, and get back to the real world.
*
Summer was ticking down, the days still long and languid but getting incrementally shorter, every sunset shaving off another little piece of the day. Sometimes when Jacopo woke before dawn, in the quiet before the birds began to sing, he could feel a chill, a brittleness to the air that hinted at the coming change of the seasons. He couldn’t get back to sleep on those mornings, and so he lay there watching Nate as the light spread over him, wondering what he dreamt about and finding every little snuffle and snore and twitch in his sleep hopelessly charming.
He’d thought once that he needed to make a dictionary of Nate’s American slang, but what he realized now was that he needed to make a dictionary of Nate, to file away every impression he could before the man was gone from his life, to keep the memory of him alive and beating and close to his heart. Being here with him already felt like a dream, and soon enough it would only be a memory, the colors faded, the sensations growing dull. To hope otherwise was stupid. Nate had made it clear that this thing between them was limited to the summer, and anyway, there was no way that Jacopo could take anything–or anyone–with him when he left. He had piled up the things he was hiding too high, and if he dislodged any of them, they would bury him. His only option was to make a clean break: from Carmosino, and from everyone.
So he studied Nate in the early morning light, cataloging everything he could.
This morning, though, Nate had risen before him. Jacopo found him out in the courtyard, head bent over his sketchbook, a watercolor palette lying open on the grass beside him. The intense focus of his face in profile, the confident movements of his hands, sent a little tingle down Jacopo’s spine. There was a steadiness to Nate when he drew, so different from the usual nervous energy that overflowed in him.
“Hey.” Nate looked up. His hair was in his eyes, and Jacopo bent down to brush it out of the way.
“Your hair’s getting so long.”
“I know,” Nate said, with an embarrassed smile. “My mom’s not here to trim it.”
Jacopo played with a lock of it, feeling the texture between his fingers. He looked down at what Nate was working on. The castle, half rosy pinks and yellows, half in shadow as the sun slowly crept up the sky. It was so foreign to him, being able to take the shapes and colors of reality and put them onto paper like this. He squeezed Nate’s shoulder and pressed a kiss to his temple. “I’m impressed. I haven’t seen you paint before.”
“It could be better. I don’t have the right paper for watercolors.”
Jacopo frowned. “Then we’ll get you the right paper. You need to have good supplies. The best.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Nate put the painting down. “I have to stop working on it, anyway. If I add more, I’m going to crap it up.”
“Stay here,” Jacopo said. “I’ll get breakfast.”
He smoked and drank espresso as Nate started another sketch, a basket of bomboloni on the ground between them. Jacopo had noticed that Nate favored the Italian doughnuts more than any other pastries he’d brought back from the market, so he’d continued to buy them, despite Nate’s insistence that he didn’t need the calories. The wiry, overgrown grass of the castle courtyard still glimmered with drops of dew, and the earth was rocky and hard beneath Jacopo’s tailbone, but he felt luxurious and almost decadent sitting here, his foot idly rubbing against Nate’s bare calf and the sun’s warmth spilling over his head and neck as it crested the ramparts of the castle.
“What are you drawing now? Not me again, I hope.”
“I was trying to get Pennywise over there, with his little tongue out.” Nate nodded toward the cat, who was dead asleep in what had once been a flower bed. “But I should draw you. I don’t have enough pictures of you.”
“Michelangelo used to draw his lovers, you know.” Jacopo watched smoke swirl up into the sky from the tip of his cigarette.
“Are you saying I should draw you naked?” Nate looked up, grinning. “Or, like, immortalize your ass in bronze?”
“Nate, if anyone’s ass deserves to be immortalized in bronze–”
“Oh my God, stop.” But he was laughing, his face lit up and achingly beautiful. Nate put the sketchbook down and grabbed a pastry from the basket. “Didn’t Michelangelo also paint his enemies into things? There’s a guy somewhere in the Sistine Chapel getting his dick bitten by a snake or something, right?”
Jacopo nodded, warmth blooming in his chest. He loved Nate’s thirst for historical scandals. “Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of ceremonies at the time. He complained about the nudity in the painting, so Michelangelo painted him into it. With–a snake biting his dick, as you said. But conveniently, the snake covered up the nudity, so there was nothing he could say about it.”
“Wow, the original shady queen.” Nate took a bite of his bombolone, getting powdered sugar on his chin. Jacopo’s fingers itched to wipe it away. “You know, I thought it was so cool, when I learned that he had male lovers. Da Vinci, too.”
“Yes. So did I, when I found out in university,” Jacopo admitted. “It made me feel–less alone, I think.”
“Is that when you figured it out for yourself?” Nate was doodling again, not looking at him, but there was a tenseness in his shoulders that Jacopo couldn’t miss. “In college?”
Jacopo sighed. He didn’t want to get into all that, didn’t want to bring the ugliness of it here, into this little pocket of sugar and sunshine, the stillness of early morning and the comforting smells of coffee and tobacco. That day in the kitchen that his parents pretended hadn’t happened and that Jacopo couldn’t forget. He looked away, smoothing the front of his shirt.
“I knew earlier,” Nate said. “Like, way early. My mom didn’t know until I was in middle school though. She found some drawings I’d done.” Red was creeping up his neck, but he kept scribbling on the paper in front of him, his pencil moving in rapid circles. “You know. That kind of drawings. And then we had to have a talk. And she wasn’t unhappy about it or anything, just confused, because I liked skateboarding, and I guess skateboarding isn’t gay? But the only reason I started skateboarding is because there was this guy, Travis, who I had a crush on, and–” he cut himself off, taking a deep breath. “Never mind. Sorry.”
“I knew earlier, too,” Jacopo said. “But in university was when it really sunk in.”
“Did you have a boyfriend?”
“No, never. But I had a best friend, a girl, and she was the only one I told.” He thought of Lucia, then, the memories of that other life suddenly so vivid that he felt tears coming to his eyes. The two of them always together, a strange pair, Jacopo gawky and unpolished, with his outdated clothes and his rural slang that hadn’t caught up to what they were saying in the city, and Lucia, serious, quiet until she had an opinion, endlessly intense with her notebook full of poetry and her fishnet tights and the streak she had bleached in her own hair. Something dark squirmed in his chest. What would Nate think if he knew? His skin felt too tight all of a sudden, and he fumbled in his pocket for another cigarette.
“Are you still in touch with her?” Nate asked.
Jacopo shook his head. He had said too much already.
“I get it. People come and go.” Nate looked up at him. His cheeks were flushed, and there was a funny little half-smile on his face. “I wish I’d met you in college.”
“You would have been too young for me then.”
“Not too young to have a big, fat crush on you. You could have corrupted me.”
Nate’s hair was in his eyes again, and Jacopo tucked it behind his ear, running his knuckles down his cheek, across his lips. His heart was pounding, and his pulse felt lodged in the back of his throat. “I think you’re corrupting me,” he said. “I like it.”