Three Ramin #2
Relieved to be free of the swampass, too. His jeans were not meant for the late Italian summer.
Now he just needed food.
Boring Old Ramin would’ve found a salad bar. Or a grocery store.
Interesting New Ramin, on the other hand, spotted a gelateria across the cobbled street and thought fuck it . He was allowed to eat gelato for lunch.
The tiny (and blessedly air-conditioned) gelateria had a service counter at the front and two narrow bar tops along the walls, each with three tall plastic stools.
Ramin listened in as the people in front of him ordered.
He understood a bit—lemon, vanilla, peach—but the rest of the conversation went over his head.
He had a decent knack for language, decent enough at least to ace his honors French in high school. Not that he ever used French in real life. And a decent knack didn’t do much when you only had three weeks of practice under your belt. Ramin cleared his throat as he approached the counter.
“Buongiorno,” he said.
“Buongiorno,” the vendor, a curly-haired masc person in their twenties, replied.
Ramin smiled, remembering how curly his own hair had been at that age.
He kept it much shorter now, easier to care for, with a sharp part down the left side.
He’d adopted the style when he first started at SNK, Stark-Norris-Kauffmann, the marketing firm that hired him right out of college.
The style was casual enough to be approachable, yet professional enough to lead a meeting or talk a highly stressed client off an imaginary ledge.
He was about to order a lemon sorbetto—literally, was there anything finer?—but once he actually saw the spread of flavors at the counter, something else caught his eye.
Ramin cleared his throat again. “Per me, un Persiano, per favore?”
The vendor nodded and asked something way too quick for Ramin to catch.
“Uh…” Ramin said.
“Cup or cone?”
“Ah! Una coppetta, per favore.”
Ramin paid, took his cup, and found a stool in the corner, facing out the windows to people watch.
He tucked his bags beneath his stool and dug in with the little plastic spade.
The gelato was smooth and creamy, a perfect balance of rosewater and cardamom, with just a bit of crunch from the ground pistachios on top.
He never expected to find bastani in a gelateria in Milan. Italy really was magical.
As Ramin savored another bite, the door chimed, letting in two new guests.
One was a man about Ramin’s age, resting a gentle hand on the head of a boy who looked so similar they had to be family.
Ramin did a double-take, seeing a blue Kansas City Royals T-shirt on the father, but then shook his head.
He’d only walked a few blocks today, and he’d already seen a ton of folks wearing US team apparel, though mostly basketball now that he thought about it.
He’d thought they were tourists, but most had been speaking Italian.
He wondered if these were Italians, too, until the son started talking in English.
“I want one scoop. No, two! In a cone.”
The dad laughed and played with the kid’s messy chestnut hair.
Ramin’s heart clenched at the sight.
Adopting kids had been part of his plan, once he and Todd were married.
Ramin hadn’t given much thought to having them when he was newly out and in his twenties, but as he’d gotten older, he realized that he kind of wanted children.
He thought he’d be a good dad. And he liked the idea of having a family.
But that was probably boring, too.
“Do you think they have bubblegum?”
“Hah, I don’t think so, buddy, but let’s look,” the dad answered.
Ramin’s heart skipped a beat. The man’s voice was deep, mellow, the tiniest bit grainy, and weirdly familiar.
Ramin tried to eye him without being super obvious.
He had messy (but not too messy) black hair and a sharp jaw.
He looked strong, with broad shoulders, a defined chest, and arms that filled the holes of his shirt.
He wore a pair of light blue jeans, and his thighs filled those out, too.
He looked like he spent time in the gym, but not too much time; he seemed built for practical strength rather than for vanity.
The man turned, staring at one of the signs on the wall, and Ramin glimpsed warm brown eyes, a day’s scruff on his cheeks, and a cleft chin. Ramin nearly dropped his cup. He gripped it tighter and hoped the guy hadn’t noticed him staring.
Holy shit. It was impossible. Wasn’t it? His heart skipped another couple beats. Could the whole gelateria hear it?
But no. The probability was basically zero.
“Okay, buddy. You know what you want?” the man asked, and fuck it, Ramin could swear he knew that voice, even twenty years later.
Noah Bartlett. His old classmate. It couldn’t be, could it? No. But what if it was? Fuck, the guy even looked like Noah. Noah, if he’d aged like fine wine.
Ramin had never thought that about a person before—that they had aged like fine wine—but damn. He risked another glance. There were laugh lines around the guy’s sparkling eyes, and way more hair on his forearms. He looked like a man, not a teenager. But he knew that face. That voice.
Impossible. Right?
“Mmmmmm, pistachio!” the boy said.
“Two scoops of pistachio in a cone, per favore,” probably-definitely-not-Noah said. “And one scoop of lemon for me. Grazie.”
“What about Mom?” the boy asked.
“We’ll let her pick when she comes.”
Okay. Ramin had—very occasionally, and only when he couldn’t sleep—looked Noah up over the years.
Well, tried to look him up, because Noah didn’t seem to have a profile on any social media, at least not one that Ramin could find.
Even combing through his exceedingly neglected Facebook account (because seriously, fuck Mark Zuckerberg) to see if he could find mutual friends had yielded nothing.
As far as the internet was concerned, Noah Bartlett didn’t exist.
So this couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be Ramin’s first crush. Not that he’d understood it was a crush. He’d been seventeen and growing up in suburban Kansas City and closeted didn’t come close to describing it.
He hadn’t been able to put words to the strange draw he’d felt toward Noah.
He told himself it was jealousy—that Noah was handsome and fit, while Ramin had felt fat and ugly, his nose too big for his face, his stomach too big for his shirts.
He told himself it was friendship, that Noah had everything going for him, that by all rights he should’ve been awful to Ramin like all the other popular white boys, but he never was.
He told himself it was admiration, that he wanted to be like Noah, who had half the girls in their class crushing on him, or dating him, or whispering about him and giggling every time he walked by…
Ramin shook himself.
First, it probably wasn’t Noah. Kansas City was half a world away. Well, a third of a world at least.
Second, even if it was Noah Bartlett, it didn’t matter, because there was no way Noah would remember him.
Third, and most important: He was Interesting New Ramin. He was here to drown himself in foreskins, not dwell on a teenage crush.
Ramin squeezed his eyes shut as brain freeze shoved a dagger into his forehead. He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. That was supposed to help, right? When it finally went away, he opened his eyes to find probably-not-Noah gone.
Relief and disappointment warred in his chest for a second before relief won out. And if he heard a small, sad whisper of what if in the back of his mind, well, he ignored it.
He finished his gelato, wiped his mouth on the scratchy napkin, and was about to scoot off his stool when a voice spoke behind him.
“Scusi. Are you American? Sei Americano?”
Ramin froze. Turned and faced the voice.
It was the guy. Probably-Not-But-Maybe-Noah.
Who hadn’t left but was instead standing right behind him .
Up close, he was even more handsome. His cheekbones were strong, his jawline defined. His upper lip was heavily bowed, his bottom lip thick and round, turning his mouth into a heart. The light streaming into the shop caught in his eyes, made the honey in them shine.
One hand still rested on his son’s head; the other held up a cone of lemon sorbetto, showing off a bicep that was testing the tensile strength of his sleeve. A little vein squiggled toward the crease of his elbow.
Ramin reminded himself to breathe.
“Sì. I mean, yeah. Yes.”
A grin blossomed across the man’s face, just a tiny bit crooked, and those eyes sparkled even more. That smile could boil lakes.
Ramin worried he’d pass out. Slip off his stool, concuss himself on the counter, spend the rest of his time in Italy as Awkward Comatose Ramin.
He made himself unclench his ass and hoped it didn’t show in his face.
“This might sound weird, but you’re not from Kansas City, are you? Did you go to Northland High? Class of ’05?”
On second thought, ass clenching was good and healthy and normal.
Because holy. Shit.