17. Leo
Leo
Torturing Alex over the next day was the most delicious thing I’d ever done. And honestly, the asshole deserved it.
It started small. Innocent, almost. I came downstairs the morning after our kitchen argument in the shortest pair of shorts I owned, the ones I’d packed as an afterthought.
They were a faded gray pair that sat low on my hips and left very little to the imagination.
I made coffee. I stretched. I reached up for the mugs on the top shelf of the cabinet with both arms fully extended and held it just a beat longer than necessary, letting my shirt ride up above my waist.
Behind me, I heard Alex’s chair scrape against the floor.
I turned around with both mugs and smiled at him like nothing was happening. “Coffee?”
He took it without a word and looked out the window.
That was how the morning went.
By afternoon I’d graduated to the terrace.
I took my book out there and lay on the sun lounger in just my shorts, and I read with a concentration that was entirely fabricated while the sun did its work on my bare chest and stomach.
Alex appeared in the doorway at one point with a glass of water, saw me, and went back inside without drinking it. I heard the tap run. Then silence.
I turned a page I hadn’t read.
The thing was, I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wasn’t particularly proud of it.
But I also couldn’t seem to stop. There was something intoxicating about watching Alex, the most controlled man I had ever met, lose his grip on that control one fractional degree at a time.
He’d sat at that kitchen table and told me he didn’t need me, that he’d had better, that I was delusional.
Every single word had been a lie constructed out of fear and whatever emotional shrapnel he was trying to throw my way to hurt me because he was scared. I knew that.
But knowing it and being fine with it were two different things. And since he refused to grow up and talk to me like an adult, I figured I had no other alternative.
So I made him suffer. Gently. Surgically. With laser-like precision.
I wore a white linen shirt to dinner that evening, the one that was slightly too thin and slightly too open at the collar.
I made sure to sit across from him at the small kitchen table and talk about my trip to the market.
About the cheese I’d bought. About the dark preserve in the jar that I’d finally opened and which turned out to be some kind of cured olive situation that was, genuinely, extraordinary.
And of course I talked about all the attractive men down at the piazza, even making a few up just to incite his jealousy.
I talked about all of it with great enthusiasm and absolutely no acknowledgment of the tension sitting between us like a third person at the table.
Alex ate. He said very little. He kept his eyes on his plate with his jaw set and his teeth grinding.
I poured him more wine without asking.
He looked up.
“Thanks,” he said, flat and careful.
“Of course,” I said, and smiled at him over the rim of my own glass.
His jaw tightened again.
I let the silence breathe for a moment, then said, “Matteo and I are going out tomorrow night, by the way. He wants to take me to a place up the coast. Some terrace restaurant he knows.”
The muscle in Alex’s cheek jumped once, hard. He set his fork down. Picked it back up. Set it down again.
“Good,” he said.
“I thought so too.” I speared a piece of tomato. “He’s very thoughtful like that. Always knows the right place to make a guy feel special.”
Nothing.
“You’d probably like him,” I added, “if you gave him a chance.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it,” he said. His voice was low and controlled and had that particular edge to it that meant he was holding something back with considerable effort. “Can we drop it?”
“Sure.” I lifted my glass. “We can talk about something else.”
We did not, in fact, talk about something else.
We talked about nothing, which was its own kind of torture, because the silence in the kitchen was thick enough to swim through.
Every time I reached for something on the table, every time I shifted in my chair, every time I leaned back and let my shirt fall open another half inch, I was aware of Alex’s gaze raking over my bare skin.
He was trying not to look and failing in small, almost imperceptible ways.
A glance that lasted a half-second too long. His avoidance was too deliberate.
He was suffering magnificently.
I would’ve felt bad about it had his words not still been echoing in my skull.
After dinner I washed up and left him at the table with the last of the wine and went upstairs to read. I took off my shirt and lay on my bed with the window open and the scented night air coming in off the valley. I stared at the same page for twenty minutes without retaining a single word.
Because the thing about torturing Alex was that it required thinking about Alex. Constantly. In considerable detail. And thinking about Alex, at this particular juncture, was not exactly a neutral activity for me.
I thought about his hands and the way they’d explored my body.
I thought about the dark of the room and the candle burning low in the night.
I thought about the weight of his arm across my chest and the way his heartbeat had felt against my back, fast and unsteady, as he jerked me off in the dark while I still had the taste of his cum on my lips.
I pressed the book against my face and made a sound into it that I was glad no one could hear.
This was the problem with my strategy. It was working on him. It was also, with perfect and infuriating symmetry, working on me.
I heard his footsteps on the stairs around ten.
They paused outside my open door for a moment, long enough that I knew he was looking.
I shifted, pulling one leg up so my shorts tightened, hugging the curve of my ass.
For one brief moment, I thought I heard a sharp intake of breath.
And then, a heartbeat later, I heard him continue down the hall to his room.
His door closed. I heard the old floor settle under his weight.
I rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
The night insects were going at it outside. Down in the valley, a dog was barking at something with very little enthusiasm. The lemon trees were moving in the breeze, their leaves catching whatever light was left and throwing it back in small silver flashes through my window.
I was absolutely not going to go knock on his door.
That was the decision I made somewhere around eleven, lying on my back with the ceiling fan turning slow and useless overhead.
I was not going to cross the hall. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of thinking that any of this was getting to me as much as it was getting to him.
I had a plan. The plan was working. The plan required patience and consistency and a fundamental refusal to blink first.
I turned onto my side and looked at the wall.
The house was quiet in that particular way that’s only found in the country.
All the daytime sounds had been stripped back until there was nothing left but the insects and the occasional shift of old stone.
I could hear the faint movement of the curtain in the breeze.
And I swore I could almost feel more than hear that Alex was still awake in his own room.
I closed my eyes.
The problem, the real problem underneath the strategy and the white shirt and the careful engineering of every stretch and every smile, was that I wasn’t angry anymore.
I’d been angry yesterday. Yesterday, the anger had been sharp and useful and had propelled me directly into Matteo’s surprised mouth in a move that had felt spectacular at the time.
But anger, it turned out, had a shelf life. And somewhere between dinner and the wine and the way Alex had looked at his plate while I talked about the coast restaurant, it had quietly expired and left something else in its place.
Something considerably less manageable.
I wanted him to come to me. That was the honest version of it.
Not the strategic version, not the version where I was winning, but the honest one.
I wanted him to cross the hall and open my door and stand there with his blue eyes and his terrible inability to say what he meant, and I wanted him to try.
He wasn’t going to.
Not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. Alex moved at a snail’s pace.
He was the kind of guy that needed to understand every variable before he committed to a direction.
And I had, in the span of approximately thirty-six hours, introduced him to roughly fourteen new variables.
He needed time to process. I knew that. I’d known it the whole time.
It didn’t make the waiting any easier.
I must have fallen asleep eventually, because the next thing I was aware of was the room being darker, the insect noise having dropped to a low level like it was well past midnight. The breeze had stilled. Everything was very quiet.
And then I was aware of something else.
My door was open. It had been open all evening, the warm air coming through, but this was different. This was an awareness of someone in the doorway. The quality of the silence had changed. And, if I listened closely, I swore I could hear someone breathing.
I kept my eyes closed.
I heard, very quietly, a footstep on the old tile. Then another. Slow. Deliberate. The careful step of someone trying not to make noise. Another step. He was close now. I could feel the warmth of him near the edge of the bed.
I didn’t move.
I heard him exhale. Just once, low and controlled, the sound of a man who had been arguing with himself for however many hours and had apparently, finally, lost the argument.
And then his hand found me in the dark.