Chapter 3 Enzo
Davide shops like a burglar.
In and out, grab what’s closest, no eye contact. I’ve watched him do it twice now, and it hurts me both times. A market is not a heist. A market is a conversation, and this one is finally learning to talk back. At nine in the morning, the stalls are loud with the season’s prime Georgia peaches.
“You smell them first,” I say, and hold one out to Davide. “Here. At the shoulder.”
“It smells like a peach.”
“Show some respect. Memorize it.”
“You’re going to make me late for the pool session.”
“The pool will keep.” I turn to the peach man, who has trees, a sister in a town I didn’t catch, and opinions about rain. I asked him about all three a few days ago, and now we’re colleagues.
“Georgia’s done in a few weeks,” he says, weighing my bag without being asked. “Then it’s apples and lies.”
“What kind of lies?”
“Store peaches.” He says it like a diagnosis.
I like him enormously. “Twenty minutes, Davide. The tomatoes were an apology the other day. Today they might be a promise.”
“You need help,” he says, shaking his head. He drifts toward the bread stall like a man pretending he isn’t going to buy the focaccia. We both know he’s going to buy the focaccia.
I’m smelling the third peach when I turn the corner of the stall, and a full year ends in the produce aisle.
The noise of the market goes somewhere else.
My hand stays on the peach like the peach is holding me up.
My body reacts before I authorize anything.
The broad shoulders. The stillness. The cap pulled low over light brown curls it can’t fully contain.
The extra inches on me I used to know by feel before I admitted I knew anything at all.
Marek is holding a tomato.
The cap hides the curls badly. It does nothing for the eyes. They are still that pale, unfair grey, the kind of grey that makes every thought behind them look organized even when I know better.
“Enzo,” he says.
My name lands the way it always landed. Like it never left his mouth. That’s the problem with him. Nothing about him announces what he took with him when he stopped coming. That name on his lips sounds brand new even though I heard it over and over for years.
“Ková?,” I reply.
Something crosses his face at that. Quick, filed away before it finishes arriving. I’m not going to examine it.
“The tomatoes.” He sets the one he’s holding back on the pile, careful with it, like it might testify later. “Better than I expected here.”
The hands haven’t changed. Blunt, certain, careful with everything they decide to hold. I spent two years being a thing they decided to hold. I look away from them first.
“They’re trying.”
“The peaches aren’t trying. The peaches have finished the job.” He nods at my bag. “Four?”
“Six.”
“Six,” he says, in the tone of a man confirming a scouting report. “Of course six.”
I don’t answer. There was a time I’d have handed him one and watched the whole ceremony, the first bite, the verdict delivered like a referee’s decision, and the ceremony was mine, in my kitchen, at my table. He can buy his own peaches now.
“The left ones,” he says to the pile. “Two days, maybe three, and the left ones win.”
“They’re the same peaches.”
“They are not the same peaches.” He almost smiles. I watch him decide not to. “Your lot look good against Austria.”
“We are good.”
“Your last match was on in the hotel. The cross for the second goal.” A small, precise nod, placed exactly where a professional puts these things. “That was a real ball.”
I used to collect those like coins. Flat little compliments with the current running under them. Precise, portable, and worth nothing. I have a mental drawer overflowing. Two years’ worth.
“If R16 goes how the table thinks,” he says, “Then it’s us.”
“Then it’s us.”
“Ninety minutes.” He looks at the tomatoes instead of me. “Long time.”
“Depends who’s chasing.”
His mouth does something quick at the corner and is gone. A year ago, I’d have gotten the whole smile. I priced that smile once, and I’m not paying it again.
“You’ve gotten faster, then,” he says.
“I suppose you’ll find out.”
Davide arrives with the focaccia he wasn’t going to buy.
“Who’s the focaccia for?” I ask.
“It’s for the team.”
“Which team?”
“There are eleven of me that need feeding.” He eats a corner of it, then spots my company and a grin breaks out on his face. “Ková?. Two tables away last night and no hello?”
“You were busy with the brisket. It deserved your full attention.”
“You know each other from the league.” Davide, happy, a man introducing people who need no introduction, because that’s the kind of morning it is. “Enzo’s staying with me and rearranging my kitchen.”
Marek looks at me, his light grey eyes stuck on mine for a beat, then turns to Davide. “How much of it is still yours?”
Davide laughs. I don’t. The laugh sits in my chest with nowhere to go, because the line of that joke is like a hundred jokes across a table in my place in Naples that Davide has never seen and will never hear about.
My face wants to do the old thing. I inform my face we’re not doing that anymore. We’ve moved on from that.
“How’s the hotel?” Davide asks. “Kitchen situation?”
“There’s a microwave I refuse to acknowledge. The breakfast eggs are hiding something.” Flat, like a lab report. “I’m eating around the problem.”
“Come by after the round, then. We’re four blocks up. Enzo cooks like a criminal.”
“No,” Marek says. His eyes come back to mine. “Criminals compromise.”
The morning goes very still. Somewhere behind me, the peach man is telling somebody new about his trees. There’s a question in Marek’s eyes he would never say out loud in front of a teammate of mine, and I would have answered it before he finished asking.
“We have film at eleven,” I say. To Davide. “And you have a pool session.”
“It’s nine fifteen,” Davide says.
“The peaches need to get home.” I take the focaccia out of his hand and put it in my bag, because his hands are full and mine need the job. “Ková?. Good luck.”
“You too.” Marek’s gaze drops to the bag hanging from my hand. “Six peaches. I understand the urgency.”
I don’t laugh. I am a professional at not laughing. I could give clinics.
I turn away.
We’re half a block gone when Davide starts.
“That was strange.”
“It wasn’t strange.”
“You talk to parking meters when they steal from you. You asked the peach man about his childhood. Ková? spends five minutes being funny and you stand there like a passport photo.”
“I don’t perform on command.”
“No, usually you perform without command. That’s why it was strange.”
“I don’t know him.”
Davide gives me a look.
“Not like that,” I say.
“Everybody in Serie A knows Ková? like that. He’s easy.”
“Ková? is easy the way a locked door is easy because it has a handle.”
Davide slows down one step. “That was almost interesting.”
“It was accurate.”
“I invited him to dinner.”
“Nobody is coming to dinner, Davide.”
“There it is,” he says, glancing over at me.
“There is nothing.”
“The voice. Press conference Enzo. You use it on journalists, referees, and that one physio you hate because he called it ‘prosciutto ham.’”
“He did call it ‘prosciutto ham.’”
“And you forgave him never.”
“Film at eleven,” I say. “What do you want for dinner tonight?”
Davide watches me for a second too long.
He has known me since we were seventeen, which means he knows exactly what a locked door sounds like when it has decided to pretend it’s a wall. He lets it stand anyway. He always does.
“Something with the peaches,” he says. “Two of them are mine.”
“None of them are yours. You can have one.”
When we arrive at the apartment, Davide heads to his room for a shower as I put the peaches on the sill with the tomatoes. The sill is starting to look like my mother’s, and normally that thought would hold me for an entire minute.
My phone buzzes on the counter. Gianna. A voice note, fifty-two seconds, which from her is a telegram.
“You never answered the real question. Mamma says the cat took the second planter and honestly she sounded proud of the cat. Carlo’s limp moved to the other leg, which everyone agrees is a miracle.
Also the sports channel keeps showing your bracket.
Enzo. Voice note me after film or I’m telling Mamma you’re sad. ”
I record mine leaning against the counter. “Tell Mamma the cat is a squatter and I’m not sad. The real question doesn’t exist until we beat Austria.” I look at the peaches on the sill. “It’s possible I ran into him this morning. It’s possible he’s exactly the same. Don’t tell Mamma either thing.”
I send it before I can improve it. She’d only hear the improving.
I take the knife out. I look at the peaches.
I put the knife down. The kitchen isn’t going to fix this one, and I refuse to waste peaches on a lie.
The shower runs hot. I stand under it with both hands on the tile and my head down and let the morning replay. It’s going to replay whether I authorize it or not. I’d rather supervise.
He said my name. He stood in a market with a tomato in his hand.
He looks the same. He looks better. That’s worse.
And his voice did the thing it does when he’s being funny, that tone with the current under it.
The one I used to feel against the back of my neck at two in the morning, when he thought I was asleep and I heard him say things to my ceiling in Czech he never offered to translate.
The want arrives all at once, the way it always did with him. No suggestion. No build up. Just impact.
My hand moves, and I let it. I’m done pretending this isn’t happening.
The plan is maintenance. Efficient and clinical, thirty seconds of honesty, and then film with a clear head.
My cock has other information. I’ve been half-hard since the corner of that stall, since my own name left his mouth.
The first slow pull of my fist drags a sound out of me that no maintenance ever made.
Fine. Then we do it properly.
I brace my forearm against the tile and put my forehead on it and slow down. Long strokes from base to head, thumb riding the crown on every pass. The water runs hot down my back. I let the memory in. All the way in. No supervision after all.
His hands first, because it was always his hands first. Working hands, blunt and certain, one splayed at the small of my back and one in my hair, tipping my head where he wanted it like a man adjusting an instrument.
The breadth of him behind me, too. Those shoulders I used to feel before I saw them, blocking out half the room and then somehow making the room feel safer for it.
The scrape of his jaw down my spine. The way he took inventory with his mouth.
Unhurried and thorough. Shoulder to rib to hip to the crease of my thigh, until I was cursing him in multiple languages and he hummed against my skin as if he was confirming a measurement.
The first time I said his name against his ear, Marek not Ková?, I felt the whole solid, pragmatic architecture of him shudder.
His fingers, next. Patient in a way that should be illegal in a man that impatient to leave when it was over.
Two and then three fingers, working me open with the same attention he gives a back line, reading every hitch of my breath and adjusting, always adjusting, until I was the one begging and he was the one deciding when.
And the sound he made on the way in. Low.
Wrecked. His composure never cracked anywhere in Europe except there, seated deep inside me.
There it cracked every single time. I chased that sound for so long, as if it was a trophy to win.
My knees on my own mattress in Naples. His grip printing bruises on my hips that I wore under my kit for a week like a number.
The headboard learning Czech. That rhythm he’d find and hold, deep and level and relentless.
The same engine that runs ninety minutes without complaint, except aimed, except mine, and me telling him exactly what it was doing to me while he filed every word and used all of it.
“Je?tě,” he taught me, my one word of Czech, learned on my back with his mouth at my ear. More. Again. I own that word the way you own a new scar. Pink and raw and a throbbing pain that doesn’t stop.
I’m fucking my fist without a shred of craft.
The tile is cold, and the water is scalding, and in my head he’s behind me with his hand closing over mine, over my cock, his chest against my spine, saying my name into the wet between my shoulders.
Enzo. Enzo. Like the name was the entire point of the drive from Rome.
I come so hard my knees dip, spilling over my fist and against the tile in pulses that feel years long. His name stays held behind my teeth, where it can’t get out. What gets out instead is ugly and honest. A sound like something tearing along a line somebody perforated years ago and left.
The water runs. I stay where I am, breathing, both hands flat on the tile like I’m holding up the wall of a building that has just been through something.
This is what I didn’t let the market see. This is the bill for the passport photo. Because it held. That’s the part I keep. He said my name and made me want to laugh and looked at me with a question in his eyes. I gave him the price of a peach and a good luck, and I left first.
I left first. He can learn how that tastes.
I turn the water cold for one minute, because my father says a man should finish what the day started, even when the day started it badly.
I dry off. Slowly. I put on my old Napoli training shirt, faded and worn.
Then I go back to the kitchen and pick up the knife, because now the peaches can have my full attention.
The want isn’t gone. The want is fine. It can sit at the table like everybody else. It doesn’t get to cook, and it doesn’t get to decide anything.
If we win against Austria, if the bracket does what brackets do, I’ll be on his wing for ninety minutes with seventy thousand witnesses. He’ll learn the other thing I’ve gotten better at in the last year.
Waiting him out.
Rosemary, honey, and a knob of butter go over the peaches in the skillet. Davide comes into the kitchen and eats the first one standing up. Over the pan. Like a burglar.
“What did the market do to deserve this?” he says.
“The market behaved.”
“Mm.” He reaches for the second one. “This one’s mine, no?”
“That’s the one I poisoned.”
“Worth it,” he says with his mouth full.
He grins through it anyway, and he doesn’t ask any more about the market, the voice, or the passport photo. I love him for every second of that, too.