9. Alex
Alex
The next night, much to my surprise, Matteo, the plumber, was knocking on the front door. I figured he was the type to flirt with clients to get a good tip, but never actually show up. However, it seemed I was wrong.
I could see Leo grinning from ear to ear as he went to answer the door. And I couldn’t deny feeling a bit jealous. Leo already had someone treating him like he was worth something. I couldn’t remember the last time someone gave a shit about me.
Is this what gay men were like? Leo was the only one I really knew on a personal level.
I was sure I had a couple of coworkers that were gay, but telling the boss about your love life wasn’t exactly encouraged.
And I didn’t have enough time for Amanda, much less a social life.
So, really, I was seeing this all for the first time.
Matteo greeted Leo with a wide, devastating smile, the one that apparently had the power to reduce grown men to puddles.
He said something in Italian, low and warm, and Leo laughed at it in a way that I’d never really heard him laugh before.
It wasn’t the bright, performative laugh he used in public.
This was something more genuine. The sound of it surprised me.
I watched from the kitchen doorway with my coffee mug and tried to figure out what exactly I was feeling.
Jealous was the word I’d landed on, and I didn’t much like it.
It felt imprecise. I wasn’t jealous of Matteo, exactly.
I didn’t want Leo for myself. That wasn’t what this was.
It was more that I was jealous of the transaction itself.
The ease of it. The way Matteo had looked at Leo and decided he was worth pursuing without any of the hesitation or strategy or negotiation that I associated with the whole miserable process of dealing with other people.
He’d just seen Leo and wanted to know him better. Simple as that.
When was the last time anyone had looked at me like that?
I tried to remember and came up empty.
Leo turned back toward me as Matteo stepped inside, and his expression shifted through about three emotions in quick succession before settling on something carefully neutral. He knew I’d been watching. He had the good sense not to make it weird.
“Matteo wants to take me to this place on the water,” he said. “Some kind of terrace bar. He says the view is worth the walk.” He paused, just slightly too long. “You should come.”
“You don’t have to invite me,” I said.
“I know I don’t have to.” He gave me a look that was impossible to argue with. “Come anyway.”
Matteo had followed Leo into the main room and was now looking between us with the relaxed curiosity of a man who had no particular agenda and was content to let the evening unfold however it chose.
Up close he was even more absurdly handsome than I’d gathered from eavesdropping at the bottom of the stairs.
He had the kind of face that looked like it had been assembled by an artisan.
Strong jaw, easy eyes, and a quality of warmth that seemed intrinsic instead of forced.
I hated him a little. Purely on principle.
“Alex,” Leo said, gesturing between us with the resigned energy of someone who knew this introduction was going to be a whole thing. “Matteo. Matteo, this is my stepbrother Alex.”
Matteo extended his hand and shook mine with a firm grip. “Piacere,” he said. And then, with that smooth transition to English, said, “Good to meet you, Alex.”
“You too,” I said, because I was a functional adult and could manage basic social pleasantries even when I didn’t feel like it.
There was a brief pause in which I became aware that both of them were waiting to see whether I was going to make an excuse and stay behind.
A small, self-destructive part of me wanted to.
It would’ve been easy. I could’ve claimed tiredness or a headache or some pressing need to sit alone in the kitchen cataloguing my failures.
But Leo had that look on his face, the careful, quiet one that meant he actually wanted me there, even if he’d never say so directly.
Even if asking me had been an instinct rather than a considered decision.
And besides, I was trying to be different now. That was supposedly the whole point of this vacation.
“Let me get my shoes,” I said.
Leo’s expression didn’t change dramatically, but something in his shoulders released by about half a degree. I noticed, and filed it away, and went to find my shoes.
The walk down into town was longer than the previous evening’s route, Matteo leading us along a different path that cut around the back of the hill and came out above the port. The view that opened up when we cleared the last row of buildings stopped me mid-step.
The harbor lay below us in the last of the evening light, the water dark and glittering.
Fishing boats were lined up along the quay with their lights reflected in long wavering columns.
Beyond the harbor mouth, the sea stretched out flat and enormous toward a horizon that had gone the color of embers.
The air smelled of salt and diesel and something faintly sweet that I was starting to recognize as a baseline condition of being in this particular part of the world.
“Christ,” I said quietly.
Beside me, Leo made a soft sound that wasn’t quite a word. He was standing very still, his hands in his pockets, looking out over the harbor with an expression that I could only describe as grateful. Like the view was something he’d been given rather than something he’d stumbled across.
Matteo watched us both with an easy satisfaction, the way someone looked when they’d brought you to a place they loved and you’d reacted the right way.
“Come,” he said. “The bar is just there.”
The terrace bar turned out to be less of a bar and more of a collection of mismatched plastic chairs arranged on a wide stone platform that jutted out over the harbor wall.
It was presided over by an ancient man in a white undershirt who appeared to be simultaneously the owner, the bartender, and the entire front-of-house operation.
There were strings of yellow lights overhead that buzzed faintly, and a small radio on the bar playing something scratchy and indistinct that might’ve been from any decade since the nineteen-fifties.
Matteo said something to the old man, who grunted and disappeared behind the bar. We settled into chairs at the edge of the terrace, directly above the water. Below us, the harbor lapped quietly against the stone.
“What did you order?” Leo asked.
“The only thing worth ordering,” Matteo said, with the confidence of a man who had never second-guessed a decision in his life.
What arrived, delivered by the old man with the wordless efficiency, turned out to be three small glasses of something pale yellow and a plate of olives and thin slices of cured meat arranged without ceremony on a chipped ceramic dish.
“Limoncello,” Matteo said, raising his glass. “Local. Not the tourist version.”
I picked mine up and sniffed it. It smelled intensely of lemon rind and alcohol, sharp and clean and nothing like the sickly sweet version I’d had once at some corporate dinner event years ago.
I took a sip. It hit the back of my throat like a lit match and then dissolved into something bright and citrusy that I felt all the way down to my chest.
“Okay,” I nodded.
Matteo looked pleased. “Good, yes?”
“Don’t push it,” I said, which made Leo snort into his glass.
We sat for a while without talking much, which suited me fine.
Below us the harbor was doing its slow evening routine.
A fishing boat was coming in late, its engine a low grumble that carried across the water.
A couple was walking along the quay below, their voices drifting up in fragments before the breeze took them.
The lights of the city climbed the hillside behind us in warm irregular clusters, and the sky above the harbor had deepened from ember-orange to a blue so dark it was almost purple at the edges.
I hadn’t felt this still in months. Maybe longer than months.
I turned my glass slowly in my hands and tried not to examine the feeling too closely in case it disappeared.
Matteo and Leo had fallen into a low conversation beside me, their voices easy and unhurried.
I caught pieces of it. Leo asking about the town, about the harbor, about how long Matteo had lived here.
Matteo answering with a relaxed confidence, like he wasn’t on a date but just catching up with a friend.
He’d grown up two streets from the water.
His father had been a fisherman. He’d learned plumbing from his uncle because, as he put it with a shrug, boats and pipes were not so different when you understood what water wanted to do.
Leo laughed at that again. The real laugh. The one I’d noticed at the door. He was enjoying himself.
I drank my limoncello and watched the harbor and tried to figure out what was going on inside my own chest. It had been behaving strangely for most of the evening in ways I didn’t entirely understand.
It wasn’t jealousy, I’d decided. Or not only jealousy.
It was something more like grief, which was a word I didn’t usually associate with myself and which I was now applying with some reluctance.
But sitting here watching Leo lean slightly toward Matteo as he talked, watching the way Matteo’s eyes tracked back to Leo’s face with that easy, interested attention, I felt the absence of something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing until just now.