18. Alex
Alex
Leo was a drug I just couldn’t get enough of and I hated myself for feeling that way. The more I tried to resist him, the more I couldn’t stay away. And that had become incredibly evident last night when I’d sneaked into his room in the middle of the night, jerked him off, and left without a word.
Now I wanted more.
That was the problem with wanting things you couldn’t have.
The wanting didn’t stop just because the thing was wrong.
It didn’t stop because of consequences or context or the fact that the man sleeping across the hall had grown up with you.
It just sat there in your chest, warm and persistent and entirely unreasonable, and waited.
I’d been awake since before the birds started to sing.
That was becoming a pattern. Italy was doing nothing to help my sleep, or Leo was the issue, or both.
The two had become so thoroughly entangled in my mind that I couldn’t separate them anymore.
The warm stone, the lemon trees, and those amber eyes. All of it made my heart race.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about what I’d done.
The thing was, I hadn’t planned it. That was what I kept coming back to. In fact, I’d been doing everything I could not to think about it. But in the end, I got up anyway. Like my body had simply made the decision without consulting the rest of me.
And then I’d stood in his doorway and watched him sleep.
I pressed the heels of my hands hard against my eyes.
He’d known I was there. I was almost sure of it.
The moment his breathing changed, the moment the quality of his stillness shifted from genuine sleep to something performed, I’d realized.
He was allowing me to touch him. And I’d continued, anyway.
Which was either the most honest thing I’d done in years or the most reckless, and I still couldn’t figure out which.
Again, probably both.
The light through the shutters was going from gray to pale gold at the edges, the same progression I’d been watching for days now.
In a few minutes the birds would get serious about it.
In an hour Leo would be downstairs, making coffee in that teasing way of his, and I would have to sit across from him at the kitchen table and look him in the eye and try to pretend that I didn’t want to fuck him senseless.
I sat up. The old floor was cool under my feet. I found my shirt on the chair by the window and pulled it on, moving quietly out of habit despite the squeal of the floorboards.
I made it to the kitchen before him, which was the only small mercy the morning offered. I started the coffee with focused deliberateness. I stood at the counter and watched the pot and tried to get my thoughts into some kind of order.
I couldn’t apologize. Not because I didn’t want to, but because every time I opened my mouth to form the words, something in me locked up completely.
I’d never been good at speaking when it came to matters of the heart.
Amanda had told me that, near the end, in a voice that was more tired than angry.
And she hadn’t been wrong either. I was great as an executive.
I could lead teams all around the world to make a company successful.
But when it came to telling people how I felt… well, that was a different matter.
Last night though, I’d found another way.
The coffee pot started its low rumble, and I stood there and let the sound fill the kitchen and tried not to think about the way Leo’s hand had found my wrist in the dark.
The way he’d held on as I stroked his cock.
I had a feeling he knew exactly what I was saying, that it was the only way I knew how to make an apology in that moment.
That I wanted him desperately but couldn’t say it out loud.
I just wished I wasn’t such a fucking coward.
The footsteps on the stairs came a few minutes later, earlier than I expected.
I didn’t turn around. I heard him reach the bottom step, pause, and then continue into the kitchen.
He moved to the cabinet and took down a mug with an easy familiarity, like we did this every morning.
Like it was routine. He reached past me for the coffee pot and I felt the warmth of him, the nearness of him, and held my breath.
He poured his coffee. Poured mine without asking, setting it at my elbow. Then he leaned back against the counter beside me and wrapped both hands around his mug. Out of the corner of my eye I realized he was only wearing his shorts and nothing else. My heart quickened.
He didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
Outside, the garden was bright with early light, the lemon trees throwing long shadows across the flagstone.
A bird landed on the stone wall and regarded the terrace with a nod before flying off again.
The morning was doing what it always did here, being relentlessly, aggressively beautiful, without any sympathy for the internal disaster happening inside the kitchen walls.
I could feel Leo looking at me. Not demanding anything. Just looking, in that patient, open way of his.
“I’m not going out with Matteo tonight,” he said finally.
I looked at him.
His eyes met mine over the rim of his mug, steady and dark in the morning light. “I cancelled this morning,” he said. “Sent him a message.”
I set my mug down carefully on the counter. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know I didn’t.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
“I know that too.” He held my gaze. There was something in his expression that was different from the past two days.
The careful engineering was gone. He looked just like himself, which was somehow more disarming than anything else he could do.
“I’m not doing it to make a point, Alex.
I’m doing it because I don’t want to go. ”
The muscle in my jaw tightened reflexively. I worked to loosen it.
“Because of last night,” I said. It wasn’t a question exactly.
“Because of last night,” he confirmed. “And the night before. And the argument in the kitchen.” A pause. “Because of all of it.”
I picked up my coffee again, but I didn’t drink any. The morning light was coming in through the window above the sink and catching the steam rising from both our mugs, and I focused on that for a moment because it was easier than focusing on his face.
“I said things I shouldn’t have,” I said. My voice came out lower than I intended.
Leo was quiet.
“The things I said.” I stopped. The words were like something physical that had to be moved by force. “They weren’t true. Any of them.”
I heard him exhale slowly, a long, careful breath.
“I know they weren’t,” he said.
“I know you know.” I set the mug down again, harder than I meant to. “I’m saying it out loud. Because apparently I need to be the kind of person who does that.”
For a long moment neither of us spoke. A car passed somewhere down the lane below the villa, its engine faint and distant. And then it was gone, and the morning went quiet again.
“That’s the closest thing to an apology I’ve ever heard from you,” Leo said.
I looked at him. “Don’t push it.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but a hint of one. Something in my chest loosened a fraction at the sight of it.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I repeated.
“I’m sorry for kissing Matteo in front of you,” he added. “I… I was angry.”
He turned back to his coffee. I did the same, the apologies settling in. We stood side by side at the counter in the morning quiet, and I was aware of every inch between us, the warmth radiating from his arm close to mine, the faint smell of his skin that I missed so much.
I thought about touching him in the dark again.
“Leo,” I said.
“Mm.”
“I don’t know how to do this.” I’d said it before.
More than once. But I needed to say it in the daylight.
With the morning coming through the windows and both of us standing upright and fully awake and entirely visible to each other.
“I want to. But I need you to know what I’m saying.
” I paused, taking a breath. “I’m saying I genuinely do not know the mechanics of—” I gestured vaguely, which was embarrassing. “Any of this.”
He looked at me for a moment, those amber eyes doing what they always did.
“You figured out the important parts pretty well last night,” he said, and his voice was careful but there was warmth and humor in it.
My face did something I couldn’t entirely control. I looked away from him toward the window.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said.
“I know what you mean.” He set his mug on the counter and turned toward me, leaning one shoulder against the cabinet so he was facing me.
“I can’t give you a roadmap, Alex. And I can’t tell you exactly what to do, how fast, or where to go.
” He reached out, running the back of his finger over my forearm. “We have to figure it out together.”
The back of his finger against my forearm was a small thing. Barely a touch. But pleasure and relief moved through me like a current, and I had to work very hard to keep my breathing even.
“Together,” I repeated.
“Together,” he said.
I looked down at where his finger was still resting against my skin. The morning light caught the fine hair on my forearm and the contrast of his tanned hand against my pale skin, and I stared at it for longer than was probably necessary.
“I’m not going to be good at it,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’ll probably say the wrong thing. All the time.”
“You already do,” he pointed out. “And I’m still here.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. It surprised me a little, the way it came out.
Something had shifted in the kitchen, in the air between us.
It was still complicated, still weighted with everything we hadn’t resolved and everything we still needed to say.
But the particular tension of the past few days, that tight, miserable standoff, was gone.
I didn’t know what to replace it with yet. But I was starting to think that was all right.
“What happens tonight?” I asked. “If you’re not going out with Matteo.”
Leo tilted his head slightly, considering. “I thought I’d cook,” he said. “With the rest of the market things. There’s still the cheese and the olives. And I bought wine.” He paused. “Two bottles, actually.”
“Why two?”
“In case the first one was too good to stop.”
I looked at him. “That’s terrible reasoning.”
“It’s excellent reasoning,” he smiled. “Why not have more of what you enjoy?”
I picked up my mug again to keep my hands busy. The coffee had gone slightly cool, but I drank it anyway. I stood at the counter with Leo’s shoulder an inch from mine, and I tried to identify what I was feeling.
It wasn’t panic. That was new.
There was still the uncomfortable awareness of everything that needed to be examined, the labels I didn’t have and the conversations we hadn’t finished and the very significant matter of our parents who were married and living in a house where we had both, at various points in our adolescence, borrowed each other’s things and been annoying and done nothing remotely like this.
All of that was still there, waiting. It needed to be figured out at some point.
But underneath it, or maybe alongside it, there was something else. Something I didn’t have a word for that felt quiet and warm and slightly terrifying.
“Leo,” I said.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“I… I can’t promise you anything,” I said at last. “It’s too new and too… different.”
Leo placed his hand on my forearm, giving it a squeeze.
“I’m not asking for promises, and I’m not asking you to figure it out right now.
” He pulled the coffee mug from my hands and placed it on the counter before he wrapped his hands around my waist. “Just explore with me. Trust yourself. And when our vacation is done… then we can figure out what to do then.”
His hands were warm at my hips and I let myself be pulled in without resistance. That alone felt like progress. A week ago I would have found an excuse to step back. I would have manufactured distance out of thin air and called it reasonable.
Instead I stood there in the morning kitchen with my hands hanging at my sides and let Leo hold me, and tried to figure out what to do with the feeling it filled me with when he did it.
“Explore,” I said. The word felt strange in my mouth. Foreign in the way that a lot of things had felt foreign lately, things I hadn’t expected to have to learn about myself at thirty.
“Is that so terrible?” he asked. His chin was tilted up slightly, those amber eyes finding mine easily. He wasn’t smiling but there was something in his expression that wasn’t quite serious either. Something curious and open.
“No,” I said, which surprised me.
The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely.
“Good,” he said.
I put my hands on his waist in return. I didn’t make a decision to do it.
They just went there, finding the warm skin above the waistband of his shorts with a certainty that the rest of me hadn’t caught up with yet.
I felt him go slightly still under my palms, that particular stillness that I’d learned meant he was fully present in the moment.
The morning light had filled the kitchen, falling across the old table and the terracotta floor.
The two of us stood silently in the middle of it.
There was nowhere to hide. No storm, no candle guttering out, no convenient darkness to make things feel untethered from reality.
Just the morning, and the kitchen, and Leo’s hands at my waist, and mine at his.
“I keep waiting for it to feel wrong,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. He was just looking at me, taking it all in.
“Does it?” he asked.
I thought about it honestly, the way he’d asked me to. Instead of running or letting fear control me, I allowed myself to consider it.
“No,” I said at last.
He nodded, once, slowly. Like that was the answer he’d needed.
I became aware of the distance between his face and mine. It was not a large distance. It was a distance that I could close without moving very much. And I was aware of wanting to close it in broad daylight, instead of hiding in the dark.
So I leaned forward and kissed him.