Chapter 13 Luca
The taxi from the airport is a seven-two. Clean, air conditioning committed to its work, driver plays no music, which I respect. The keeper rides in front with the case belted beside me in the back.
“One day,” he says to the rearview. “Island exception. Don’t make me regret the paperwork.”
“The paperwork was a nine-one. Cleanest I have ever filed.”
“It was thorough,” he allows. In the mirror, the driver keeps looking at the case. He knows what’s in it. Everyone at the airport knew what was in it. Aruba is a small island and the Stanley Cup clears customs loudly.
The villa is the same as it has been every year. This is the point of the villa.
Small, white, blue shutters. The bougainvillea has annexed another quarter of the bathroom window since February.
I predicted this. That vine has structural ambition, and nobody on this island will stand up to it.
The lock sticks. You have to lift the handle and lean.
I have now performed the technique across multiple years.
Wes is on the balcony. There are lime wedges on the table and two glasses. And a third glass, because the keeper is a person and Wes counts persons. That’s him, complete, in one table setting.
“You made it,” he says.
“The Cup made it. I came with.” I take a lime wedge. This is the ritual. The lime is the first impression, and the first impression sets the tone for the entire stay. I have explained this every year. I taste it. I stop.
“Eight-one,” I say. “The lime has never been above a seven-five. What happened to the lime?”
“New tree,” Wes says, in the tone of a man reporting weather, and goes to help the keeper with the case.
I file it. The file has been getting strange entries all summer.
I have chosen, professionally, not to run the report yet.
It’s my day. Actually it’s my two days. An island exception, negotiated by a keeper who has decided we’re the easy stop on his schedule.
The Cup goes on the little table in the living room.
The ocean does its ocean thing past the railing.
I take a photo and send it to exactly one group chat, captioned with coordinates and no explanation.
Chaos is a dish I like to serve remotely.
For the record, the things that are not normal are as follows: The landlord stopped answering emails in May.
The lime tree arrived unannounced. Wes has been answering every question about Aruba in the weather-report tone since June.
Any junior auditor would have run that report already.
I did not want the results yet. That is also in the file.
Thursdays happen even in paradise and at four o’clock, I take the laptop to the balcony and call Gwen.
She comes into frame with her purple hair and her rainbow glasses. Behind me, the most trophy is sitting in the Caribbean sun. I watch her clock it. Gwen has seen me cry, spiral, fragment, and rebuild. Gwen does not startle easily.
“Is that…?” she starts.
“It gets a day with me. It’s a whole thing. There’s a schedule and a man in gloves.”
“How’s the whole thing going?”
“The whole thing is a nine-four provisional.” I settle back. “Thought records are down to two a week. I did the walk this morning before I came to Aruba. I flagged one absolute on the flight. It didn’t hold up under review.”
“It never does.” She smiles the small professional smile that took me three months to earn. We walk through what’s been in my head, how I have been spending my time since my last in-person session.
“You look good, Luca. Not performing-good. Good,” she says at the end of our time.
“That’s the plant talking. How’s the plant?”
“Thriving. Since someone corrected my watering schedule.”
“You’re welcome. Same time next week?”
“Same time next week. Enjoy it, Luca. Enjoy the whole thing.”
I close the laptop and sit with it for a second, the ordinary miracle of a Thursday that costs nothing.
A few months ago, a Thursday weighed nine hundred pounds.
Now it’s a video call from a balcony, and a woman who repotted a plant because I bullied her with data.
Recovery is not a straight line. It is, however, ratable, and the trend continues up.
The shower happens before dinner.
We’re both in it, which is tradition. The villa’s shower is technically a one-person shower.
We have never once respected that. Steam builds against the little window and the bougainvillea shadow moves in it, and Wes crowds me back against the tile with his hands already moving, over my shoulders, down my arms, slow and thorough.
The kind of unhurried that Wes has been since Miami.
Since always. Hands moving over me like I’m something he’s developing in a darkroom.
“Missed this,” he says, against my jaw. We have been in the same city for six weeks and he only came down a few days before me.
It doesn’t matter. I know exactly what he means.
There is Atlanta-us and Miami-us, and then there is this-us, the one that only exists where nobody knows our names, and we have both been missing this-us since February.
“Prove it,” I say, because provoking him is the fastest route to everything I want.
He proves it. His mouth comes down on mine, hard, water running between our faces, and his thigh pushes between mine and I am hard against his hip.
He takes his time anyway. His hand slides down my chest, flat, deliberate, and wraps around my cock with the firm certainty that has been dismantling me since a couch in Miami years ago, and the first slow stroke pulls a sound out of me that the tile throws right back.
“There he is,” Wes says, low, pleased with himself, entirely too calm.
“You’re at a seven,” I manage. “The grip is an eight. The pace is dragging the composite.”
“The pace is on purpose.”
“I know the pace is on purpose. You’re a menace.”
He laughs into my neck, and the laugh turns into his teeth at my collarbone, gentle then not, and I stop having numbers.
I get my hand around him and he exhales like I’ve knocked the air out of him, heavy and hot in my grip, his hips pressing forward into my fist, and for a while the only sounds in the room are water and skin and the two of us breathing like it’s the third period of a game.
He strokes me slow and I stroke him not slow, an argument we conduct entirely by hand.
He wins it the way he wins everything, patiently, his thumb dragging over the head of my cock on every pass until my knees start filing complaints and my head goes back against the tile.
And that’s when I notice.
The water is drumming on my chest. Drumming. Even, hard, insistent. The spray is holding its line from his shoulders all the way down to where our hands are working, no sputter, no sulk, no mid-shower loss of conviction.
“Wes.”
“Mm?”
“The water pressure.” He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, which makes this the hardest inspection I have ever conducted.
I put my hand flat on his chest anyway. Professional standards.
“Wes. Stop. Look at the showerhead. This is a nine-one. This shower has been a six at best since we started coming here. I have rated it. Multiple times. On the record.”
“Mentioning is not a complaint,” he says, into my wet hair, quoting me from long ago, his hand still moving, slow, evil. “Mentioning is a permission slip.”
“The landlord finally fixed it.” I’m panting and inspecting plumbing simultaneously, which is the most me I have ever been. “Wes. If the landlord fixed the shower, the landlord takes requests. The lock. The kitchen faucet that cries at night. I’m making a list. One document, itemized, before we…”
“You should take it up with management,” Wes says, smiling at me.
There’s a tone. I’ve known this man almost three years.
I know all of his tones. This is the tone from the gelato counter.
The tone from a kitchen in Miami with the retirement in his mouth.
The tone of a man who has been carrying something and has just decided to set it down.
His hand has gone still on me. His heart, under my palm, is going like a rookie’s.
“Wes?”
“The owner mentioned he was selling,” he says, shrugging his shoulder.
“In April, when I called to book. He was going to list it after our week here. So I made him an offer.” Water runs between us.
He pushes my wet hair back with one hand, careful, like he’s framing me.
“It closed in June. I had them fix the water pressure first thing. I left the lock. The lock’s load-bearing. ”
“You bought the villa?”
“Yes. Sort of,” he says, and his mouth does the smallest thing. “I bought it for us. I paid for it but it’s ours. Consider yourself the landlord. I am sure management is going to have notes about your list.”
The showerhead drums on. A nine-one. Somewhere in my chest an entire filing system undergoes an event.
I have a plan. I’ve had a plan since the handshake line of his last game.
The plan has a document. The document has columns.
And this man just stood in a shower he secretly bought for us, in the one country where we never had to hide, and called a sticking lock load-bearing.
The plan just became unbearably slow. All of it. Every column.
I kiss him with the water going everywhere.
He laughs into it, startled, and then he stops laughing, because I have him by the back of the neck and I am done being inspected today.
I turn us. His back hits the tile and I press the whole length of myself against him and take us both in one hand, his cock against mine, slick and hot in the tight space between our bodies, and the sound he makes goes straight through me.
“Luca.” His voice has dropped through the floor of itself. His hands find my hips and grip hard enough to leave the good kind of evidence. “Fuck.”
“You bought me a house,” I say, working us slow, then less slow, his breath going ragged against my temple. “You kept it for months. Through the playoffs. Through the parade. Through my entire Cup day schedule, which you helped me plan, in the house that you had already bought.”
“I made the lime tree stay quiet too,” he manages.
“The lime tree.” My hand tightens and his head goes back against the tile. “I rated your secret lime tree an eight-one this afternoon. You are the calmest liar in professional sports.”
“Retired,” he says, wrecked, grinning, hips moving into my grip. “Calmest liar in retirement.”
I get my other hand in his hair and put my mouth on his throat and finish the argument.
It doesn’t take long, for either of us. He comes first, for once, with his fingers digging into my hips, hot over my fist and my cock.
The feel of it, the sound of it, this steady unhurried man shaking against tile in a house that’s now ours, drags me over half a stroke behind him.
I come apart with my forehead on his collarbone, saying something that is partly his name.
The water runs over both of us for a while. His hand moves up and down my spine. The showerhead maintains its nine-one without wavering, a professional to the end.
“Emotional ambush,” I say, into his chest, “in a wet environment.”
“Noted.”
After we finish showering, he dries me off.
He always dries me off. Warm towel. As thorough and unhurried as ever.
The aftercare of a man who has been taking care of things his whole life and finally gets to do it in the open.
I stand there and let him. Letting him is a skill I had to learn in therapy, and I am now extremely good at it.
“Rating,” he says. He knows the ritual.
“Shower: nine-six.” I hold up one finger. “Point-four deduction.”
“For what?”
“Structural interruption of a manual process. There are workflow considerations.”
He puts his hand over my mouth, and then he replaces his hand with his mouth. Outside the window, the vine keeps eating the building that belongs to us now, in a country that maybe knows our names after all. The deed knows them. That’s a start.
Dinner is in an hour. The plan is in my suitcase, columns and all, three weeks early and completely obsolete.
Some things you don’t reschedule. Some things you just move up.