"I suppose I've made myself rather obvious."
Lovino just frowns and considers throwing his espresso in the man's face. "Aren't you like fifty or something? Jesus."
"I'm thirty-eight."
He snorts. "Like that's any better."
Lovino's been coming to this café for a long time. He meets Arthur Kirkland at an oversized table on a busy Monday afternoon tapping furiously at his laptop. "Can I sit here? The tables are-"
"Of course! Just please be quiet, I'm trying to finish this chapter." Arthur doesn't look away from his screen, too engrossed in the activities of some warlock in a faraway land.
That's more than fine with Lovino, who pulls out his iPad and begins to lazily look through online fashion catalogs as he dips an oversized biscotti into his coffee.
Arthur is lost the minute he looks up.
Lovino feels eyes on him for the next few weeks, and he starts to notice a dirty blond head of hair in that dark little corner a lot more often. But suddenly he's getting free drinks, so he just opens his economics textbook and doesn't complain.
And if he'd done more than blankly stare at the pictures, maybe he would have realized that nothing is really free.
When Lovino gets home, there's a bouquet of red roses sitting in the kitchen. "Where did those come from?"
"Hmm? Oh, a man dropped them off this morning, aren't they pretty?" Feliciano is on the floor, ass shoved in the air like some cheap porn star as he adds a little more red to one of the many paintings he's working on.
"I guess a lot of men are giving you flowers when you're in that position…"
Feliciano just giggles and points to the roses. "The card's addressed to you, silly!"
"Me? Who would-" Lovino opens the card slowly, reading over the message that's written in long flowing script.
I humbly do beseech you of your pardon. For too much loving you.
What the fuck did that even mean?
There's no signed name.
"I'm a novelist."
"I don't even like Shakespeare."
Arthur thinks that love works in funny ways.
The cloth of the napkin feels soft against his fingers as Lovino spreads it across his lap. He has a weakness for fine food and fine wine. Especially when someone else is paying. So he barely scowls when Arthur smiles across the table at him.
And he almost smiles when Arthur kisses his hand goodnight.
Lovino reads one of the man's books on a rainy afternoon when he should be doing homework. He doesn't like fantasy either.
Arthur's next novel is a romance.
"You should just give up, old man."
"This is our fourth date."
"You know I only come for the food."
"You kissed me last time…"
Lovino can't argue with that. And when he wakes up in Arthur's bed the next morning, he wonders how much of it he can blame on the wine.
They sit against a large oak tree as the sun sets on a warm summer night, Lovino with his head in Arthur's lap and Arthur reciting lines of poetry from some old book.
"You do know you're too old to be such a sappy romantic, right?"
"And you're too young to not believe in magic."
"No one in university believes in fucking magic."
"No one said that university was good for you." Arthur runs his fingers through Lovino's hair and the Italian just maybe makes a wish when he blows out the dandelion he'd been twirling in his fingers.
Lovino graduates that next summer, and they rent a house in the countryside. And maybe Lovino was a bit too cynical, and maybe Arthur was a bit of a dreamer, but no one could argue that they'd found something special with each other.
Maybe even something a little bit magical.