Snapshots
1.
"Apples."
"Maybe. Yes, if I could bore a successful hole. Not sour ones, though."
"Oranges."
"Eh," making a contemplative face. "Citrus; so tingly. Could be unpleasant."
"Beg to differ. Probably lovely." Teasing. "But I wouldn't know as I've never fucked a fruit."
"Ah chiudi la bocca, shut your mouth," says Elio, lazy in a biting way, one arm falling over his face, veiling dark damp curls. "Another."
"Cherries."
"Too small," snorts Elio, and Oliver looks at him and laughs because yes, too small, there can logically be no successful insertion of a phallic object into such a dainty thing as a cherry. "I'd eat them off you, though."
"Mmm." Oliver runs languid fingers through Elio's hair, eyes closed, fantasizing about the drip of sweet dark cherry juice and the sweeter tongue that laps it up. "I'd let you. Bananas."
"I already have one of those." Grinning. "Not exciting."
"Mine is, though." Oliver winks. "Pomegranates."
"Ahh, pomegranates, favorite of Persephone and Hades." Elio is aware that he sounds like his father, exclaiming over mythology as Mr. Perlman would over Latin etymology. "Yes. Absolutely. I would let you watch."
They look to each other then, all heat. The strength of their eye contact has only intensified over the days, forceful to begin with and near terrifying now, enough to fragment the earth. "You would let me watch," clarifies Oliver.
"Yes. You could finish me if you wanted." Elio is shy then, looking down to the tendrils of emerald grass between them. Oliver loves him most when he is like this – unsure, no trace of adolescent overconfidence.
"I want."
Immediately the amber-olive of Elio's face blooms into pleasant peony pink. Coloring the word he speaks is the smile in his voice: "another."
Oliver makes a filler noise, more focused on the stroke of his hands nestled in the younger's boisterous curls, gritty and salted with the day's sweat, ocean, vigor. "Lemons."
"Same as oranges. Possible." Elio flips to his side, tosses a coppery leg over Oliver's warm hips to draw him in. "You wouldn't eat a whole lemon, even if I came in it."
"Likely not," agrees Oliver. "I'd rather you came in me."
Elio is hard for that, nudges in an exploratory way into Oliver's body to announce it, testing. "Are you offering?"
Oliver turns his head to look at him then and the emotion in his eyes is an aqueous sunrise, shimmering with promise and heat and brilliance, pure. The breeze is frisky and rushes to join their conversation, skittering through the gold of his hair, and Elio could watch that beautiful motion all night. "I might be."
Elio kisses him, lightly to entice, tasting the metallic rawness of the elder's lower lip. In bed last night he had bitten it bloody, gripping the American's hip as he rode him through the mattress, Oliver's moan grating through the stagnant summer air. The drop of red produced had been nothing compared to the infamous nosebleed – scarlet blossoms across the alabaster cotton of Elio's napkin, a stress reaction he's had since he was a child – but Oliver had laughed about it anyway, remembering. "I guess you did owe me a blood debt."
Now, all conversations of fuckable fruit forgotten, Oliver fists in Elio's hair, raises to one elbow. Intensifies his kiss. The younger is rutting gently without conscious command of his body, wanting, wanting the silk of Oliver's flesh against his cock. "Here?"
Oliver pulls back to survey the area, trees to one side of them, ocean to another, the sleeping Perlman house in the distance. Overhead the stars frolic like fairy lights in a midnight garden, sufficiently illuminating even on this moonless night, and they give all the permission in the world. "Who can see?"
Sighing, Elio crooks his arm around Oliver's shoulder and burrows as the elder man opens his mouth over the younger's throat, smooth as the skin of a peach, bathwater-warm, permitting. One word, spoken into the crevice between Elio's neck and shoulder: "Oliver."
And: "Elio," sighs out the younger, his own name bursting from his lips, natural as breathing. Their little game has become habitual now: they are not two, but one. Not singular, but unified. It feels like ages since they have not been a cohesive being and for one to be inside the other is effortless, each filling the other's empty space with thick wood-hard flesh and copious surges of pale, viscous fluid. By this time it is difficult for each to refrain from the practice of name sharing in the presence of others. Elio looks at himself in the mirror and sees Oliver on every inch of his own skin, the illumination radiating from his eyes, the health and youth of his demeanor. Joy.
2.
The first time Elio asked to drink wine with Oliver:
"I should not. I know myself. If I have one glass, I'll drink the whole bottle."
This was prior to them; prior to if only you knew how little I know about the things that matter. To his credit, Elio was not trying to seduce Oliver with the assistance of alcohol; however, when he thinks of the occasion now, he realizes that Oliver, by declining his offer, was likely trying to prevent his natural defenses from collapsing. Elio becomes extremely physical when he is drunk; he knows now, weeks later, that Oliver is the same. The overused "I know myself" excuse was in fact quite appropriate for the situation.
The second time Elio asked to drink wine with Oliver:
"Okay, just one glass. But take it away after that; don't let me drink more. Per, Mrs. P., I'm holding you to this."
It was after dinner one calm Saturday evening, after Oliver had treated Elio's scent like it was the finest of perfumes, before Elio found the courage to take Oliver to Monet's Berm. Mr. Perlman had brought out a lovely vintage bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and Oliver had acquiesced to imbibe after confessing his weakness for red wine. Elio watched him drink, watched the cherry tone of the wine gradually take over the color of Oliver's lips as he began his second glass. So the virtuous Americano did back down from the lofty moral benchmarks he set for himself, then.
Elio promised himself that he would not take advantage of this newfound knowledge. But he himself was unafraid to pour a second glass and he would be a terrible liar if he could not admit that his mind was racing with the thought of taking Oliver to bed, wine-drunk and blissful stumbling to undress each other in the shadows of Elio's room. He curled his toes against the more vivid details that pushed to the surface and forced himself to tune back in to his family and his American, who were discussing the merits of this versus that translation of War and Peace. Regarding Russian literature, his mother was the connoisseur; while she was not fluent in the language, she was an avid admirer of the Tolstoy-Dostoyevsky crowd and had read as many translations as she could get her hands on.
"It's got to be the Dole version," Mrs. Perlman was saying, enthusiastically. "I think he's really got the best grasp on the place and time and he doesn't gloss over the, you know, Russian-ness of the text. You can see the original language shining through quite clearly."
"Dole, yes, he was certainly thorough," agreed Oliver with his wineglass pressed contemplatively to his mouth. On the table he was picking under his thumbnail with the point of his forefinger, a habit that Elio had long since memorized: when Oliver was deep in thought, he started to dig under his thumbnails. "I really like the Inner Sanctum edition by the Maudes, though. They just went to such a great deal of extra trouble with the inclusion of the maps and such. And, you know, they're the only translators to actually have worked with Tolstoy, so they've really got a grasp on his particular style. But – and you might argue with me here – Garnett's version is really the most readable for me. Very descriptive language she uses throughout the book. I think it's important to capture the fact that Tolstoy was a beautiful wordsmith and some of his verbal imagery tends to be lost in the more academic translations."
He took a sip of his wine. Mr. and Mrs. Perlman exchanged a delighted glance. Their muvi star continued to impress, day by day.
"Bravo, Oliver. I never thought I would meet someone who was as enthusiastic a Russophile as my wife." Mr. Perlman raised his glass and all of them took a generous drink.
"I'm just curious for other cultures," shrugged Oliver modestly, but he was smiling. "Elio, you've been quiet. Any scintillating insight to share?"
Elio had read exactly one edition of War and Peace and he had drowned in his own boredom the entire way through, but he had been required to read the book for school and he refused to back down from a daunting novel simply because it was dull. There was, his father had taught him, always a lesson to be learned even from the most soporific of books; so from Tolstoy Elio had learned that he did not particularly enjoy what he considered to be archaic Russian literature. However, he liked to listen to his parents discuss it, because they could always withdraw from the text some emphatic meaning that he had overlooked. And Oliver…well. Elio could listen to Oliver discussing the bathroom habits of an aardvark and enjoy it.
"You know, I did really like it when the book ended," Elio said seriously, poking his tongue out just a smidgen when he finished his sentence, and he was rewarded with a general chuckle from around the table. "I'm not much for Tolstoy. Reading War and Peace was a great way to practice my French, though."
"Oui, oui, garçon," said Oliver in exaggerated, throaty French, and Elio snorted into his glass of wine before they were both cackling, looking at each other and cracking up even harder. Elio knew that he was looking at Oliver as though the elder man was the only thing he could see in color but he was pleasantly tipsy and he didn't care. Let Oliver know; let him see. His opinion was the only one that mattered anyway.
Later that night when they were preparing for sleep in their respective bedrooms, each bathroom door flung wide, Elio caught sight of Oliver standing in the middle of his room wearing only thin cotton shorts, a destroyed copy of War and Peace open in his hand. Obviously he was immersed, brow crinkled and lips parted as he read, and for a long moment Elio stood still just looking at him, pervaded thoroughly with the comfortable gold haze of genuine attraction. At last he moved to close his door; it squeaked to announce its progress and Oliver looked up, startled. Their eyes locked and Oliver, after orienting himself, smiled. Then both doors were closed and Elio was positively attacked by a giddiness that followed him straight into feverish sleep.
When he awoke in the morning there was a ragged piece of paper shoved under his door.
"If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed." - Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There. You've learned something. Later. - O
Elio was flabbergasted. Oliver had been reading War and Peace half-drunk last night just to unearth a suitable quote from its daunting density and write him this note. That surge of uncontrollable, drug-like capriciousness soared once more through Elio's bloodstream; he was insurmountable. When he looked back later he would be able to pinpoint with entire surety that this was the moment he decided that he was brave enough to go to confession, he the sinner, Oliver the priest. Whether Oliver would absolve or condemn him was irrelevant. Both paradise and damnation would be welcome deviations from the purgatory in which their relationship had halted, quicksand-stuck, in the absence of courage.
3.
By mid-summer it is no longer a luxury but a principle for Elio to saunter around the grounds without his shirt all day, hot as it always is during those slick northern Italian summers, but it destroys Oliver each time to see him, so spritely in body but omniscient in the eyes. When Elio watches him he feels bolstered, charged as he might if a lightning strike gave strength rather than death. Under that gaze every iota of his body grows warm and yearns, pulling towards the source of its longing, and Oliver is mad for it. For a time he runs from that to which he is deliriously attracted, afraid, indecisive, cruelly aware of his ability to ruin the tenuous truce that has been crafted between them.
He wonders why Elio flinches from his touch if the air between them is so obviously, heavily, perpetually aflame. But when he watches the boy at play, the naiveté of late adolescence iridescent around him like an aura, he realizes just that: Elio is a boy. A wise boy, yes – one fluent in multiple languages and schooled thoroughly in art and philosophy and music – but hampered by the hesitation of youth just the same. All of his clothes are too big and when he wears that particular pair of torn denim shorts and raises his arms above his head he is exposed in too many places, the pathway of dense dark hair that disappears into his shorts thickening as more of his lean gleaming pelvis comes to the light. Oliver wants to submerge his face in the tufts of shadowy hair curling from each armpit, familiarize himself with the pheromones that siren him when they sit close and Elio has been perspiring all day. The heat that erupts from him when he breathes Elio's natural scent is primal; more than once he has had to excuse himself from the dinner table to gulp cold air from the comfort of the kitchen, sure that he himself is emitting the distinct scent of lust. In the house, away from the chatter of voices melding in so many different languages at once, he is invisible. What he doesn't know is that he is anything but unseen. Elio watches his every move; keeps tabs on his tendencies even in the absence of understanding.
One particularly wrathful summer day, Elio sat down to dinner without a shower after a grueling afternoon of tennis with a funny, talented German woman who was visiting Italy for work. He was sandwiched between Oliver and his mother and while Oliver struggled to keep his face nonchalant after one solitary breath of Elio's glorious undisguised sweat Mrs. P made a disgusted noise and elbowed her son with a throaty exclamation: "Oy, il mio porcellino, my little pig, clean yourself if I have to eat next to you!"
Everyone laughed; she was joking, but Oliver was hard pressed to stop himself from burrowing into the sweat-stained undersleeve of Elio's damp salmon-colored t-shirt. He made it through half a plate of antipasti before he had to excuse himself briefly, rattling dishware in his haste to get inside, the teenager's musk settled densely under his nose. He bolted gracelessly up the stairs to slather strong menthol chapstick on his upper lip, certain that the medicinal perfume would mask any other smell that tried to penetrate his olfactory senses, but as he trotted back downstairs he looked up to see Elio leaning through the doorway from kitchen to living room, holding himself up by one arm on each side of the frame. A little smirk of comprehension was gamboling around the comma corners of his mouth.
"Do I smell that bad, Americano?"
As often he was when Elio was in such a mood, commanding and cocksure, Oliver was helpless. He rolled his dice without calculating what his win/loss ratio might be and sauntered forward, taking in the salt crust rimming the dark-haired boy's face, the vital flush of exercise in his axblade cheeks. Elio watched without blinking, ceaseless, something stark in his eyes.
"You? Smell bad?" He was in front of Elio now, close, looming so he could force himself to recover some of the dominance in the room. Carefully he leaned down and, without touching him anywhere else, breathed the brackish scent of Elio's damp raven curls, the patch of skin behind one bronze ear. Finished boldly by tucking his head to inhale sharply near the exposed crevice of one armpit, hair that exactly matched the shade of those dark curls peeking out from where Elio's sleeve had crinkled down. The younger gave a startled little suck of air when Oliver's nose nudged him there and just like that the power balance was redistributed. "No. No, you don't smell bad at all. Italiano."
Both were instantly, embarrassingly hard, both unaware of the other's plight, though Elio was sure that the hitch in his voice when he spoke and the deathgrip of his fingers on the doorframe were transparent giveaways. "I'm more than that."
"Yes, according to your mother, you have some swine ancestry, too." Oliver grinned, chucked Elio gently under his severe jawline, but his blood was positively yodeling for how close they were, for how the smell of the younger lingered like an apparition in the air.
Elio went for him then and they grappled laughing in the doorway, forgetting that it was probably unwise to let their hips brush in such states of heightened excitement; swim shorts tragically did nothing in the way of concealing peak arousal. For half an instant Oliver was sure that they were going to crash into each other and his shameful state would be unveiled; however, Mrs. P had heard them grunting and carrying on from the open kitchen window and was now hollering for il cauboi and il porcellino to return their behinds to the dinner table now, please, before Mafalda's beautiful dinner lost its heat. When the two sat back down to eat, both still giggling intermittently, Oliver forgot that he had vowed to keep his distance and spent the remainder of dinner touching, teasing, making faces at, poking, and sneaking little sniffs of Elio, who was obviously equal parts stupefied and delighted to find himself the center of the American's spotlight.
That night, with only a wall barricading him from the object of his fantasy, Oliver masturbated desperately into the heat of his open palm, the phantom odor of Elio's sweat filling the air while he bit into the soft thickness of his pillow to keep from groaning out loud. He was unaware that in the adjoining room Elio was doing the same, spattering salty seed across the marble-white coolness of his sheets with nothing but Oliver, Oliver, Oliver in his mind.
4.
"You think that's weird? That's not weird. I'll tell you weird." Elio has Oliver's head on his bird-boned chest, tapping steadily across his sunburned forehead, smiling at Oliver's comical, self-deprecating description of his own sweat fetish. It is early morning, apricot and tangerine and pomegranate splattered in watercolor across the sky, and it is as though they are the only two awake for miles.
"There is nothing you could say that would weird me out at this point," says Oliver, quite firmly, and it is true. He has never been closer to another human being than he is now to Elio Perlman.
"Once when you were out, a while ago," says Elio anyway, distantly, "I went into your room and I took your red trunks and I buried my face in the inner lining so I could understand your scent under all that sea and sweat. And then I brought them to my room and jerked off smelling what was left of you in those shorts. I have never had such a violent self-given orgasm in my life." In startling contrast to the age and salience of those words he nuzzles into Oliver's hair, snuggling down as he sighs, an action that can only be described as adorable. Oliver smiles.
"Did I leave enough behind for you?" he asks, teasing, drawing Elio's hand to the warm bare ridges of his lower stomach.
Elio groans a bit, hushed mmmmm purr in his throat, and his fingers flex across Oliver's hipbone.
"Never. I wanted every inch of you packed inside my mouth so I could taste you. I imagined what it would be like to suck you dry and swallow every drop when you came down my throat."
Oliver's eyes, which had been somewhere between half-mast and closed as they lay together in the drowsy air, bolt open.
"You thought about that?"
"So often. Oliver, I used to watch you so closely when you'd get out of the pool soaking wet because I wanted to see anything of you that I could, any outline or suggestion of you. You've no idea." Elio rolls so he can kiss Oliver's forehead, the side plane of his perfectly shaped nose, the plum fullness of his lips.
"And what is it that you wanted to see, exactly?" asks Oliver, fully aware of what Elio is saying, asking in his own way for the words to drip from the younger's multitalented tongue. His hand inches habitually between his legs to paw at the swell of his erection, impatient.
"Your cock," enunciates Elio, moving to straddle Oliver's hips now as the American grins wickedly for the admission, any secret between them obliterated as their hips amalgamate. Elio's face when he realizes Oliver is aroused is eyes-closed lips-parted eyebrows-slanted bliss, and he got it from Marzia but he thinks it always when he finds that rigid warm pulsing flesh awaiting him: sei duro, you're so hard.
Oliver smiles for that; he knows what Elio is thinking, knows the expression decorating his face like it's his favorite painting. He pulls his hand through Elio's curls as the younger makes his way down, all tongue and the sharp nip of teeth and open lips.
"It's yours."
Elio chuckles, low, entitled. Doesn't take his eyes from the gilded canvas of Oliver's hips. "Oh I know," he says, and that vicious tongue pokes out to inspect, lick, taste. Oliver shifts and exhales; he is mad for Elio's foreplay, cruel but delectable, the promise of something much more satisfying in his wicked multicolored eyes. Every bodily exploration is a new trek; Oliver's body is Amazonian, always some new spot or mark or crevice to discover. Meanwhile Oliver treats Elio's skin as though it is delicate porcelain, creaseless and without flaw, only freckles and crops of hair and the occasional beauty mark to mar the surface. Now in the early morning they are both bespattered with dots of that sunrise light, shades open, nothing at all between them and the sky. Their only closed doors exist within this household, the implications behind the way they look and talk and act with each other as clear as the sea for anyone who would procure a second glance.
But now, now, there is no need for closed doors. It is Elio and Oliver and Oliver and Elio; the house slumbers around them but Oliver has out of necessity long since learned to silence himself with Elio's mouth engulfing the very core of him. His hands are blonde-tipped and rigid in the contrast of Elio's thick hair; Elio's fingers press commandingly on Oliver's hips to hold him down and with every third suck he pulls in a deep lungful of Oliver's musk. L'Americano isn't the only one with a sweat fetish, especially not when the sweat in question comes from there, that most sequestered of places between Oliver's ridiculous thighs. He likes the intimate things about Oliver the most – the thin salt of precome weeping from the head of his cock as they fumble frantically under each other's shorts, the ripeness of him after he's just finished a jog or a tennis match, how vulnerable he is stepping out of the shower with his eyes clear and huge. The thick briny taste of his come rippling in quick spurts down Elio's throat. How hard he gets for that; how instantly ready he is to submerge himself into Oliver's heat.
Afterwards they stand forehead to forehead in the middle of the room, Oliver's huge hands framing the stark bones of Elio's face, Elio's fingers laced in Oliver's damp tawny hair. Eyes closed, hearts thrumming in time; nothing between them but the air. It is here that time feels interminable; here where some of their most lasting memories are created, because for all the incandescence of the early morning jogs and swims and bike trips to town and deep philosophical conversations there is never anything so tender as comfortable silence.