A couple of days after our visit to Lake Garda, I rode all the way into town only to realise that I'd left behind the letters that I needed to post on the desk in my room. The sun must be addling my brain. On returning to the villa, I greeted Mafalda as we passed at the gate then headed upstairs, the house peaceful and empty. Everyone must be out. When I entered my room, I could sense that someone had been there since I left that morning. Mafalda probably, doing her daily delivery of clean clothes, a service that I'd sorely miss when I was back in my tiny apartment in New York that was for sure. But wait a minute. My red swimming shorts were lying crumpled on the centre of my bed. I hadn't put them there. Surely Mafalda wouldn't have moved them. Could it be? I felt an embarrassing purr of excitement at the thought that he might have been here, on my bed, touching my shorts. I quenched it as best I could. Just a fantasy – I must have left them there myself and forgotten about it. But all the same, I couldn't help but pick them up and bring them to my face, to imagine that I could smell him on them… I could smell a scent on them… Could I? Or did I just want it so much that my sense of smell was rendered unreliable? Just in case, I switched into them from the green ones I was wearing, so that I could pretend that he had been in my shorts, and that by having them rub on my skin it would almost the same as if my skin was rubbing directly against his skin. I shook my head at myself.

We were back on speaking terms, yet there was nothing to say without risking saying everything. So we stuck to mildly pleasant chitchat, which was like feeding a starving man rosewater – possibly just enough to stave off death, but not at all what he really needed. That night, alone at my garden hideaway, it occurred to me that Elio likely had no idea that I came out here every night. He probably thought I was with Chiara. How could I correct that notion, though? I couldn't exactly stride up to him and tell him "Oh by the way I spend hours every night in your backyard thinking about you." I might still be reading him wrong. While I had learnt how to speak in code pretty well over the years, code was a language that had different grammatical rules for each speaker, and bitter experience had taught me that there was always a chance that someone would turn out to only have been speaking pure, disappointing English all along.

The next day came the first, and only, rainy day that I experienced during my stay with the Perlmans. After breakfast, the family withdrew into the lounge where they curled up on couches to read. The picture of intimate familial contentment. Feeling like an intruder, I made my excuses and left them to head into town. I was glad to have an enforced break from our usual poolside routine under the blazing sun as I had a lot of work left to do to make sufficient progress on my thesis before I returned home, given how much time I had spent preoccupied by a certain maddeningly distracting young man. However the following day dawned hot and sunny again, and once again I found myself sitting on the edge of the pool, leg dangling in the refreshing water, mind fixated on the being sitting some metres away behind me who was ruining my life effortlessly just by existing. I felt like I would soon be asphyxiated if I didn't say anything to him, but my throat was paralyzed and no words would come.

His voice came like a liferope. "My mom's been reading this romance. She read some of it to my father and I the day the lights went out." I had seen the book by the couch. Heptameron. If my intuition was correct, I could guess which story might have prompted him to tell me about it. "About the knight who doesn't know whether to speak or die?" I asked, Elio replying yes. Still facing away from him, I grappled for words to draw some kind of clarification of whether we were talking about the story or talking about us. "So does he speak?" "No, he fudges." And that was it. That was us. I made some lame joke about that being typical since the knight was French, and turned so I could look at him side on. Now. Seize the moment. There's a chance there.

My heart hammering as if I were about to ask him to marry me, I casually mentioned that I needed to go to town today. I knew he had no plans, surely if he was interested he would take the bait. He rushed his words, almost tripping over his tongue. "Oh I can go, if you want. I've got nothing on today." It must be real, then. Say it. With careful nonchalance, I offered a suggestion. "Why don't we go together?" "Right now?" "Yep, right now." An echo of the day weeks ago when I had burst into his room to get him to go swimming with me. I leapt to my feet to keep the momentum going. "Unless you've got something better to do." I winced at my feeble attempt at macho indifference, Elio mocking my words right back at me. Thankfully he then got up and hurriedly collected his things as well as accepting the papers that I coolly asked him to put in his backpack for me.

I collected the bike I'd been using from Anchise, who had fixed it for me after I'd had a bit of a crash. He'd attempted to fix me, too, insisting on smearing a home-made potion on the sizeable graze on my hip. I lifted my shirt to show my injury to Elio. Look at my body. Go on, see me. See me. He made appropriate noises of sympathy, then we were on our way. I loved biking the quiet Italian roads with him, shirt billowing in the wind, sweat trickling down my back. I couldn't be further from the crowded, noisy streets of New York. On reaching the piazzetta I popped into a corner store to grab some cigarettes, although I didn't usually smoke. It gave me a reason to cup my hands close to his face when he accepted my offer of one and I reached over to light it. Such simple pleasures, being alone with Elio on a sunny day with all the time in the world.

We meandered with the bikes towards the memorial at the centre of the piazzetta, which I hadn't taken the time to really look at before. There were so many war memorials in Europe, it was quite haunting. I hadn't even heard of the battle of Piave, and said so to Elio. Inevitably, he knew all about it and gave me some of the details. He was too much. "Is there anything you don't know?" I said, both joking and genuinely admiring at the same time. Elio blushed a little, looking down and walking away around the other side of the memorial while replying "I know nothing Oliver." Something dangerous came into the air. I moved away from him, bracing my hands against the memorial handrail. How to let him know that I adored him for his depth of knowledge, that his easy ability to provide insightful comment on any topic held me spell-bound? "Well, you seem to know more than anyone else around here." I stared hard at him, trying to hold his gaze as the world around us faded out around the edges. He laughed a little, responding quickly "If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter."

The boom of my pulse reverberated through my body, drowning out the background noise of the town as my senses reached a point of alertness so intense it felt as if the universe was imploding around me and the only point that held fast was his face. This conversation was pulling me down a rabbit hole, but I had to follow it. I straightened up and took a deep breath. "What things that matter?" As if I didn't know what he meant. Did I know what he meant? I hoped I did but somehow it was too terrifying to believe. If I indeed knew exactly what he meant, then what came next? He was staring me directly in the eyes, my sunglasses barely managing to shield me from that gaze that was just made to skewer me. He spoke softly, but confidently. "You know what things." I was stunned. Was this the same seventeen year-old boy that could barely look at me during my first week here? He had broken a pact between us that we had never made except in my unconscious. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked. He looked back steadily, evidently trying to work out the answer himself, as his reply had a questioning tone to it. "Because I thought you should know." "Because you thought I should know?" I repeated back to him with a laugh, stalling for time as I frantically tried to figure out how to react to his bold declaration. He revised his statement. "Because I wanted you to know."

I broke off and wandered further around the memorial, heart pounding and mouth dry. I had wanted this all along, but having it prove real was far more tough to deal with than simply fantasising about it. At the far end I was confronted by Elio, who had likewise moved around the other side of the monument. We stood face to face, as he bravely finished his declaration. "Because there's no-one I can say this to but you." So true. I looked around. Surely everyone in Crema must be hearing our words, reading our minds, sharpening their pitchforks. But there was no-one nearby. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" I asked, as if there were still any possibility that I might have misunderstood him. He simply nodded coyly. I swallowed hard. I grasped for something to keep me from being thoroughly trounced in this high-stakes game. Something that would bring me back to my other world, the fastidiously managed world of carefully manicured friendships, industrious career advancement and well-planned progress past the expected mileposts of life, rather than this whirlpool of raw emotion. "Don't go anywhere. Stay right here." I touched him gently on the chest with my finger before heading to the typist's office across the square.

Somehow the typist had managed to mess up my pages completely – this should have annoyed me, it would put me back an entire day. I tried to feel annoyed. I failed, due to that intrusive thought that slunk its way in and permeated my mind, that what this state of affairs actually meant was an entire day free to spend with Elio if I wanted to. Curse him and his courage, for bringing whatever this was to a head. Though wasn't that exactly what I wanted? I'd thought I knew what I wanted. The conflict I felt right now proved I was wrong.

Meeting him back where I'd left him, he just laughed when I explained what had happened with my pages. Then he said he wished he hadn't said anything. I couldn't tell if he was being truthful or not, but simply replied "just pretend you never did." That was my method, wasn't it? Just pretend and move on, flitting through life pretending not to care so as to protect yourself from the fact that you cared far more than you could ever admit. Undeterred, he spoke up again. "Does this mean we're on speaking terms – but not really?" I felt guilt at the note of hopelessness in his voice – having revealed himself to me, were we going to continue as if this day had never happened? I turned to face him, frustrated at his youthful naivety. Did he really think we could act on his admissions? "It means we can't talk about such things. We just can't." It hurt to see his face fall from hopeful vulnerability into downcast resignation as he walked past me without replying to grab his bike. I paused at mine, still struggling to comprehend the fact that Elio had as good as announced that he both wanted me and was inexperienced himself, and trying to think of how to put what I was thinking into words for him, to explain why it wasn't a possibility. I didn't notice that he'd ridden off already until he called dispassionately over his shoulder to me. "Andiamo, americano." Let's go. I turned and pedalled after him.