Lovino sat at the table, eating his pasta. "Slow down," he scolded, poking the blond across from him with his fork. "Haha, sorry Lovi," Alfred responded. "I'm just super hungry!"
"You're a bottomless pit," the brunet snorted fondly, but scraped some of his food onto Alfred's plate. "You don't have to do that!" the blond protested, only to be waved off. "I'm never going to eat all of this anyway," justified Lovino.
"You should!" Alfred responded, grasping the smaller boy's wrist. "Look how skinny you are! My hand can fit all the way around your wrist." Lovino blushed and scowled. "You're just huge," he said, tugging his hand away.
Everything was wonderfully normal, so normal, in fact, that at first he almost didn't register what his eyes were telling him. The pasta was good, Alfred was saying something stupidly cute again, and Antonio was standing in the street, looking at him. Wait a minute. Antonio was standing in the street looking at him. What. The fucking. Hell. Lovino jolted away from the table. He threw a "Wait there, bastard!" over his shoulder before racing outside.
Sure enough, Lovino thought, taking in the tousled brown hair and eyes greener than the grass, it was Antonio. Lovino wasn't sure if he was lightheaded from getting up too fast or because Antonio was standing right the fuck there! He opened his mouth but didn't know what to say, besides the obvious, of course, so he went with that. "Antonio? What the fuck are you doing here?"
"Hi, Lovi," the older brunet smiled nervously. "I missed you."
The Italian jerked as if slapped, and then snapped, "You missed me, bastardo? Missed me?" He then dissolved into a slew of swear words- a mixture of incomprehensible English and Italian, with a bit of Spanish thrown in for good measure. He tried not to remember for whom he had started learning Spanish in the first place.
Lovino was so far gone that he did not even notice the tears streaming down his face. Panicking, the older teen tried to calm him down. He gripped Lovino's arm and tried to pull him closer. "Lovi, Lovi, Lovi," he pleaded. "Calm down, mi tomate." The Italian fought him tooth and nail, tears and snot running down his face. "Let go of me!" he managed to choke out. Antonio just tried to drag him closer into a hug, before being stopped by an iron grip on his forearm.
He looked up to see the blond from earlier (Alfred Jones, his memory supplied). "He said to let. Him. Go." Jones said evenly. Smiles don't have the right to be that scary, the Spanish boy thought erratically. The blond hadn't looked so tall earlier, either. His arm was beginning to hurt, so Antonio reluctantly let go of his (crying!) Lovi. "Thank you," Alfred said politely. "Lovino, did you want to talk to him?"
The Italian was now crying too hard to be understood, but shook his head. "That's what I thought." The blonde's smile slid off as if it had never existed. What replaced it made Antonio nostalgic for the smile, as creepy as it had been. "Then get the fuck out," Alfred ordered, wrapping an arm around Lovino and pulling him closer.
Antonio turned and left, not because of anything the blond said, but because when Alfred pulled Lovi towards him, the slender brunet went.
xXx
Lovino felt like an idiot. He saw the bastard for the first time in over a year, and instead of chewing him out, he had cried like a little girl. And Alfred had seen him like that, too. The brunet buried his face in the taller boy's shirt and gripped the edge of his bomber jacket. This was so embarrassing, but he couldn't stop. It was as if everything he had felt since Antonio left had conglomerated into one giant knife that was stabbing him in the gut.
He finally managed to pull himself together and looked up at the blond. Cornflower blue eyes stared down at him in concern through wire-frame glasses. "I thought I told you to wait there," he sniffed. "Idiot."
Alfred smiled. "You know I could see you guys through the window, right? I saw you crying and of course I came."
Lovino blushed and leaned against Alfred, worn out. The blond stroked one hand down his back. "Hey," he murmured. "I have to go pay before they think we skipped out on the bill, okay? But I'll be right back," he promised. Alfred shrugged out of his jacket and placed it around Lovino's shoulders before going back inside. The brunet pulled it closer around himself. It smelt like Alfred (a mixture of freshly-cut grass and fast food) and he felt a little better. A few minutes later, the blond came out and wrapped an arm around the Italian's shoulders. "Come on. Let's go home."