Chapter Text
“Isn’t it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?”
Taylor Swift, 2020
The ocean just before dawn has always reminded Joe of his beloved’s eyes. Pale, sparkling green, with flecks of sky blue when it catches the minimal light. Clear and endless. Quiet and calm, but with a storm unseen underneath.
The view from the upper balcony of the little house they’d built in the eighteenth century is breathtaking. The cliffs crumbling into the sand below, the warm sea, the cascading sky that travels forever toward the horizon and far, far beyond where Joe’s human eyes can see. When they built it, there were no other houses nearby. They were alone on the cliffside, where they could be safe together in a time before their love would have been accepted. Now, there is a paved road and a small smattering of cottages, and the constant white-noise of tourists on the beautiful stretch of beach below. Joe doesn’t mind the change. They have enough room to keep to themselves, and it’s nice to have a bit of life around them.
For two centuries they have found solace in this place. The guest room on the first floor has really been Andy’s room, when she has wanted to be with them. They brought Booker here, too, back when he was still Sébastien, because he’d been so broken by the loss of his cherished wife and treasured children and he’d needed time to heal in a peaceful place.
For two centuries the bricks and plaster have protected them from the wind and rain. The wooden floorboards have creaked under their bare feet. The orchard with lemon and olive trees out back have grown fruit that graces their table. The walls decorated with Joe’s paintings have borne witness to their hysterical laughter, to their affectionate teasing, to their unbridled passion. Their home has always been in each other, necessarily, but this place is as close to a physical home as they’ve ever had, and Joe wouldn’t trade it for anything.
When he heads back inside to refill his coffee, Nicky is swaying his hips gently as he hums to himself, slicing an orange on a marble cutting block on the counter. He doesn’t hear Joe come in – or, if he does, he doesn’t react to it – so Joe leans against the doorway and simply watches for a moment. He vaguely recognizes the tune Nicky is humming but can’t place it. They might have heard it five hundred years ago, or maybe it’s a new pop song they heard on the radio just last week. Nicky brings a slice of orange to his mouth and tastes it, hips still moving.
He certainly knows now that Joe is watching him. He wiggles, suggestive and silly all at once, and damn it does Joe ever love him. He loves this man to the end of the universe and back, loves him on their worst days, loves him with a stronger gravitational force than the sun holds on the planets in their solar system.
Joe sets his nearly empty coffee mug on the weathered kitchen table and heads for his husband, stepping in closer behind him and wrapping his arms around Nicky’s waist. Nicky lifts another orange slice, holding it above his shoulder for Joe. He slides it along Joe’s lips, the juice leaving them sticky, and Joe sucks it from his fingers. Sweet and tart bursts on his tongue and he makes a contented noise before pressing a sticky kiss to Nicky’s cheek.
“Hey,” Nicky complains, laughing. He taps his cheek where Joe’s mouth had touched it, and Joe laves his tongue flat over the spot, cleaning him up. “Grazie.”
“Prego,” Joe murmurs. He nuzzles into Nicky’s neck, nosing through rough stubble from a week without a shave. “Are you going to join me to watch the sunrise?”
“I guess I should. It’s only once in a blue moon that you’re willingly awake in time to see it.”
“I will certainly drag you right back into bed after it’s over.”
“It’s a deal.”
Joe steals two more pieces of the orange from the counter and then drags Nicky with him, back up the stairs and to the terrace. He sits on the stone bench and pulls Nicky into his lap, arms going back around his soft middle and nose burying in the fabric of his t-shirt. Nicky is heavy on top of him, and warm, and Joe’s eyes slip closed until Nicky urges him to look up. The emergence of the sun is majestic, the entire world turning dark and mysterious blue for a few minutes before light peeks over the distant horizon.
True to his word, once it’s high enough in the sky that they have to squint, Joe gets up, knocking Nicky out of his lap and then scooping him up around the thighs. Nicky laughs loudly and complains as Joe fireman-carries him back to their comfortable bed and dumps him onto it. Nicky bounces and gives Joe a middle finger, and Joe growls at him happily and pounces, covering Nicky’s body with his own. Their mouths crash lightly together, tongues twisting around each other’s, the sweetness of the fruit still on Joe’s tastebuds.
Joe kisses him until his lips tingle numbly, laying heavily over him like a blanket and slowly rolling his hips down, interest brewing between them, bodies sliding lazily together. Nicky moans underneath him, a beautiful, wanton sound. Joe nips at his plush lower lip and rocks his hips a little deeper to hear it again. He has never, in over nine hundred years, ceased to be humbled by these gifts his Nicolò gives him. He remembers vividly how difficult it was for him, in the beginning, and will burst with pride for Nicky and how far he’s come until the day he leaves this world.
“What time is this?” Nicky asks, words slurred into their messy kiss.
“Hm?”
“Sex,” Nicky clarifies, an impish lilt to his low voice. “We’ve only been back a few days. How many times does this make?”
Joe chuckles. They have spent most of their year-long break at their house in Genoa, but they were just in Rome for two weeks, for a change of pace and scenery.
He kisses along Nicky’s jaw and down his neck as he answers, words punctured by pecks of his lips to familiar skin. “No idea. Maybe thirteen? I lost count immediately, I can’t resist you. I need you all the time, daily, hourly. I need your touch and your body tangled with mine, need you trembling underneath me, need you filling me up with your beautiful cock until it’s all I know.”
Nicky’s fingers grasp at his hair as Joe continues his descent. He shoves Nicky’s t-shirt up underneath his armpits so he can lick over brown nipples, tickling Nicky’s stomach just to watch him squirm and then kissing the skin in apology. His plaid boxers are tented and Joe noses into the erection underneath them, feeling the heat of him through the fabric, his scent tantalizing.
“Yusuf,” Nicky whispers, not urging Joe to quicken the pace, not really, just saying his name because he likes the way it tastes on his tongue.
The boxers are loose enough that Joe can get at his cock without removing them, tugging back a leg opening and revealing his prize, flushed and swollen and resting against Nicky’s hip.
“Hello,” he murmurs fondly to it. “You look lovely dressed in green plaid.”
Nicky snorts. “You’re an idiot.”
“You’re the one who loves an idiot,” Joe points out with a shrug and a kiss to the head of Nicky’s cock.
“So much. I never stood a chance,” Nicky answers. His fingers card through Joe’s hair and his eyes, when Joe looks up at him, shine in the early morning sunshine cascading in through the open window. “You were a hurricane.”
* * *
They spend the rest of the day in town. There is a café in the square that makes the most delicious espresso brownies Joe has ever tasted, they order three with their lattes and Joe eats two with gusto while Nicky smiles at him. They walk along ancient cobblestones, absorbing the history of this place, feeling the ghosts of their former selves around every corner. The world turns, the sun rises, and everything changes, but they don’t. Not in the ways that matter. Their love for each other grows, and maybe evolves, but doesn’t change.
In the afternoon, Nicky wanders out into the yard. Joe follows him after he finishes up a rough sketch of an orange cat they’d seen in town, to find Nicky looking serenely up at one tree in particular – the largest, right in the center of their little garden. Joe knows it’s the first one they planted, nearly a century ago. As he watches Nicky touches the center of the trunk, fingers rubbing slowly over the bark as if he’s speaking to it, and Joe’s heart swells in his chest.
He remembers vividly the day they planted it, as the smallest, most fragile sapling he can recall ever seeing. The Great War had been over for some years but the devastation lingered, and they were exhausted by it all. Nicky had wanted something alive, something they could care for, something that would grow tall and strong with enough nurturing. It had been six years before it produced its first lemon – a puny, untenably sour little thing – but Nicky had been so proud of it. Now it stands twenty feet high at least, sturdy and magnificent, and its yearly blossoms have given them an orchard.
He makes his way over. Nicky plucks a ripe, brilliant yellow lemon from the tree and brings it to his nose, smelling it, feeling the smooth surface under his thumb. When Joe gets close enough he wraps his arms around Nicky’s waist from behind as he had early that morning and rests his chin on Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky’s head tilts sideways, leaning against Joe’s as he picks a few more lemons off low branches and places them tenderly into the bowl he’d brought out with him.
“Dance with me?” Joe requests.
Nicky turns his face into Joe’s so that Joe can feel him smile against his cheek. He’s expecting Nicky to comment on the lack of music, but Nicky doesn’t. He merely extracts himself from Joe’s hold long enough to set the bowl down onto the grass and then turns in Joe’s arms, his own sliding around Joe’s waist and moving in close. Joe drapes his arms around Nicky’s broad shoulders, the fingers of one hand coming up to rest cupped around the back of his head as they sway in the stillness and the long, late-afternoon shadows.
Nicky hums, low and quiet, the same melody he had earlier before they watched the sunrise. Joe recognizes it this time, although he still couldn’t say where they heard it. It is a modern tune, a love song, and in Nicky’s deep, resonant voice, it vibrates through them both like the purr of the cat Joe had been drawing. It reverberates down into his bones, relaxes him from the inside out.
* * *
In the evening, Nicky cooks for him, a delicious, creamy pasta dish, garnished with lemon zest from their own trees. Joe eats entirely too much of that, too, and praises Nicky until he blushes and rolls his eyes and begs Joe to shut up.
As the light begins to fade outside, they make their way down to the beach below their home on the cliff, climbing easily down a precarious but well-worn path that they’ve trod for centuries. They aren’t alone, on the beach, but it isn’t crowded. Near the other end of it, sunbathers soak up the last of the day’s rays as early evening clouds begin to turn pink and orange in the sky, and children shriek happily in the water, splashing each other and laughing. Nicky lowers himself to the ground with his back leaned against a pale rockface and his legs stretched out in front of him, bare feet in the sand. He extends his hand, reaching up for Joe with a hopeful smile on his face.
As if Joe, in any time or space, could refuse him.
Joe takes his hand and settles comfortably between Nicky’s legs, leaning back into a familiar chest, familiar arms wrapping snugly around his waist from behind. Joe’s lips curve into a smile as Nicky brushes fingertips over his stomach, and he reclines, letting Nicky hold him, head tipping back to rest on Nicky’s broad shoulder. It’s more luxurious than the most expensive mattress because the warm body cradling his belongs to someone who loves him.
“D’you think Andy will call, soon?” Nicky asks.
“I hope so,” Joe answers. He has enjoyed their break. He’s enjoyed such a long stretch alone with Nicky, with no violence to disrupt their serenity, with nothing but endless sunshine and all the time in the world to hold each other as they do now. But he, like Nicky, misses their family. He’s thought, a number of times, that they should have invited Booker to stay. Joe misses him and plans on making it up to him as soon as he can.
Nicky doesn’t respond. His hand slips underneath Joe’s linen shirt, palm resting on his stomach.
“You know,” Joe tells him, “if you looked on a map, Tunis is almost directly South. When I was small, I used to sit on the shore and look across the sea to the North and wonder what was over there, beyond the horizon.”
“You did?” Nicky asks in a soft voice, and when Joe nods, he continues, “Joe, so did I.”
Joe opens his eyes in surprise. He tries to twist around to meet Nicky’s gaze but he can’t, Nicky has leaned forward to bury his forehead into Joe’s neck, arms tightening around him to keep Joe close against his chest.
“Amore mio,” Joe whispers.
“It was you,” Nicky says. Joe can feel warm breath on his neck.
Joe exhales. He turns his face, nose finding Nicky’s soft hair and inhaling him. “My mother used to say she didn’t know what was across the sea. I always felt it had to be something important. I didn’t believe her when she said it might be nothing at all.”
“We have always been connected. Pulled toward each other by something we couldn’t see, but always felt. It was you,” Nicky repeats, emotion thick in his deep voice. “All those years, all those times I felt incomplete and looked to the sea for hope that something more existed, I was looking at you. Waiting for you.”
“And I was looking at you.” Joe nudges his face, needing to see him, and finds Nicky’s eyes wet when he shows them to Joe. Joe reaches up for him, cups Nicky’s cheek in his hand and brings him in for a kiss. Into the press of their lips, he teases, “sappy.”
Nicky chuckles. He leaves his forehead resting intimately against Joe’s, noses touching between their faces, and answers, “about you? Yes, I am.”
“Do you even fathom how much you are loved?” Joe murmurs. Nicky’s arms are the warmest, safest place for him to rest, and he snuggles in closer. “Love isn’t erased at the end of every night and reborn in the morning. It adds up. When I fall in love with you again every day it piles onto the love from yesterday. That means you are the most loved person who has ever lived, my Nicolò.”
“I’m not. You are,” Nicky argues in a soft voice. His hand moves, palm rubbing Joe’s stomach slowly. “I loved you first. My life had been nothing but fear and hellfire until I met you, and you were gentle and warm and caring. You accepted me, you taught me how to be a better man. You taught me to love. I loved you long before you loved me.”
Joe shakes his head, and emotion forms as a lump in his throat. His voice wavers as he says, “I won’t argue because I don’t have any dates in my head to prove you wrong, but Nicky, I loved you for a long time before we ever admitted it. I was captivated by your eyes, by your voice, by the gentle soul I saw in you. I think more likely we’re tied, even if we haven’t loved each other evenly every single step of the way.”
“Tied. I like that.” Nicky’s lips slide over his, barely a kiss but heartfelt and Joe feels it to his toes. “And I love you. Endlessly.”
“Perpetually,” Joe adds, and Nicky nods, remembering Florence. “I’ve loved you more than any living person has ever loved another. I’ll never get tired of telling you.”
“I’ll never be tired of hearing it.”
Joe gives him a real kiss, this time, searching lips and wandering tongues. When they break apart to breathe, he promises, “and I’ll never go anywhere I can’t bring you with me.”
“Neither would I,” Nicky responds, as he always has. “I wouldn’t want to.”
* * *