Chapter Text
Massimo Marcovaldo pauses in the doorway of his kitchen. He regards you with the kind of caution a large, very tired dog might exhibit around a very enthusiastic puppy.
"Kjell is here. Is it that time of year already?" he says in a low, measured sort of voice that makes it sound like maybe he wishes it wasn't.
But it is that time of year, lucky him, lucky Alberto, and luckiest of all you, finally your annual Italian summer holiday. Three weeks on the Riviera; no work, no relentless viola practice (just enough to keep you lubricated), no four-hour long pretentious operas and puzzlingly experimental ballets monopolizing your evenings, no crowded trams or packed trains during rush hour, no handsome but clingy ballerino who yes can lift you over his head with one hand but more importantly keeps trying to spend the night when he knows it's time for him to leave, so maybe three weeks without a call will finally drive the point home: he's just not that special and you don't play for keeps.
Three weeks with all that behind you, to worry about later, just good wine and better food and bright sun and the most comfortable, uncomplicated boy on the face of the planet. You like the life you've built for yourself in Vienna, you've worked hard for it and you've got plenty to show for it: you're rising through the ranks at a respectable clip and with god as your witness if you don't take first chair in the opera by the time you're forty it'll only be because you've graduated to the Philharmonic instead. Music is your life's work, and you love it, love the act of pulling art out of thin air, temporary and ephemeral. But it's still work, both the dedication to the craft and the endless social acrobatics of kissing the right ass at the right time to always stay one step ahead of your lazier, less devoted colleagues, and it wears on the bones. Vienna is great, but it's not Sweden at your mother's for Christmas and it's not Italy with Alberto in summer. You've been here not three hours yet and you already feel like a new person, rejuvenated, five years younger, slotted right into the place made and kept ready just for you every summer since the one Luca didn't come back and you came to scrape Alberto off his mattress and teach him to be functional again, to keep the household running while his father worked and Alberto recovered. You know Massimo loves you even though he acts like you're a nuisance. He might not talk much, but he doesn't have to for you to know he's grateful that you were there to help.
You've made yourself right at home in the Marcovaldo kitchen, like you never left, busying yourself over the stove, as though you know how to cook anything you didn't learn how to make in this same kitchen, from these same people.
"Signore Marcovaldo, look at you! Handsome as ever." You wag your wooden spoon at him while Alberto makes theatrical gagging noises from his seat at the kitchen table. " Are you skinnier? You have to stop losing weight, I'll get worried, don't make me call your doctor."
Massimo's mustache twitches twice before Alberto comes to his rescue. "Dinner will be ready in a half hour, dad, why not go downstairs and get a drink until then?" Massimo seems to agree this is a good idea, because he turns without a word to head back downstairs to the dark safety of a bar. The way he fills the entire doorway with his broad shoulders makes you crane your neck a little to watch as he goes.
Alberto catches you looking and groans the long-suffering groan of a man who knows he will never win the argument he's about to make. "Oh my god could you please stop trying to fuck my dad? And right in front of me? Please??"
"Alberto, darling," you bat your eyelashes at him, "you'd know if I were really trying, because I'd be succeeding."
"It's never gonna happen, man."
"Maybe not, but I've never met a man who said no to a blow job. I'm told I look like a girl from the right angle anyway. He can pretend, I don't mind. Is he big? I bet he's big. I like big." You bite the business end of your spoon and pretend to consider, grinning. Realize it's covered in red sauce and spend a moment licking it, as if demonstrating. It's good, definitely one of your better attempts. "Think I could take you both at the same time?"
"What, like one on each end or in the same- god, no, stop!" He pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes as if it can help scrub the image from his brain. "Whyyy," he whines.
"Because I missed you." You set the spoon in its rest and cross the tiny kitchen to press a fond kiss to his temple and dig your fingers into his mop of tight curls to scratch affectionately at his scalp. He whimpers and yields into your touch like the overgrown baby he is. It's a good, comfortable feeling, to know you've still got what it takes to press his buttons. "And because I love to make you squirm."
"---He doesn't take a hint, and I don't know if he's just that stupid or if he's hoping he'll wear me down–he pretended to fall asleep!" Just laid there fake snoring when I told him to get lost. Taking up two-thirds of my bed–" you sprawl out across your hotel bed like a pale, skinny starfish, getting as much into Alberto's space as possible to prove your point, "I can't sleep like that! I was dead on my feet for the whole next day."
"Oh," Alberto says through a crooked grin, disentangling his legs from yours, "Should I leave? Does Prince Charming need his beauty sleep?"
"Not you, you booger. You know you don't count-"
"So now I don't matter-"
"Of course you matter. Ugh! Asshole." You take his cigarette from his fingers, pull from it, and exhale, low and smokey around the truth. "You're still the only one who does."
"Mmhm." Alberto smiles, crooked and handsome in the dark. "Tell me more about how great I am."
"Shut up. You tell me more about how great you are. Have you had any dates lately?"
The grin disappears like a wave receding back out to sea. He plucks the cigarette back from your fingers and fiddles with it, ashing it over a tray on the bedside table before drawing deep and holding the smoke in his chest for a moment before blowing it at the ceiling, exactly as if he had to steady himself before answering. "Naw, you know I don't really-"
"Alberto-"
"No, look, it's not– it's not like I'm still pining or whatever, y'know, it's just. I'm not looking. It doesn't bother me to, to fly solo. I'm fine. I don't even really think about it."
"Mmm. Me either, but I still get laid."
"So do I-"
"By me!"
"Are you complaining? I didn't hear any complaining a half hour ago when-"
"Tyst, of course not!" You prop your head up with your hand to get a good look at him, let him know you're serious. "But is it enough?"
Alberto gives you a wary side-eye. "This is a trick question. If I say no you'll hurt me, won't you."
"Arsel." You cluck your tongue at him. "Don't be a coward, I'm only looking out for you."
"I know, I know. But really, I'm fine. Even if I wanted to get laid, where would I go? There's like, maybe two dudes my dad's age I know of, and one of the kids has started hanging around the pescheria in these little shorts trying to get my attention, but he's just a baby, like fifteen at the most-"
"If he's prettier than me-"
"He's not, don't worry. I don't want him. I have to shoo him away with a broom, like a cat-"
"Tourists?"
"Tourists," he repeats with derision.
"Watch it, mister, I was a tourist once-"
"You're still a tourist-"
"That's no way to talk to your new step-dad-"
"Point is," he cuts you off with finality, "I don't exactly have a lot of options. But it's not a big deal! Really. Once a year my friend, the incredible human vacuum cleaner, rolls into town to take pity on me. Maybe you've met him: blonde hair, blue eyes, funny accent, could suck the bend out of a river?"
You laugh, flattered. "I think I've heard of him. Good things, mostly."
"Good things, definitely." He stubs out the cigarette and rolls over to drape an arm over your waist, and you meet him with a kiss, lingering and familiar, a privilege awarded to no one else you share your bed with.
You and Alberto continue to exist comfortably somewhere in the space between friends and lovers, or maybe even outside that spectrum altogether. You come back to Portorosso every summer and together you shift into a sort of friendly parody of married life, a thing you don't want but would only ever pretend at with Alberto, an extension of the month you spent making him eat and bathe go out into the sunshine when all he wanted was to suffocate under dirty laundry and die, because it scratches a nostalgic little itch somewhere behind your heart you don't even notice until you're getting groceries with him or hanging laundry out his kitchen window or crowding each other for space at the bathroom mirror. There's love but no romance: you're more like brothers who fuck than anything resembling a real couple, and probably will be for as long as neither of you commit exclusively to anyone else.
(There are at least a half dozen mouth-sized rings of well-healed puncture scars in your neck and shoulders that suggest otherwise, souvenirs of the times Alberto has taken you down into the surf and shown you the kind of sex that would make the boys back in Vienna lose their minds with jealousy if only they could comprehend it, but they mean exactly as much to you as they do to him, fish out of water that he is: nearly nothing.)
In another world, maybe you would have been happy to swoop in and snatch him up where Luca dropped him, and been comfortable with that kind of life. But as long as there's no orchestra in Portorosso and no ocean in Vienna, neither of you would dream of having it any other way.
"Missed you," he murmurs into your hair. It's far too warm to cuddle but you let him anyway, because he's big and soft and you missed him too.
And for three weeks out of the year you sort of get to pretend you have someone to keep, and though you would never admit it out loud, it's honestly kind of, maybe…a little bit nice.
Strange, how being crowded in bed doesn't bother you when it's someone you actually like.