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You'd never have known if Giulia hadn't called you, and she wouldn't have known if her father hadn't written to her, and the two of you agree that even he'd probably only done it because he was desperate and at the end of his rope. Massimo Marcovaldo might be a man of few words, but he's caring and sympathetic, so he probably made a solid attempt to the best of his stoic, intimidating ability before resorting to asking Giulia for help. It was brave of him to try, you both agree, but this isn't a one man job. It's going to be a group effort the likes of which none of you are really prepared for.
Because Luca won't be coming home from his study trip to Rome. Maybe ever.
He's "met someone."
Giulia is furious and blames herself, I shouldn't have let him go, I could have talked him out of it, but it's not her fault. They were best friends once, before their studies took them down different life paths, and keeping in touch got shuffled to the bottom of the to-do pile more and more often. It happens, you know, as you grow older and time moves so much faster but demands so much more of you. The little things, they fall through the cracks when you only have so much time to spare for them. So why should she have noticed if he speaks of home less often? If mentions of missing Alberto are fewer? They're both so busy, and it's not as though she calls him just to hear him moon over her brother. If anything, it's probably actively discouraged.
I could have warned him, at least, if I'd known, she mourns, as though warning an island fishing village of an incoming a-bomb could do anything to stop it from making contact.
At the end of the day, Alberto is still a smoking, bereft crater in the earth, and his father just isn't equipped to scrape him back up alone.
None of you are, because none of you truly understand what it was they had, what they were, why it seemed so much more real and true than anything you've ever known. You shrugged it off years ago, decided human hearts just weren't made to do whatever thiers were doing, maybe whatever chemicals their brains were sending just couldn't found anywhere in human physiology. (That's depressing, Giulia had argued; Let me know when you can prove me wrong, you'd said, and she hasn't brought it up since, so.) This is not just a bad break-up: a previously vital piece of your best friend is just fucking gone and he has to learn to live without it, as much so as if he'd lost his eyes or feet or a lung. He'll survive, of course, you won't accept anything else, but surviving won't necessarily be pretty.
Giulia absolutely can not right now, but as soon as I can, Kjell, I promise, I just can't miss these exams, but I'll be on the train the minute I'm done, I swear!!! and you can because you graduated a year ago and are still in the process of looking for something a little more stable than juggling quartet gigs, and honestly you could use a break from playing Pachelbel at three to five sinfully boring heterosexual weddings a week, so it's certainly not a problem to take an impromptu Italian holiday.
Not that you expect it will be much of a vacation.
If Sig. Marcovaldo is surprised to find you on his garden steps, he doesn't show it with more than a twitch of his mustache. "He is upstairs," he says simply. "I cannot make him come down. He will not eat. But I have to tend to the shop, and the nets…" he trails off rather helplessly. He wants to help, but his household—and business—has just gone from three hands to one. He can only juggle so much.
"I'm here to help. I'll do what I can," you promise, but you hope he knows "what I can" excludes any actual fishing, though that's probably obvious by your sunhat, delicate hands and pretty white sandals. He rests that enormous hand (so big, he's SO BIG, where do men like this come from and how can you get one for yourself?) on your shoulder for an awkward moment before trading places with you. He heads out to the pier with one of Alberto's many, many cat friends on his heels, and you slip inside and climb the worn stairs to the familiar little apartment over the fish shop.
The kitchen isn't in bad shape, which you can appreciate, but any hopes you hold out die at Alberto's bedroom door. You leave your suitcase and hat in the hallway and ease the door open a crack to peak inside.
It's dark: the shutters over the window are closed and covered with an old T-shirt for good measure, which means of course there's no air flow either. The room smells vaguely of sweaty man feet and old fish, a thought you feel a little bad for thinking until you realize there is actually a sizable piece of old, dried-up sea bass on the floor. A low growl from somewhere in the room diverts your attention from the fish and also solves the mystery of where it came from.
There's a vaguely Alberto-shaped hummock of dirty laundry on the bed, and perched on the apex of that hump, somewhere in approximate shoulder vicinity maybe, is a just fucking enormous mottled black-and-ginger queen with fierce, bright gold eyes. There's a mostly untouched plate of food on the bedside table: stale bread, dried fruit, and the remains of a scrap of fish, maybe.
The cat growls a warning growl again, ears back, those gold eyes on you and looking for a fight you're not sure you would win.
"Enabler," you accuse her in a whisper. "Are you actually protecting him or are you just protecting your own interests, you little thief? He's supposed to be eating this." Her growl pitches higher as you cross the room to collect the plate, as well as two tepid half-glasses of water garnished with dust and a few floating cat hairs, and the t-shirt over the window.
You drop the dishes in the kitchen sink and the t-shirt in what will surely become an impressive pile of fetid laundry in the hall before the day is done. In the bedroom, an Alberto-shaped hand has emerged from the Alberto-shaped pile of blankets and laundry to dig fingers into the comfort of the cat's soft coat and warm fat rolls. When the mean little bitch starts revving up for another protest growl, an Alberto-adjacent voice—froggier and heavier than you remember—says, with no particular conviction, "Lucrezia, knock it off."
"I think she's waiting for you to starve so she can eat your fish face," you offer gently. "I would not give her the satisfaction if I were you."
"If she wanted to eat my face that bad she wouldn't bother waiting." Then, "Who told you?"
"Giulia."
Like a death rattle: "Fffuuuck."
"Sorry. She'll be here in–" You move toward the bed, but Lucrezia raises her significant hackles and hisses at you. "Christ, can you please do something about this…this?"
A second arm emerges from the pile and both of them wrap around the cat for the sort of hug that, to the best of your knowledge, no cat anywhere has ever enjoyed. She tolerates it for a surprising amount of time before she decides this has been quite enough of that, thank you, worms out of his grasp and thumps meatily down onto the floor. You swear she turns and gives you the stink eye before slinking out into the hallway.
"Giulia will be here in two weeks," you repeat, half-crawling over him to straddle what is probably his waist, maybe, and clearing enough mess out of the way to find his poor, tired face. Red, puffy eyes sit in dark, bruise-purple hollows and his sun-golden skin is noticeably duller, even in the dark. He doesn't seem to want to look at you, which is fair. If you looked this bad, you’d kill before you let anyone perceive you. "She said to give you this." You lean down and press an enormously wet and obnoxious kiss to his cheek.
"Ugh, gross. I don't know where your mouth has been." He doesn't wipe it off, though.
You wink, not that he's looking. "If you have a few hours I can give you the shortlist."
He snorts a little, which feels like a good sign. You tip over to wedge your slight frame between the wall and his horrible little burial mound, carving out a space for yourself as you go by tossing laundry over the side of the bed. Now you have enough room to find his body, and wrap yourself around him.
(Huh. Maybe the old fish smell is coming from multiple sources after all.)
Without being urged, he tucks his nose into the crook of your neck, filling your face with a mess of unwashed curls. You endure it for the love of him, and dig your fingers in to find his scalp, scratching like you would one of the cats—the ones that don't hate you, anyway.
"I'm so sorry, Alberto."
That's the closest you get to naming the thing that broke your best friend's heart, carved him up and hallowed him out. You had no real fondness for Luca, because he had none for you. He always viewed you with suspicion—which, the way you've heard the story, makes him a bit of a hypocrite, actually—but you know better than to say as much. There's no point in belaboring the subject: Luca has left, but you and Alberto are still here, and that's what matters. If he wants to talk about it, you'll indulge, but you know when Giulia arrives she'll have enough to say for all three of you. Best to get his strength back up before that hurricane makes landfall.
Alberto grunts and says nothing else. He seems content to just lie here in comfortable quiet, so you allow him a small doze in your arms before you carefully extricate yourself to start collecting laundry, airing out the room, and tracking down any other squirreled away dishes or unpleasant cat-related surprises. You manage to sweep up the aforementioned fish, two hairballs and a single dehydrated frog's leg—a gift from a well-meaning cat, it's about as sweet as it is disgusting—and a great deal of crumbs and dust before you decide it's time for Alberto to wake up and face the rest of his life.
"Enough," you announce, hauling him out of bed by his wrists. He moans a half hearted protest but doesn't have the strength to fight back. "You stink."
"You stink," he mumbles.
"I do not. I smell like orange blossoms. You smell like body odor and dead fish. I am not asking you to stop hurting, I know the hurt won't wash away so easily. But a shower will be good for you, and also the rest of us, because you stink. Now come."
You push him into the bathroom and make him wait while you run the water to a suitable temperature and crank the old shower on. When you turn back to him, he is standing listless, eyes on his feet, and hasn't undressed yet.
"Go on," you urge. "You haven't got anything I haven't seen before."
"Don't be so sure about that." He starts pulling off his clothes: sweatpants he hasn't changed in four days and a white tee-shirt, damp and yellow in the armpits. You decline to comment on his underpants. You'll figure out what to do with all this laundry later, after you get a chance to strip his bed and change the sheets.
He steps into the tub and into the spray of the showerhead, and the change begins, from the crown of his head downward, in streaming rivulets of silver-violet. Sharp, angry looking fins sprout from his forearms and his back; his tail hits the tub with a heavy, wet thwap.
You undress and step in behind him, careful of the spiny rays lining the length of his tail. Alberto jerks out of his daydream or sulk or whatever when you place a hand on his broad shoulder for balance.
"Relax," you say, as you cast about the shower trying to decide which of these things a fish man might use to clean himself with. "What are you, an American?"
He glances over his shoulder, and his bright, almost-animal eyes start to stray downwards before he jerks them back up and turns back to face the showerhead. "How many Americans have you showered with?"
"Enough to know there is something not right with them. This is yours?" You hold a coarse bar of mossy-green soap over his shoulder for him to see. "And this brush?"
"Yeah," he says, "But you don't have to-"
"I do, because if I don't you will stand here sulking until the water goes cold and you won't feel better."
He mumbles something under his breath that sounds a little like you don't know, but you do know, so you give his dorsal a little tug.
"I am taking care of you," you say in a kind but authoritative way, in an excellent impression of your own mother, and he sighs resignation, shoulders bowed forward. "It will go easier if you let me."
The soap lathers into a thick green foam that smells vaguely of kelp, and the brush, a palm-sized thing with stiff, natural bristles in a smooth wooden base, is used to massage the soap around his scales. You start at his shoulders and work the brush in gentle circles across his skin.
"Mmm." You pick a little fleck of purple the size of the fingernail on your pinky finger out of the brush's bristles. It flashes silver when you rotate it in the light. "You're losing scales. Is that normal?"
"Only when I'm sick," he says.
"Have you been eating?"
He doesn't answer.
"Alberto?"
"Not really," he admits. You suck your teeth and flick the scale away like an offending piece of lint. "I'm not hungry."
"It doesn't matter if you're hungry, you still have to eat." Two more scales come loose and slide down his left shoulder blade in a little procession of suds. You brush them away and follow the line of his dorsal down his back with the brush, finding a certain satisfaction in the way the bristles clip the rays of his fins, fwipfwipfwip. You stretch his dorsal gently, flaring it to its full size with your hands. "This is okay?"
"Mmm."
"Is that a yes mmm or a no mmm?"
"Yes mmm."
"The tears, are they normal?" The edges of the thick membrane stretched between the rays of his fins are tattered like a frayed piece of fabric. You've never noticed before, though admittedly he usually hides his dorsal fin under a shirt. You're unsure if it looks painful or not.
"They're old."
"Hm. Okay. You're off the hook for that one."
So you keep going, under his arms, down to the small of his back, over his hips and down a reasonable portion of his tail before you decide you've had enough of that. Your back is starting to ache and he certainly has a lot of tail.
"Turn and rinse," you instruct.
He shuffles in a miserable little half circle to face you, though he never looks at you.
The color in his face and chest is tipping a little further into pink than it is blue, and you politely pretend you don't notice the way the areas of him that flush, where his skin is thinner and more delicate, turn a sort of fuchsia-magenta. You expect him to say, I can do the front, and you expect to let him, but he surprises you by...not offering. He doesn't say anything at all.
His eyes stay half-lidded, unfocused, looking past your elbow, but at nothing in particular.
So you keep at it, gently scrubbing soap in lathery whorls down his arms, over his chest and stomach, down his thighs—he doesn't seem to have much of anything going on between his legs, which is curious but fine, because you're crouched in the bottom of the tub eye-level with his groin and doing your level best to be professional—down, down to the tips of his webbed, fishy toes.
You gesture for his hand to help you back to your feet because the bottom of the tub is slippery with a smattering of dropped scales like sequins on the floor after a night in a cheap club. You formulate the beginning of a joke (usually I make a man buy me dinner before this next part—that’s not even true, but it’s the heart of the joke) to let him know it's time to take care of his genitals, or whatever it is he has happening down there, and at the very least under his tail, but while he reaches down to hoist you back up, once you're standing, he does not immediately let go.
He still won't look at you, but he comes close. His eyes focus, but when he tries to let them meet yours, they slide off the other side of your face. His throat works hard with the effort to find words, and produces nothing.
But his hand leaves yours and re-anchors itself on the side of your face, his thumb tracing over your cheek, pushing stands of wet hair behind your ear. You can see his blunt claw pass through your field of vision from the corner of your eye, not even remotely threatening. Those should be sharper, you think, irrationally. Maybe I'll file them for him.
You tilt your face into his touch, questioning, let him cradle your fragile human skull in the large palm of his hand.
"Please," he manages at last, hoarse and flimsy.
Oh.
Well, of course.
When you were seventeen and aching from your first broken heart, you met a bright, handsome boy in an Italian fish shop who flirted openly with you and made you feel seen and desired when you were still green enough and hurt enough to wonder if anyone would ever be willing to take a chance on you again. He turned you down you when you made your move, but he was polite about it and you respected his choice and never resented him for it, and fell into an easy, lifelong friendship with him.
But you know without a doubt in your mind that if he had said yes, it would not have taken a full twenty-four hours before he found himself filling the back of your throat, even as nervous and lost as you were at the time. You would have gladly had him, had he offered himself.
You don't usually need more than a yes.
But it's different now, because now he's not a boy you'll say goodbye to when the holiday is over, but your best friend with years together behind you, and he's hurting from a loss so deep and profound that it's left him gutted and empty and helpless, a ghost of a man who can't even be trusted to feed and bathe himself, and in a month or two your very professional advice might be to go get laid, but right now the idea of telling him to go find some random piece of ass in the state he's in is absolutely untenable.
You think he wants something now, though, maybe he needs the endorphins, or maybe he just needs reassurance he's not totally unlovable.
His arm drops from your face and slips, scaly slick, around your waist, hand resting featherweight in the small of your back. He hesitates, then steps forward, tips his nose against your ear and exhales, ragged and wobbly. The sound he makes into your wet hair, the only slightly braver cousin of a sob, is heartbreaking and absolutely pathetic.
It's possible you're off the mark and maybe he just needs a hug. So you reach up and wrap your arms around his neck, your chest flush with his, and smooth back the hydrangea-blossom of frills that replaces his curls in the water, reaching your fingers down in between the vibrant petals to scratch at his scalp. He makes a sound you've never heard before, something like a large cat's purr, but with more clicks and an undercurrent of something else you can't really identify, but translates just fine.
"Alberto, älskling, I think I need you to say it," you whisper, unsure if he can even hear you over the hiss of the shower and the smooth gray fog of depression blanketing his own mind.
He whimpers, but his body shifts against yours; your cock slips heavy in the space between his thighs.
"Can we," he manages with great effort. "Can you." His hand fists nervously against your back, claws making no more impression than blunt fingernails. He rolls his face against your neck. "Can I kiss you?"
"Yes, of course." Something not entirely unexpected unfurls deep in your belly, eager and hungry after years of sleep. "Of course. I am here to take care of you."
So you lift his face away from your shoulder and look at him, and finally his sad, desolate eyes meet yours, and your heart breaks for him all over again. Alberto is a good man, sweet and honest and loyal, bright and brave and caring, and he deserves better than this, than being left behind, thrown aside for the promise of something easier, more normal. He's not normal and neither are you, two peas in a pod, still, after all these years, and you will gladly give him anything he wants and more.
You kiss him, carefully, unsure how well you'll match but unbothered either way. He responds with a hitch of breath, a squeeze of your waist, and a moment of uncertainty stretches long and thin before it snaps, and he is kissing you back, rough enough to bruise, alien tongue chasing your lips, hungry for closeness, for compassion, for anything. "Please," he keeps begging against your mouth, your jaw, your neck, voice broken and pinched, "Please, please."
"Of course," you answer, though you suspect it's not really you he's speaking to. "Anything, anything."
And then things get interesting.
You're half hard because he's pawing at you and pleading with you and he keeps making this incredible choked growling noise when he clearly wants catch bits of you between his teeth but refrains for your safety, and fuck's sake you're only human. But he's something too, something with needs to be sated and chemicals to trigger and your hand absently slips down his stomach to his groin before you remember there wasn't much happening there, except now there definitely, definitely is.
You pull back to look, and watch in awe as something emerges from a fuschia-flushed slit between his thighs, something long and tapered and thickly muscled that curls back in on itself as it grows, as if bashful, ashamed, trying not to take up too much space. "Sorry," he chokes, momentarily lucid.
"Don't be. Let me see," you say, fascinated, enamored, as it shyly unfurls like an octopus' tentacle, snaking its full, vivid, alarming length up his belly. It's a beautiful, brilliant, inhuman purple-pink, decorated with texture and ridges near where it grows thick and wide as your own, wider even, possibly. It's slick with something the water doesn't wash away, self-lubricating, and when you reach down to touch him again it's so thick and strong with muscle shifting and undulating below the surface of the skin, you have a ridiculous, brain-breaking moment of oh my god I'm so fucking gay, I love men so much, Paguro is sick in the head to leave him, but more for me, more for me, but this isn't about you, it's about Alberto, so you wrap your hand around his strange, beautiful cock and press hard, hungry kisses to his throat and promise to give him anything he needs.
The sex is...it's not great. But you really didn't expect it to be; even human first times can be pretty rough, and the learning curve here is—understandably—unusually steep. But it's not for you, it's for him, and with a little trial and error you get him that desperately needed flood of endorphins, and if it makes him feel even the smallest bit better, even the tiniest bit more normal, then it was good enough.
Next time will be better.
"That's better, ja?" You swaddle him in a towel like a toddler and not a sad, ruined, grown man in his twenties. You pat away his scales and scrub his hair back into existence. It smells fresh and clean again, grease-free. "Fresh as a daisy."
"I shouldn't have done that," he says from under the towel. "I shouldn't have asked you."
You move to pull the towel off his head, but he reaches up with both hands to hold it in place, as if he's ashamed to meet your eye. When you crouch down between his knees and look up under his little makeshift tent, you find the dark smudges under his eyes don't wash away so easily.
"Hm. I have given far more to boys I like far less, Alberto. I never offer anything I don't want to give." You let him keep his terry-cloth shroud, but pull him to his feet and steer him into fresh boxers. "I told you, I am here to take care of you. I might be a bit of a bully. But you want something like that, you have to ask, okay? That's the rule. Just don't be afraid to ask."
He hesitates, considers a moment, and nods. A good enough sign. Cautiously, he pulls the towel from his head, revealing his unruly cloud of sun-brassy curls. You cluck your tongue and pluck at the haphazard coils, already in dire need of a trimming. You don't know if that's something you can help with. Getting him to a barber might be a big ask.
Well. One step at a time.
And it'll be a lot of steps, going forward, getting him back on his feet. Step by step you'll get him eating small regular meals, and bathing without your help, stepping into the sunshine for short periods of time.
And the dark smudges under his eyes will clear up, and he'll get his color back, and he'll remember how to sing to the radio while he teaches you how to make his favorite recipes.
And he'll brave the ocean again, in time, and take you with him, and show you secret coves and hidden grottos, and he'll ask can we…? and you'll answer anything, and eventually, with enough practice, he'll remember it's your name he's meant to be growling when he finishes with his sharp carnivore's teeth sunk into your soft human shoulder, neither of you really understanding why he does it, only that it's fucking incredible.
And no matter how many years pass, how many summers you spend dropping everything to come to Italy under the pretense of taking care of your best friend, you never stop promising yourself that if Paguro ever shows his face in this town again, you will personally and gleefully snap his scrawny little neck.