Chapter Text
Fratenello-
I'm sorry to say I won't be coming back to Portorosso this summer, because I'm staying over to do a summer program at the observatory!! Of course this means you have to come visit ME for once, and you can finally meet my mamma! Luca and I can show you all the sights, there's a shop here that does flavors of gelato you wouldn't believe! You're going to love it.
And then you have to take Luca away again IMMEDIATELY because I need a holiday from him. His lovestruck mooning over you never ends. Listen, I've met you. You're alright, but I think he might be overselling you a little.
-Giulia
Alberto, love of my life,
I never thought I'd be so glad to be rid of school. My teachers seemed disappointed I won't be back, but I think they understand. One of them in particular seemed especially understanding. He said it was important that I kept a passion for learning, and if leaving school is what it takes to keep that fire burning, then I'm making the right choice. He seemed a little tired when he said it, and it made me wonder if he wished he had my freedom to run away and see the world. What adventures has he missed out on? What passions has he lost?
We're finally going to have our freedom, Alberto. I won't let it go to waste.
I have SO MUCH missed time to make up for. I lost so much time to fear and doubt and confusion, afraid to face what you've meant to me all along, but that ends now. I love you! I love you and I'll never let you doubt it again, not for a minute. How can I make up for all the hours I've spent not touching you, all the minutes not kissing you? I'm so mad at myself for not spending more time committing every bit of you to memory, because when I close my eyes I can't remember you absolutely perfectly. Is the fish hook scar between your second and third fingers or your third and fourth? How many freckles on the bridge of your nose? I'm going to fill in the gaps in my memory until I know every single inch of you by sight, by touch, by tas
WHOA. On second thought, this one's private.
(Where on earth did he learn this stuff?)
The train is early.
That's good, great, obviously, except it isn't. You had a plan; meet him at the train station, in clean clothes, maybe not smelling of fish, with flowers and your shiny, perfect, beautiful Vespa (sea green, like the first, and only very slightly second-hand, free of rust and obsessively tuned and polished.) You thought you had another forty-five minutes, at least, but there it is, announcing its arrival with its screaming whistle and belching steam, chugging along the coast, and here you are, docking the gozzo at the jetty to unload the day's catch, in filthy work clothes, nowhere near the station. You freeze in a panic.
"Go," Massimo says, laughing kindly.
And you don't need to be told twice.
You kick off your sandals and peel out of your fish-grimy tank and dive off the jetty, slicing a smooth and effortless arc through the water toward the coastline. You'd probably not make it to the station on time by land, not if you wanted to make yourself presentable first, but if you can get his attention by sea, at least he'll know you're coming. So you race along the cliffs as fast as you can, to meet the train as early as possible. You're built for speed and power, strong and silver-sleek, and when you porpoise out of the water you get better height and distance than you've ever gotten before.
The train comes into sight around the next cliff, and there he is, small in the distance, but his pale face and wind-whipped hair as he leans out of a car to get as much of his eyes on Portorosso as possible are unmistakable.
You race to meet the train, then flip and reverse direction to race alongside it, diving deep deep deep and propelling upward, out of the water, eyes on him. At the apex of your arc, you use your whole chest to scream his name, to be heard over the engine, to be sure he sees you. The last thing you see before you hit the water again is his hand raising in acknowledgement.
You think, okay, you'll follow the train for as long as you can, still a ways to go, and then meet him at the station on your Vespa even if he has to wait a few minutes, but when you surface again and find Luca, he's kicking off his shoes (one bounces off the train, down the cliff and into the sea, hitting every rock on the way down) and throwing his shirt to the wind, and, no. No way. No one's that crazy.
Not you. Not even Luca. He wouldn't.
You watch in mounting horror as he braces against the sides of the car entrance, gauging his timing and-
"Santa mozzarella…"
-he fucking
jumps.
The scene plays out in adrenaline-shrieking slow motion; he clears the train, small, fragile human thing he is, hanging in midair briefly like a bird riding a rising updraft, but he doesn't fly, he drops, tucking his pinwheeling pale limbs close to his body at the last moment, before he disappears beneath the waves.
He makes it as far as the water, at least, a lot further than his shoe did, but you are still one hundred percent sure you just watched the love of your life leap to his death from a rocky cliff face overlooking the Ligurian Sea. Your heart has fully stopped in your chest, so at least, if nothing else, you'll be joining him in death before too long.
"Luca?" you call, voice pitching in panic, then dip below the surface to try again, hoping to god you wont smell blood on the water the moment you submerge your face. You don't taste blood but you don't see him, either, so you start swimming slow circles calling his name.
You're about to rise to the surface again when you're blindsided from behind, hard, sent tumbling in dizzying forward somersaults through the water, and you're still so sure he's met his doom that you only think shark, it smelled the blood I couldn't until skinny arms and legs and a tail wrap around you, immobilizing you, and you've never met a shark with arms and legs but there's a lot you don't know about the world, so honestly who knows?
"Guess who?" the shark with arms and legs says with your boyfriend's voice.
Oh god. Oh god.
"Don't you ever," you sob, wrestling free of his grip and spinning to shake him violently by his shoulders, "EVER scare me like that again."
"Alberto-o-o-o I'm fi-i-i-i-ne." His eyes rattle in his head as you shake his skinny, fragile, breakable body, and you have a dawning realization that if anything ever happens to him you will go fully, irredeemably, violently insane, but until then you will be an embarrassing and unapologetic worrier, and maybe you and Daniela have more in common than you thought.
"I thought you were dead," you choke. "Why did you do that?"
"What, jump off a cliff? We jump off cliffs all the time!"
"No, jump off a moving train!"
"I dunno, guess I just couldn't wait to see you."
He grins like he's proud of himself, like he's not sorry at all, and you don't know what to do with that except take him roughly by the face and kiss him, hard and life-affirming. His hands come up to snake around your neck, he hums into your mouth, but you can feel him smiling.
You pull away. "You're not even sorry!" It's very hard to stay upset with him when he looks so catlike for a fish: heavy-lidded eyes and a smug, incredibly pleased smirk curling the corners of his mouth.
"Sorry I scared you," he grins. "Not sorry I did it."
"Be good, or I'll tell your mother. She's going to figure it out anyway when your luggage is on the train and you aren't."
"All the more reason to take our time, then," he says, winding his tail around yours. "Let her cool off first. I missed you! Keep me to yourself for a while, for once."
He makes a compelling, if faulty, argument, (Daniela will not cool off, just the opposite, actually,) so you take his hand and lead him to the shelter of somewhere deep, dark and private to admire his beautiful, radiant face and touch his peridot-emerald-sapphire skin and kiss his stupid, smug, smiling mouth, the way you daydreamed about when you were fifteen and still reeling from a newly discovered love so big your dumb little heart could hardly stand it.
He lets you push him down into a nest of seagrass, fits himself close against your chest and says with a sigh and a smile, "It's so good to be home," and you know, the same way you know gravity will always pull you back to earth and that the sun will rise tomorrow, he doesn't mean Portorosso.
Min karä Alberto-
I write to share my new address with you, I am back from home in Vadstena and now am staying permanently in Vienna for school! I've been accepted to the University! I'm very excited to be in the city again, I missed it very much.
I'm so excited to hear you'll be travelling soon! I know I'm in the opposite direction, but I'd be delighted if you came to visit with me in Vienna on your trip back home. I'm eager to meet your treasure properly and apologize to him in person. I think I made a very bad first impression! I hope he can forgive me. Surely he understands I had your best interest at heart. I have many sights to show you both, and much to tell, so maybe that will help him warm up to me. I know you will suffer through a museum or two for him if I bribe you with coffee and pastries!
Please drive safe!
Många Kramar
Kjell
Papà-
I'm so sorry I didn't get to come see you this summer, especially since the boys are leaving on their trip. I hope you won't be too lonely without us making so much noise and eating all your food! And you have to promise to hire help while Alberto's away, it's too much to do all on your own. And if you get lonely you have to call me, okay? It's been too long now since you lived alone.
I've met some of the other students who will be in the program and I'm really excited, I think we'll be good friends. I hope so, anyway, because it's hard to imagine what I did before I had Luca with me everywhere I went for three straight years. I'm going to miss him. Alberto too, I guess, but when I had Luca, I never had to worry about being weird or lonely. He's been a lot to deal with lately, and driving me a little crazy, but he's still my best friend, and I'll miss his company.
Wish me luck, I'm gonna need it.
Baci e abbracci
-Giulia
Massimo-
While I did not know your pesciolino before your influence, I've heard enough stories second-hand to confidently say you've done a wonderful thing for him. Though the way Luca talks of him, I half expected him to be seven feet tall and broad as a barn. If not for Giulietta shaking her head behind his back, I wouldn't have known what to expect! He's a good boy, though, and you should be very proud. I can tell he thinks the world of Luca, who I've grown quite fond of over the years. We'll miss him in Genova if he's really not returning, but at least I know he's in good hands. Yes, I know he has his own parents, I can hear you telling me so as I write, raising your judgemental eyebrow at me; what can I say? I've grown attached to our unusual, extended little family. Maybe Giulietta and I will have to come to Portorosso for a short visit after her study program ends and the boys return home. There's still much I could share with them, I think, if I had more time with them.
Be sure to phone when they come home, and we'll see what we can arrange.
Your friend always-
Stella
Dear Mom & Dad-
We've made it safely to Rome, and I know all the postcards in the world won't satisfy you until I come back home, but it really is amazing. I could spend years here in the city and visiting museums and exploring ruins, but I think Alberto would get restless if I tried to keep him here that long. His favorite part I think is the actual traveling and eating everywhere we go, so you should be thankful to him that he's keeping us moving along, or I might just decide to stay here until I'm satisfied! See? He's good for me.
Turns out we're adding a stop in Austria on our way back home, so don't be too alarmed if we're a little late. I hope it won't be a long one, I'm not super thrilled about it, but Alberto follows me along on all my adventures without ever complaining, so I think I owe it to him to visit his friend for a few days. I'll keep you updated.
I love you,
Luca
P.S. Alberto says "hi" to Grandma (No, I don't know why either)
Luca buys a picnic lunch from a bar in Nemi and you putter along the shoreline of the lake until you find a suitably private place to lay out your blanket and sit draped over each other while you eat little sandwiches made with focaccia that isn't as good as it is back home and nibble small, sweet local strawberries and share pulls off a bottle of wine you had to swear up and down you were old enough to buy, promise signor, I'm travelling and must have lost my identification, but I'm good, really.
Luca sits in the shade with his legs draped comfortably over your lap. "Oh, hey," he says, and produces from the basket a bunch of the fattest green grapes you've ever seen. "Do you remember-"
"Yes."
He laughs. "How'd you know what I was gonna ask?"
"Because I thought about those damn grapes every day for like a year straight, maybe more."
"You too? I don't think anything in my life has ever tasted as good as those grapes. I used to wonder why. When I figured out how I felt about you, I started thinking of them as the forbidden fruit, only it took a few years for my sight to kick in."
"Did I tempt you? Did I get you kicked out of paradise?"
He laughs again. "Listen, it's not a perfect metaphor."
"I wanted to feed them to you," you admit to him, for the first time ever.
"Really." He sounds amused, or interested.
"Mmm. I think it meant I wanted to kiss you, or touch your mouth or….something. I don't know. But I knew it meant something."
"That's beautiful."
"Yeah?" You chuckle nervously. "I always thought it sounded kind of insane."
"Not at all! I think it sounds romantic."
So you pluck a grape from the bunch and hold it to his smiling lips, three years of your daydreams made intimately real.
He takes the grape from your fingers, gently, pillowed on the edge of his tongue and held in place by his teeth, but his lips graze your fingertips in the process, and isn't that what you always wanted? Wasn't this your awakening? He holds the grape a moment, watching you through dark lashes, and, listen. You don't get to be seventeen without seeing your fair share of dirty magazines, but even if any of them had actually been made with your interests in mind, they're still amateur hour. A skinny girl standing there with her tits out is not even in the same league as the wet edge of a beautiful boy's tongue flicking a green grape back into his mouth, his pink lips closing softly around your fingertips, his eyes pinning you in place, exposed and tissue-paper fragile like a butterfly behind glass.
He touches his tongue to the underside of your captive fingertips, and you're done. He's ended you. You tremble and your vision blurs and you've forgotten how to breathe.
Luca releases your fingers. "Oh god, Alberto, I'm sorry. Was that too much?"
"What? Never, I'm perfectly fine," you say, voice cracking and on the precipice of openly weeping. The fingertips of your first two fingers are purple.
"It was, I'm so sorry!" He kisses your face so sweetly. "I spent the last few years reading a ton of romance novels. Really, just, truly bad ones. Pure garbage. It helped take the edge off when school work was getting too miserable, because they're, you know. Not complicated. And, well. You know how my imagination runs wild sometimes."
"That...probably explains the letters," you say, warming at the memory of them.
"Little bit." He smiles, sheepish, but not ashamed. "I'll have to share some with you sometime, you'll think they're hilarious. But you can't be too mean about them, okay? They mean a lot to me." His fingers play along your clavicle, slipping under the collar of your shirt. His voice drops an octave, wine-dark and equally intoxicating: "They kept me… company when we were apart."
That's, well that's, that sure is something. To think about. That sure is a, a thing to imagine. Vividly. In graphic detail. About Luca.
"Yeah, well." You look at him, hyper aware of your hand resting on his bare thigh, fingertips ghosting just under the hem of his shorts. Deliberately and with intent, you let your thumb stoke a lazy path across his skin. "Same for your letters."
He exhales, thick and heavy like smoke. "I'm so glad."
Luca kisses you, hands in your hair, fingernails against your scalp with just enough pressure to make you shiver all over. You purr involuntarily against his mouth and wrap your arms around him, whine with the overwhelming and impossible urge to melt into him, to crack him open and climb inside him, to tie your nerves and veins side by side together in true lovers' knots. He responds, greedy, eager, gasping, wet, hands on your face, your shoulders, your back, until he breaks for air.
His face is flushed and his pupils are blown and a single tendril of hair has escaped his ridiculous, perfect sfogliatella curl to stick damply to his forehead. He is absolutely fucking radiant. You've been doing him a disservice, all this time, thinking he was only passionate about school, that it was his true calling and that he was just settling for you in the end. Luca is driven, and eager, and hungry. But for so many different things at once. Knowledge, yes, but also freedom, and adventure, and friendship, and love.
Right now, as he looks around and says, with a little smile and a lot of meaning, "Y'know… there's probably no one around for kilometers," the thing he is most hungry for is you.
You swallow. Usually when you wanna make out a little, you'll find the safety and privacy of water to do it in. "The lake is right there, we could-"
"Actually... I kinda wanna try something new."
All you've ever wanted is to help him chase his dreams, to share new experiences with him, to help him satisfy his curiosity, that hunger, so when he straddles your thighs, pushes you gently back onto the blanket and slips his soft, warm hands under your shirt, hooks a tentative finger under the waist of your shorts and looks to you with permission, love, adoration and that insatiable hunger in his honey-amber eyes, you want nothing more in the world than to share this feast with him.
Buon appetito.
Dad-
Greetings from Napoli! The pizza is incredible and the city is beautiful. Luca is losing his mind over all the history, he's practically lost his voice trying to tell me everything. More than once he's pissed someone off for asking too many questions and I had to steer him away before he got hurt. He never seems to notice! It's a good thing he's got me to look out for him. He's really excited to see the volcano and the ruins, and he promises it's going to be pretty morbid, so I'm excited too.
We're having an amazing time, but don't worry, we'll be back. Luca's been talking about getting a job in town so we can save up for our next trip. We're thinking maybe France, or Amsterdam. We have plenty of time to think about it though, we don't plan on rushing right off again just yet.
I hope you're well, and enjoying the peace and quiet while you can, because I'll be home before you know it.
Love you, miss you, pet the cats for me,
Alberto
PS: Thanks for always being right.
