Chapter Text
New York is not a safe place to live in 1985. The days are long and the crime is rampant and the summer sun is sticky, clinging to Oliver like a second skin. He’s not sure what he’s doing here — is he sure of anything these days? — but the universe must be more sure than he is, because he is wandering out of Chinatown and into Little Italy when an all too familiar mop of brown curls interrupts his line of sight.
Elio.
Oliver watches him without consciously deciding to; at the way two years have passed, but so little time at all. He is still the lanky, coltish boy he was two summers ago, still walking with that same kind of lazy purpose, still scrutinizing his surroundings with a careful eye. He masterfully weaves in and out of the crowd without disrupting it, closer and closer, approaching too fast.
He doesn’t see Oliver at all, so thoroughly distracted by whatever is on his mind that as he starts to pass Oliver feels less than solid, like some kind of a ghost. It’s a feeling he isn’t used to, existing in this body as long as he has.
Oliver thinks he’s just going to let him go, but then Elio takes two steps further away and it’s like he has Oliver’s heart beating in his hands, like it’s still connected to his chest and every step Elio takes pulls it further and further beyond its ability to reach. He’s jutting out an arm and wrapping it around Elio’s before he can think, warm skin on warm fingers, a flutter of familiarity and ache already halfway up his throat when, abruptly, Elio flinches with his entire small frame and drops the cloth bag of groceries in his hands.
“Oliver.”
Elio’s body is stunned but his face is beatific, splitting into a grin so wide that it somehow parts the crowd faster than the spoils of his groceries on the ground.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing you,” says Oliver, the words coming out of him a lot more composed than they are in his head — breathless, stunned, so all at once pulled back into the magnetism of this orbit that it’s laughable, that he let himself think it would fade with time.
“Yeah — yeah, wow,” says Elio, blinking behind those thick lashes, behind that —
“What happened to your eye?”
Elio smirks and juts out his chin. “Street fight.”
“Ha ha.”
He’s expecting Elio to tell him the actual reason for the now yellowing shiner on his left eye, but then someone interrupts them by leaning down to help pick up the groceries that Elio dropped on the sidewalk.
“A little jumpy there, huh?” says Oliver, when Elio straightens back up.
Elio lets out a short laugh. “Shut up.”
Oliver moves to put a hand on his shoulder, but then thinks the better of it. “Your parents around?”
“Huh? No. No, I’m — I go to school here.”
“For music?”
Elio nods. “Yeah, yeah. Are you … ? I thought you moved to Connecticut.”
“I moved back.”
“Oh.” Elio’s eyes lift comically in surprise. “Did you just …”
God, it’s weird. Acting like it’s not weird, that is. Pretending that neither one of them has felt the pain of the last year and a half of silence when Oliver feels it so acutely both in his own body and reflected back in Elio’s eyes that it seems too large for a city street to contain.
“A few months ago, yeah.”
Elio’s eyes flit to his ring finger. It reminds him of how the kid was that entire summer — secretive, but never subtle. Guarded, but painfully easy to read.
Oliver isn’t, but his bare finger is plenty answer enough.
They make plans to see a movie that weekend, in a little theater a few blocks from Union Square. The Breakfast Club. Oliver doesn’t really watch, and neither, he suspects, does Elio. Their knees brush exactly one time. Elio is the one who pulls his away. The gesture wraps like a coil around Oliver's brain and pulls, tight.
Afterward they wander out in the overly bright sun, squinting in surprise at the brightness. Oliver felt like he’d lost all sense of time, like they were going to emerge out into darkness and stars.
Elio’s quiet. Shifty. Oliver figures he’s going to ask questions, but instead he gets in line for a soft pretzel.
“Elio.”
“Are you okay?” Elio asks. His hands are in his pockets, but his shoulders shrug at Oliver anyway, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to ask.
Oliver stares at him for a beat. “I am.”
Elio looks uncertain, and then almost disappointed, his eyes hitting the concrete before bouncing back up to look at Oliver.
“I am,” says Oliver, in a conciliatory way: I’m sorry. I can’t talk about this right now.
Elio nods. Looks at his pretzel like he’s going to take a bite, and then thinks the better of it. Offers it to Oliver.
Oliver takes it and takes a hearty, ridiculous bite of it, and Elio laughs soundlessly and shakes his head. Oliver wonders what the hell they’re doing, walking down these crowded streets like this isn’t the twilight zone, like the universe didn’t just spend the two years chewing them and then spat them out of all places, right here to next to each other again.
He wants to grab him by his skinny shoulders and kiss him senseless. He wants to cross the street right now and pretend this never happened. He wants to pin him against the wall, remembering the way his heart used to thud the word mine, mine, mine. He wants to go back to four days ago and stop himself from ever running into Elio, from ever waking up this need in him, from reminding him of it was like to feel whole but know that he’ll never truly be again.
Elio surges ahead to avoid a cluster of girls walking five abreast. The two of them are out of sync. Out of rhythm. Like the beat that used to play underneath them is too muffled for them to get back on track.
“C’mon,” says Oliver, “there’s some place I want to — ”
Elio hisses when Oliver wraps a hand around his wrist. At first the hurt is so fresh that there isn’t a way for Oliver not to take it personally. It seems like far too much of an overreaction — this is New York, for god’s sake, and it’s not like Oliver was about to intertwine their fingers and scream their sins from the rooftop.
He’s already scowling when he sees it, just before Elio can shove the long sleeve of his shirt back over it — the mottled, ugly bruise around his wrist, glaring and purple and large enough that Oliver can’t even see the full extent of it.
“Oh my god.”
Elio won’t meet his eye. “Sorry,” he says, presumably about flinching away, but Oliver’s miles past that now.
“Elio. What the hell is that?”
He grabs for Elio’s arm again, but Elio dodges it, weaving past him so efficiently that Oliver ends up reaching for air.
Oliver stops in his tracks, his voice firm and unyielding: “Elio.”
Elio stops too, but doesn’t come any closer. “I was — walking against the light. A car was coming. So my boyfriend grabbed me to yank me back.”
At first all Oliver can do is blink. “Your boyfriend?”
Elio’s voice is quiet. Almost miserable. “Yeah.”
Oliver blows out a breath. “Your boyfriend.”
Elio looks up at him then, his expression an almost indecipherable mingling of apology and defiance. He shifts his weight between his feet, his mouth opening and then closing, looking like a fish out of water. Oliver supposes they both are.
“It’s different here,” says Elio.
He’s damn right it is. And Oliver suddenly hates it with every fiber of his being.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I never thought I’d have to.”
Oliver swallows down the hurt and offers Elio a tight smile.
“You’re mad,” says Elio anyway.
“No. No. I’m happy for you.”
Elio tilts his head at Oliver, inspecting him. Oliver stares back down at Elio’s wrist, covered up by his sleeve, trying to find the root of his sudden unease.
“What are you even doing here?”
Oliver runs a hand through his hair. “Teaching,” he says. He feels numb. Outside of his body. It’s brutally hot outside, but he has to tense his entire body from stopping a chill from running up his spine. “I got an assistant professor position. At Columbia.”
“Congratulations,” says Elio, the word hollow.
Oliver reaches his hand out, looking back at Elio’s wrist. “Can I look at it?”
Elio hesitates. “It’s fine.”
It is and it isn’t but Oliver can’t split his focus right now, the word boyfriend expanding like a balloon in his brain, leaving no room for anything else. It’s selfish. It’s stupid. But he just never imagined a version of Elio with somebody else.
“Do you still want to … ?”
Elio doesn’t finish the sentence, but he doesn’t have to. He can see it watering in Elio’s eyes, quivering in his lips.
“Of course,” says Oliver. “Yeah. Let’s — I’ll give you my new number.”
Elio nods vigorously, but doesn’t offer his own. Oliver realizes with another unexpectedly possessive lurch that Elio must live with this boyfriend of his. That someone else is waking up next to Elio and running his hands through Elio’s curls and rolling his eyes at Elio’s antics.
He can’t give this man a face or a name or even a shadow. Even in the brutal space of his own mind, there is nobody Oliver can see Elio with but him.
Elio doesn’t call Oliver for three weeks. Oliver starts to think he’ll never call at all.
It drives him crazy, that Elio has all the power here. That Oliver can’t do anything. He feels like an idiot, using his spare time to wander around the NYU campus, to linger in Washington Square Park, to peer into too many coffee shops, flinching at every curly mop of hair that passes by. He is better than this. He is smarter than this. But it feels like there is some invisible tether between him and Elio, pulling him closer, closer, closer, until —
Until finally, Elio calls.
“Do you want to grab some food tonight?” he asks, as if he hasn’t been radio silent for nearly a month. As if he hasn’t been driving Oliver up the goddamn wall. As if this is normal, just casually asking each other to dinner, when of all the things they are and have ever been is anything but normal.
“Yeah,” says Oliver. So much for keeping up his guard. "You got somewhere in mind?”
He can almost hear Elio’s relieved smile through the phone. “Yeah, but I can be talked out of it.”
“Good. Because I have just the place.”
He tells him to meet him at Kosar’s on the Lower East Side. Oliver buys a bag of bialys and some babka and coffee for them to share and they saunter over to Roosevelt Park, all awkwardness and careful glances that he can’t quite reconcile with the steady ease they still have with each other.
“Eat,” says Oliver, giving Elio a critical look after they find a place to plant themselves. “You look like you haven’t had a meal since the last time I saw you.”
Elio sighs. “You sound like the girls in my music theory class.”
They talk about Elio’s internship with a production company, scoring music for student films. They talk about Oliver’s summer classes, the flirty undergraduates and the dusty classrooms. They talk about New York in the summer, the rampant crime and the smell of hot garbage and the places they haunt, for better or for worse.
They talk about things that don’t matter and hedge around everything that does.
Then they walk — aimlessly west and aimlessly north until they’re back at NYU, back on Elio’s new stomping grounds, wandering around the same park that Oliver’s been visiting now for days with a keen eye on skinny frames and sheepish smiles that are no match for the actual thing, sweet and solid and whole at his side.
Oliver insists on walking Elio home. He says it’s because it’s a nice night. But they both know that the city is anything but safe after dark, and the memory of that black eye on Elio’s face when they first ran into each other is all too fresh in his mind.
Elio abruptly stops at a walkup on top of a coffee shop. The whole thing is so Elio that it kind of hurts.
“It was good to see you,” he says.
Oliver doesn’t nod. Doesn’t move. “Don’t be a stranger.”
Elio glances toward the ground and nods at the concrete, one of those nods that’s less head and more body. “Uh huh.”
And then they’re hugging, and at first it’s so painfully stiff that Oliver wishes they hadn’t, wishes this hug wasn’t about to taint the memory of any other time they touched and cast that whole summer in newer, more sinister colors.
And then they’re hugging, the way they once did, and Elio still has that same smell of pine and sweetness and sunshine, is still warm and pliable in his arms, fitting so neatly into him that it stuns him that he ever thought this was something he could live without — that in a few moments he’ll just go on living without it all over again.
The front door opens with a crack. Elio pulls away so fast that it feels like it rips something in the universe.
“Adam,” says Elio. His smile is wobbly and too wide. “This is Oliver.”
Oliver blinks into the eyes of a man he instantly hates, and not for any particular reason other than he knows that territorial look in his eyes — knows it so well that he’s not sure who he hates more, this Adam or himself. Adam takes a step forward, further into the light, and Oliver sees that he has at least a decade on Elio. He’s handsome, too. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a fair amount of scruff. Oliver wonders how they met.
Oliver unconsciously straightens out. At the very least, he has a few inches on the guy. He isn’t sure why it matters, but of course it does.
“How do you and … Oliver know each other?”
“He was a graduate student of my father’s,” says Elio smoothly. There is no affect in any of the words. As if the whole thing were as simple as telling someone the time.
Oliver extends out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Adam doesn’t take it for a moment, and that’s the moment that Oliver’s irrational hatred hardens into actual dislike. Then Adam takes it and shakes, a little too hard to be polite.
“Thought you’d be home by now,” says Adam, addressing Elio but still staring at Oliver.
“We grabbed dinner. Thought you had a shift?”
“Canceled. Ariel needed the hours. Thought we could spend some time together tonight, but evidently …”
“Sorry,” says Elio, with a contriteness that Oliver isn’t used to. It doesn’t suit him. “I’ll see you around, Oliver?”
Adam’s hand reaches out, presumably to grab Elio’s hand. But it doesn’t. It wraps around his skinny wrist, his fingers reaching all the way around and squeezing.
Oliver tears his eyes away, his heart in his throat.
“Later,” says Oliver lowly.
Elio doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t meet his eye. The word seems to have punctured some part of him that Oliver didn’t think he could still reach. He regrets it immediately, watching as Adam pulls Elio in by the arm, a little too sharp, a little too fast. Elio smiles a tight smile back at him, like he knows how it must look, but it doesn’t do anything to stop it from looking that way.
Elio and Adam disappear, swallowed up by the stairs in the apartment building, and Oliver stands uselessly on the stoop for too long to justify himself. He shuffles down the steps and looks either way down the street. He knows how to get home, could close his eyes and walk uptown if it came to it.
But he doesn’t want to leave. Can’t, just yet. Because he knows what Elio might not understand just yet, knows it so certainly that it feels like he closed his eyes and opened them into a funeral — this is the last time he’ll ever see Elio. At least, the last time he sees him on purpose. There is no room for Oliver in Elio’s life now, not as a friend, not as a brother, not as any of the infinite things they were or are or could have been in some other world. The metaphorical door closed before the real one did; this relationship, whatever it is, can only bring the both of them pain.
It should be easier to let this go the second time around, but somehow it is much worse — because he knows, now, the exactness of the hurt. How long it will last. How all-encompassing it will be. He is suddenly so exhausted at the thought of it that he stumbles into the little coffee shop under Elio’s apartment, orders himself a coffee and perches on a stool in the window, existing in some between world — the purgatory of before and after the goodbye.
It isn’t over until he leaves. It isn’t over until he turns the lock in his own apartment door. It isn’t over until …
He runs a hand through his hair. It’s been over since the moment Elio shook his hand. It will never end.
He’s about to walk his empty cup back over to the barista when he sees a fast-moving figure cut past the light of the street lamp just outside the shop — Oliver recognizes Adam so immediately that it feels like he has spent far longer than half an hour hating him. The man’s face is hard, his steps purposeful, the anger so present in him that Oliver can practically feel its heat from behind the window. He disappears from view so quickly that Oliver might have conjured him, if the look on the other man’s face weren’t seared into his head.
Oliver freezes in his seat, watching for Elio, but Elio doesn’t follow. Somehow he knew he wouldn’t. And somehow he understands something that is conscious mind wasn’t willing to — that for Elio, the trouble didn’t begin when he ran into Oliver on the street last month. For Elio, the trouble sleeps in the same bed.
He rises, then, and leaves the coffee shop, hovering outside the buzzer in Elio’s building. He doesn’t know the apartment number. He considers just buzzing all of them until someone lets him in, but that’s — that’s crazy, isn’t it? And Elio will figure out what he did, and then the line he’s been toeing will officially have been crossed, and really, he’s probably built this all up in his head to be something it’s not. He worries. He’s a worrier. And yes, this Adam may have been upset to see Oliver, but yes, he might have picked a bone with Elio over it, but he probably just walked out to blow off some steam and Oliver should just go back to minding his own goddamn business before he makes it any worse.
Right. Right. Oliver turns around, and starts walking back toward the 1 train. Considers, even, hailing a cab. Or maybe just walking around aimlessly until he’s lost.
He closes his eyes. There’s no way he could lose himself here, the grid of the city scored on his heart, the water closing him in on all sides. Elio wasn’t a coincidence. He was an inevitability. And now that Oliver has established that, he doesn’t know what on earth to do about it.
He’s still walking away when he hears the creak of the door open; sees the slender, hooded figure slink out, walk down the stairs, and head in the opposite direction. It’s Elio, but it isn’t. It’s Elio’s pants hanging on lanky limbs, it’s Elio’s curls poking out from the hood, but it isn’t Elio in the posture or the gait. It’s too slow. Too … resigned. Too …
Oliver turns to follow. He opens his mouth to say Elio’s name, but the air blows out of him. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong .
He follows him down one block, and then another, and then he gets too close and the length of his shadow hits the sidewalk, right in Elio’s line of view. Elio stops dead, inhaling so sharply that he almost chokes on it, and whips around.
“Jesus Christ,” Oliver breathes.
Elio blinks at him. Turns back around. But it’s too late — Oliver has already seen the thick stream of blood running down his forehead, the already bruising cheek, the red-rimmed eyes behind wet lashes.
Elio keeps walking forward, faster now.
“Elio. Elio, stop.”
And he doesn’t, and Oliver has to run to catch up with him, and the moment he does Elio turns back around like he can avoid him, like he can will himself out of Oliver’s sight.
“Don’t,” says Elio, taking a step back. He pulls the hood over his head with shaking hands, so unsteady on his feet that he almost trips right there on the pavement. “It’s not — I’m not — ”
“Elio,” says Oliver, with so much weight, so much grief, that Elio can’t help but stop in his tracks. He leans away then, like he’s going to keep trying to avoid him; then Oliver reaches out and murmurs his name one more time and Elio pitches forward, right into his chest, his bloody face pressed against his shirt and his skinny frame quivering in Oliver’s arms.
“I’ve got you,” says Oliver. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
Elio doesn’t protest, just sucks in a breath that turns into a soundless, painful sob, shuddering against him so powerfully that it feels like the earth is quaking under them. Oliver holds him, holds him and thinks he won’t ever let him go, can’t ever let him go, except that Elio’s bleeding and he’s hurt and he needs to figure out how badly, needs to understand what happened and take control of this situation and decide what happens next, needs to murder the man who did this — did this to sweet, gentle, innocent Elio, whose hands barely even know how to make a fist, let alone throw a punch —
“I’m sorry,” Elio gasps, half-pulling away and half-not, like his entire body is at odds with itself. “I’m so sorry, I …”
Oliver hushes him, guiding him over to the mercifully empty bench on this mercifully empty street. Elio is senseless and trusting as ever, letting Oliver set him down, letting out a hiss of pain as he sits and touching his ribs.
Jesus fucking Christ. For a minute the rage is so white hot that it almost consumes him, almost burns him alive. But Elio doesn’t need more violence. Elio needs … Oliver doesn’t even know yet.
He reaches a cautious, probing hand to the side of Elio’s face that isn’t stained with blood, his fingers fanning out over Elio’s cheek, his thumb catching the fresh tears.
“Where are you hurt?” he asks first, because it seems like the sensible thing to ask, because he doesn’t trust himself to say anything else just yet.
But Elio just shakes his head and won’t stop shaking it, leaning into Oliver’s hand and then falling back into him, his head on Oliver’s shoulder.
“I’m so stupid,” he whispers into Oliver’s shirt.
Oliver stiffens. “No. You’re not.” I’ll kill him, he thinks again, but this is not the time. He pulls Elio in closer, trying to be mindful of his injuries even though he wants to pull him in so close that he consumes him, that nobody else can get near him again. “Elio, you’re — fuck.” The realization slams into him all at once, painful and unyielding. “This was because of me, wasn’t it?”
Elio doesn’t answer.
“He did this to you because of me,” says Oliver.
And then, the worst words that Oliver has possibly ever heard: “It wasn’t you,” says Elio. “It just … happens sometimes.”
Oliver wants to cry. Wants to pinch his eyes shut and let loose right here. But he can’t be the weak one right now. Elio needs him.
“This kind of thing doesn’t just happen,” he says. “Not ever. And never again.”
Elio swipes a wrist at his eyes, catching his tears. It comes back smeared with his blood.
“We need to get you to a hospital.”
“N-no. No, we don’t. It’s — it’ll be okay. I’ve …”
Had worse , he is going to say, but evidently thinks the better of it. It’s too late. Oliver hears it in the silence. It takes shape in the air and crystallizes in the darkness, hurts Oliver more than a person ever physically could.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” says Oliver. His hands are in Elio’s hair, stroking it at the nape of his neck, a careful eye on the street to make sure nobody can see. “We’re going to hail a cab. You’re going to stay with me until we figure out what to do. You’re never going to see him again.”
Elio’s lips press together. “I can’t just …”
“I don’t care if you love him. This is unforgivable. Inexcusable. Do you hear me?”
Elio’s voice is small. Mournful, almost. “I don’t love him.”
Oliver should be relieved. He is anything but. He hasn’t let himself imagine Elio in any way, has cut himself off at the train platform before he let himself get any further, but god, there was no part of him that ever thought of Elio like this. No part of him that thought a world could be this cruel to someone so innocent, so unsuspecting of it.
He has a thousand questions. They all have to wait.
His eyes dart up and down the street. Still alone. He presses a kiss to Elio’s hairline, and the effect is almost heartbreakingly instantaneous; the way Elio’s body stops shaking, the way he leans into Oliver’s lips, the way his eyes half-close like a part of him is still here but the rest of him is still there, in those sun-dappled sheets, between those old, sturdy walls.
“Can you stand?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” says Elio, the second yeah a little stronger than the first one. “I’m — Oliver, I can’t just come with you.”
“It’s not up for discussion,” he says, taking Elio’s hand and hoisting him to his feet. He pulls the hood back over Elio’s head. He’d keep his hand in Elio’s to lead him out to street, but there’s too much of a risk, here in this city where there are eyes even where eyes can’t be seen. Instead he puts a hand on his shoulder, gently first to make sure there isn’t some new bruise he is pressing against, then firmly when Elio submits to the pressure and follows his lead.
He hails a taxi. Gives the driver the cross streets to his apartment, on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem. Doesn’t say a word as the taxi sails through the night, except to shake Elio’s shoulder and tell him to stay awake, because he doesn’t know if he’s concussed or not and the idea of Elio passing out at all scares the hell out of him.
Elio is quieter than a ghost as they make their way up the stairs in Oliver’s third floor walkup, only pausing on the landing of the second floor for a moment to wince.
“Your ribs. You’re sure they’re not …”
“It’s fine,” says Elio, his voice tight.
Oliver watches him like a hawk as he helps him up the stairs, as he unlocks the door to his crammed little studio apartment and ushers Elio inside. Elio blinks at it for a moment — at the bursting bookshelves and the papers scattered on his desk, at the unmade bed by the window, at the prints Oliver hung on the walls.
“C’mere,” says Oliver. “Sit.”
Elio does, in a daze, while Oliver digs up the first aid kit and ice, and wets some paper towels in the kitchen. He starts by washing the now dried blood on Elio’s face, and Elio closes his eyes, another silent tear coursing down his cheek, and lets Oliver scrub at it. He gets close enough to the source that Elio winces, but thankfully it doesn’t look bad enough that it needs stitches; he disinfects it, and tries not to let his heart seizes at Elio’s inadvertent hiss of pain.
“I’m sorry,” Elio blurts again, when the bandage is secure. “This isn’t — I didn’t want you in the middle of this.”
“How long has this been happening, Elio?”
His eyes hit the floor. “It wasn’t like this at first. He was … nice.” Elio swallows hard enough that Oliver can hear it in his throat. “And he wanted to — to live together, and I … I thought …”
“How long?”
Elio’s voice is clogged, fresh with tears. “Since January?” he says, like it’s a question. Like he doesn’t want to believe it, either.
“Elio,” says Oliver lowly, pulling him in again.
“Please don’t tell my parents,” says Elio into the crook of his neck. “Please don’t.”
Of course Oliver is going to tell his parents, but there’s no use in working him up right now. “Why did you stay?” he asks instead, before he can stop himself.
Elio sucks in a shuddering breath, then promptly uses it to break Oliver’s heart. “Who else would have me?”
Oliver doesn’t sleep that night. He puts Elio in a pair of his sweatpants and an old shirt that he swims in. He presses a cautious hand to the bruises forming on Elio’s ribs, and makes him promise to tell him if he’s having trouble breathing. He sits on the couch with him until his eyes start to droop, then hooks one arm under his knees and the other under his shoulders and carries him to the bed, where he lets out a little sigh and curls into himself in this protective way that he didn’t before.
At some point in the middle of the night, Elio’s eyes flutter open and he immediately cringes — then he sees Oliver and remembers himself, and tries to pretend he didn’t.
Oliver reaches out and thumbs Elio’s eyelids, gently closing them again. Elio lets out one of those mewling protests he remembers, but his eyes stay closed just the same. He looks impossibly young, here in Oliver’s bed, in this overcrowded city, in new colors cast by the dim apartment light. Not just delicate, but fragile. Not just beautiful, but breakable.
“Oliver,” says Elio, his voice rough. “Where is your wife?”
Oliver licks his lower lip and lies. “She called off the wedding.”
He hopes Elio doesn’t say he’s sorry and make liars out of both of them. “But why?” Elio asks, like he can’t imagine it. Like he can’t imagine that there’s a person who wouldn’t want to be with Oliver if Oliver wanted to be with them.
Oliver runs a hand through Elio’s hair. “Go back to sleep.”
For once, Elio obeys, out so instantly that Oliver wonders if he’ll even remember it when he wakes.
Morning eventually comes, but clarity doesn’t. Oliver still has no idea what to do. The solution seems simple: Keep Elio with him forever. Don’t ever let Elio out of his sight.
But of course, he can’t do a fraction of that. The reality is and has always been that he has to keep Elio at arm’s reach — for both of their sakes. Otherwise he wouldn’t have lied. Otherwise he would have told Elio that his fiancée didn’t call off the wedding; that Oliver did. That Oliver knew he could never be with Elio, but couldn’t put the final nail in the coffin just yet, no matter how painful it was to pull it back out.
He can’t tell Elio that, though. He doesn’t want Elio to hold out hope. There is nothing more painful than that.
Oliver makes them cereal in the morning, because that is something he can do. Food. Clothes. First aid. The bare needs can be taken care of, even if the rest of this is a mess that will follow Elio for the rest of his life.
“Do you think this guy would come after you?” asks Oliver.
Elio swirls his spoon around the bowl, not actually eating any of it. “I left once. A few months ago. He found me.”
Oliver holds his breath, waiting for Elio to elaborate. He doesn’t. Oliver closes his eyes, wishing he couldn’t imagine what happened next.
“Okay,” he says. “The first thing we do is get a restraining order.”
“What? No,” says Elio, dropping the spoon into the bowl, his eyes wild. “We can’t do that. We They’ll — they’ll know, and he’ll get fired, and he’ll — ”
“Fired from what? I thought he was some kind of bartender.”
“In the summer. He’s a — he’s a teacher.”
Oliver grits his teeth. “Your teacher.”
Elio hangs his head. “I told you I was stupid.”
“No. Elio. You’re …” Oliver reaches his hand, skimming the pale skin of Elio’s cheek, drawing his head up to look at him. “Trusting. Kind,” he says, because if he says naive then Elio might take it the wrong way. “This isn’t your fault.”
Elio shakes his head. “I wish …”
And then, for a moment, the Italian sun is warm on Oliver’s face. Elio’s skin is humming under his touch, and there is a sweet aftertaste in his mouth, slick in his throat. It smells like damp grass and ripe fruit and clean sheets, like nothing bad has ever happened to either of them, like nothing ever could.
He was so scared, then, that he might break Elio. That he would scar him in some way, leave him with more of a burden than he could bear. To him, Elio was perfect — and he would rather keep him that way forever than even lay a finger on him, if he thought it might hurt him.
And now someone has. It didn’t matter how careful Oliver was, how cautious. Elio went out into the world and the world reared its ugly head just the same.
Oliver lowers his eyes, blinking back the sudden sting. “Yeah. Me too.”
Elio gives Oliver the key to his apartment, and Oliver takes a few friends over when Adam is on shift at the bar to collect the things Elio needs — his passport, his clothes, his books, his Walkman. Among them are the shirt that Oliver left him, with a folded note in its pocket; Oliver ruefully recognizes his own handwriting: Grow up.
Elio is listless when Oliver returns, like he’s been standing at the door waiting for him since he left. He doesn’t ask about Adam. Doesn’t ask if Oliver found all of his things. Just wraps his arms around Oliver’s back and leans into him.
Minutes pass before he pulls away. Oliver starts making them sandwiches, tells Elio to start going through his things, but Elio just takes one of the bags Oliver uses for recycling and starts putting everything in it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to get out of your hair,” says Elio, “I’ve already — ”
“Whoa. Hold on a sec. Elio — ”
“There’s a hostel downtown, I’ve got enough money to stay for a week or so, that’s plenty of time to — ”
“Elio. Stop. Stop,” he says, putting a hand on Elio’s arm before he can reach for something else to put in the bag. “You’re not going to a damn hostel. There’s plenty of room for you here.”
Not to mention that between his baby face and the bruises on it Elio looks like a goddamn fifteen-year-old runaway and whoever was running that racket would have Child Protective Services swarming the place in an instant — and even if they didn’t, Elio was practically a neon light for thieves in a place like that.
Elio shakes his head. “I’m a mess, Oliver. Me. Not you. This is my fault, and I can’t — ”
“We’ll figure it out — ”
“No, Oliver, I can’t — I can’t let you do this. I know you — I know you don’t want me in your life, not like this, and I — ”
“What?”
Elio flinches and Oliver immediately regrets raising his voice. He crosses the distance between them, bracing Elio by the shoulders, holding him there.
“How could you think that?" he breathes. He tries to find his voice again, some common ground between too loud and too quiet, but he doesn't know how the world is supposed to sound in this vacuum of shock. "How could you think that for even a second after everything we’ve been through?”
Elio’s cheeks are soaked. “How could I not?” he says. “You — you never called again, you didn’t write, and you — you didn’t marry her, and you never told me, and I …”
“Shit,” Oliver mutters to himself. He wants to pull Elio in again, but he needs to make him understand. Needs to find words to explain this thing that he has never let himself acknowledge out loud. “Elio. No. It’s not like that. It’s …”
“It is,” says Elio, “and that’s — that’s okay, I don’t mean to … you don’t have to feel bad about it. I don’t want you to. You — you were good to me, too good, and even now — ”
“Because I care about you. Because I did then and I do now and me not saying anything about it has nothing to do with how I feel about you and everything to do with me trying to keep you safe .” His blood is hot in his veins, moving too fast, boiling him alive. He was never going to say these things — not just for his own sake, but for Elio’s — but now they are slipping out of him too fast to reel back in. “I would spend every minute with you if I could. Every hour of every day. Build a life with you. Grow old. But …”
Elio’s eyes meet his. But what? he seems to ask. And how can Oliver answer that, if he doesn’t already know?
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to hurt you.” And then, because he can’t help but be honest, like there is a wedge in him that needs to be pulled out: “And I didn’t think … I didn’t know if you thought of that summer the way that I did.”
“What do you mean?” Elio asks quietly.
It somehow doesn’t get any easier, exposing himself like this. It’s been 26 years of big words and bravado and broad smiles, an empire he’s built himself on that crumbles at his feet every time Elio is in the room. “You’re so young.”
Elio shakes his head. “We were never just fun for me. We were never a game.”
It’s been so long since Oliver said those words to him that yet again he finds himself blurring past and present, like everything that has happened in the past two years is inconsequential, some kind of fever dream he’s only just woken up from.
“And that’s why I have to leave,” says Elio. “I have to — not see you anymore. Because the longer I’m around you, the more I … the more I know I’ll never be okay again. I’ll never even be able to pretend.”
Oliver doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t. He puts a hand under Elio’s chin, lifting his face up to look at him. Elio’s eyes are wet with unshed tears and uncertainty, with Oliver’s own pain reflected back at him. He doesn’t have to tell Elio that he feels it, too. Doesn’t have to tell Elio about the sleepless nights or the unsent letters he burned, about the calls he imagined making but never did, about the torturous dreams or the way the wind will hit in a certain way at a certain time of year and take him back to Italy like a punch in the gut.
He closes his eyes and presses his lips to Elio’s. For a moment neither of them moves, just standing there, chaste and sweet and almost beyond belief, like they ripped their way back into a sealed off world.
And then Elio’s lips part and he presses his body into Oliver’s, backing Oliver into the door, and Oliver’s hands are in Elio’s hair and skimming down his back and over his shorts and he’s still here, all of him, all of his certainty and uncertainty, his hope and his fear, his heart beating like a bird’s against Oliver’s chest.
It isn’t Italy. It’s scarier and sweeter and more real ; the stakes aren’t somewhere far beyond them, but breathing behind walls, in the space between their limbs. But somehow it does nothing to dampen the crush of want, the heat of his desire, the distant hum in his head that is now roaring in the air around them, silencing every doubt, every reservation, every part of him that ever thought that the road would never lead him right back to here.
Elio pulls away, his bruised face like a fallen angel, staring at Oliver. Oliver presses a kiss to his nose, his forehead, to the ring of purple on his cheek.
“From now on we … we stay in touch,” says Oliver. “We call. We see each other when we can.”
Something sinks in Elio’s gaze. “I want more,” he says, his hands bunching the fabric of Oliver’s shirt. “I can’t have a little bit. I have to have the whole thing or nothing at all.”
Oliver was afraid of just that. Afraid on all sides — that Elio wants too little, or wants too much. That the two of them will never know what they are and aren’t allowed to be to each other, that they’ll always press every bend in their story so far that it breaks.
Like here. Like now. When he understands that avoiding Elio these past two years did anything but keep him safe; it pushed Elio into the arms of the kind of man who hurts people. It pushed Elio into some belief that he could settle for it, like it was some kind of penance he had to pay to be loved.
And who could he have told? Who could he have trusted, if not Oliver, who had built a wall between them too high to fathom the other side?
“I know,” says Oliver. “I know.”
And this much, he does: that he will never let this happen again. That he will always be there for Elio, even when he can’t be here for him. That this — whatever they are and whatever they will be — is their heaviest burden and their greatest gift. That nobody will ever hurt him like Elio will. That nobody will ever love him like Elio will. That he will spend just as many moments cursing this as he will cherishing it, and that it will be worth it all the same — because this something beyond measure, beyond scorekeeping, beyond good and bad.
But right now there is good. Right now there is Elio, in his arms and in his bed, warm and safe and right.
Oliver presses a finger to Elio's chest. "Oliver," he says, lightly scratching the fabric of his shirt. "Oliver, Oliver, Oliver."
Elio lets out a pained breath of a laugh. At first he doesn't say anything; just takes the hand that Oliver has poised on his chest and wraps his fingers around it, pressing the ball of their hands back into Oliver's chest.
"Elio," he says, after a few moments. Oliver almost sags in relief at the sound of it. "Elio."
It isn't a promise; it's the closest thing to one that they'll ever be able to make.