Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s early February when the professor Oliver has been assistant teaching with ribs him and says, “So, what are your Valentine’s Day plans with the missus?”

Oliver blinks. “Oh.”

Professor Richards smiles a little smugly. “That’s what I thought. Take it from someone who has gotten the hang of this marriage thing over the past 30 years: you do not want to mess up Valentine’s Day.”

“Of course,” says Oliver, already making a mental note to call Carly’s favorite restaurant, the little Italian place in the East Village she’s always begging him to take her even though they live much further uptown. “Thanks. Dodged a bullet there, huh?”

Not really, of course, because Carly has never been one to harp over romantic occasions — but just so, Professor Richards claps him on the back. “Don’t mention it.”

On the actual day, it’s snowing profusely. Carly runs to the window, eyes bright, hair wild, and says, “Maybe they’ll cancel your classes.”

Oliver lets out a sigh, stretching out on the bed, his spine cracking with the effort. “That’ll be the day.”

“We could have a snowball fight in the park …”

“How romantic.”

She turns from the window to smirk at him. “Remember that time in college, when we — ”

“No, no, please, remind me of that time you threw an ice ball at me and bruised my ass for two weeks.”

“I didn’t mean to throw it that hard!” she protests, walking back over to him.

He reaches up and grabs her by the waist, pulling her back into the bed as she squeals. “Sure you didn’t,” he says, pressing a kiss into her temple. “You weren’t just trying to mark your territory — ”

“It worked, didn’t it?” she says slyly. “If you hadn’t complained about it so much, I’d have never seen your butt in the first place. And then we never would have … well.”

“You’re a criminal mastermind.”

She kisses him chastely on the lips. “I’m your criminal mastermind.”

It only takes a few moments for Carly’s shirt to slide off, for the hem of his boxers to drop, for everything to be off, off, off and for what should otherwise be a dreary, cold Tuesday morning to become an early romp in bed, the flurries outside coming down so thickly that it looks like they’re making love in a snow globe.

“See you later tonight,” says Carly, raising her eyebrows suggestively at him on his way out the door.

“If I’m not a snowman by then.”

She nudges him with her hip. “I’d make it work.”

He leaves the apartment with a buoyancy he hasn’t felt in ages; everyone around him is trudging through the snow, slipping and sliding and muttering to themselves, but Oliver feels strangely unburdened. Maybe it’s because he has some distance now that the last few months have not afforded him — he spent the holidays in a fog after his conversation with Elio over the phone, replaying it over and over, spending his nights staring at the ceiling and haunted by his own stupid words: Do you mind? And more haunted still by the weight of Elio’s silence on the other end of the line.

But this, maybe, he can handle. The bite of the snow. The shock of Carly’s blonde hair. The smell of the bakery down the street pumping out chocolate chip cookies. The little things that are all so separate and removed from that summer in Italy that for brief, merciful moments, Oliver can pretend he doesn’t remember it. Can be something close to content.

He loves Carly. He truly does. It’s the problem and it isn’t; it’s as if the moment he laid eyes on Elio, Pandora’s Box was opened, and he could never go back to the before — to the not knowing. If it weren’t for Elio existing, he thinks, he could be happy.

No. He is happy. A different kind, maybe. He just needs to remember it.

The snow doesn’t let up all day, coming down so thickly that Oliver’s students seem far more captivated by the window than his actual lecture. Shortly after class lets out Carly calls and proposes they cancel their reservation and have a cozy night in at the apartment.

“If you’re sure,” says Oliver. “I can pick up something up from the deli on my way home.”

“Sounds perfect.”

By the time Oliver leaves campus, the 1 train is so empty that he practically feels like a ghost — anyone in their right mind has long gone home by now. He emerges to a sheet of snow blanketing the two blocks it will take to get to his apartment, and so few cars on the road that it almost feels like he stepped into some other city, in some other place and time.

This momentary peace is abruptly ended by the sound of a car horn blaring, and the sound of someone bleating, “Scus — ah, sorry, sorry! Shit. Sorry.”

Oliver turns and sees someone in the middle of 66th and Broadway, running against the light and, apparently, narrowly avoiding getting slammed into by a taxi. He freezes on the curb as he stares out into the snow, his body seeming to process what he is looking at before his brain does — at the dark mass of curls littered with snowflakes, the the lanky arm patting the hood of a taxi in awkward apology, at the familiar backpack swinging off its shoulder.

Oliver only keeps staring because it’s uncanny, how much like Elio this boy looks, only to realize a beat too late that this boy is none other than Elio himself.

Their eyes connect just before Elio nearly barrels into him — he skids to a stop, already stuttering out another apology as Oliver reaches out instinctively to steady him. His hands grab Elio’s shoulders and Elio rights himself, blinking up at him, his jaw unhinging.

“Oliver?”

The moment Elio says his name, Oliver knows he is damned; that the ache he has been waiting to fade away may have quieted in the last few weeks, but in its quiet has extended even further, reached every part of him. Now he feels it in its fullest, most unbearable force, staring into Elio’s flushed cheeks, his wide eyes, his ridiculous, bow-shaped lips a stark red against the white of the street.

“What are you doing here?” Oliver manages.

Elio stammers for a few moments before getting his bearings: “I … I …” His eyes widen. “I have an audition! I’m late. I’m so late — is this 66th? Which way is Amsterdam?”

“You’re auditioning for Juilliard?”

“Yes,” says Elio miserably, manically, looking up the street, “but my flight was delayed, and then there weren’t any taxis, and — ”

“Hey. Hey. Take a breath,” says Oliver, only just realizing that his hands are still bracing Elio’s shoulders, that nothing in the world feels less natural than letting him go. Elio is shaking like a leaf, evidently more from panic than from the cold; and just like that, the weirdness of this encounter is overpowered by the compulsion to fix, to soothe, to take care of the practical rather than the bottomless, astronomical pit that is everything else between them. “What time’s the audition?”

“Six.”

Oliver checks his watch. “You have time,” he says, which is an utter lie — Elio has one minute. But he can’t imagine anyone won’t be forgiven for a delay in this weather. “Come on. I’ll walk you over.”

“This is crazy,” says Elio, the words coming too fast. “You’re — I can’t believe I ran into you. That you’re here. This is — “

“Let’s just focus on the audition, okay?” says Oliver, trying to project some level of calm so that Elio might settle a bit, even though every bone is his body feels like it is screaming right now. “What are you playing?”

Elio rattles off the names of the pieces, following Oliver down 66th with the same blind trust that he always has, the wind and the snow whipping at them from all directions.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was coming,” says Elio, “I honestly didn’t think that — well — I’m just here for the day, really, and even if — “

Oliver stops them a few feet away from the entrance to the school, putting a hand on Elio’s arm that seems to pacify him, if only for a few moments. He looks up at Oliver, his expression wobbly and uncertain, his eyes darting toward the entryway.

“Here,” says Oliver. He leans forward and adjusts Elio’s tie, tightening it where it’s gone loose at the collar, then nudges him over to the entryway and reaches up to shake the snow out of his hair. The whole thing is wrenchingly, achingly intimate, but Oliver forces himself to dissociate from it, to not really feel it, or at least wait to let himself feel it until Elio is out of his line of sight.

Once Oliver is finished, Elio glances toward the main doors, looking stricken.

“You’ll be fine,” says Oliver, in a voice far more steady than the rest of him. “Just — pretend you’re at home. And that it’s Mafalda in the kitchen, and not — ”

“An entire terrifying panel of adjudicators?” Elio supplies.

“To be fair, Mafalda can be pretty terrifying when she wants to be.”

Elio laughs, sharp and loud, and with so few people around it seems to echo off every surface of the street.

Oliver leans in and lowers his voice, holding Elio’s gaze. “They’d be lucky to have you. Don’t go in like you’re auditioning for them. Go in like they’re auditioning for you.”

Elio’s laugh softens into a smile, and he stands up a little straighter; only then does Oliver see the subtle but marked difference between Elio then and Elio now. The slight change in the definition of him, the way he carries himself, the way the past seven months have settled into his body. It’s a brutal, fleeting reminder of the time that has passed out from under them, time that Oliver is suddenly and irrationally desperate to have back.

He nods at Oliver, and then disappears into the entryway. Oliver waits for a few moments, watching through the window as Elio composes himself, shakes the hand of somebody perched behind a desk, and is led out of the main hall and through a massive set of doors.

Only then does it feel like the wind has finally blown out of Oliver’s sails, all of the composure of the last two minutes so far depleted that he finds himself leaning against the wall and running his hands through his hair, a fraction away from sitting on the sidewalk. He’s shaking, like all of Elio’s nervousness rattled into the air and was absorbed into Oliver’s skin.

Elio. Elio. It feels like the fabric holding his universe together has ripped open again, and the cut is anything but clean — he can’t make the pieces of himself fit back together again, doesn’t even have the wherewithal to remember what he was doing out here in the first place.

Dinner. Valentine’s Day. Carly waiting for him in the apartment. They all suddenly seem like circumstantial things that apply to somebody else.

But this — this isn’t a problem. It’s okay. Elio’s just here, and he’ll be gone, and things will go on the way they always have once Oliver swallows this encounter like a too large pill and lets it run its course.

Unless Elio gets in.

Shit. Of course Elio is going to get in.

It’s still snowing like a curtain all around him, but suddenly the air is so oppressively hot that he feels like a one-man inferno. Elio, in the same city. Elio, walking on the same streets he walks. Elio, going to school a block away from him, from his fiancée, from the ridiculous cookie cutter, scrapbook page of a life he has tried so hard to fit back into ever since he came back.

He should leave. Get to the deli, pick up his dinner, and go back into his apartment, into his life, into the arms of a person he promised himself to, and forget about this.

The door swings open. Oliver turns, and there is Elio, beaming at him so brightly that for a spellbinding moment it’s like staring into the sun. Oliver is powerless to stop himself from smiling back, every bit as widely, and then Elio is running up to him in a ball of anxious, wild energy and throwing his arms around Oliver, as unselfconscious and joyful as Oliver has ever seen him.

Oliver doesn’t even make a conscious decision to hug him back, and only realizes he’s doing it when the force of it accidentally lifts Elio an inch or so off the ground and Elio lets out an ecstatic laugh.

“It was the best I ever played,” says Elio. “I can’t believe it, even if I don’t get in I don’t care, it couldn’t have gone any better — ”

He pulls back from Oliver then, their arms still around each other, and Oliver stares into that radiant smile and is suddenly so displaced in time that he finds himself leaning — not just leaning, but leaning in, his body so poised and expectant for Elio’s mouth on his that he doesn’t even think about it. Elio pauses for the thinnest of seconds, like a skip in a vinyl track, something flickering in his eyes before he lowers his chin.

Oliver lets him go and claps him on the back, gruff and too chummy. His knees are weak with what he almost did.

“I wish I could have heard it,” he says.

Elio looks a little shaken when he looks back up, a little wary, and then something worse — forgiving. He’s going to pretend it didn’t happen, too. Oliver isn’t sure why he suddenly finds himself disappointed in Elio for it, certain that the Elio he knew eight months ago wouldn’t have done the same.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I’d be in the city,” says Elio. “I didn’t think — ”

“No, you don’t have to apologize. You had enough to worry about.”

And Oliver means it, he really does, but only then does he acknowledge that there is a part of him that is hurt by it; a part of him that wants to grab Elio by the shoulders again, hold him there, and ask if he really means so little to him — but no. That’s not it, and he knows it. Elio’s silence wasn’t dismissive. It’s much more complicated, much more difficult to acknowledge than that.

“Are you … where are you staying?”

“I’m not,” says Elio sheepishly. “I’m about to catch a bus to Boston for another audition tomorrow.”

“Back to back?”

Elio shrugs with a grim smile. “I can’t miss too much school.”

“Right. Of course,” says Oliver, shaking his head. He forgets that for all of Elio’s cleverness, he’s still bound to a level of education that Oliver has long forgotten the feeling of. “Your bus, it’s …”

“Out of Port Authority. I’m meeting a cousin there,” he says with a slight smile, anticipating Oliver’s next question.  

Oliver casts a worried glance at the snow coating the street. “And if your bus is canceled — ”

“Oliver,” says Elio, laughing at him a bit. “I’ll be fine.”

“Do you even know anybody here?”

Elio doesn’t have an answer for that. “There are plenty of hostels, if worst comes to — ”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Do you have a pen?”

Elio finds one in his backpack, watching Oliver curiously as he hands it over. Oliver grabs Elio by the wrist — a stupid thing to do, really, he realizes the moment he does it — and writes his phone number on Elio’s palm.

“In case you end up needing a place to crash,” says Oliver, oddly self-conscious as he gives Elio back his pen, as he releases his grip on him. “We have plenty of room.”

Elio winces slightly at the we. “Thank you,” he says sincerely. “I — thank you.”

Oliver follows him out to the curb, where Elio glances down the street, looking for a taxi. Oliver opens his mouth to say something, not having anything to say and having too much all at once — he realizes, though, that it’s less about that and more than he needs some excuse to keep Elio here, just a few minutes more, already so reluctant to let Elio out of his sight that it feels like someone has his ribcage in a vice grip.

But they spot a taxi too soon, and then it’s pulling up to the curb, before Oliver can do a thing about it. Elio hugs him goodbye, still looking rattled by the whole encounter.

“You have everything?” Oliver asks.

Elio nods, but looks almost like he wants to say no; his eyes linger on Oliver for a fleeting moment that nearly breaks down all of the resolve Oliver has to let him go.

“It was good seeing you,” says Elio. “Crazy, but — good.”

Oliver puts a hand on his shoulder as he slides into the cab. “Call and let me know when you get your acceptance letter.”

Elio flushes, shaking his head as Oliver shuts the door for him, patting the top of the taxi. And then this time Elio is the one pulling away; Elio is the one with his head turned out the window, watching Oliver fade into the distance behind him; and Oliver finds in that moment that if he is bad at leaving, he is even worse at getting left behind.

He only ends up arriving at home about fifteen minutes later than he thought he would; Carly doesn’t even notice his tardiness, bounding up to him in jeans and one of his Columbia sweaters and planting a kiss on his cheek before grabbing the deli bag from him to plate the food.

“Red or white?” she asks, holding up two wine bottles.

Elio, his brain stupidly supplies. “Your call.”

They settle down to eat, and it’s stupid, impulsive, even, but he has to tell her. He has to tell someone, has to put the words out into the air and find some way to solidify what just happened, make it permanent, make it real.

“I just ran into the son of Professor Perlman — the man I interned with over the summer,” he says.

“Oh?” says Carly. “What did you say his name was again?”

“Elio,” says Oliver. He says the name so brusquely, so unpreciously, that it feels like even from this distance he has let Elio down. “He had an audition at Juilliard.”

“Oof,” says Carly sympathetically. “He better not get his hopes up.”

Oliver can’t account for the sudden heat of his defensiveness. He takes a sip of wine, willing it to simmer down. “I actually wouldn’t be too surprised if he gets in.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” she muses. “He showed you all around his town. You could show him your city.”

Oliver tries to imagine it, the wine loosening up the tight wall he usually keeps around thoughts like these: Elio in New York, Elio running in Central Park, Elio coming over for dinner. Elio and Carly existing in the same world, within the same hour of each other, the way they just did now. The roar of all the could have, would have, should have reaching a fever pitch, drowning out everything in its path.

That night they make love again, quietly and in the dark, easy and intimate and familiar. Carly falls asleep with her head propped against his chest, fitting neatly there, the same way she has for three years. Oliver closes his eyes, feeling like a traitor, feeling as if he is poisoning Carly through his skin as he does it: but he imagines, just for a guilty, stolen moment, that it’s the weight of Elio’s head on his chest instead.

Chapter Text

They’re late. Not exactly a surprise, because Oliver and Carly as a unit are pretty notorious for it and have been since they first started seeing each other — but usually it’s a group of people waiting on them, and not an eighteen-year-old student with zero friends in the city to his name, who probably wants to murder them right now.

“He’ll be fine,” says Carly, although she is every bit as anxious about it as Oliver is, staring out the window of the delayed train as if she can will it to move. “He’s a charmer.”

Oliver huffs out a laugh. “When he wants to be.”

Carly swats at him. “Maybe it’ll be good for him. He’ll have to mingle a bit, make a few new friends …”

“Who are all twice his age.”

“Hey! We’re hip. Our peers are hip. Besides, he seems to get along just fine with people who are older than he is.”

Oliver stares at his own reflection in the subway window, the thought unbidden: If only you knew.

Elio’s been living in the city for two months, but it took approximately two days for him to wrap Carly around his little finger. It’s strange to Oliver now, how much he balked at the idea of them meeting, how much he dreaded it — he assumed Elio would be stiff and distant, assumed that Carly would be wary, and that within weeks she would put two and two together and call them both out on it in a blaze of self-destructive glory. He assumed that Elio’s acceptance to Juilliard and subsequent move to the city a mere week after Oliver's wedding would be the catalyst that unwound them both.

As it turns out, it only unwound Oliver. Elio seems to be doing just fine.

So fine, in fact, that Elio and Carly are arguably closer than Elio and Oliver are right now. She teases and mother hens him and Elio rolls his eyes and demands to know all the weird stories she has about her patients and Oliver has, on occasion, started to feel like a third wheel in his own apartment — something that happens with more frequency since Carly insisted that Elio come for dinner every Wednesday night.

“I just feel like we need to keep an eye on him,” she said at the time. “He’s all on his own, and he’s so … I don’t know.”

Oliver does know. “I’m glad you two are friends,” he answered, the lie feeling like partially dried concrete in his throat.

He should be happy. Should be grateful. This is the best case scenario, isn’t it?

Except that it isn’t. It feels some days like there is a noose around his neck, slowly tightening with every fleeting exchange — Elio at the kitchen table, laughing that infectious laugh of his. Elio’s shirt riding up as he reaches for the wine glasses in their cabinets, exposing a sliver of pale stomach. Elio, with those soulful, compelling eyes, staring briefly out the apartment window, lost in some trail of thought.

Elio, who has apparently so fully and thoroughly moved on from Oliver that he doesn’t seem to be feeling even a fraction of the torture Oliver is living with every damn day.

Oliver was the one who received the invitation to the Fourth of July cookout in the park that they’re running late for; inviting Elio had, of course, been Carly’s idea. Oliver hadn’t expected Elio to accept. It was mostly people from his department, and their friends and family. But Elio had lit up at the idea of a real American Fourth of July, smiling one of those slightly ironic smiles about it: “There are going to be hot dogs, aren’t there?” he’d asked, as if the prospect was foreign and thrilling.

“Elio!” Carly calls out when they finally arrive, breathless from running across the park. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry we’re late.”

Elio turns just as Carly wraps him into a hug.  “Hey,” he says, “it’s fine, I — ”

“Ah, so this one belongs to you two?” asks Paul, one of the professors in Oliver’s department. “I was starting to wonder who snuck in the pint-sized expert on Greek civilizations.”

Elio flushes. “It’s really my father who — hey,” he says in protest, as Oliver swipes the cup of beer out of his hands and takes a hearty sip.

“You’re not allowed to drink in this country anyway, last I checked,” Oliver reminds him. He smacks his lips and hands the glass back to Elio, their fingers grazing. He sees Elio’s eyes flit to their hands for a moment, and feels a surge of misplaced satisfaction over it.  

Carly interrupts it by rustling Elio’s hair. “Let’s go get some food in you, you beanpole.”

She leads the charge over to the grill, grabbing Elio by the crook of his arm, the rest of them following suit.

“Elio was just telling me how he usually spends his summers in Italy,” says Paul, falling into stride with Oliver. “The way he talks about it made me want to ditch all of you and get on a plane right now.”

“Yeah. It’s lovely there,” says Oliver, his head shifted toward Paul but his eyes still on Elio.

“Glad you invited him. He’s really something,” says Paul, clapping him on the back. “And Juilliard! Clearly no slouch.”

“Hmm,” says Oliver in agreement.  Distracted. Knowing he shouldn’t be. His eyes on the worn denim of Elio’s shorts, the slight slouch of his shoulders in his thinly-striped button down shirt — clothes he has seen on Elio in another time, another place, that give Oliver the strange sense of falling through a rabbit hole. And then Carly pulls him over to the grill, the two of them laughing at some joke she made, and Oliver is right back in the present again where he doesn’t quite belong.

Carly loads up Elio’s plate with a hot dog, a hamburger, pickles, pasta salad, and angel cake, insisting he get the “full American experience.” Elio mostly picks at his plate, looking a little overwhelmed but happy to be there, his eyes darting back and forth between speakers at the large, rickety picnic table. At first whenever he cuts into the conversation it’s quiet and cautious, but always clever — he is immediately rewarded with laughter. Within an hour it almost seems like everyone’s leaning over to his side of the table, anticipating whatever he'll say next. 

Oliver feels an embarrassing, almost shameful level of possessive. He finds himself alternately beaming with a stolen kind of pride that everyone is so immediately smitten by Elio, and wrestling with a sudden wish that he had never let Carly invite him here.  

“So, Elio, exactly how set are you on this whole … Juilliard thing?” Marie, another one of Oliver’s older colleagues, teases him. "You never once considered Columbia?"  

Carly laughs. “Let the poor kid start a semester first!”

“Maybe graduate school,” says Paul.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Elio, turning to look at Oliver with a smirk that curls just on one side of his mouth. It’s the first time he’s looked Oliver directly in the eyes all night, and it nearly knocks the air out of him. “The only Columbia graduate I know is such an uncultured and brutish Americano — ”

Oliver knocks his shoulder into Elio’s as everyone laughs. “Alright, alright, you’ve said your piece, you bully,” he says, reaching over to grab Elio’s mostly untouched burger and taking a bite as if to emphasize Elio's barb.

Elio’s laughter stutters for just a beat as Oliver leans into him, his shoulder grazing Elio’s chest. Oliver is two beers in now, and a very present voice in the back of his mind is saying Don’t, but his blood feels hot in his veins, his heart pulling him too fast for the rest of him to catch up. He lets his gazes linger. Lets his knees graze Elio’s. Lets his hands wander to Elio’s plate, to Elio’s glass, to Elio’s shoulder.

Eventually Paul slaps his hand down on the table. “Who’s up for capture the flag?”

Oliver’s about to beg off, but Carly has already leapt to her feet and Elio is quick to follow, with an eagerness that almost insults Oliver — like he needed some excuse to put distance between them. Oliver stares down at his plate, chastised. Maybe he does.

They end up dividing into teams of six — Oliver, Carly, Marie, and three other people on the Red Team, and Elio, Paul, and four others are on Blue. The older and less athletic crowd either sit back to watch or aid in hiding the two cheap little American flags on either side of the wooded area where they’ve decided to set up the game. The rules, as always, are very clear: there is a neutral territory in the middle of the two teams, marked by two trees. On either side is the Red territory, where the Blue Team’s flag is hidden, and the Blue territory, where the Red Team’s flag is hidden. Any member of a team caught in the other team’s territory can be tagged and taken prisoner until someone on their team sneaks in to "rescue" them without being caught. 

“So, does Elio have any weak spots?”

Oliver turns to Carly, his heart lurching. “What?”

She mimes beating her fist into her open palm, shifting her weight between her feet like a boxer. “Bad endurance? Weak ankles? What’s gonna give us the upper hand here?”

Oliver laughs, maybe a little too loudly. Carly matches it with one of her wolfish, competitive grins — he forgets sometimes just how into activities she gets, her unabashed, unbridled enthusiasm for things as silly as running around in the park. It reminds him of college. It reminds him of a time when things were as simple as Carly, classes, food, and sleep.

“On your marks … get  set … go!”

Elio surprises the entire Red Team by bolting in the opposite direction, further into their own camp, while the rest of them start scattering to protect their flag or swarm the neutral territory.

“That little punk is gonna go around the back and sneak in from the side!” says Carly, pointing an accusatory finger.

“Not on our watch!” says Marie. “Oliver, take the right, Carly, take the left. I’ll stay on the front lines with the others.”

Oliver nods and takes off, feeling a strange, youthful kind of thrill in him, the kind he hasn’t felt since — well, since Italy. Since racing bikes with Elio, since shuddering at the cool mountain water on his torso, since opening his eyes into Elio’s in one of those seemingly infinite, rapturous moments in the dark of the villa at night.

He’s alone now, and maybe he shouldn’t be. There is suddenly too much room in this park, in the sweltering summer heat, to pretend he is something he isn’t; to pretend he is somewhere he’s not.

He hears a commotion in the distance, teammates calling to each other. He tilts his head in that direction, but can’t shake the odd and sudden feeling that he’s being watched. Before he can find the source of it, he hears the crack of a twig a few feet away.  

The look on Elio’s face as Oliver’s eyes snap over to him looks straight out of a sitcom — his eyes wide, his hands still clutching to the tree he was attempting to hide behind. Oliver grins like a jackal, and there is something almost bone deep in the sensation, a predator locking onto prey.

“My, my,” says Oliver slowly. “Look who’s on the wrong side of neutral ground.”

Elio casts a quick glance back, clearly trying to judge whether it’s worth it to try to make it back to the other side. They both know Oliver’s the faster runner of the two of them.

“Oh, this ground?” Elio asks. “Because I didn’t see any markers — ah!”

Oliver takes off after him and Elio bolts, not before Oliver sees the grin lighting up his face. He’s running aimlessly, skirting through trees, trying and failing to throw Oliver off of his trail. Oliver catches up with almost absurd speed, and that’s when he looks down and realizes Elio is trying to outrun him in a pair of sandals. Sure enough, when he’s about twenty yards away, Elio stumbles and trips, rolling right into a bush.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” Elio laughs, scrambling up to his feet, “I’m terribly injured, it’d be heartless to tag me out now — ”

“You brat,” Oliver calls, resuming the chase.

“Vive l’équipe bleue!”

They’re sprinting into more open territory now, gaining ground on the rest of the players. Oliver is directly behind Elio when Elio turns, sees how unexpectedly close Oliver is, and yelps in surprise — Oliver takes advantage of his momentary lapse and grabs him by the waist, swinging him over his shoulder in one fell swoop, barely even breaking his stride.

Elio wheezes out a laugh, his feet dangling and his sandals falling clean off.

“Put me down,” he protests, but Oliver can hear the grin in it.

“I’ve found a prisoner,” Oliver calls up to the area where the rest of his team is clustered.

Carly lets out a triumphant whoop, and Oliver hoists Elio further up on his shoulder, showing off. Elio’s fist hits his back, too gently to be taken seriously — ”Put me down,” he protests again, but Oliver doesn’t. It’s the only excuse he can make to touch Elio, maybe one of the few he’ll ever be able to make now that they have crossed into this alternate world. He hates how much he savors it, even in this fleeting, ridiculous instant: the warm plane of Elio’s stomach against his neck, the weight of him on his shoulder, the way he can wrap his entire arm around Elio’s torso.   

But then Elio’s voice goes very quiet, his body almost slack: “Please, Oliver, let me go.”

Oliver releases him that instant, too quickly. Elio stumbles a bit, looking dazed. Oliver reaches out to steady him, but Elio backs away from his hands, his eyes suddenly full of something that Oliver can’t bear to see.

This is what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? Some evidence that he wasn’t losing his mind. That they’d had something special, something that couldn’t be written off so easily by time and circumstance. That Elio was hurting every bit as much as he was.

Elio’s guard is down for a mere second before he plasters the smile back on his face, but that mere second is enough for Oliver to hate himself all over again.

“Welcome to Red Team jail,” says Carly menacingly, ruffling Elio’s curls and leading him over to the tree he’s sentenced to stand on until a member of his team rescues him. Before Oliver can get his wits back about him, she stands on her tiptoes and plants a kiss on him. “Good work, babe.”

Oliver cuts a glance at Elio to try and detect any lingering hurt, but Elio’s face is a mask of calm, watching the game go on without him with mild amusement. At some point Paul sneaks past them and “rescues” Elio, which gets him free passage back to the Blue Team’s side. Elio doesn’t cross over again — at some point the game ends when Marie devises a plan that ends with Carly capturing the Blue Team’s flag, and the Blue Team surrenders, all of them exhausted and grass-stained and half-stumbling out of the park just as the sun starts to sink in the sky. Only then does Oliver catch sight of Elio again, who looks flushed and happy enough bounding over to Carly that Oliver lets some of his guilt ease out of him.

But then Elio steers clear of him for the entire walk to Marie’s apartment. Oliver peers over his shoulder every now and then, but Elio seems to be deep in conversation with Paul, who apparently speaks fluent French.

Carly grabs Oliver by the crook of his arm, swinging in to lean on him, propping her head on his shoulder. “Look at that!” she says. “He’s so precious when he speaks French.”

Precious. He hates the idea of anyone infantilizing Elio like that, even though he supposes there are very few other appropriate ways for a married woman to regard a teenager. But Elio is so much more than precious. He’s captivating, magnetizing, all-consuming; even the few times Elio’s voice is audible over the rest of the group, the lilt of it in Oliver’s ears feels like something he has stolen.

They all touch base briefly in Marie’s apartment to grab another round of drinks before they head up to the roof for the fireworks, cramping into her studio and rummaging through the fridge.

“Elio! Your knee,” says Paul.

Oliver turns and sees the dried blood that has weaved a river down Elio’s shin. Even Elio seems surprised by it — “I didn’t even feel it,” he says, self-conscious at the slight gasp it earns from a few women in the room.

“I’ve got some band-aids and antiseptic in the bathroom,” says Marie.

Elio waves her off. “Really, it’s just a scrape, I — ”

“I’ll get them,” says Oliver. “You guys head on up.”

“Here, I’ll grab your beers and save us some seats,” says Carly, wincing a bit at the sight of Elio’s leg. “Take good care of him.”

By the time Oliver finds the supplies in the bathroom, the apartment is empty, save for Elio standing awkwardly in the kitchen. His eyes sweep up to meet Oliver’s, and there is something wary in them — as if Oliver has trapped him here. An hour before they were playing at predator and prey; now, though, it feels like anything but playing. 

Oliver softens his gaze. “Hop up,” he says, patting the counter.

Elio obeys. “I can … “ he tries to protest, but Oliver has already started dabbing at his leg with a wet paper towel. “Okay.”

Oliver mops up his shin, staining the paper towel red, catching the diluted blood before it drips down into Elio’s shoes. He takes his time, wondering how a person can be so entranced by something as simple as the way the bone meets the muscle of a leg, by the pale, tender skin of it, by the slight curve of a calf. He drags the paper towel all the way up to Elio’s knee in one final, painfully slow motion, and then gasps as he feels the sudden jerk of fingers knot into his hair at the base of his neck, pulling his face upward.

Elio holds Oliver’s gaze as he holds his head there, their faces suddenly a fraction of an inch apart. Elio’s eyes are dark and unknowable, staring at Oliver in a way he has never been stared at before. There is something daring in his expression, something wild — in the split second he is sure that Elio is about to pull him in and kiss him, Oliver pulls back, the breath leaving his lungs like it might burn him.

But Elio doesn’t look hurt. Doesn’t look surprised, or resigned, or any number of things Oliver expects. Elio looks so bitter in that moment, cast in the dim light of the apartment, that Oliver doesn’t recognize him; that Oliver is certain that whatever change in Elio is his own fault, and that he has tainted him, turned him into something frightening to behold.

“That’s what I thought,” says Elio, the words low in his throat.

“What …”

Elio slides off the counter, his hands balled into fists. “Don’t insult me. We both know what you’ve been doing.”

Oliver doesn’t answer. Can’t. The shame is suddenly overwhelming, suffocating, even — Elio takes one look at him and knows Oliver is all too aware of what he’s talking about.

“You have a wife,” says Elio, “one that I actually like and respect, and — ”

He stops himself, his voice cracking. He turns his head away from Oliver; his hands are shaking at his sides, his jaw tight, his entire body rigid. Only then does it occur to Oliver that Elio is trying not to cry.

“I’m sorry,” says Oliver. His feet and his hands suddenly feel numb. “I’m so — I’ve been stupid.”

“You’ve been cruel.”

The words are a thin knife wedged between his ribs, but one he deserves. He understands all at once that Elio wasn’t going to kiss him — Elio was waiting to see if Oliver would. The whole thing was a test.

A test Oliver failed long before Elio’s fist was in his hair.

Elio turns to leave, then, but his hand stalls on the doorknob. “I thought what we had mattered.”

“It did,” says Oliver. His throat sticks on the words he is dying to say instead: It does.

“Then stop treating me like I’m some bit of … fun.”

Elio opens the door and disappears through it before Oliver can so much as take a breath. He should be grateful Elio wasn’t there to hear it; it sounds like the breath of a dying man, rattled and full of remorse. He lowers his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He wants some way to fix this, some way to apologize, but even here, in the brutality of the immediate aftermath, he realizes there isn’t one. There is nothing he can do now except rely on time — time to prove that he can be better than that. Time that he hopes Elio will allow him.

Time that he doesn’t deserve.

Maybe he could make this easier on both of them. Walk out the door and run up the stairs. Catch Elio on the landing, before he joins everyone on the roof. I’m sorry, he’ll say, but I have to be honest — I can’t be around you. It will only drive us both mad.

But he is too selfish to even do that one selfish thing; so selfish that he sees that the road he is on will only lead to ruin, both for himself and for Elio, but he cannot for the life of him steer himself from it.

He gives himself thirty seconds to compose his face, and then he follows Elio up. Carly pats the spot next to her for Oliver to join, and tucks herself into his side, her head tilted up toward the sky. Oliver watches the fireworks gleam over the Hudson, feels the rumble of the explosions reverberating in his chest, but nothing will ever be quite so stark or as loud as the pain in Elio’s eyes, or the words that swallow every beat of silence: Please, Oliver, let me go.

Chapter Text

Paul insists for months that his 30th birthday is going to be a rager, but when November rolls around, he ends up doing the same thing he does every year: liberally inviting far too many people to his one-bedroom apartment, where everyone will cram in like sardines, red wine will inevitably be spilled on a couch, and there will be so little food to go around that someone will end up ordering a stack of pizzas around ten o’clock at night that will be devoured within half of an hour.

They’re waiting for aforementioned pizza when someone buzzes to be let in, only it isn’t pizza — it’s Elio.

“Hey!” Oliver calls from the couch. “How did the showcase go?”

Elio tries and fails to suppress a grin. “Not bad, not bad,” he calls back over the noise.

Much to Oliver’s disappointment, Elio is followed in by Roger, his roommate. “Bullshit!” Roger crows, grabbing Elio around the shoulders and jostling him. “He knocked it out of the park.”

“Wish we'd been allowed to see,” says Carly, half-pouting from her perch on Oliver’s lap.

“Yeah, well, guess you’re just gonna have to take my word for it,” says Roger with a wink.

“Where’s the birthday boy?” asks Elio, wandering into the kitchen. “We brought wine.”

Roger lazes over to where Oliver and Carly are on the couch. Oliver plasters on a tight smile, the way he always does when Roger is within a ten-foot radius of him — Roger, with his overly-familiar grins and his liberal touching of people and the way he seems almost carelessly aware of his own handsomeness, brandishing it around like a gun without the safety locked.

Maybe Roger wouldn’t rub him the wrong way if he weren’t so —  familiar with Elio. Right from the beginning of the semester, he was always wrapping an arm around him, or tweaking his side, or murmuring something low in Elio’s ear. There was never any awkwardness between them that Oliver could detect, no barrier of acquaintance to friendship to overcome; he waltzed into Elio’s life like the two of them were long lost brothers, or — well. Oliver doesn’t even want to entertain what’s on the other end of that or .

To be fair, they rightly could be brothers. Both pale, with striking eyes and dark curls. But where Elio is soft and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Roger is forward and brooding and has the kind of face that never quite matches the words that come out of his mouth.

Oliver supposes that if something were to happen between Elio and Roger it would have happened by now; but then again, if it had happened, Oliver doubts Elio would have told him at all.

“He’s killing us. If he sucked a little more, the rest of our class could relax,” says Roger, his eyes still on Elio even as he’s talking to them. Well, talking to Carly. This is yet another reason for Oliver’s mounting dislike of Roger — more often than not, he’ll address Carly or Elio over him, even if Oliver is standing in his direct line of vision.

“Aw,” says Carly, “I’m sure you’re doing just fine.”

“Eh. I could do better. But I’m not looking to go full Elio. Kid’s been stumbling out of the practice rooms past midnight,” says Roger, as if he and Elio aren’t the exact same age.

“Yikes,” says Carly. “Is that safe?”  

Roger flashes a Cheshire cat grin. “We musicians like to live on the edge.”

Elio returns then, holding a glass of wine for himself and one that he hands Carly. “Angel!” she says, putting her empty one on the table and taking a sip.

Oliver feels himself starting to slip into one of those moods of his, some darker shadow of the ones he used to feel so intensely the summer he and Elio met: that feeling of insurmountable distance, of a gap that cannot be bridged even when they are a breath away from each other. But then Elio turns to Oliver and asks quietly, as if it is the two of them alone in some island in the middle of this party, “How did the exercise go?”

Oliver blinks in surprise, an embarrassing warmth in his chest. He mentioned doing an outdoor exercise with his students over a week ago, in passing at the dinner table. He didn’t expect Elio to remember.

“They took to it pretty well, once they all stopped complaining about the cold,” says Oliver.

“I’m glad,” says Elio. He takes a sip of wine. “Wish we could go on field trips.”

“I’ve got some hash that’ll make you feel like you’re on one, if you want,” says Roger.

Elio smiles into his wine glass. “I’m good.”

“Nerd,” says Roger, with affection.

Maybe that’s the reason why Oliver hates him so much — he’s so blasé with everyone else, so overly-cool, but ineffably kind to Elio. Oliver doesn’t need anyone to explain why Elio is so often the exception to everyone’s rule, but it grates at him nonetheless.

Fortunately, they don’t have to deal with Roger for long. He snakes his way into the crowd, making the rounds, introducing himself with the confidence of someone who is throwing the party himself. Elio takes the opportunity to settle himself on the couch next to Oliver and Carly the moment someone vacates the spot, where they spend the next hour talking about their holiday plans and eating the pizza when it arrives.

Once some people have left and the crowd has thinned out to mostly the younger of his friends, Paul proposes a drinking game.

“Elio, did you remember your card deck?” Paul asks.

“Yes,” says Elio warily, taking it out of his jacket pocket and handing it to him. “But you never explained what it was for.”

Paul’s eyes gleam with mischief, and at once Oliver realizes what’s about to happen before anyone else in the room does. “No!” he protests, laughing. “We can’t. We can’t. I married a lightweight — ”

“Speak for yourself — ”

“ — and Elio’s two pounds soaking wet, he’ll die.”

Elio nudges Oliver with a bony shoulder, if anything further emphasizing Oliver’s point. “Please. I can drink you Americans under the table.”

“Undoubtedly. And besides, Kings is tradition,” says Paul, opening Elio’s cards and fanning them facedown on the table with a flourish. “We have to teach it to the Elios and Rogers of the world so that they, too, can pass it down to unwitting eighteen-year-olds one day, and keep our debauchery alive.”

“In that case, sign me up,” says Roger gamely, jumping over the couch to plant himself on Elio’s other side. “What are the rules?”

Paul explains it to them: they go around in a circle and each draw a card, and for each card there is a rule. If someone draws a two, they get to point at two people and those two people have to drink; “three is me” means whoever draws a three has to drink; four means you decide two people to drink, and drink two sips yourself; five is guys, and six is chicks; “seven is heaven,” meaning everyone has to raise their hand, and the last person to do it has to drink; “eight is mate,” meaning whoever draws an eight gets to pick someone who drinks every time they do for the entire round; and so on and so forth, the rules getting more convoluted as the cards get higher.

The truly damning act in all of this, though, is that after each person draws a card, they have to slip it under the tab of an unopened beer can. Whoever’s turn it is when the tab pops open has to shotgun the beer immediately. In other words, whoever’s turn it is when the tab pops open is screwed.

By the time the first three people have gone, it’s clear how the night is going to end — everyone seems to have simultaneously joined a group effort to pick on one Elio Perlman. Marie draws a two and points at Elio and Roger; Roger draws an eight and makes Elio his drinking “mate” for the rest of the round; even Carly gets in on it when someone draws a seven, covering Elio’s eyes with her fingers so he’s too confused to realize that everyone’s hands have shot up around him.

“Sabateur!” Elio accuses with a laugh, as Carly opens another beer for him to drink from.

Oliver doesn’t worry too much about it, because Elio’s right — despite being a matchstick, he has held his own so easily that Oliver has woken up with some regrettable hangovers trying to match pace with him. What Oliver doesn’t factor in, though, is that given the showcase practice, Elio hasn’t slept for the better part of a week.

Still, it’s not exactly a secret when Elio starts toeing the line between tipsy and drunk.

“Nine is rhyme!” says Paul. “We go in a circle and you have five seconds to say a word that rhymes with the one I choose, that hasn’t been said yet. The word is …” He takes another bite of his pizza. “Cheese.”

“Please,” says Marie.

Carly pecks a kiss to Oliver’s cheek. “Tease.”

Oliver scrunches his nose at her. “Sneeze.”

“Um … uh ... cheese?” says Elio, visibly pink-cheeked.  

“Drink!” says Roger.

Elio’s mouth falls open. “What?”

“Paul started with cheese,” says Carly, “and you can’t repeat. Drink.”

It only goes downhill from there; a few turns later, Elio draws a six — a drink for the women, so for once he’s off scot-free — and when he goes to place it under the tab of the beer with the other cards, it hisses open, and the entire room erupts with cheers.

“Down it!”

“Take it like a man, Elio!”

“Drink, drink, drink, drink,” Carly starts chanting.

He does, albeit terribly. Halfway through his first sip his face crinkles and he starts laughing.

“Pathetic!” says Roger.

Elio valiantly attempts again, and only is let off the hook when he starts laughing so hard that beer starts coming out of his nose.

“Alright, alright, man down,” says Oliver, putting an end to it. He reaches forward and grabs Elio by the crook of his arm, easing him back onto the couch. “His blood is like eighty percent beer now, thanks to you bullies.”

Elio insists that he’s fine, attempting to take another hearty gulp even though most of his weight is sagging on Oliver by now. Oliver wishes in that instant that he were a better man, for not feeling a certain level of smug that it’s Oliver Elio is sagging against, and not Roger on his other side. Even the small victories feel like losses these days.

They continue on a few more turns without incident, and then one of Paul’s friends draws a ten — categories — and picks fruit at the subject.

“Strawberry,” she starts.

“Cherry.”

“Orange.“

“Grape.”

Oliver feels the ghost of a smirk coming on, ribbing Elio in the side: “Peach.”

Elio’s laugh is so sharp and unexpected that it echoes through the whole apartment; he clutches his stomach and only avoids sloshing his beer on the floor because Roger has the wherewithal to grab it from him.

“What’s so funny?” Carly asks.

But now Oliver is laughing too, and it only seems to make Elio’s fit twice as bad, his cackles turning into wheezes, falling into Oliver’s side. “Nothing, nothing,” Elio manages to sputter. “S-sorry.”

“That’s it, bub. I’m cutting you off,” says Carly, grabbing Elio’s beer out from Roger’s hand and taking a sip from it herself.

“What was that about drinking us all under the table, Elio?” Paul teases.

“I don’t know who he’s brought more shame upon, Italy or the institution of college,” says Roger, rubbing a hand on Elio’s knee.

Elio just smiles, holding his hands up in surrender, letting them rib him. He’s become something of a little brother to everyone since all of Oliver and Carly’s friends let him into the fold, in very much the same way he was back with his slightly older friends in Italy — they tease him, dote on him, quietly look out for him. At first it grated at Oliver, how immediately endeared to him everyone was — but now, he supposes, he’s glad for Elio’s sake that he has some kind of home base here.

Roger ends up leaving a few minutes later, to go meet up with some of their Juilliard friends at a bar further downtown. Oliver can hear him attempt to lure Elio away, but Elio waves him off and says he’ll see him in the morning. Carly whines that he’s being a buzzkill, leaving before the game is over, but Oliver is less than sorry to see Roger go.

They run out of cards and start another round after that. Oliver is about to lean forward to grab his card off the table when it’s his turn, but Carly touches his arm, halting him.

“Don’t wake the baby,” she says, muffling a giggle.

He turns to his left and sees that Elio isn’t just leaning his weight on him anymore; Elio has fallen asleep with his head lolling on Oliver’s shoulder. Somehow, despite the chaos of the game and the music pumping from the kitchen and about a dozen people laughing at him, Elio has conked out so fully that he’s even snoring a little bit.

“Does your Polaroid have any film left in it?” Marie asks Paul gleefully.  

“Aw, leave him alone. He’s all tuckered out,” says Carly.

Oliver blinks and has to look away, something cinching in his heart at the sight of Elio’s sleeping face — his full, parted lips, his pale cheeks, the slight rings of purple under his eyes. Oliver has conditioned himself to handle Elio’s beauty in the daytime, when their faces are constantly in motion and their glances are fleeting at best. He has forgotten the almost otherworldly quality to him in the night, when he is utterly still and there is nothing to stop Oliver from watching.

They continue the round, with a new rule in game play: whoever wakes Elio has to take a shot. Oliver wants to point out that he’s at a significant disadvantage considering Elio is essentially attached to him, but the game has taken on a general lawlessness as it is. Not that Oliver is complaining — it feels like every nerve in his body is humming. The heat of Elio’s cheek against his shoulder. The pressure of Elio’s ribs against his arm with every breath. The moments between now and whenever it is Elio wakes up are suddenly absurdly, terrifyingly precious ones; Oliver thinks he could stay like this forever, if given the chance.

Inevitably, though, the night starts to wind down, and everyone’s energy with it. People start reaching for their jackets, and Oliver has a slightly drunk wife to shepherd home. He turns his gaze back to Elio, reminded, excruciatingly, of that morning after they first made love, of the quiet beats where Oliver skimmed his fingers across Elio’s bare chest, waiting for him to wake.

This time he settles for Elio’s shoulder, touching it gently. Elio doesn’t seem to feel it. He rests his whole hand on him and nudges him.

“Hey. Elio.”

Elio’s eyes flutter for open. “What …” he says groggily.

“You fell asleep, you goose.”

Elio’s face immediately reddens, from his cheeks to the tips of his ears. He looks up at Oliver, stricken, and then backs away from him like he accidentally fell asleep on burning coals.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to — “

“Don’t worry about it, Sleeping Beauty,” says Carly. “You didn’t miss much.”

Elio looks around, completely disoriented, before settling on a rueful smile and running a hand through his curls. “Sorry,” he mutters again, and Oliver understands that it isn’t a sorry for everyone else — it’s a sorry meant just for him.

Oliver wishes he could tell him to take it back.

“C’mon,” says Oliver. “We’ll put you in a taxi.”

“He can crash here for the night,” says Paul.

Oliver opens his mouth to say he and Carly can take Elio home with them, if it’s coming to that, but Elio beats him to it.

“You sure?”

“Of course,” says Paul. “Couch is all yours.”

“Thanks, man.”

Oliver lingers for a moment — he and Carly live just down the street, and it really makes no sense for Elio to stay here when he’s at their place every week anyway — but at the last second he loses his nerve. If Elio doesn’t want to stay with them, he must have his reasons. It’s just one of countless unspoken, invisible lines the two of them are always on alert for, trying not to cross.

Carly kisses her palm and sloppily presses it to Elio’s cheek. “Call us in the morning so we know we didn’t kill you.”

Elio hums in acknowledgement, offering them both a sleepy wave on their way out. Oliver hovers at the door for a moment, like he’s leaving something behind. But then Carly stumbles a bit and steadies herself on Oliver’s shoulder, and he is brought back to the present, to the state of his actual life: he has an apartment to get back to, a wife to get home, a lesson plan to finalize.

They’re home and Oliver is turning the key in the lock when Carly groans.

“What?”

Carly shakes her head. “I changed out of scrubs at Paul’s and left them there.”

“You don’t have any others?”

“My hospital ID’s in the pocket.” Carly blows out a breath. “Ah, well, I’ll tell Elio to grab it when he calls in the morning.”

“I’ll just go back and grab it now,” says Oliver.

“No, no, it’s fine — ”

Oliver opens the door for her and presses a kiss to her temple. “It’s three blocks away. I’ll be right back.”

It feels somehow chillier when he walks back out of the building than it was two minutes before. He slouches into his coat, picking up the pace, half-jogging to Paul’s place. His reasons for going back aren’t entirely selfless — if he’s being honest, he does want to check on Elio. It still feels weird, that they just left him there. He tries to blame the uneasy feeling on the fact that Samuel once asked him to keep an eye on Elio — it’s familial obligation, and nothing more than that.

Just as he rounds the block, he sees Elio stumble out of Paul’s building, without his coat on. Oliver’s heart is immediately in his throat — that’s it, then. The reason for the uneasy feeling in his gut. Elio’s too drunk to get himself home, and Oliver got here just in time to find him about to do something stupid. 

But Elio’s not stumbling from drunkenness, he realizes, but because he’s carrying a trash bag. Oliver recognizes it as the one they were filling up in the kitchen earlier in the night.

“I could have grabbed that,” says a voice through the door — Paul, carrying a bag of recycling, following Elio into the cold.

“It’s your birthday,” Elio protests. He evidently already has the key to the trash can outside of Paul’s building, because he starts unlocking it. “Let me do the clean up.”

“Mmm. How about when you’re not walking like you have sea legs, mon chat?”

“Maybe I just need someone to steady me,” says Elio.

Oliver sees what’s about to happen five seconds before it does, but those five seconds seem to last an eternity. Elio tilts his chin up, gazing up at Paul with that same wild gleam in his eyes, that same electricity in his body that Oliver remembers so viscerally from their night in Rome that for a moment he forgets himself entirely, unable to reconcile the thrill of that memory with the cold dread suddenly seeping through his veins.

“Do you?” Paul asks, taking a lazy step over to Elio.

Elio casts a glance down the street, then licks his upper lip. Paul bridges the distance between them before Elio’s tongue is back in his mouth, clutching Elio’s face between his hands, Elio immediately sinking his fingers into Paul’s back. The two of them lean into each other, their long shadows becoming one, their kiss slow and languid and lingering.

Oliver stands like a buffoon, his feet rooted to the sidewalk. They don’t even see him, and somehow it doesn’t occur to him to be afraid that they will. They seem so enraptured with each other that a pipe bomb could go off in the street and they wouldn’t notice.

They pull away, staring into each other’s eyes with a quiet kind of intimacy that makes Oliver ache. Paul’s hands are still on Elio’s face, holding him in place, stroking the rings under his eyes with his thumbs.

“You think you’ll be okay to meet my sister for brunch tomorrow?”

Elio’s voice is low, but still excruciatingly audible. “I can think of a few things that might sober me up.”

Something finally snaps then, and Oliver turns around.

He’s going to be sick.

It’s strange, he thinks as he bolts down the street, how he thought that his body and Elio’s were made to fit each other’s. That at one point in time his sense of self was inflated enough that he really and truly believed in something as ridiculous as destiny, as hopeful as soulmates, as if their finding each other wasn’t just luck, but predetermined. For the first time in his life, Oliver had eased into some sense of belonging — he knew Elio had felt it, too.

But maybe it was not Oliver and Elio who made a perfect fit. Maybe Elio was just the kind of person who made himself fit. The kind of person who loved passionately, and unapologetically; who gave everything in wholes and never spared a piece for himself.

They looked like they belonged together, Elio and Paul. They looked the way Oliver imagined he had once looked with Elio, on that one carefree, stolen night in Rome, when they were two nameless, faceless people free to be and do whatever they pleased.

Once some of the shock starts to wear off, the indignation swiftly replaces it. There are so many loose ends to this, so many questions that only lead to more questions. For one thing, Oliver has known Paul for years, and never once thought he was interested in men.

Then again, it’s not as if Oliver has been forthright about that, either.

And then there’s the fact that Paul is thirty to Elio’s eighteen. The fact that they’ve both been lying to Oliver — Elio at the dinner table every Wednesday and at brunch every Saturday, and Paul every single day they pass each other’s offices.

He wonders how long they’d been keeping it from him. He wonders, with a fresh surge of paranoia, how much Elio had told Paul about that summer in Italy, about Oliver’s inclinations. He imagines them laughing about it, laughing at how they’d duped him —  Couch is all yours — Thanks, man — just one of countless little performances the two of them have probably been putting on for weeks. No — months. Oliver honestly can’t tell.

Paul has a nickname for Elio. Elio has the keys to Paul’s place. They’re getting brunch with Paul’s sister.

Elio is leaving Oliver behind.

He should be happy. Relieved, even. Paul is a good man. A great one. He’s loyal to his friends, passionate about his work, patient with his students, kind to strangers.

Oliver has never hated him more.

He’s keyed up by the time he gets back to the apartment. He wants to call Paul’s place and tell him he knows. No, he wants to call Paul’s place, ask for Elio, and tell Elio he knows. He wants to puncture their happy, blissful bubble, wants to go back in time and stop himself from ever introducing the two of them, or so far back that he never leaves Italy, that he just holds Elio and holds him and holds him and lets the damn train roll away without him on it.

Carly’s asleep, thank God. He stares at her, her hair spilling onto the pillow, her knees bent the covers tangled, and feels some of the anger hissing out of his bones. He isn’t angry because Paul and Elio lied to him. He’s angry because there was a door that he knew was closed, but now the door has disappeared. He and Elio have both moved on. It’s as if what happened between them never happened at all.

He climbs into bed with Carly, willing himself not to feel like a stranger in it. But he doesn’t know Elio anymore, and by extension, he cannot know himself.

The phone rings around eight, while Carly’s in the shower. Elio’s voice is hoarse and groggy on the other end.

“Hey. it looks like Carly left her ID here,” says Elio by way of greeting. “I can drop it off if she hasn’t left yet.”

Oliver’s jaw is so tight is feels like it might snap. “That’d be great.”

“Be there in a few.”

Oliver meets him downstairs, his expression neutral, his resolve ironclad: this is the moment he starts holding Elio at arm’s length. This is the moment he stops acknowledging the distance between them, and starts respecting it.

But Elio shows up all pale in the face and red in the nose, looking wrecked from last night’s shenanigans, and the resolve instantly starts to weaken.

“Here,” says Elio, holding out the ID. 

Oliver takes it with a stiff hand. “Thanks.”

Elio grins at him. “How’s your hangover, old man?”

Oliver offers him the faintest of smirks. “Very funny,” he says. And then, with a measure of self-hatred: “Later.”

He turns on his heel, and heads back into the building — but not before seeing the grin on Elio’s face wilt in the early morning chill. He climbs back up the stairs, both satisfied and horrified with himself. A part of him wants Elio to hurt the same way he is hurting; a part of him that is at odds with his bone-deep, concrete belief that Elio should never be hurt.

By the end of the morning, the regret is churning in his stomach, already hardening into self-hatred. He’s twenty-six goddamn years old and acting like a toddler. The lying aside, Elio hasn’t even done anything wrong. In fact, he’s done precisely what Oliver asked of him, what Oliver has done himself: moved on.

It seems, though, that despite the brevity of their exchange, some amount of damage is already done. A few days later Elio calls the apartment at a time he knows Oliver will be teaching, and tells Carly he’ll be at a study group during their usual Wednesday dinner. On Friday, when they’re all supposed to meet up for drinks to celebrate Marie’s promotion, Elio is a no-show, and even Paul doesn’t seem to have an explanation for it. Elio calls the next morning about an hour before they usually get brunch at the deli halfway between their apartments, and tells Carly he’s sick.

Oliver grabs the phone from her. “How about tomorrow?”

It’s the closest thing to I’m sorry that he’ll be able to say.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, and then a guarded, “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. See you at eleven.”

The next day Elio meets them at their usual spot, looking wary and muted. Oliver goes out of his way to pat him on the back, to ask him about his classes and make eye contact when he can — I’m sorry, I’m sorry — but the whole thing feels stilted somehow. There is still this cavern between them, a secret now that has bridged both sides, has made the air too heavy.

“Did Elio seem a little off to you?” Carly muses later that night, when they’re reading in bed.

Oliver purses his lips. “Probably just still getting over his cold.”

“Probably.”

They ease back into their routine, or at least they give the appearance of it. Oliver notices that Elio doesn’t linger at their apartment for another glass of wine and watch television on the couch with Carly the way he usually does. He stops inviting them to get drinks out with his friends, or telling them about hole-in-the-wall shops he’s found. Oliver knows that the city is winding down for the holidays and that it’s party to blame, but the distance is too pronounced for that.

In the middle of December they all start disappearing, one by one. Carly heads up to her parents a few days early for her sister’s baby shower. Marie heads back to her parent’s place in California. Roger cavalierly skips one of his finals to go on a road trip with his brother and some friends. In a few days, Oliver will join Carly, and Elio will meet up with his parents at the villa, and Manhattan will be free of the lot of them until the new year.

The third night after Carly leaves for her parents, Oliver is woken by the phone ringing. He blinks himself awake, not entirely surprised — she’d mentioned she was getting drinks with friends, and she has never quite outgrown the habit of calling him drunk after a night out to say hi. He raises his eyebrows, already poised to tease her.

“Hello?”

“Oliver?”

The smirk drops from his face. “Elio?”

“Yeah, um …”

His voice sounds far away, like he’s holding the receiver from his mouth. Oliver is all at once more awake than he’s ever been.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” says Elio. “Sorry. I’m fine, it’s fine, I — "

“No, it’s not. Tell me what’s going on.”

Elio sucks in a wet breath. “Um — I’m fine, really, I’m sorry for calling so late — I just — kind of got mugged.”

“You what? ”

“I’m okay, it’s fine — "

“Are you at the dorms?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He’s expecting Elio to revert to that self-conscious, defensive way of his — You don’t have to do that, or Really, it’s fine. Instead he says in a small voice, “Are you sure?”

His heart clenches in his chest. “Don’t move.”

Oliver hails a taxi and tells it to wait for him on the curb of the dorm. Elio’s already at the main entrance, a hoodie pulled over his head, his hands in his jacket pockets. He glances up when he sees Oliver approaching, and Oliver immediately feels more murderous than he ever has in his life.

“You said you were fine,” he says, looking at Elio’s swelling eye, at the dried blood on his cheek.

Elio shrugs at him, looking embarrassed.

“Where was this? Where did it happen?” Oliver demands, taking a step closer. He hisses when he gets close enough to see it in the light.

Elio bites his lip. “I was coming back from the practice rooms, and … well.”

“Jesus, Elio — ” You shouldn’t be out so late, he wants to say, but Elio’s eyebrows are already knit like he’s one light breeze away losing his composure. “Come on. We’ll get you sorted out.”

Fifteen minutes later, Elio is burrowed into his usual corner on their couch, holding Carly’s bright pink ice pack to his eye with a dazed look on his face. Oliver is sitting on the edge of the back of the couch, staring down at him, afraid to get any closer. He wants to wrap him into his arms. Wants to soothe the hurt with more than a flimsy pack of ice. But even after all this time he doesn’t know if he can trust himself that close to Elio, and he can’t risk it.

“What did they take?” he asks instead, focusing on the practical.

Elio gnaws on his lip. “My bag. I had my wallet and my compositions in it. At least my keys were in my pocket.”

“We can start calling and get your IDs replaced in the morning. You still have your passport?”

Elio nods. “I just …”

“What?”

“There was something in my wallet that I — “ He stops abruptly, something in his face hardening. “Never mind.”

And there it is again. That distance. That unbridgeable gap. Oliver is starting think it is less about that encounter on his doorstep the day after the party, and something else entirely; something they’ve both missed.

“I’m glad you called me. And I’m glad you’re alright,” says Oliver. “Well — relatively speaking.”

Elio huffs out a laugh, but his eyes are cautious. He knows another shoe is about to drop. Oliver does his best to do it gently.

“But … why didn’t you call Paul?”

The blood all but drains out of Elio’s face.

“You know?” he asks.

Oliver nods, careful to keep his expression as neutral as he possibly can. “Yeah. I … I saw you two together.”

Elio blows out a breath, leaning into the ice pack and staring down at his lap. “When?”

Oliver pushes himself off the edge of the couch and takes a step toward the kitchen. “After Paul’s party.”

He waits for Elio to put two and two together; waits for his confusion to crystallize into the anger that Oliver no doubt deserves, after the way he reacted the morning after. Instead Elio’s face starts to fall in that way that it does in the beats before it crumples.

“I’m sorry, Oliver. I didn’t want to keep it from you. Paul asked me not to say anything … he’s not out at work. I had to respect that.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” says Oliver, too cavalierly to be believed.

“I wanted to tell you,” says Elio, with the kind of earnestness that aches. He takes the ice pack off of his face, standing to level with Oliver. “I wanted you to know.”

His words are brutal, but Oliver can tell he doesn’t mean for them to be. “You wanted me to know?”

“I wanted you to know that — that I was — I don’t know.” Elio shifts his weight between his feet, the ice pack starting to drip on the floor. He offers Oliver this half-shrug, something that is both apology and forgiveness in one. “That it was okay. That I wasn’t … messed up from that summer, or something. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know we don’t talk about it — "

“We’re allowed to talk about it,” says Oliver shortly. “It happened.”

“Okay.” Elio swallows hard. “I didn’t know.”

Oliver stares at the wall. Elio's face is too much for him to take. “You haven’t told Paul …”

“About us? No. God, no. Oliver — I would never.”

“Of course not.”

“You’re angry,” says Elio, his voice wretched.  

Oliver closes his eyes. “Not with you.”

“Then what?”

With himself, for wanting what he can’t have. With Paul, for taking it. With his parents, for ruining him from the start. With the whole goddamn world. With Carly, even, who in all of this mess is the most blameless of them all.

But he can’t say that. None of it will ever change. To acknowledge it out loud be to damn himself like Sisyphus, pushing the same boulder up the same hill over and over and over — there would be an immediate relief once the explanation was made, once the words were aired out, but ultimately they would fall and settle right back where they started. There is no condition where they could find a solution for this — they are both too far gone now, forever following the same what if, climbing the hill of what could have been.  

It’s Elio who breaks the silence; Elio, who has quietly padded across the apartment, and is now a mere foot away from him.  

“I didn’t call Paul because — because …”

Oliver sees it then, swimming in Elio’s eyes. The same fear. The same unknowability. The same desperation that hums in his bones, even now.

“You don’t have to explain.”

Elio blinks and swipes at his cheek. “They took your note,” he says thickly. “I had it in my wallet.”

Oliver stares, uncomprehending.

Elio says the words to himself with reverence, like they are either a gift or a curse; as if they have power over him that nothing else does. “Grow up. See you at midnight.”

Oliver’s lips part in surprise. You kept it? he almost asks, but of course he did. Kept it the way Oliver kept things — the names of pieces Elio played, that he now owns on vinyl. The book with Elio’s inscription. A lone sock of Elio’s that somehow ended up wedged between the mattress and the bed back in Italy, now tucked into the corner of a drawer here in the apartment Oliver shares with his wife.

When he looks back at Elio, he seems wobbly on his feet, more uncertain than he was even on the night of that note. Oliver isn’t sure how it happens — if he’s the one who leans forward, or Elio falls into him, but he closes his eyes for a moment and there Elio is, folded into his arms, his chest against Oliver’s chest and his head buried into Oliver’s shoulder.

The whole thing is so inherent, so instinctual, that he has this sudden impression that he is not remembering the feeling of this from that summer in Italy, but from years and years ago, from his childhood and further back into some other lifetime. He runs a hand through Elio’s hair without even considering what it means and what it doesn’t; he just knows that he has to. That right now, it is the only thing that will soothe this particular hurt — this hurt that belongs not just to Elio, but to them both.

They both seem to unconsciously understand when their time is up. They pull away, slowly, guiltlessly. Oliver holds him in that in between for a beat, letting himself stare at Elio for the first time in over a year — at the dusting of freckles paled by the winter, the sweet curve of his nose, the unflinching trust in his eyes.

There is a beat when either one of them could take advantage, and know the other would forgive them. The air is charged and the circumstances are just right. One kiss, they’re both thinking, and nobody would need to know — one kiss, and no consequences for anybody but themselves.

He leans forward and presses his lips to Elio’s brow. The spell is broken. Time starts moving again in its indifferent way.

“I’m glad you’re alright,” says Oliver, which is to say — I’m sorry. I love you. Maybe I always have. And whether a live a hundred more days or a hundred more years, I will never be able to stop.

Elio smiles the kind of smile that fragments his face, beautiful and breakable. We’re allowed to talk about it, Oliver said, mere minutes ago. But they both know in that moment that this isn’t the beginning of something, but another in a long series of endings; they will never be able to speak of it again.  

Chapter Text

The time passes with brutal, unflinching speed.

In some ways, Oliver is numb to it. He takes up running again with a vengeance — he’s out every morning, rain, shine, snow, hail. Carly starts calling him Road Runner, tweaking the muscles of his legs with a smirk, occasionally questioning his dedication but never raising too many concerns about it.

He can’t tell if it’s hurting or it’s helping. It feels sometimes like there is a poison he needs to drain from his system — not just for his own sake, but for Carly’s and Elio’s, too — and running is the only way to get it out. But running, unfortunately, affords him entirely too much time to think.

But he runs and runs and manages to outrun it, until the summer comes and the Perlmans invite Oliver and Carly to spend a week with them in the villa.

Oliver hesitates. Elio’s only been gone for two weeks now, but Oliver misses him with an ache that frankly scares him; like he didn’t realize how dependent he was on the regularity of seeing Elio, didn’t realize it had become something of a drug, and the withdrawal is swift and uncompromising.

But more practically, he hasn’t been to Italy since their summer together. The last thing Oliver wants to do open up old wounds, when some days they still seem so fresh that they haven’t had a chance to scab.

As if he can sense it, Elio picks up the phone from some other place in the house, and says, “Please come. I’m so bored.”

Oliver can hear someone laugh and chide him on the other end — either Marzia or Chiara, it sounds like — so Oliver knows that Elio is just saying it for his benefit. Elio is giving him permission to be there — or rather, giving him the excuse to do something that he knows in his heart that he shouldn’t.

They arrive and this time, Elio’s already beaming and flying down the front walk to meet them with a hug when the car pulls up. There is none of his guardedness, none of that wariness there once was, back when Elio was at times as confounding as a double-sided coin. Oliver can’t help but search for some crack in his demeanor, something that will give him away, but is both disappointed and relieved to find none.

Elio delights in showing Carly around his home, almost manic in his enthusiasm. He takes her to his mother’s favorite gelato spot, asks Anchise to take them out on the boat, happily recruits them for volleyball games with his cousins. There is no trace of the Elio who once lazed by the pool, who napped on the couch in the sitting room, who took long, furtive glances at Oliver out of the corner of his eye when he thought Oliver was asleep behind his sunglasses. He seems constantly in motion, like his body is a live wire, never in one place for more than a moment.

It’s driving Oliver mad.

In fact, the entire villa is. He is paranoid, maybe. That he’ll turn the corner and see some ghost of himself and Elio, kissing under a shady tree; that he’ll see their shadows on the deck, one hand reaching out for another; that the wind will moan Elio’s name in Elio’s voice. Several times he catches Samuel measuring him from afar with a gaze that is probably just as friendly as it was two years ago, but suddenly the weight of the Perlmans’ eyes make his skin crawl — they know. There are no secrets here. The farce of his existence is almost livable an ocean away, but where the walls here used to whisper his secrets at him, now they all seem to scream.

Carly jokes at the beginning of the trip that maybe Italy is where they can make a little Oliver together; but every night after Carly falls asleep he returns to his rock, the one by the shore where he used to wile away the hours when he couldn’t sleep. It isn’t enough to curb his desire, the way it sometimes was then. He wants to keep walking, further into the night, up the road that winds into another road that leads down the path to Monet’s berm. Wants to sink his feet into the ice cold water, plunge his face into and scream: it happened, it happened, I was there and so was he.

He thinks that Elio will join him. There is no way that Elio is sleeping soundly, no way that he doesn’t hear the door to the room creaking open and clicking shut, hear the whine of the floorboards under Oliver’s feet.

On their last night, Elio isn’t in his bedroom. Carly falls asleep in that easy, instant way she always does, but Oliver’s eyes are on the door, certain that Elio is sending some kind of message. Meet me in your spot. Why else would he not be in his room, when he knows full well he’ll have to sneak through Oliver and Carly’s to get to it?

So Oliver steps quietly down the stairs, his eyes set on the front door.

Before he reaches the last step he hears the sound of someone letting out a breath, sees the dim lamp light through the crack in the door to Samuel’s study.  

“It’s like I said,” murmurs Samuel. “It gets easier with time.”

He recognizes the responding voice as Elio’s, but he can’t make out what he’s saying. He doesn’t have to. It’s low and muffled, spoken into the crook of an arm or the plush of the couch.

“I know,” says Samuel, and by then Oliver is already wrenching himself away, climbing back up the stairs, praying he doesn’t make any noise. He slides back into bed, his bones hollow and his heart too heavy for them. He doesn’t even bother closing his eyes to try to sleep, waiting for Elio to come up the stairs — waiting, at least, for a quiet beat in the dark. For a moment the two of them could look into each other’s eyes, and absorb some of the ache of this; for a moment to mourn something that was strangled at birth, but somehow still refuses to die.  

But Elio never comes back up the stairs. The next morning the sun is shining, and Elio is bright-eyed and smiling when he meets them for breakfast. He hugs them both goodbye, a little bonier than Oliver remembers him being, and waves as their car pulls away.

Oliver is in a daze all the way to the airport. Their flight is delayed, so they get themselves coffee and split a biscotti, tucking themselves into a corner apart of the bustle of other travelers. As Oliver turns the page on the book he is both reading and not reading, Carly looks up unexpectedly and stares at him, without saying anything.

He meets her gaze, and understands in that instant that there is something he has missed — something he is about to pay dearly for.

“That summer you were here … you were different when you came back.”

Oliver smiles carefully. “You said so at the time.”

“Yes, but I don’t think I understood until now,” says Carly. She doesn’t blink, searching his face so intently that he feels as though every transgression he’s ever made is carved into it. “You fell in love, didn’t you?”

Oliver’s breath hovers in his throat for a moment. “With Italy?”

She shakes her head. With Elio, he is sure she’s about to say. His paranoia has reached a fever pitch. This is it. The moment he’s been dreading, the moment he’s been waiting for, the moment he can never decide will crucify him or save his life.

“I saw the way she looks at you — Chiara.”

Oliver laughs. Carly’s eyes immediately fill with tears.

“Oh — Carly. Oh, god, no. I’m sorry,” says Oliver, “it’s not funny — ”

“It really isn’t,” she says quietly, even as the tears start streaming down her face. “You think I don’t notice when you — when you disappear from me, Oliver, but I do. Not just when you were sneaking out of our room doing god only knows what, but — but all the time. Sometimes it’s like — you’re here and then you’re just gone.”

“Carly,” Oliver breathes, gathering her hands in his, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have told you, or invited you to come with me, because honestly, all I did was go out to a rock by the shore and sit. I promise you that.”

Carly buries her face into his shoulder. She so rarely cries that the sight of it startles him, makes him all too aware that this is not a blip, not a funny little misunderstanding, but the tip of a much larger iceberg.

“Fine,” she says, after a moment, pulling away to look at him again. Her expression has lost its charge, its defensiveness; more than anything, she looks afraid. “But the rest of the time …”

He squeezes her hands. Feels the pinch of her wedding ring against his fingers. “I love you,” he says, and he does. It’s not just that Carly is a person who is incredibly easy to love — it’s everything. The shared history. The empathy. The weight of their parents’ expectations. The way they can glance at each other across a crowded room and silently communicate a joke nobody else will understand. The fact that he could go anywhere, be anywhere with her, and be happy to be at her side.

She leans into him then, and he wraps an arm around her and pulls her in, letting her cry into his chest as the busy airport hustles around them.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s for this and for so much else — a sorry to her, a sorry to Elio, a sorry for every moment in the past two years he has cheated them both at the other’s expense. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says into his shirt. “Just come back.”

They spend the rest of the summer in a bubble. Their friends are all gone until the semester starts back up again, so it’s Oliver and Carly, Carly and Oliver, eating and sleeping and reading and running in the park as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

But summer ends, and Elio returns, his hair a little longer, his skin a little tanner, his frame a little skinnier; Oliver takes one look at him standing in their doorway, and the bubble gets smaller and smaller until he is the only one in it, until he is suffocating.

“Did they starve you over there?” Carly demands — and time starts moving again, against Oliver’s will. “Sit down. If you don’t finish everything on your plate you’re not allowed to watch television.”

Elio cracks a grin. “You’ve already got this whole Jewish mother thing down.”

There’s a moment where Oliver’s heart clenches in his chest, but Carly doesn’t skip a beat. “You know it,” she says, sticking her tongue out at Elio and pointedly not looking at Oliver as she skits into the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine.

And so it goes, the way it usually does: Elio and Carly are fine left to their own devices, riffing on each other’s jokes, asking about each other’s summers, complaining about the heat, while Oliver joins in just often enough that it won’t seem like he’s brooding. It strikes him as odd, how drastically their roles have reversed: where Elio used to the the quiet, cagey one at the dinner table, now he is the one who carries the conversation and tries to include Oliver in it when he can.

They spiral back into their routines, but even the reliability of that starts to fracture: Carly is distant and distracted, Elio is too skinny, and Oliver runs until he has hairline fractures on both his foot and his knee and then continues running anyway. It seems like they are all pushing at the edges of their worlds, testing them to see how much give is left, to see how much more they can take before they snap.

October marks Elio’s 20th birthday. He and Roger invite a group of friends over to their apartment to celebrate with wine and cake, Elio insisting that he doesn’t want to do anything more than that with midterms on the horizon. They all get a respectable amount of tipsy, and Roger starts playing one of Elio’s recent compositions on the piano until Elio looks so embarrassed he might burst.

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop,” says Roger, before abruptly playing the open chords to “Like A Virgin” and tailspinning the party into semi-drunken karaoke madness.

At some point there is a lull from everyone just short of earning them a noise complaint from Elio’s neighbors, when Paul bashfully rises to his feet and snakes an arm around Elio’s waist. Oliver sees what is about to happen just before it happens, and is already bracing himself for it like the headlights of an oncoming train. 

“I just — I wanted to say that … Elio and I are — well. We’re together, and have been for awhile.” His face is bright red; Elio leans up and presses a quick kiss to his cheek, and some of his courage seems to return to him. His lip quirks upward and he says, in a wry tone, “Also — I’m gay.”

Marie is the one who breaks the silence: “Well, shit. It’s about time.”

Paul lets out a strained laugh. “What?”

Carly holds out her hand. “Pay up,” she says to Marie.

“What?” asks Elio, a grin already blooming on his face.

“You idiots. Marie and I ran into you two necking in the Village in April,” says Carly.

Oliver nearly chokes on his beer. “What?”

“April?” says Roger, with a scoff. “I saw them holding hands on the 1 train in March.”

“Oh my god,” says Paul, burying his face in his hands as Elio dissolves into laughter, leaning into Paul’s side. “You assholes.”

“Anyway, we made a bet on when you guys were going to finally spill the beans, and evidently, I’ve won,” says Carly, folding up Marie’s twenty dollar bill and ostentatiously sticking it in the little pocket in the front of her shirt.

Oliver balks at his wife. “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything to me,” he says, aware of how ironic the words are even before he says them.

Carly does look a little rueful about it. “It didn’t seem like my business to talk about,” she says quietly, her eyes asking for forgiveness.  

Oliver pesters her, teasing her and Marie both, focusing his eyes anywhere except for Elio and Paul. He should be alarmed that Carly kept something of this magnitude from him, all things considered, but he’s so grateful to have his joking indignation to keep him occupied that he honestly doesn’t care. It feels like the walls are caving in on him. He wants to leave, wants to sprint into the park and run and run and run and — 

“Can someone cut the cake already?” Roger sighs. When nobody immediately gets up, he sticks a finger into some of the icing on the side and licks it. “I’m starving.”

Elio threatens to physically leave the apartment out of embarrassment if they sing happy birthday to him, but Carly at least manages to convince him to let her light some candles. She sets it in front of him, Paul sitting so close to him on the couch that Elio is practically in his lap, and says, “Make a wish.”

And Paul — hateful, terrible, traitorous Paul — turns to him and says in a teasing voice, “I’m pretty sure they’ve already come true.”

Elio knocks his head into Paul’s shoulder with affection, then closes his eyes for a beat and blows out the candles. Oliver excuses himself to go to the bathroom, and gives himself exactly three minutes to recover — three minutes to hold his head in his hands, to splash water on his face, to absorb the self-loathing that nearly paralyzes him when he catches sight of his reflection.

Paul has now done for Elio what Oliver never could; stood beside him, proudly and unapologetically, and told the world, This one’s mine. He’s made it look so easy, so uncomplicated. And that’s the worst part: maybe it is.

The hurt is somehow as fresh as it was when he first caught them kissing outside of Paul’s building, nearly a year ago; it was easy to pretend it wasn’t happening, when he wasn’t there to see it. Now the knowledge won’t just haunt him. It will be there always, directly in front of him, or in the periphery, a constant, relentless ache.

In bed that night Carly purses her lips and says, “You already knew about Elio, didn’t you?”

Oliver nods. There is a tension in the air that follows — a quiet acknowledgment that they are, apparently, the type of married couple who can keep secrets from each other after all. He is brutally reminded of his own mother and father, of the curtain that seemed to shroud every interaction between them. The thought of it pains him.

But Carly doesn’t seem to resent it. She nods back, and there is a quiet understanding between them. They may not be on the same page on a lot of things right now, but he supposes when it comes to protecting Elio, they still are.

“I’d be worried, if it were anyone other than Paul.”

Oliver closes his eyes. “Hmm.”

“But Elio’s always seemed like — an old soul, I guess.”

“Yes,” Oliver agrees. “He is.”

The next morning Oliver runs for so long that both of his socks are full of blood when he takes off his shoes.

They’re all set to go to Carly’s parents for Thanksgiving, when her parents unexpectedly cancel on them because they have to go take care of a pipe that burst in their other house upstate. By the time they call to let Carly know it’s too late to catch a train to Oliver’s family, so they decide to bunker down in New York for Thanksgiving and wait to see their families until the winter holidays.

Oliver has never stayed in the city during Thanksgiving, which is why, when he wakes the morning of, he can’t for the life of him explain why it’s so damn noisy outside — that is, until Carly rolls over and groans, “The parade.”

“Oh, Jesus. How?” Oliver asks. It’s 15 degrees outside, and even with the heat on full blast their apartment is chilly.

Carly burrows further into the comforter. “Let’s stay here all day.”

“We have no food.”

Carly responds by grabbing the comforter and pulling it over her head.

They do eventually emerge, once it occurs to them that the very few places that are open will probably close early for the holiday. It takes them three blocks to find a place that even has an “Open” sign on it, and by then Carly’s teeth are chattering she’s walking slightly behind him so she won’t get the brunt of the wind. They’re about to walk into the shop when Carly grabs his arm.

“Is that Elio?”

The coffee shop next door is open, it seems — there’s a curly tangle of hair visible with its back turned to the window, one that unmistakably belongs to Elio.

“That can’t be good,” Carly murmurs, letting go of Oliver’s arm.

Oliver is too stunned by the sight of Elio to put two and two together. “What?”

“Isn’t he supposed to be in Connecticut?” Which is to say: Isn’t he supposed to be with Paul?

Carly is already opening the door to the coffee shop before Oliver can fully process this — before he can fully come to terms with the selfish thrill that is immediately dampened with self-hatred. Carly says Elio’s name, and he turns around, his eyes unmistakably red-rimmed, his expression glazed.

“C-Carly,” he stammers. His eyes flit from her to Oliver, his face snapping back into place with almost heartwrenching efficiency. “What are you … I thought you were …”

“Got stuck in the city,” says Carly. “You, too?”

“Um — ” Elio blinks and stares down into his coffee cup, his voice thick. “Yeah, yeah, me too.”

Oliver pulls out the chair next to Elio and wordlessly sits down next to him, searching his face. His nose is bright red, his cheeks flushed, his eyes unwilling to meet Oliver’s. His hair is so long now that his curls hang in his face, a curtain between him and the rest of the world.

“What are you doing here?”

Elio answers the question without really answering it; he knows full well Oliver means here as in Manhattan, and not here as in the coffee shop. “Well — the pipes froze in the apartment yesterday, so there's not heat. So I’ve just been hanging out in coffee shops while they’re open.”

“Elio!” Carly exclaims. “You poor thing. Why didn’t you call?”

“I didn’t realize you guys were still here,” he says.

“Well, we are. And you’re coming home with us.”

“Oh — no, no, really, I’m — ”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Oliver, reaching forward and putting his hand on Elio’s wrist. It’s freezing cold. Elio flinches a bit at his touch, looking at Oliver’s fingers as if they are some kind of apparition, but doesn’t pull away. “Come with us. We’re grabbing some food and holing up for the night.”

“Yeah?”

Carly tweaks his cheek. “We can get so drunk we don’t even notice the cold.”

Elio smiles a bit at that, like he is coming out of some fog. “Well, in that case.”

They load up at the store on baguettes, some cheeses, deli meat, mashed potatoes, three different types of pies, and more wine than they could possibly drink if they were snowed in for the week. Then they make a quick pit stop at Elio’s place, now much closer to their own since Roger and Elio moved out of the dorms, so Elio can grab a few things he’ll need for the night. As soon as Elio is out of range, Carly leans into Oliver.

“Do you think they broke up?”

Oliver shakes his head. “I’m sure it’s just a — squabble, or something.”

Carly purses her lips. “I hope so.”

Oliver feels like a criminal in that moment, for hoping the very opposite; like everything about Elio being with them today is stolen. He finds himself getting carried away again, imagining that Elio and Paul have broken up with such vividness that it veers more toward fantasy than possibility, like he really is sick for letting the hope carry him so far.

They spend the night drinking and watching movies on VHS, with Elio sandwiched in between them. Carly ends up grabbing one of Oliver’s sweaters and putting it on Elio and then stuffing him under a mountain of blankets when he is still shivering from the cold. The apartment doesn’t ever get any warmer, but by nightfall they’re all just buzzed enough from the wine that it’s tolerable, and by ten o’clock they’re all half-asleep where they sit.

“You gonna be okay out here, bub?” Carly asks.

It’s the closest they’ve come all day to acknowledging the fact that Elio is very much supposed to be out of the city right now. There’s a brief moment when Elio seems to steel himself, as if he will shrug off the concern in Carly’s voice, ignore the unspoken question she is clearly asking in the spoken one.

But then Elio’s eyes mist a bit, and he reaches out suddenly and wraps his lanky arms around her. “Yeah,” he says, as Carly pulls him in and and squeezes him tightly, with the kind of love that makes Oliver’s chest ache. Over her shoulder Elio blinks offers Oliver a slight smile. “Thanks for letting me crash with you guys.”

“Of course,” says Carly, stroking his back. “You’re always welcome here. You know that, right? You’re family.”

Elio bites his lip, looking away from Oliver and burrowing his head into Carly’s neck. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Family.”

They turn in after that, and Oliver surprises himself by falling asleep so immediately that when he wakes up in the middle of the night he is disoriented enough to panic a little bit, not entirely sure if he’s in his own home. He feels Carly’s hand resting on his chest in the dark and the fear loosens its grip on his chest. He realizes that he both desperately needs to pee and even more desperately needs a glass of water — he can already feel the beginnings of what is promising to be a killer hangover by morning.

He relieves himself, then opens the door to his bedroom as quietly as he can, careful not to disturb Elio. But Elio is sitting on the couch with his eyes wide open, so fully awake that Oliver finds himself disoriented yet again — as if it’s the middle of the day, and Oliver accidentally slept through most of it.

“You’re up,” says Oliver, stupidly.

Elio gnaws on his lower lip. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

Elio lets out a self-conscious breath of a laugh. “I don’t know … I don’t know.”

Oliver nods, trying to hold in the slight smirk at Elio’s tone, which has taken on a slightly delirious air. He crosses the room to grab himself a glass and fill it up at the sink, and Elio turns away, expecting Oliver to go right back into his room. But Oliver walks over to the couch, to where Elio is sitting with his knees hiked up to his chest, and says, “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Nah,” says Elio, shrugging. Oliver’s sweater is so big on him that it looks misshapen, tilted to one shoulder. It reminds Oliver of the shirt Elio asked for when he left Italy the first time, the one he somehow knows Elio still has. “You?”

“Already nursing tomorrow’s hangover, it would seem.”

Elio smiles in earnest then, his eyes grazing Oliver from his chest back up to his face. “Can’t keep up with me and Carly?”

“Apparently not.” Oliver leans on the edge of the couch, staring down at Elio. For a few moments he just stares, and watches as the smile on Elio’s face starts to thin, as he realizes that the silence settling over the room can only end in one thing: “Elio … what happened?”

Elio’s eyes immediately drop to his lap. “I don’t know,” he says again, this time in a murmur.

Oliver stays very still. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

Elio looks up at him, his eyes unexpectedly charged. “No — I mean, I really don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what happened.”

He says it the way a concussion patient might tell a doctor that he can’t remember the moments before a car accident, can only remember waking up after it happened. Elio blinks, as if he is still trying to retrace the steps that led him here. Oliver cautiously moves to the other side of the couch, almost sitting on the end opposite Elio before deciding to sit in the middle instead, right beside him.

Elio’s gaze is defensive when he notices the shift in the couch and sees Oliver sitting there, as if Oliver has come there to judge him, to tell him what he did wrong.

“Elio,” he says softly.

Elio shrugs again, as if he there is some weight on him, but he doesn’t know where it is or how to shake it off.

“He … he was different all week. We woke up one morning, and he just …” Elio’s mouth stays open for a moment, and then he closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Sorry. Sorry. You don’t want to hear about this.”

“No. Tell me,” says Oliver solemnly.

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” Elio breathes, as if he has been waiting for days to get it off his chest. “I keep — thinking about the day before things changed, over and over, trying to think of what I did or said, but I — I can’t.”

“And you asked him?”

“Of course,” says Elio. “And it was like — talking to a stranger. He wouldn’t say. And then when he finally did want to talk, he started asking me all these things point-blank — why we never talked about moving in together, did I ever think I was going to settle down, if I wanted kids one day …”

Oliver feels an immediate flash of anger, one that is every bit protectiveness as it is possessiveness. “You’re twenty. He shouldn’t be putting that on you.”

Elio shakes his head, still looking bewildered. “It’s not that I — don’t want a serious relationship. I just thought it already was one.”

Oliver pushes past the instinctual hurt and says, “But you don’t want to move in with him.”

Elio answers without quite answering, in that Elio way of his. “I didn’t say that.”

“So you don’t want kids.”

“I don’t know, I … probably. One day.”

“Then what’s the problem, Elio?”

Elio opens his mouth, poised to say something that dies before the air leaves his throat. He looks up at Oliver with an expression so unflinching, so open, that it feels like it tilts the room.

“I tried.”

Every word until now has been spoken just above a whisper, but this Elio can’t seem to tame. The words have traveled up from somewhere deeper than Oliver and Elio have gone in a long, long time — so deep that it takes a moment for Oliver to understand Elio’s meaning, when in another time he might have understood before the words were even uttered.

“But nothing I said could convince him I was all the way in, and … and I think he might be right.”

Oliver breathes his name without meaning to, without remembering where he is. “Elio …”

Elio shakes his head, and the smile on his face — small, apologetic, without any bitterness — cinches something in Oliver’s chest.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says, laughing a bit on the second one, shaking his head. “I’m not — I’m okay, Oliver. Really. It’s better that I know now.”

Oliver already suspects, but he still has to ask. “Know what?”

“That it’s never going to be like it was. Like we were.” Elio shrugs, but Oliver can see the tiniest crack in his nonchalance, can see the slight wince before he speaks again. “I’ll know that for next time. And the next, and … well. Life is long.” The way he says it, he has looked, for the first time, more strikingly like his father than he ever has; not in appearance, but in the groundedness of him, the strange calm. “At some point, maybe, I’ll stop comparing everything to what we had.”

Oliver doesn’t understand how Elio can say these words so easily when they are upending everything — the careful balance they have maintained for two years is gone, the scales thrown out the window, the surface unleveled. He is reeling with the implications, both spoken and unspoken.

Oliver’s heart is slamming in his chest like a battering ram. “What if …”

Elio burrows further into Oliver’s sweater, hugging the fabric to himself. “What if,” he agrees, with a bit of wryness in his eyes.

“No. I mean — what if — ” Oliver doesn’t remember walking around the corner of the couch, doesn’t remember sitting down beside Elio, but here he is, as if he has always been. “I don’t think life is long enough for that.”

Only then do Elio’s eyebrows seem to wobble for a moment, as if he is about to give into something. “What?”

“I don’t think we ever get to forget.”

Elio searches his face — no, Elio is waiting. Waiting for the moment that Oliver cushions the words with some excuse for saying them — It’s late, or I don’t know what I’m saying — waiting for Oliver to do what he usually does, and find some way to take them back.

Oliver’s mouth has gone dry. He suddenly can’t remember how.

So Elio does it for him. “We drank a lot,” he says, blowing out a breath.

Oliver leans in, pressing onward. It’s like his wheels have been spinning for years and only have just found traction with the ground. “Do you ever think about what would have happened if we’d …”

Elio flinches, but makes no attempt to pull away. “You can’t ask me that.”

“Why?”

“You know why.” Elio’s eyes track the distance from the couch to Oliver’s bedroom door, where Carly is sleeping. “She’s like a sister to me.”

The fact that it is Elio having to remind Oliver of his own wife should horrify him, should do something to stop him in his tracks. But they are in some strange, otherworldly twilight right now. Oliver feels suspended here, in this semi-darkness, in the blue of their shadows and the depth of Elio’s uncertain eyes.

“Oliver,” says Elio gently, pleadingly. Like he’s trying to wake him up. But Elio is the one who is leaning, bridging the gap — so slowly that he doesn’t even seem to be aware of it.

Oliver says something then that he hasn’t even fully let himself acknowledge in the privacy of his own mind.

“Sometimes I close my eyes and I’m in some parallel world, where it’s us instead. In this apartment. Waking up beside you. Coming home to you at night. Traveling in the summers …”

There are tears coursing down Elio’s cheeks, so silent that he may not even be breathing.

“I kept waiting for it to stop, too, Elio.” Oliver reaches out and touches a hand to Elio’s face, cups his cheek in his palm. Elio shivers under his touch, and leans into it. “I don’t think it ever will.”

Elio’s voice is graver than Oliver’s ever heard it. “Don’t say that,” he breathes. “I’ll die if it’s true.”

Is it better to speak or to die? Oliver hears the words rattle in some distant part of his brain, and understands now that it was never an “or,” that the two options were never options at all. He either speaks and he dies, or he doesn’t speak and he dies. There is no way to cheat it now.

Elio leans, then, and Oliver is resigned to it — to the mistake they’re about to make, to the cruelty they’re about to commit. It seems in this moment that there is no consequence that can hurt either of them more than they are already hurt.

And something too warm and too thick to be tears grazes the hand Oliver has on Elio’s face, and he sees the blood starting to stream out of Elio’s nose. Elio sees Oliver’s eyes widen before he notices it himself, inhaling sharply and pulling back, jamming his palm to his face to try and stop the flow.

“Shit,” says Elio, and all at once his face is a mess of tears and blood and anguish. “Shit , I’m sorry, shit — ”

“You’re okay, it’s okay,” says Oliver, leaping up to grab paper towels and an ice pack. He is waiting for that rush of oh my god, what did you almost just do, the relief of the interruption, but the only regret that he feels is for the mess he’s made of Elio.  

In the midst of this momentary chaos, the door to the bedroom creaks open. “What’s going … Elio,” says Carly, blinking at the blood on his face.

Elio scrambles to his feet, wide-eyed. Carly has already crossed the room to him, and evidently not a moment too soon — Elio tilts and almost seems to go slack for a moment, dizzy from the nosebleed, and Carly only just manages to catch him by the arm and ease him back on the couch before he goes down.

“What happened? Did he fall? Why is he — ”

“Just a nosebleed,” Elio murmurs into the sleeve of Oliver’s sweater, which is now soaked with blood.

“Jesus,” Carly mutters, taking the ice pack from Oliver and easing it onto Elio’s face herself. She looks at Oliver, then, and the concern in her face seems to stiffen. She looks at Oliver, and then back at Elio. “What was — did something happen?”

“No,” says Oliver. Too quickly.

But Carly isn’t looking at him. She’s looking at Elio, who is staring back at her, his eyes still red-rimmed and his head tilted back.

“Elio,” she says, her voice shaking. “Did you … “

Elio’s eyes are welling with tears again. If the last ten seconds haven’t given them away, then this undoubtedly will.

“Did you tell him?” Carly finally asks.

Elio takes a shuddering breath. “Tell him what?”

Carly watches his face for a moment, and then blinks something back into herself, turning away from Elio. “Never mind.”

“Tell me what?”

“Nothing — I’ll — we’ll talk about it later,” says Carly, with a strained smile. She puts a hand on Elio’s shoulder and strokes her thumb on it. The sight of it makes Oliver lurch with the guilt he should have remembered much earlier, but still does nothing to make him want to take it back. “I’ll get you some water and another sweater.”

Elio makes a noise to protest, but she squeezes his shoulder to let him know it’s going to fall on deaf ears and then hops off the couch, disappearing into the bedroom for another sweater. When Elio’s eyes sweep up to Oliver he looks fully and utterly wrecked.

“I’m — ”

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.” He puts his hand under Elio’s chin, tilts his face up to look at him. “Don’t.”

Elio pulls away, blinking, his eyes cloudy and unreadable. Carly comes back with another sweater and motions for Elio to pull off the bloody one. He sits up, peeling it off, and Oliver sees that Carly wasn’t just mother henning Elio earlier — he really has lost weight in the last few months. Oliver wonders then just how long Paul and Elio have been having problems — wonders if Elio just assumed Oliver wasn’t the kind of friend he could talk to these things about.

He supposes he isn’t. If anything, they just proved he never could be.

Elio is gone when they wake up in the morning; on the kitchen table there’s a note thanking them, and a bag of bagels with cream cheese that he must have gotten from down the street and dropped back off before he left.

Carly barely speaks to Oliver for the entire day. He waits for the other shoe to drop, for the accusations to be made. For whatever she was referencing last night to come out in full force in the light of day.

But it doesn’t. Not that day, or the next, or the next. Classes start again, and Oliver and Carly are infallibly polite to each other — thoughtful, even — but during the day they barely look at each other, and at night they don’t touch.

It’ll make it easier, maybe. Because Oliver wakes up that day after Thanksgiving, the clarity is as simple as it is brutal: he can’t keep living like this. Neither of them can. What they have between them is something that no amount of time, no amount of distance will ever be able to ease, and the longer they go on like this, the longer they will be leading half-lives.

He decides to do it on the following Friday. They don’t have plans for the weekend, so it won’t be interrupting anything. It’s all so very logical, so clear-headed, the plans that he makes: the way he will sit her down, and what exactly he will say. He’s decided, for now, to leave Elio out of it. They haven’t done anything wrong enough to merit it, for one thing, and for another — Oliver doesn’t want to assume that Elio will even want the things that Oliver wants after this. His silence has never been more terrifying than it is right now, but in some ways in catalyzes Oliver, gives him the resolve that he needs. He never wants to endure distance from Elio again.

The night before he’s supposed to talk to Carly, he finds himself out to dinner with colleagues, interviewing a potential new hire for the department. Paul corners Oliver afterward and asks him if he wants to grab another drink. Oliver opens his mouth to say no, but there’s an urgency in Paul’s eyes that compels him.

Paul keeps cracking his knuckles and looking at the drink menu long after they’ve ordered, making uncomfortable small talk. A good twenty minutes pass and they’ve both nearly finished their drinks when Oliver starts thinking of polite ways to excuse himself and go home. As if he senses this, Paul reaches out suddenly and touches Oliver’s arm.

“You and Elio,” he says, and then seems unable to say anything more.

Oliver goes completely still. Once he is certain nobody is within earshot, he leans in, his tone unyielding. “Paul — ”

“Were you involved?” Paul asks in a rush, knowing otherwise Oliver won’t give him the chance.

It feels like a betrayal to Elio to lie. “I have a wife,” he says instead. For at least another day, that is the truth.

Paul’s expression is somehow both desperate and humiliated; Oliver reluctantly feels the edge of his anger starting to wear off. Paul was his friend long before he was dating Elio, and for the most part, he has been good to him. Oliver can’t fault him for existing, as much as he has wanted to in this past year.

“I’m sorry,” says Paul. He knocks back the rest of his drink, and only then does Oliver realize that Paul has surpassed tipsy, and is wallowing in something else. “I … this is ridiculous. I just — I thought the other day, when he was sleeping — I could have sworn I heard him murmuring your name.”

Holding back the smile that threatens to bloom on his face is perhaps the most impressive feat of Oliver’s life. Instead he finishes off his own drink, raising his eyebrows as if to say, I don’t know what to tell you.

“And then I figured … since he was staying with you …”

“Wait, what?”

Paul blinks at him. “Elio’s been at your place since Thanksgiving.”

Oliver's fingers clench around his glass. “No, he hasn’t.”

Paul’s brow furrows. “But I — I went to his apartment. To apologize. I — it’s a long story, you probably …” He shakes his head, the worry brewing in his eyes as quickly as it is starting to seize Oliver’s chest. “Roger said he was staying with you and Carly until the heat was fixed.”

“I haven’t seen Elio in a week.”

Paul blows out a breath. “Maybe he just didn’t want to speak with me.”

Oliver reaches into his jacket pocket, pulling cash out of his wallet and setting it on the bar. “It’s late,” he says. “I have to go.”

He lives just up the block, but it seems to take him forever to get there. He almost ends up stopping at the payphone just to dial the numbers faster, but dismisses the thought as soon as it comes, bounding up the stairs to his apartment.

The door’s unlocked. Carly is home from her shift early. It registers dimly as he opens the door, but all at once when he sees her sitting on the couch, her eyes trained on him as if she has been waiting for him to return for some time now.

“Hey,” she says.

There’s a beat when he knows he’s supposed to ask her what’s wrong, supposed to give her some kind of opening for whatever is about to happen. Instead he finds himself blurting, “Have you heard from Elio at all this week?”

Her eyes skim the floor. “Actually … I need to talk to you about something,” she says. “Can you sit for a moment?”

No. “Yeah. Of course, of — what do you want to talk about?”

She swallows noticeably, watching and waiting for him to sit down. Her posture is stiff, almost formal — as if she has been practicing whatever it is she has to say, but still can't find the right words, or the rhythm she's supposed to say them in. After a few moments she licks her lips, seeming to steel herself, and says, “It’s ... well, it might have to do with why Elio has been avoiding us.”

Oliver closes his eyes for the barest of moments. He wonders what gave them away. He can't find it in himself to regret it — only that it didn't come out the way he planned, the way he hoped it might. 

"Carly," he says, "I need you to know that — "

“No, no, you … need to hear me out first. I think I — may have put Elio in an awkward position.” Carly’s eyes are wet, but her gaze resolved. “I think he knows something that — I should have told you a long time ago. Something that ... just, uh.” Her voice breaks, and she stares up at him not with the anger, or hatred, or despair that he might have anticipated, but shame. "Something that's become a problem." 

“What?” 

“I … well, Oliver. I’m pregnant,” says Carly. And then, before the words even have a chance to land: “But — I don’t know if you’re the father.”

Chapter Text

It is far too late to be knocking on anyone’s door. Carly begged him not to. But the moment Oliver takes everything in — her wet, pleading eyes, the weight of the confession, the implication of everything that’s happened in the weeks leading up to it — he knows he won’t be able to stay away even if he tries.

“Who is it?”

“You know damn well who it is,” Oliver answers through his teeth.

There’s a pause. “Are you going to hit me?”

Oliver huffs out a breath through his teeth. “Don’t be ridiculous. Open the damn door.”

And open it Roger does, or at least marginally. He has never looked more absurd than he does right now, standing in his sweatpants and a ratty shirt, all of the bravado blown out of him. His eyes are like saucers, bloodshot and crazed, looking at Oliver as though he has a loaded gun cocked in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” says Roger out of the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, I bet you are,” says Oliver, pushing past him into the apartment.

“It just kind of — it was never meant to — “

“I don’t give a shit what you meant,” says Oliver, crossing through the kitchen to Elio’s bedroom door. He flings it open, and turns on the light — empty. He walks in, pushing open the closet door where he knows Elio keeps his duffel bag — gone. He turns back around to face Roger, who won’t look him in the eye. “Where the hell is Elio?”

Roger seems to brace himself, and says, “He asked me not to tell anyone.”

Oliver is not sure which one of them is more surprised when he reaches out, grabs Roger by his collar, and pushes him up against the wall. Roger lets out a literal whimper, pinching his eyes shut.

“You’ve been fucking my wife,” Oliver says lowly. “You don’t get to keep shit to yourself anymore.”

Roger cracks an eye open. “You said you weren’t going to hit me.”

“Then don’t give me a reason to change my mind.”

Oliver releases him then, and Roger wheezes, a little too dramatically than the situation merits. Then he straightens up and says, “The last time he called, he said he was at some hostel in Boston.”

“The last time — when was the last time he called?”

Roger purses his lips. “Three days ago?”

“And it didn’t occur to you to tell anyone that your roommate went AWOL?”

For a moment Roger almost has the nerve to look angry, but then seems to think the better of it. “There’s been a lot going on.”

Oliver lets out a bitter laugh. “Yeah. I suppose there has been.”

Roger gives him the name of the hostel, or something close to it, and seems surprised at his good fortune when Oliver suddenly turns to leave. Oliver feels as though he can’t get out of here fast enough, but he still can’t help himself from pausing at the door.

“Elio didn’t know about you and Carly, did he?”

“No,” says Roger. The misery in his voice is palpable. “Nobody was ever supposed to know.”

There’s a moment when Oliver almost empathizes with him. He knows what it is to want something that is forbidden, knows what it does to a person when they decide the consequences are worth crossing the line. But Oliver never crossed it out of desire alone; the desire may have tempted him, but it was love that pushed him over every edge, that brought him past every hurdle, that convinces him even now, after all this time, that what he has with Elio can be saved.

He doesn’t think that Roger loves Carly. But that, at this particular moment, is none of Oliver’s concern.

When he heads back to the apartment, Carly is right where he left her, looking as though she’s been cast in stone. “Where did you go?” she asks, her voice shaking. “What did you …”

Oliver walks up to the couch, leans down, and presses a kiss to Carly’s forehead.

“Oliver …”

“I’m going to Boston,” he says. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Carly’s eyes fill with fresh tears, but her expression is accepting. “You should be angry with me.”

Oliver is anything but. Shocked, maybe. But any anger he has is directed at Roger, and Roger alone — Roger, who is just the type to identify someone with a weak spot and use it to his advantage. Roger, whose recklessness might have just changed the course of Carly’s life forever.

He knows Carly isn’t blameless. But Carly he knows as well as the back of his own hand. Being angry with her would be as futile as being angry with himself.

“What happened … it’s every bit as much my fault as it is yours.”

Carly laughs. “Well, that’s not true.”

“It is,” says Oliver quietly. “This wasn’t working, and we both knew it.”

Carly shudders, swiping at her eyes, a hand unconsciously skimming her stomach. “I do love you,” she says. “I wish … I wish I could take it back.”

Oliver shakes his head. “You’ve got a baby on the way.” They both know she is keeping it, the same way they both know it isn’t his; Carly’s phrasing was only to cushion the blow. He and Carly haven’t had sex in at least two months. “You can’t regret that.”

Carly tucks her knees into her chest, but her eyes are dry, as if she’s all cried out. Oliver supposes she’s been living with the knowledge of this for at least a few days longer than he has, and the guilt of the affair for even longer — Oliver hasn’t asked how long. He doesn’t want or need to know.

“Everything’s going to change,” she says.  

He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She rests her hand on his hand, then, and squeezes it. In a strange way, it’s the closest he has felt to her in months. He understands, in that moment, why he can’t bring himself to feel any anger toward her; why he can’t resent that Carly was the one who slipped, when there were so many times Oliver tortured himself so he would not. Carly may have been and will be a lot of things to him, but she will always remain his best friend.

“What’s in Boston?” she asks.

“Elio.”

She nods. Doesn't ask any questions of him. They've had enough questions for a lifetime, maybe. “Be safe.”

Oliver wants to rent a car, but he also doesn’t trust himself to drive in his current state. He manages to get on the last bus out of Port Authority heading up to Boston that night, set to get in around three in the morning. He spends most of it reeling, still trying to process everything in stages; so much of it that he realizes, once they have reached the city limits of Boston, that he has no idea if he’ll even be able to find Elio, or what he’ll possibly say if he does.

The crux of it is simple: find Elio. Never let him go. But there is so much else to explain to him, to make him understand — not just from the last few hours, but the last few years.

Oliver understands as the bus deposits them all in a listless, exhausted heap that there aren’t words that will explain this, that there is nothing he can say to fix, to heal, to excuse any of it. They are past the ability to rely on words — they will just have to rely on each other. On the quiet understanding. On the tug of the same current that has been pulling them since the day they met. On the weight of every glance, every grazing touch, every quiet beat that they have not quite let themselves acknowledge, even when it was louder than anything in the room.

He finds a taxi, and says the name of the hostel that Roger gave him. It only takes ten minutes, and once he’s there, he immediately feels foolish; it’s the middle of the night, and Elio is probably camped out in a locked room with a cluster of boys. Oliver has no way to reach him until morning, and that’s even if Elio is still here. It occurs to him, the way it should have occurred to him hours ago, that Roger said he hadn’t heard from Elio in three days.

The taxi pulls away, leaving Oliver freezing on the curb, an all too familiar fear clenching in his heart.

He figures there is no harm in walking into the hostel lobby and asking for him. He’ll say they’re traveling together, maybe, and that they were separated after a night out. Oliver is all too aware of his own charm; he’ll resort to using whatever he has in his arsenal, if it means getting to Elio faster.

But when he walks into the hostel, he finds that the lobby is actually bustling — teens and twentysomethings coming and going up the stairs, in various states of sobriety, all of them seeming to congregate toward a common area in the back. Oliver expects someone at the front desk to stop him, but he’s swallowed into a group of boys returning from a night out and flashing their keys and follows them into the back room, with its threadbare couches and a humming vending machine and empty beer bottles scattered on the floor.

And there, as if the universe carved a path to him, is Elio: limp and sagged into a beanbag chair, his headphones askew in his curls, a pencil on the floor and his transcriptions threatening to fall off of his lap.

Oliver takes a step toward him, in this moment suspended between the before and the after — no. This moment suspended between the pain and the resolution, the questions and the answers, the hope and the salvation. He stares at Elio in the dim blue shadows, at curve of his sleeping cheek, the dark lashes that fringe his lids, and thinks that his eyes will never fully absorb the beauty of him; that there will always be some new angle, some new way the light will hit the rich landscape of his face that will steal his breath.

Elio seems to sense he is being watched. He starts to stir, his eyes moving behind their lids, looking nearly bruised with exhaustion. He looks so small and so pale that the beanbag might just swallow him, that Oliver feels a pang of protectiveness seeing him here, so exposed in such a strange place.

Then something crashes — one of the boys from the group Elio followed in has knocked over a chair — and Elio’s eyes fly open, a gasp escaping him. There’s a wrenching beat where he seems to have no idea where he is, flinching at the unfamiliar room, the transcriptions falling off of his knees. Oliver crouches down beside him just in time to catch them.

When he looks back up Elio’s eyes are moons, staring at him as if he has lost his mind.

“Hi,” says Oliver. He doesn’t know why, but he’s smiling. It’s the relief, maybe. The kismet. Elio is here, exactly where Oliver needs him to be, exactly as though the universe has been planning on it all this time and merely wanted to play a few tricks with them along the way.

Elio swipes at his eyes, trying and failing to sit up in the bean bag. “You’re … how are you here?”

Oliver reaches out to put a hand on Elio’s face, but remembers himself just in time and puts it on Elio’s wrist instead. He has forgotten what it feels like, the heat of touching Elio without the guilt of it. It’s so intoxicating he almost forgets to speak.

“I had to find you,” he says.

Elio’s brow starts to furrow. Oliver can see the color starting to rise in his cheeks, the spell of his sleep finally starting to break. “Is — is everything okay? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Look who’s talking,” says Oliver softly. He offers his hand to Elio, and Elio stares at it for a moment, looking wary and almost a little bit afraid, before taking it. Oliver eases him up to his feet, nearly over-correcting because of how light he is, how insubstantial seeming.

“Elio … what are you doing here? Why did you leave?”

Elio seems skittish, holding his arms to his body like he is trying to contain himself. “I … “

“You scared me.”

Elio’s eyes start to water, but he blinks and shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I just — I knew it would make things easier, in the long run.”

“What would?”

He’s shaking, so plainly that it takes everything in Oliver not to step forward, not to wrap his arms around Elio and pull him into his chest.

“I’m transferring to Boston Conservatory,” he says, the words just barely above a whisper. “They’ve been trying to poach me for a little while. I came up to talk to the dean and audition, and … they’re transferring all my credits. I start in January. I didn’t mean to stay so long, except I haven’t found an apartment up here yet.”

This is not a turn in the conversation Oliver was anticipating. Just like that, the ground is unsteady again; just like that, his stomach is in his throat and his feet are like lead in the ground.

No — he can fix this. He has to fix this. Everything depends on it.

“Can we — can we go for a walk?”

Elio’s eyes are cavernous with an unresolved kind of grief. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

Oliver reaches out and wraps his hand around Elio’s, intertwining their fingers. Elio casts an alarmed glance toward the boys still in the common area, but Oliver doesn’t even both to turn to them, gently leading Elio out of the hostel and into the frigid night.

They walk for about a block in silence, Elio still shaking, either from nerves or the cold. Oliver feels oddly grounded. He has one focus, one task, and he knows that the words he chooses now are going to be the ones that lay the foundation for the rest of their lives.

“Would you rather be here than in New York?”

“I probably shouldn’t have come to New York in the first place,” says Elio.  

Oliver tries to stay calm even in the face of his mounting unease. “That’s not what I asked.”

“Boston Conservatory is a good school,” Elio persists, stubborn as ever. He takes his hand out of Oliver’s, pressing his arms to his chest and wrapping his coat around himself tighter. “I’ll get a good education here.”

“But will you be happy?”

Oliver has to know, has to hear it from Elio himself; because if Elio really does believe he will be better off here, Oliver will be the last person to stand in Elio’s way. He will live with his personal misery forever if it means Elio has a chance at happiness.

But Elio won’t look at him, his eyes trained on the ground. “Nothing good will come of me staying. We both know it,” he says. “It was selfish of me to have come at all. I’m sorry, Oliver. I’m so — ”

“I told you the other night not to apologize, and I meant it,” says Oliver fiercely.

Elio doesn’t answer, doesn’t even seem to register that words are being spoken to him. Oliver grabs him by the crook of his arm, and Elio’s whole body pivots, stopping to stare at Oliver, at the hand that has seized him and then up at his face.

“Do you know how much it means to me to have you in my life?” Oliver asks. “How much I look forward to seeing you, even if it’s just for — for a moment, or from across a room? Even if we don’t speak? Do you even know how much I — ”

“I love you,” Elio blurts. The words aren’t soft, or expectant, or hopeful — they’re wretched. They blotch in his cheeks and water in his eyes and cave in his shoulders, as if they are a poison leaving his body.

Oliver would be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined Elio confessing his feelings, if not with those words than with something close to them. He has hoped for it, even — for Elio to be the one who folds, so that Oliver can follow him down. For Elio to be the brave one, the one who crosses the divide, the way he once did.

But there is nothing brave about this. Elio seems hollowed out by it. Wrecked.

Oliver wants to reach out to him, is aching to ease the agony that seems to wrack his bones, but Elio has made himself an island, stepping back from him before he can.

“Shit,” Elio breathes. “I’m sorry — I didn’t want to — put that on you. I’m not trying to. It’s why I’m here, because — because it’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” he says, even as his eyes start to well with tears, the forced smile on his face starts to wobble. “I’m not trying to — to leave because I’m mad at you or something, I just wanted you to know that. I’m leaving because I love you, and I can’t — I just can’t.”

Oliver feels Elio’s pain so acutely that it makes him senseless, makes him forget the calm and nuanced way he was going to deliver the news. He finds his own hands starting to shake, as if he is absorbing Elio’s own fear, as if there is no barrier of skin or bone or air between the two of them.

In the end, the words are graceless and bare, with nothing to cushion them: “Carly and I are separating.”

For a moment Elio doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to breathe. Then he turns, takes a step away from Oliver, and sinks into a bench, propping his elbows on his knees and burying his head in his hands.

Oliver stands there, reeling. He didn’t consider this. He never had any intention of pressuring Elio with the news, but at the same time never expected a rejection this swift, this … decisive. But the way Elio seems to cave in on himself, it can’t be anything but. There is a truth in it that maybe words are incapable of really conveying: that Elio loves Oliver, but too much has happened since the beginning of that love for them to be saved.

He sits down next to Elio, feeling numb, out of his own body. He puts a tentative hand on Elio’s shoulder, only further stunned when Elio wrenches himself away.

He sits there, his hand still hovering in the space where Elio’s body used to be. ”Elio …”

“I’ve wrecked everything, haven’t I?” Elio says into his palms. “I’ve wrecked your life and Carly’s. Oh, god. Oliver, I — ”

“No. No, you — where did you get — ”

“I can’t bear it. She — she doesn’t deserve this, she loves you, and — and I know how awful your parents are, what would happen if — I swear, I swear I never wanted to come between you, I really — I — ”

“Hey. Hey,” Oliver says, a little more sternly, when he reaches out and Elio tries to pull away again. This time he is firmer about it, an arm around Elio’s shoulders, trying to ground him. Elio resists, but after a brief struggle he stiffens and seems to give up the fight. “Elio, breathe.”

The next breath he takes sounds like it might split his ribcage. “It’s all my — ”

“No, it’s not. The decision was mutual.”

“No it wasn’t,” Elio moans.

Oliver doesn’t want to outright tell him what Carly did — what happens now is between her and Roger, and honestly, he doesn’t want the two of them interrupting what is happening here, getting in the way of what Oliver needs to say.

“It was,” says Oliver gently.

Elio shakes his head.

“You don’t believe me?”

He shakes his head again, and says in a small voice, “Nobody would ever leave you.”

It takes Oliver some effort not to snort at that, given the situation at hand. For a moment it all seems so absurd, so equal parts terrible and fortuitous that he could almost convince himself none of it happened at all.

“Carly was the one who … instigated it,” says Oliver.

Elio’s shoulders are shaking, his face still obscured by his hands.

“I’m telling you that so you understand that this isn’t your fault. The truth is we should never have gotten married in the first place.” He squeezes Elio a little tighter, hoping that he’ll look up, that he’ll see the sincerity in Oliver’s face. That he’ll understand. “But I also want you to know that — even if she hadn’t, I was going to end it.”  

Elio flinches under Oliver’s grip.

“You didn’t wreck anything. I did. I should never … I should have known. I did know. That summer, I knew, and so did you, but I just thought — I thought I was protecting us. I thought we would be better off.” He feels the heat rising into his cheeks, the tears in his throat; getting the words out feels like an uphill battle against the weight of all of the guilt, all of the pain they have caused each other. “And you respected that, even when you knew better than I did, even when I gave you every reason not to. If anyone is to blame, Elio, it’s me.”

Elio has gone so still in Oliver’s grasp that it feels more like he has secured a statue than a person. Oliver leans in close, so that Elio cannot mistake his words, so that he feels the impact of every one of them.

“I tried to stop you once from doing anything that we’d regret,” says Oliver. “The last few years of not being with you — they’ve been the biggest regret of my life.”

Elio finally lifts his head, his eyes swimming. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Oliver’s throat is suddenly too tight to speak; his courage is somewhere pooled in his sinking stomach. “Only if it will make you happy,” he says, knowing that he’ll die if it doesn’t.

Elio blinks at him, the last of his tears sliding down his cheeks. “I hate Boston,” he says, suddenly and candidly. He wipes at his nose with his jacket sleeve, his eyes steady on Oliver’s. “It’s cold and their parks aren’t big enough and the students are all snobs.”

Oliver cracks a grin that threatens to burst. He leans in, settling a hand on Elio’s face, staring at him with the open kind of reverence he has spent too long avoiding, palming his warm cheek, tangling his fingers through his curls.

“I love you too, you goose.”

And then Elio laughs, and Oliver doesn’t think he’ll ever hear a sound he loves as much — of the unselfconscious, elated, borderline giggle that escapes Elio’s mouth, just before Oliver presses his lips to it and feels the echo of it humming in his own throat. Elio leans into Oliver with that same visceral hunger, and it feels like someone has brought their bones back to life, like there is electricity between their lips and in the places skin meets skin — Elio’s hands in Oliver’s hair, Oliver’s on Elio’s neck — and then Oliver is laughing too, laughing like this whole thing was just a poorly-executed, rambling joke that unexpectedly just led to an incredibly satisfying punchline.   

There is a heat and a friction that seems to make time something that doesn’t move forward or back, but something that just is — something that absurdly reminds Oliver of childhood, of not caring where he is or who he is with, of the contentment of just existing the way things are. He kisses Elio in this strange city in these strange circumstances, in this new plane where nothing is familiar to him but the beat of his own heart, and it feels like coming home.   

He pulls away at some point, hungry to gaze into Elio’s eyes, to make up for all the time he spent only ever seeing them in greedy, fleeting glances.

“I feel like I’m going to wake up from this,” says Elio, staring right back.

Oliver leans forward and presses his lips to Elio’s nose, which is bright red and frigid cold. “Let’s get inside before one of us loses a toe.”

“Yeah,” says Elio, nodding so dreamily that Oliver thinks he could propose jumping into the Charles River and get the same reaction. He doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s shivering, staring at Oliver with that same drunken, bottomless adoration that he did back in Rome. It almost breaks Oliver’s heart all over again, how fast they find their old ground, how quickly they are OliverandElio — as if they have been holding their breath underwater all this time, and only just broken the surface.

They half-stumble back to the hostel, where Elio to collects his backpack from the room he was staying in, then meets him in the lobby with a giddy skip like they’re breaking out of jail. Oliver finds a reasonably priced hotel down the street, charming the woman at the front desk into letting them into a room despite the late hour — “My cousin only just got in from Paris,” he says, and Elio murmurs something to him in that ridiculously alluring French of his to keep up the game. The two of them fall into another fit of laughter in the elevator, hanging all over each other, kissing fiercely before the doors open.

They are somewhat well-behaved in the twenty seconds it takes for them to find their room and unlock the door. Oliver initially found the room with the intention of sleeping — he’s nearing twenty-four hours without it, and the rings under Elio’s eyes are so deep that he looks like he might drop at any moment — but the instant the door clicks shut Elio shoves Oliver against it with a surprising amount of strength, kissing him fiercely, grinding his hip into Oliver’s crotch.

It is far too soon and also far too late — there is still so much to be discussed, so many things that need sorting out and explaining, but god , it feels like he has come back to his own body, as if it is only just remembering what it feels like to be touched, to be moved, to be undone.

“I hate this coat,” says Elio, wrangling with zipper to shove it off of Oliver. “I hate this shirt, I hate these shoes, take them all off, off, off — ”

“Shhh,” says Oliver, suppressing a laugh, “we have neighbors.”

“I hate them too,” says Elio with a grin wider than Oliver has ever seen it. There is something sly in it, something older, something that has only happened in the past few years. It makes Oliver reach out and kiss him again, to taste it on his lips — these years he needs catching up on, every infinitesimally small change he has missed.

Oliver starts thumbing the buttons off of Elio’s shirt, Elio both helping and not helping by further pressing Oliver into the door. He grinds himself into Oliver again and Oliver groans into his mouth.

“Shhh,” Elio taunts him.

Oliver smirks and claps a hand over Elio’s mouth in retaliation, which Elio immediately opens his mouth to lick. The charge that runs through Oliver’s bones all at once from Elio’s tongue on his bare skin is almost obscene; before he even realizes what he’s doing he is half-lifting, half-pushing Elio onto the bed, where he falls in a heap, his eyes gleaming up at Oliver as Oliver takes his wrists in one hand and pins him to the mattress.

“Jesus. You are an ungodly kind of beautiful,” Oliver mutters.

Elio’s face immediately turns beet red, but he rolls his eyes. “Says Adonis.”

“No,” says Oliver, rejecting Elio’s self-criticism. He puts his hand on Elio’s neck, stroking it down to the curve of his collarbone, to the pale, smooth skin of his chest. “Let me look at you.”

Elio arches his back impatiently, his gaze wandering up Oliver’s chest and to his lips, his wrists still pinned to the mattress and unable to act on the infinite impulses Oliver can see flitting in his eyes. He is Elio, and he is not — he is still thrumming with the same restlessness, gazing up with the same awe, but the map of him has changed; in the cut of his shoulders, in the ribs that were not once so visible, in the depth of his too wise eyes. Oliver takes it all in, raking his eyes up and down Elio’s body, and in that moment all he can think is that this person belongs to him now — not to keep, but to hold. To yield to and to protect; to break and to heal; to love and to free.

It should scare him, the enormity of this. But staring into Elio’s eyes, Oliver is always braver than he has ever been on his own.

“You’ve looked,” says Elio, wriggling out of Oliver’s grasp and immediately burying his fingers into the hair at the base of Oliver’s neck, pulling him in for another kiss.

Oliver lets him have his way, lets him unhook the belt of his jeans, lets him murmur the words I need you inside me into his ear just before he nips at the lobe and sucks. Afterward, when they are both breathless and euphoric and exhausted beyond reason, Oliver will hold the whole of Elio in his arms, will graze the skin of his back with his knuckles, will feel the warm breath against his shoulder, and know that until he draws in his last, he will never let him go.

Later

Oliver and Elio are late, but it’s an intentional kind of late. The odds of their companions being ready to go when they show up to collect them are slim to none, so they take their time, popping into a bookstore when they see a new release from a favorite author of Oliver’s, pausing on the street to talk to a classmate of Elio’s who is coming back from a run in the park.

“We’re meeting your parents at one?” asks Oliver, glancing at his watch.

Elio bumps his shoulder into Oliver’s — one of the many little displays of roughhousing they resort to in places where displays of affection are off the table. “No. I told Carly we were meeting them at one,” says Elio with a smirk. “I told my parents to meet us at two.”

Oliver laughs. “Smart man.”  

They arrive at the apartment — Oliver’s old apartment — to an all too familiar scene. Oliver has only knocked on the door once before it swings open to Roger, who is holding a very upset looking Sophie, who otherwise looks darling in a ruffled, polka-dotted dress with a little matching bow in her dark curls. She cracks an eye open from her tantrum just long enough to notice Oliver and Elio in the doorway, and extend her pudgy little arms to Elio with a demanding shriek.

“Oh, thank god. Sing her that song that she likes, will you?” asks Roger, thrusting Sophie into Elio’s arms.

Elio takes her with a smirk. “What song?” he asks innocently.

“You know what song,” Roger grumbles.

“Last week you said if you heard that song one more time you’d rip your own ears off,” says Elio, addressing Roger but saying the words to Sophie with a big, dopey smile on his face.

Sophie reaches out and grabs for a fistful of his hair, which Elio has neglected to cut in some time and now makes him look like the jaded, mysterious musician some agent will likely die to represent when he graduates in the spring. Oliver’s heart cinches at the sight of them, the way it always does.

“I also said that about the Sesame Street theme song, and honestly I’d blow Big Bird for all the peace he’s brought to this apartment,” says Roger, opening the zipper to the diaper bag propped on the table and taking stock of supplies.

“Language!” says Carly from inside the bedroom.

Elio grins a conspiratorial grin at Oliver, and then they go about doing what they usually do when they arrive to Carly and Roger’s brand of chaos — Elio walks over to the window with Sophie and starts singing the French lullaby his aunt used to sing to him and his cousins, and Oliver makes sure that Carly and Roger aren’t on a crash course to throttling each other.

“How’s it shaking?” asks Oliver, as the blur of Carly darts from the bedroom and back into her bathroom, where she’s yanking a brush through her hair.

“Well — we were all set to go, and then boom, she spat up all over my dress,” Carly informs him. “Her aim was impeccable. I think she’ll be a soccer star.”

“Or really, really good at beer pong,” Roger supplies unhelpfully from the kitchen.

Carly rolls her eyes, but there’s affection in it. “I swear to god, Oliver,” she says, shaking her head.

There is no follow up to that particular swear to god, but Oliver isn’t necessarily expecting one. Carly and Roger are — well, they’re Carly and Roger. They aren’t quite in a relationship, but they’re certainly not not in one, either. They live together now; once Oliver vacated the apartment and Sophie was born, it only made sense for Roger to move in to help take care of her.

Oliver has to admit that he didn’t see that coming. He may not ever grow to like Roger, but at the very least, he respects him.

The rest of the arrangement, though, could use some work, and Roger and Carly are the first to admit it. Still — there is something there that can’t be denied. An electricity of sorts. They may drive each other up the wall, but Carly is a different kind of alive around Roger, a different kind of Carly — a little snarkier, a little more adventurous, a little more quick to voice the opinions that Oliver usually only heard after she’d had a glass or two. And Roger — well. Roger is softer. Kinder. After Sophie was born he was awkward and graceless at the whole fatherhood thing, and it humbled him a bit. Made him less of an ass and more of a man.

“I think they’re like us, in a way,” Elio said out loud once, half of his body on the mattress, half of it sprawled on Oliver’s legs. He was already looking healthier. It was only after they'd gotten back together that Elio was honest about the last few months he was with Paul — the paranoia, the passive-aggressive accusations, the small things that ate at them both before eventually swallowing them whole. Little by little, Elio was looking like his old self again; brighter in the eyes, fuller in his cheeks.  

But Oliver had wrinkled his nose at this particular observation. “In what way?”

Elio traced a line from the base of Oliver’s throat down to his belly button, as if to halve him. “Like — magnetized. They need each other. They can fight it, but they always end up right where they started.”

“Is that what you think of us?” Oliver asked, propping himself up on his elbows to get a better look at Elio. “That you can’t escape me?”

Elio leaned over and pressed a kiss to Oliver’s neck, sucking the tender skin of it. “You can’t escape me.”

“I don’t know. You’re not a very fast runner.”

Elio rolled over abruptly, so that his entire lanky body was on top of Oliver’s, pinning him to the bed. “And yet we always meet at the same finish line.”

It was a weighted moment, even with the playfulness; a moment that spoke to the commitment they were making to each other, to the bridges they’d burned in its wake. About a month before Carly had come clean to both of their parents about the baby and their subsequent separation. Two weeks after that, Oliver had sat her down and told her the truth about Elio — a truth that stunned and initially angered her so much that she hadn’t spoken to either one of them in the three days that followed.

She came around — crying, and armed with a bottle of wine that she couldn’t even drink. But they were still in the awkward initial phases, when they were all trying to settle into their new selves: Carly, knocked up by an undergrad; Roger, thrust into the last thing he imagined for himself; and Elio and Oliver, still shrouded in secrecy, living together and pretending that it was only out of convenience from the aftermath of the divorce.

It didn’t matter. It was still the happiest Oliver had felt since he’d been aware of his own existence — a happiness that buoyed them both in the months that followed, when Oliver’s parents eventually found out, and the last of the cards came tumbling down.

“Be honest,” says Carly now, staring at Oliver’s reflection in the mirror. “Do I look like a crypt keeper?”

She does look exhausted, but also radiant; he worries for her sometimes, in the way he will always be prone to worrying about her, but in this moment, she has never looked more simultaneously satisfied and spent.

Oliver leans down and kisses her on the cheek. “You look lovely.”

She elbows him in the side. “Lies like that are the reason I keep you around.”

They’re both interrupted by the sound of a happy little crow from Sophie. Oliver peers out and sees that Elio has successfully calmed her and laid her down on one of her mats, where Roger is tweaking her side to make her laugh. The two of them look like brothers, with their near identical mops of hair bowed down to look at her.

“I’m glad we left each other for attractive people,” Carly muses.

Oliver laughs an unexpected, gratifying kind of laugh that feels like it might puncture him, then follows her out of the bedroom.

“Are you gonna be a good girl on the subway?” Elio croons to a babbling Sophie.

Carly swats at him. “I told you you’re only allowed to speak to her in French and Italian. I want her to be cultured and trilingual.”

“I would like to say, for about the hundredth time, that I did not sign up for Elio turning our daughter into a snob.”

“Mon dieu,” Elio deadpans. And then, to Carly: “Are you sure you want her showing up to kindergarten speaking Franglitalian like I did?”

“She’s already a mini Elio as it is,” says Roger.

There is no resentment in the observation — truly, the resemblance between Elio and Sophie is shocking. It’s the dark curls and the light eyes, the delicate features and the steady gaze, a combination of Roger and Carly that somehow ended up being rather Perlman-esque. People more often mistake Elio for Sophie’s father than Roger when they’re all out with her, but Oliver supposes the two of them being nearly inseparable whenever they're in a room together is somewhat to blame.

In fact, of all of the bizarre moments that have come about after Sophie’s conception upended their collective worlds, the uncanny bond between Elio and Sophie is one that none of them would have predicted. Even in the womb, she’d only ever stop kicking up storms when Elio was playing the piano nearby. She was born a colicky, finicky little thing, but in the ten months she’s been alive, Elio seems to be the only one among them who has the magic Sophie touch.  

(Oliver suspects it is because Elio is prone to fickleness himself; Elio responded to this by grazing his eyes up and down Oliver’s body and saying nonchalantly, “Well then, aren’t you glad to have made the cut?”)  

“I want her to be able to travel wherever she wants,” says Carly, crouching down next to them and stroking a hand through Sophie’s curls. “I want her to have the whole world.”

The corners of Roger’s lips quirk at the thought, and that’s the end of his protesting for the day.

Ten minutes later, they’re settled on the 1 train down to midtown, where Elio’s parents are meeting them for lunch in the lobby of their hotel. Elio is sitting between Oliver and Carly, Sophie dozing in his lap, and Oliver is leaning over all three of them, one hand on the rail and another propping up the folded stroller. The train is crowded and they’re all worn out and nothing about the reality of their lives matches the way they look to the outside world, but moments like this are the ones Oliver loves best; moments like this, when they’re all cramped and contained, like their own little dysfunctional, haphazard family.

Annella and Samuel beam at the sight of them spilling into the lobby, Samuel pulling Oliver in for a hug as Annella steals Sophie from Elio and immediately starts doting on her as if she is her own grandchild. In a weird way, it feels like she is — Carly’s and Oliver’s parents aren’t speaking to either of them at the moment. It was Annella that Carly ended up calling for advice, when Sophie was screaming bloody murder at three in the morning and Annella was, thankfully, wide awake in Italy. For a long while Carly was on the phone with Elio’s parents every week more than Elio or Oliver combined.

Roger’s parents are, mercifully, supportive — but most of that support is monetary. They flew out to meet Sophie when she was born, but seemed out of their element with the idea of being grandparents, almost as if it was too early to count. Maybe they didn’t think Roger and Carly would stick. In any case, they are flighty in their affections, only calling every now and then to check in and mostly leaving Roger to his own devices — which in turn has made Oliver’s judgment of Roger a bit more lenient, now that he understands a bit more of how he was raised.

They end up at a café for lunch, ordering a bunch of things for the table and picking at them between the six of them. It feels almost like being back at the villa, a happy little free-for-all, people talking over each other and laughing and trading Sophie around the table. Roger earns a laugh by recounting a time that Elio was holding Sophie after class and an old woman came up to him and lectured him about teenage pregnancy, assuming that Elio was her father and that the classmate sitting on the bench next to Elio was Sophie’s mother.

Annella dismisses the idea that Sophie and Elio look alike. “Trust me,” she tells Carly, “she’s much cuter than Elio was as a baby.”

“Mom.”

“What?” says Annella, casting her arms out in a shrug. Her eyes are twinkling. “You were all squished. Always screaming. You’d think the worst thing that happened to you was being born.”

“Come now, he was a very pretty toddler,” says Samuel, in Elio’s defense.  

Elio promptly lays his forehead down on the table.

“Ah, yes,” says Annella fondly, putting a finger to Sophie’s nose and tapping it. “Sometimes I even put him in little dresses. Everybody already thought he was a girl, so I thought, why not?”

“I’ll be outside walking into traffic, if anybody needs me,” Elio deadpans.

Oliver reaches out and knocks him in the shoulder. Elio looks up and smirks one of those slippery smirks, the kind that is meant just for Oliver and immediately disappears from his face before anybody else gets their share of it.

“Aww, you’re very handsome, Elio,” says Carly placatingly.

Roger scoffs. “He doesn’t need anyone stroking his ego, half the class is already swooning over him.”

“Everybody at this table is very attractive,” Annella teases in her diplomatic way, tweaking Roger on the cheek. He blinks in that stunned but pleased way he does at Annella’s maternal affection, and Annella does him the charity of pretending not to notice. “And speaking of outside, didn’t I see an ice cream place down the street? Why don’t you all go get in line, and we’ll wrap up here.”

There are some minor protestations about letting the Perlmans handle the check that are swiftly shut down by Annella and Samuel, who shoo the lot of them out of the café, insisting on keeping Sophie while they run out to stand in line for the ice cream.

Oliver’s throat is suddenly very dry. “I’m gonna hang back and use the restroom,” he says.  

“Mint chip?” Elio asks.

Oliver smiles and nods. Elio’s feet seem to stutter for a moment, obviously catching something in Oliver’s expression. Oliver motions his head toward the door for Elio to go, and Elio does, albeit with a question in his eyes — the thing Oliver seems to learn about Elio over and over again is that there is very little he’ll ever be able to hide.

This, though, was orchestrated — when Elio was in class last week, Oliver had called Samuel and Annella and asked if he might speak to them alone when they were in town. He wasn’t optimistic enough to think they’d be able to make it happen, but he supposes that’s the magic of the Perlmans — they seem to be able to bend the world to their will with a flourish and a smile.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t make it any easier to say what he needs to say. He’s sitting on the side of the table opposite from Annella and Samuel, who are both staring at him with warm, patient expressions on their faces, and suddenly he feels as though he is on trial. It’s the anxiety of his first day of solo teaching multiplied to such an absurd degree that, for the first time in his adult life, Oliver opens his mouth and seems to forget how to speak.

Samuel laughs, and just like that the tension is broken. Oliver feels silly. Embarrassed, even. Samuel reaches forward and puts his hand on top of Oliver’s, his gaze open and reassuring in a way that still makes Oliver feel altogether too seen, even after all this time.

“Oliver, whatever it is, you already know our answer,” says Samuel. “You are a part of this family now. No matter what.”

“Oh, tesoro, let him ask it. He’s clearly been thinking hard.” Annella scoots Sophie a little further up on her lap and looks up at Oliver with very Elio-esque mischief. “Go on, go on, we’re all ears.”

Oliver breathes out, a little stunned to find that his hands are near shaking. He licks his lips and lets out a self-conscious laugh. This time neither of the Perlmans laugh back, staring at him encouragingly.

“I … well — I understand that — it’s not exactly — traditional. What Elio and I have.” He forces himself not to wring his hands together or crack his knuckles, even as he feels the blush creeping into his cheeks. “And I … I just want you to know — that is to say, I …”

It is the simplest thing to know, but the hardest thing to say.

“You love each other,” says Annella.

The relief of this — of being understood, and unlikelier still, supported — is immeasurable in that moment, brimming to the top of him, his nerves giving way to an almost childish urge to cry.

“Yes. And we’ve spoken about the future,” says Oliver, “but I … that is, I wanted to ask him formally, about our lives together. Not — not right away, of course, after graduation, maybe, but the thing is — I wanted to speak with you about it first.”  

Samuel smiles at him, his eyes already shining. “I admire your courage in asking us,” he says, “but believe me — you already have our blessing, and then some.”

Annella hums in agreement, and says, “Nothing would make us happier.”

Oliver’s face starts to burn. He’s not sure if it’s the relief or the gratitude or just the strange nakedness of being so overtly and unabashedly known, but he opens his mouth to thank them, to say something, but he is all at once overcome.

“Oh, Oliver, come here,” says Annella, handing Sophie over to Samuel so she can move to his side of the table embrace him. She squeezes him so tightly that for a moment he doesn’t feel so tall, doesn’t feel so solid and aggressively present , and it’s a merciful feeling — to be able to dissolve in something this steady, to rely on it. Annella runs a hand through his hair and pats him on the back. “You are very loved. You understand?”

He nods into her shoulder, just barely managing to collect himself before she pulls away. Samuel, on other hand, is happily crying on the other end of the table, Sophie poking at the tears on his cheeks.

“Well,” says Annella, clapping her hands together. “Now that the rest of forever is settled, I think we all deserve some of that ice cream.”

“Yeah,” says Oliver thickly. He reaches out to take Sophie; he needs something to anchor him again. Samuel hands her over and Sophie squirms for a moment in surprise before looking up, seeing Oliver, and giving him a toothy, ridiculous grin.

He grins back, at this baby who is half of his best friend, this baby who so easily could have been his. She wraps a pudgy hand around one of his fingers and knocks her head into his chest, babbling happily. It’s strange, even now; how he loves her more than he thought it was ever possible to love a child that was not his own, but  how every so often, she is not just a person — she is a reminder. A caution sign, of sorts. This is the life that might have been, her little eyes seem to say to him. And as much as he loves her, he feels an acute and almost guilty relief that he has this one instead.

Elio returns a minute later, his chocolate ice cream in one hand, Oliver’s mint chip in the other. His eyes register a muted alarm at the sight of him and his parents, but he doesn’t say anything. After a quick assessment of the situation, he breaks the momentary pause by licking Oliver’s ice cream cone heartily before handing it off to him.

“You don’t even like mint chip.”

Elio waits until Carly has taken Sophie to hip check Oliver. “I may be developing a taste for it.”

Later that evening, after they’ve said goodbye to Elio’s parents on their way to a show and Carly and Roger have long abandoned them for Sophie’s mid-afternoon nap, Elio is half-dozing on their bed, waiting for Oliver to finish grading papers at his desk. He refuses to ever fall asleep without Oliver in bed beside him, even though it’s a battle he is in a constant state of nearly losing. Sometimes Elio reminds Oliver of a cat in that he’s never quite sure how awake he is at any given time after night falls.

This is one of those times, when Oliver eases under the covers, raking his eyes over Elio and trying to decide if his eyes are closed in earnest or not. Then Elio rolls over, tucking himself into Oliver’s side, pressing his mouth blindly to Oliver’s chest and smiling when his teeth knock into his collarbone.

“Sorry,” Oliver says, reaching out to turn the lamp off. “Had to use a lot of red ink on this batch.”

“Mmm. You’re gonna make some undergrads cry.”

“It’ll toughen them up,” says Oliver, reaching for the top of Elio’s forehead and running a hand through his curls. “Prepare them for the real world.”

Elio nuzzles his nose further into Oliver’s neck.

“Earlier,” he says, “with my parents — is everything okay? You all seemed …”

Oliver tries not to stiffen or do anything else to give himself away. He already knows if Elio presses him he will give way like a house of cards. “Hm?”

“Serious,” says Elio.

Oliver tilts his head down and presses a kiss to Elio’s hairline. “It was nothing you don’t already know,” he assures him.

He can feel Elio trying to decide how to interpret this, can feel him give into it after a few moments. They trust each other. That trust may be quieter now, but it’s steadier. A soft place to land.

“If you were gossiping about what an ugly baby I was,” Elio grumbles.

Oliver laughs, tweaking Elio in the side. He jolts and lets out a sharp yelp, pulling back to look at Oliver with a mix of affection and indignation.

“But 21 years later, you’re a beautiful swan,” Oliver teases.

Elio presses his forehead to Oliver’s. “Your dirty talk is getting rusty.”

“No. I’m getting old and sentimental.”

Elio sighs. “I’m in love with a geezer.”

It never stops sneaking up on Oliver, the way those words warm his chest, the way they flutter up his ribs. He gazes down at Elio, at those gleaming, mischievous eyes, and knows that it doesn’t matter when he asks him, how he asks him, or if he asks him at all. There are no promises left to be made, no obstacles left that they won’t overcome. Nothing that even needs to be spoken out loud that can’t be heard in the quiet of moments like this. 

He tilts his head down and kisses Elio again, with a deepness and an urgency, the kind of kiss you give before someone leaves for war. Elio doesn't hesitate, kissing him back with the same fierceness, the same devotion, with the same tenderness in his gaze as they pull away. Oliver stares down at him for a long while, holding his chin with his hand so he won't move.  

"What was that for?"  

"Nothing." Oliver smiles, and then amends: "Everything."