Work Text:
The hand that makes its way around Lito's back, wedging itself in between the mattress and his hip, knows a lot more than he would like it to do. Although that hand began its nightly travels not too long ago, finally brave enough to share that unspoken understanding, it cannot erase the fact that what it is trying to soothe is beyond what a warm palm and tentative fingers actually can accomplish. That hand is indeed brave, but it unknowingly battles years and years of habituation, thoughts that immediately start to pick and prod as soon as it goes silent, dark and suffocating.
Lito knows why that is, why those thoughts seem to come like clockwork, always uninvited and always on the eve before the filming of a new project. He knows the reason why all too well, even though he tries to disregard it, the reason for the thoughts and their existence. Fact is, those thoughts began long ago, long before his acting career. Long before his first awkward kisses shared with girls. Long before he knew what he actually liked.
Long before Hernando and his venturing hand.
Lito would somehow love to think that they just were there from one evening to the next, but reality is often crueler than it seems for these thoughts have been his and his alone, carried inside for decades upon decades and brought into his mind by no one else than his Grandmother.
Even though he loves Grandmother, he also hates her. After all, it was she who first spoke those words to him, made him swallow everything she said like communion wine, for she was an elder and elders are always right. Elders speak from experience, knowledge and everything in between, and who was, is, he to question them? It just doesn't make sense, although he, now breathing long and resigned breaths into his pillow with Hernando's hand trying its best, kind of wants to go against it all. Go against Grandmother and her wisdom.
With Grandmother, it started by her saying that the love is something fantastic.
Maybe, Lito thinks to himself as the tears start to burn underneath his eyelids, now tightly closed, he's unfair when he thinks of Grandmother, for that part of her now almost cursed speech was actually true. Love is indeed fantastic. It's sometimes desperate and insane, sometimes subtle and comforting, always filling him up with sensation upon sensation of an indescribable and exhilarating high that makes his knees buckle underneath his own weight, his head lose its rhyme and reason, his stomach create the most elaborate knot inside him.
Yes, maybe he is indeed unfair when he thinks of Grandmother, but then, there's that other thing she said, the one thing that always makes his nights impossible to sleep through. The one thing that breaks all his defenses and makes his succumb to all of that guilt he's never been able to disregard.
Oh yes, Grandmother had said, love between a man and a woman is indeed fantastic. Two differences creating a likeness, a unity, as it should. Sanding off the differences of one another.
Even though it stings, Lito tries to tell himself that Grandmother was old and stuck in another time, one that probably didn't think of the idea of a man loving a man, a man sleeping with a man, a man in love treating a man in the same way he should treat a woman, as something possible. A man loving a man wasn't at all the similarity and likeness Grandmother was trying to explain when she was on her mission to explain the intricacy of amor, and that is something that has created ripples inside Lito. Ripples that, over time, have grown and become more like a quake.
When he got older, old enough to take interest in what Grandmother had hinted was out there, the likeness as it were, it didn't take long before he realised that the likeness he sought was closer than he realised. It just didn't feel right when he tasted the lips of a girl, her breasts stiffening underneath his touch. But by the time he realised that, it was too late. Not only had Grandmother's words worked their way inside him, the wet and heavy blanket of society had made him damp and closed off from what he wanted. Unable for him to see and dare to act on what was beyond its weight.
So he tried. He tried to cover it up by becoming something else that could make not only Grandmother but mamá proud as well. He became the man men wanted to be and women wanted to be with. Lito Rodriguez, the actor. The action star. But, even though he tried, tried not only for Grandmother but for mamá as well, his love was nowhere to be found other than in the reflection of himself. Of his male form.
So when he finally stopped acting and started to dare to be himself, he found Hernando. Oh, Hernando, who took him to the museum of Diego Rivera for their first date, despite Lito having close to a two page list of don'ts and can'ts when being with another man in public, and gave him his first taste of love. The love Lito so desperately wanted, the love that broke all barriers, the love that made him convinced that he was very much a man in love with another.
In love with Hernando.
In love with a problem.
It didn't matter that Hernando said that love deserved to be free, for Lito knew that he was caught in so many different ways and not just by Hernando's gaze and touch. And so, it began. The game. The game of trying to make the two so very different parts of him coexist in a way that wouldn't lead to him forsaking who he was and who he wanted to be.
Now, in that flat with that fantastic view, overlooking a Mexico City that is almost asleep, it's not just Hernando's hand against his skin. His lips are too.
"Lito," Lito hears Hernando whisper, "Lito bonito, gatito, papacito. Sleep, hm?"
Lito bites down on his own tongue, for Grandmother is still plaguing him. Apart from the external, him and Hernando differ immensely. Making what Grandmother said something that feels unattainable. Something that only fans the flames of uncertainty, for elders aren't to be talked back to. But why does it feel so wrong to accept Grandmother's truths and make them his own? Maybe, it's because he and Hernando aren't normal, in the sense they are unable to fit inside that notion of centuries of ideas and decrees. For they aren't sanding each others' differences away. They are adding to them.
Take words, for example. They differ there too, for Lito knows words, words that have been hammered in by reading page upon page of scripted dialogue, allowing himself to be someone else. Someone far from himself. But Hernando, Dios mío, just has them. Every single one that falls from his lips is so real, profound and true. Every single one, and it doesn't matter if they all playfully and childishly rhyme with his name, the bonito, the gatito, the papacito, are simply spoken from the heart. They are miles and miles away from the lines he utters himself, made to impress men and infatuate women, made to continuously spin that web of lies.
"I can't," Lito sighs into his pillow, worried that Hernando will start with what he does best. Analyse.
Lito loves that, usually, because he doesn't have to say much when that happens. He can just remain silent and let himself be filled, let Hernando's words try to erase some of the words that make up the sentences he's carrying inside, which is a relief beyond compare. But, in the small hours of the night, he would like to tell Hernando to stop. To stop get inside his head, underneath his skin.
"Of course you can. Maybe not right now when you're thinking about something, but you will." Hernando's breath carries a mumble with it as it caresses Lito's neck, a mumble that becomes locked in place with lips seeking contact with Lito's skin.
"Don't do that," Lito growls, for somehow, it feels important for him to think about it, just one more time. All the things he kind of is but not quite, all the things he wants to be but hides when in plain sight.
Now, Lito hears Hernando sigh, which is a thing that rarely happens. Hernando is a man of reason, not baptised in fire with emotions running high and Lito can't help but holding his breath when he hears this. He doesn't need Hernando to be more like him, he can't be with a reflection of himself.
"You know," Hernando finally says after that eternity made of seconds as he rests his head on Lito's shoulder, "I don't mind this, not really. But you do, and that is what breaks me. I knew what I was getting into, seems like you didn't?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Lito quips, the only proof the both of them need in order to understand that Hernando is being both inside and underneath. But inside and underneath, he does.
Lito feels Hernando's hands on his shoulder and hip, adding a bit of pressure until he's been turned around on his back.
Lito wishes it was different, but he does feels like a baby, still gripping that pillow in the same way. Still having his face buried into it like it is a better companion suited to hear his thoughts, fears, dreams and secrets than Hernando. Right now, though, it kind of is, for the tears that have burned behind his eyelids now feel cool as they escape down his cheeks before the satin pillowcase soaks them up. Indeed honoring its side of the bargain by keeping his secrets to itself.
And so, the child inside him, the one not forced into submission by words spoken and untold, the one that remains innocent and open, surprises him by clinging to that pillow when the soft coaxing comes. When warm hands open his, lock with his, hold on to his, begging him to let go of a barrier that shouldn't be. At least, not between them.
"Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better," Hernando whispers; his lips making contact with Lito's forehead, eyelids and, finally, mouth, as Hernando's tongue asks for permission to make a connection not made by words this time.
With a sniff, Lito accepts. He opens up and tastes Hernando, like that tongue of his can imbibe him with the strength behind those words just uttered, still lingering around them like the warm Mexican air.
"It'll be different this time, tomorrow," Hernando promises into Lito's mouth and Lito answers by pulling him close. By gripping and holding on to the muscle and flesh that he craves more than anything else. That perfect mirror of himself, that perfect likeness that yet is so different. That perfect being that takes him in and allows itself to be taken without thinking if it's right or wrong.
He does this because he knows that it won't be different. Not this time, either. Although he wants it to.