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Gentle music wafted out from a radio seated on the windowsill of an old bar situated on the right side of an old plaza in the middle of an even older town through the late, warm summer afternoon air to mix with the soup of voices all stirred together and gathered in the town’s center.
Two boys had been sitting outside of the old bar, one with his back pressed against the salmon-colored concrete with his thin, pale legs tucked neatly into a cross-legged position as the other, decently taller and far tanner than him, relaxed with one knee to his chest and the other leg splayed simply outward.
As the small tapping of a snare drum, muffled by a choir of softly singing women hit and entered the ear of Alberto, the taller one of the pair, his emerald eyes lit up and deemed to glow with inspiration. He tilted his head to look at his friend under half-lidded, though alert, eyes, beneath an old cedar flat cap that wasn’t quite doing its job of keeping out the light. “Hey,” he started, a small playful tune in his voice.
“Yeah?” responded Luca, the lighter, as he turned his eye from the half-set, golden august sun to glance at him. From above his head, from that little maroon radio lined with gold trim, a low, smooth voice of a man began reminiscing an conversation interrupted with his lover that began their separation.
Alberto pulled his outstretched leg back to him and hugged it close with over-crossing arms. “You wanna dance?” For some reason unbeknownst to him, his chest aches and the next silent exhale was much harder to release than the last. He readjusted his seating position again, but it only gave the drum of his heavy, slow heartbeat to his ear.
Luca stared at him blankly with his mouth ajar for just a moment, brown, caramel eyes wavering between the relaxed expression on his friend’s face and the crowd in front of them. “Shouldn’t we wait for Giulia and them to get back with the snacks?”
Alberto blew hot hair through his teeth pressed to his lip, feeling a pang in his chest that came quick and left even faster, leaving behind a feeling of weight in its place. “Fffh- nah. It’ll just be practice. You know, for when we get ragazze .”
“Oh, okay,” agreed Luca with a small grin, surprisingly compliant in his approach.
Alberto got onto his feet before bending down and taking up the smaller boy’s hands into his own. He curled his lip in at the contact, hoping the other boy didn’t notice the sweat on his palms and then inciting a small wonder in the back of his mind why that’s an anxiety to him at all.
Luca used his hands as a branch and clumsily pulled himself up to his feet. He stumbled for a moment, nearly falling with the taller’s grasp still in touch, but found his balance soon enough for the taller bow to release a small chuckle and step back.
“Alright, so do you wanna be the girl, or do you wanna be the boy?” Alberto asked, crossing his arms and puffing out his chest.
Luca gulped, eyes moving to the side, to the ground, to the crowd - to anything except for the talker’s face. “Can’t we just take turns?”
The taller shrugged with a small grin, “Okay. Sure, that works.” Despite his outward proudness, internally felt a twinge of embarrassment that he hadn’t thought of that idea sooner.
“Do you know how to do it?” Luca asked, his voice lowering to a small whisper. Something in his mind told him to stop. Something inside his head told him that people would be watching, that people would be judging them, but their words fell flat, because Luca still couldn’t quite place why. It’s just two friend’s practicing, after all, so what should it matter? It’s perfectly normal.
Alberto took up Luca’s hands again. This time, he couldn’t hear his heartbeat, but he could feel his lungs as they expand and shrink with each breath. “Not really, but it doesn’t look too hard.”
Luca watched with wide eyes and his mouth turned to a small pout as his friend released his palms and moved to gingerly hold his wrists, dragging them upward and carefully, ever so gently, place them to rest on his shoulders. He swiped his thumb over his friend’s collarbone, getting used to the position and relaxing his shoulders that he hadn’t even noticed to have stiffened up with a slight sigh of a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in.
The voices of the radio pick up, but neither of the boys are really paying attention to the contents of their sad song.
Alberto traces the pale skin of his friend’s arm until it disappears beneath a trout gray sleeve, and then the contour of his shape as he finds his waist. As his hands settle, he feels another pang but it’s not a pang, really. It’s long and drawn out, it starts in the tips of his fingers, twitching against the coarse fabric of his friend’s shirt and running through his veins before reaching his middle back and spreading again to the extremities of his body like lightning.
Luca can feel his body burn, his hands electric with nerves and a fizz of a flame on his waist where he makes contact with Alberto. He can feel the older boy’s heavy breathing against his forehead as the air is still and townspeople talk amongst themselves all around them, but with enough distance so the boys can step forward as one and step backward even closer and not worry about bumping into anybody or anything.
As it turns out, the song wasn’t the best pick for a slow dance. It became faster and more aggressive as it progressed, raising its deep voice, accented by light, to the evening and bringing small shame to each of the boys as they slowly, ever so slowly, became more aware of themselves - specifically, how ridiculous they looked as they stumbled tried to find the pace in a song they’d lost.
“Should we stop?” Luca whispered, forcing himself to breathe through his words as his hands, still atop his taller friend’s shoulders, began to flush red in the pads.
Alberto shook his head, pressing his palm ever so slightly harder into the shorter’s sides. “No, no, just keep going. It’ll be awkward if we stop now,” Alberto said with a tune much deeper in pitch than he had anticipated in his words. Although he had implied a soon end to their dance, he had little to no idea of how it would occur — who would pull off first, who would be the first to speak after the fact, and even if he wanted to stop at all.
“Of course I do,” he told himself internally. “This is just practice. I’m going to be such a good dancer when I get a girlfriend. She’ll be so impressed. She’ll think I’m a natural.” But as he thought and tried to picture the girl of his dreams, he couldn’t think of a face. He couldn’t even think of a dress or personality or anything as he stared into the soft, squarish, and blushing face of his friend with half-lidded, glowing emerald eyes and a manual breath in his lungs and a heartbeat that was a bit faster than it’s means.
They get a hang of the motions the second the song begins it’s exit, the chorus of women drowning until three, maybe four, voices lead alone, singing out the final, fading line, “Che da dimenticare chi non s’ama,” until it’s gone, and another takes its place.
“Should we stop now?” Luca asks in the silence with a slight knitting in his brow, but does not move to increase the distance between them.
“Nah, but let’s switch,” Alberto responds, attentively plucking Luca’s limp hands from his shoulders and moving them downward until the rest and grab at his hips. He can barely breathe as he moves his hands upwards until they settle on his friend’s shoulders.
The music picks up again with a heavy note from a piano, instantly joined by complementary low and high tunes of string instruments. He looks up to meet the eye of his friend. Somehow, he feels much closer to him than he was before. His brown, dull eyes meet jade and he can feel a swirling, almost nauseating feeling in his stomach that whispers him truths in a language he can’t yet speak.
Alberto swallows, his growing Adam’s apple bobbing within the sight of his friend as grins down at his wide-eyed, almost fearful, expression without even meaning to.
Luca’s blank pout breaks into a dopey grin where his teeth show through his lips and his lower eyelids are pushed higher and grow creased as his freckled cheeks, now florid rise.
Everything but the music and Alberto stay as the world falls apart around him. His mind’s eye displays his friend, grinning down at him from above as they’re surrounded in a lush green forest, completely alone with the night sky untouched by light and cloud, illuminated completely with the magnificent spill of galaxies and gleaming stars.
Alberto almost laughs at his friend as his eyes drift just a hair apart, giving evidence that his mind has gone somewhere else, far into the ocean or high above the clouds — he’ll never know. He almost wants to say that he looks like a fish, with his eyes drifting like that, but as Luca is still grinning up at him with a wide, unmoving smile and a flush in his cheeks and his hands on his waist, Alberto doesn’t make a noise.
And even though Luca’s mind has travelled somewhere far off into the distance to a meadow under the moonlight that his friend can’t — and likely never will — meet, the boy can feel the warmth radiating from his friend’s body against him as they sway and step together as one, one pale pair hands at the waist, two tan draped in a cross at the shoulder. He doesn’t look to the sky as it blooms with luster and sparks, or the trees as their limbs, donned with lime green, flowering, hanging vines, extend outward in a grand display of nature, or at the long, wet grass as it becomes flattened against the earth by their step and by the gentle, fictional wind, no. He only looks at Alberto.
His eyes trace the lines created by his grin, stop and drink in the pool of his eye, and count each and every one of his dark brown freckles on his face and then another time for good measure before moving to study the curly golden locks as they move with the motion of their feet, despite the fact that trapped by that awful but attractive old cap.
In the real world, Alberto is giving himself up to improvisations as Luca takes the lead. Together, they abandon the monotonous dance and lead into a newer territory - a pattern completely unique to them, but their hands never move from their place upon the other as if they had been cemented there, or simply attached as if they hadn’t ever been anywhere else before.
But it did have to end, eventually, and the song’s finish came much quicker than the one prior. It faded back out, and Luca’s mind faded back in.
One would expect Luca’s happy grin to close into a soft smile, for his white, straight teeth disappearing behind thinned, pink lips, but that isn’t what happens. Instead, the boy, pale and thin, loses himself a hollar of a laugh, releases his friend’s waist from his hold, and jumps at him.
Alberto catches his friend in a strong hold — chest against lower chest, hands upon backs, head against collarbone and cheek into dark chocolate curls. Another song fades in.
It begins with the soft tapping of a drum, the gentle clap of a tambourine, the entrance of a slow guitar, before finally: a voice.
The shorter begins to softly sway as Alberto relaxes his arms. The voice pours out from the radio, but he cannot recognize the words.
Luca releases his friend's head and moves his arms downwards, and Alberto does the same. He threads his arms beneath his friend’s and curves upwards to feel at the shoulder blades through the fabric of his striped shirt.
Alberto follows along, feeling small tremors throughout his torso. “This is just practice,” he tells himself as he can feel a grin widen and twitch against his collarbone. “This is just practice,” he lies to himself, as he furrows his brow with shut eyes and curves his head to bury his nose in his friend's dark, curly hair.
Luca presses harder, trying desperately to cling onto an inconspicuous expression but the muscles in his face just simply won’t allow it. His ears burn with even exhale against his forehead, the sides of his mouth twitch with every pulse felt against hid back. His eyes dance behind closed lids just at the simple hug and sway.
Alberto feels a slow, subtle motion against him. He pats his friend on his back as a question for attention.
Luca parts from him, though they keep in touch — they always keep in touch — with a small question in his eye and a fading grin. He worries for a split second if he did something wrong.
“Were you singing?” Alberto asks, quirking an eyebrow upward with an almost disbelieving smirk.
“Oh,” Luca’s smile returns to him in an instant. “Sorta, just kinda mumbling the words.”
“You know the words? You know what they’re saying?” Alberto’s chest swells with pride for the other boy.
Luca suddenly becomes shy, tilting his head and shrugging. “I- I mean, only sorta! It’s pretty simple — I only recognize some of the words from my English lessons at school, but I’m kinda rusty—”
“Well, I don’t know anything!” Alberto laughs. “I’m not gonna judge you, Luca, and no one else is watching, so-”
Luca scoffs, resting his eyes on Alberto’s hands as they’ve moved from his back to his forearm. “(Alright, well),” he starts a little delayed, “Do you wanna dance, (and then) Tell me I’m your (something, I dunno. I wanna say lover? Uh-) Oh, baby, do you wanna dance and make romance,” and as he looks up to Alberto, his entire face has become red as a rose, but he cannot help but grin.
There’s a look in Alberto’s eye that neither boy can quite place. It sends a rush through Luca that he cannot quite name and sends him again in a fit of flurried laughter and giggling and pressing against his friend and demanding he just “stop!”
“Stop what?” Alberto asks, shaking his head backwards.
“Stop looking at me like that!”
“Looking at you like what? I’m not looking at you like anything,” he declares, an almost devilish grin replacing the foolish.
Luca groans again, kneading at the uncovered, tan, and spotted skin of his friend’s arms. “Whatever, let’s just get back to practicing.”
Alberto gives a small nod, releases his friend’s arm and relaxes his hands on the smaller hips as the other slings his arms over the taller’s shoulders, just like they had started out, but much, much closer by now,
As the song rolled into another, neither paid attention to the song playing, only to each other. And when Alberto tried to picture that girl again - that feminine, likely blonde and pink-dressed girl that the world would dictate to be a perfect match for him to spend his days with, he only found a picture Luca.
But that thought wasn’t new to him. The boy already was perfectly aware that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with his best friend; he’d known it since he was fourteen, and that was two years ago. It wasn’t a revelation or an epiphany of any kind, no, it was just a simple fact of his life. One day, it was going to be him, Luca, and that nameless girl under one roof, and he’d accepted that.
Snapping back into the present, Alberto once again felt the soft contour of Luca’s smile pressed into him. He could feel his slow breath on his skin and the continuous thump of their heartbeats pounding so hard, so delightfully hard, with an against the tempo of the other’s that neither boy knows which heartbeat is his own and which is not.
Alberto whispers a small “Let’s go back to professional,” into his friend's ear, feeling a small tightness creep up his throat.
Luca’s lip curled in, nodding with a small nausea in the pits of his stomach. He almost felt hurt by the words of the taller, but he couldn’t tell why, so he allowed a space of nearly 45 centimeters to come between them. Nearly instantly, he mourned the contact - mourned the warmth - mourned the itchy, woolen material of his friend’s against his arms and against his face as he felt the absence and its imprint upon him.
The boys found that dancing was much easier now, if not a bit absurdly simple and even a tad bit fake, as if it was to be performed and not enjoyed. But this is just practice, isn’t it?
As the song reached its end, Luca almost called it all to a stop, but as the next song hit his ear with as much punch to it as a steel toe to a soccer ball. His eyes grew to saucers, his mouth widening to a bright beam. He looked up to his friend with an almost delirious look, pleading, “Alberto, dude, this is one of my all time favorite songs, like of all time-all time, man!”
Alberto sighed, “Alright, no more professional style - do what you want.”
Luca took his hands off from Alberto’s shoulders to cup at the skin just beneath his armpit, gingerly petting the area and swaying with the beat. One…two…one…two as the record stick hit the muffled snare and the trumpets drug out long, raspy chords.
It didn’t seem like much to Alberto, just another song and it wasn’t even pop, the genre Luca, whose gaze had turned towards the floor, usually went for. But as his friend bobbed his head in time as a musician plucked steady low chords upon a bass, he found himself not caring a single bit.
A flute hummed the melody, still playing low and slow, and Luca’s hips moved to fit the rhythm, and Alberto found that same electric, rushing feeling forming in his fingertips, just as it had at the start of their little show returning in small hiccups and spurts.
Luca’s gaze lifted up to Alberto, his walnut brown eyes half lidded, turning almost amber in the sunset’s glow, as he spoke: “You’re just too good to be true.”
Alberto’s mouth became dry, his mind reeling at the other boy’s expression to notice that the song was in another language he didn’t know a single word of.
“Can’t take my eyes off of you,” Luca continued, his mouth curved into a short smile ever so sweetly as he whispered the words and nearly theatrically tilted his head and learned in closer.
Alberto was burning. He felt like he was on fire, and everywhere that Luca touched - his chest, his sides, his mind and his heart - there was a piece of hot coal pressing into its spot.
“You’d be like heaven to touch,” Luca’s eyes closed, loosely slitting his fingers between the cracks of Alberto’s own. They held hands like this before, sure, countless times, but never like this. “I wanna hold you so much,” Luca gave his hand and his side a small squeeze.
Alberto felt like he was going to throw up. He swallowed dryly, unable to decipher if letting Luca lead was going to be the best decision of his life or end up being the thing that finally kills him for good.
“At long last love has arrived, and I thank god I’m alive,” Luca spoke, opening his eyes to stare into Alberto’s, and nearly laughing when he catches the gawking expression the taller boy has on. “You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off of you.”
Alberto thought there had been a pause, but he was given no such grace as the song continued and breathing became one of the last things on his list as keeping his eyes glued to Luca, to his body, to his almost impish grin, to his hands, to his pink cheeks, to his voice — to each and every part of him.
“Pardon the way that I stare,” Luca punctuated the last word with a shake of his head. “There’s nothing else to compare.”
Alberto’s eyes widened even more so, realizing his friend knew what he was saying, but he didn’t. He could be saying anything to him right now, and he wouldn’t know it. He could be saying horrible things, and be doing it with a grin, and he wouldn’t know.
“But Luca wouldn’t do that,” he told himself, and that was all it took to convince him.
“The sight of you leaves me weak - there are no words left to speak,” he continues. “But if you feel like I feel, please let me know that it’s real.”
Alberto started to grow a small grin again as his anxieties became deafened to his ear. He watched his friend intently, dotingly, as he tilted and knocked his head gently from side to side, and enjoyed himself far more than he ever could just practicing.
Luca stood on the tips of his toes, using his friend to steady himself and whisper, “This is the BIG part,” before reclining back to the ground.
He didn’t lie. The music sped up in almost an instant, the trumpets music flaring and trilling as Luca worked his friend’s hands, still interlocked with his own, like a slide handle. Alberto watched, breathless as his mind whirred and his mouth gaped at his friend in awe.
Luca nodded his head in a beat that wasn’t yet present, nearly bouncing on his feet, counting in a whisper, “one, two, three, four—” His eyes slammed shut and his head turned to the sky, “I LOVE YOU, BABY—”
Alberto was yanked forward and forced into a spin, but he didn’t care. He loved it. To him, it was exhilarating. He was smiling harder than he had ever smiled all summer as the world around him turned to a blur and the only thing that remained steady was Luca, face flushed entirely pink and his hair bouncing as he banged and bounced in perfect time with the lyrics.
And he sang out: “And if it's quite alright , I need you, baby , to warm the lonely nights!”
They slowed their spin, but kept on moving as active and as energetic as the ocean at midnight.
“I love you, baby,” Luca continued, his accent slurring the words as they slowed and became more pronounced. And he reopened his eyes, “Trust it me when I sayyy—”
Alberto lost sight of the world. He lost sight of himself.
Luca squeezed his eyes shut again, springing and rocking upon his feet, shaking his head, holding on tight to his friend’s hands, and he cried out, “OH, PRETTY BABY, don’t bring me down I pray! Oh pretty baby , now that I’ve found you, stay .”
Alberto was nauseous. He was tired, he was burning, he couldn’t keep up with his thoughts, his throat was dry and his lungs tightened with a crazed, bubbling laughter.
“And let me,” Luca simmered down almost instantly, his sweaty palms relaxed their grip and slipped out to trail up the other boy’s arms and rest against his collar. “—love you, baby.”
Alberto managed to hook onto a single thought. Instead of it being a useful one, it was again of that girl he’d someday be with. Of that blonde, pink-loving, stereotypically hyper-feminine girl that was supposed to be the woman (or teen, for now) of his dreams, yet didn’t have a face.
He was supposed to be with her, in some sort of way. He was supposed to pine after her and work for her and dedicate his entire life to her, but he realizes, as Luca theatrically whispers in a game of dramatics and insincerity “let me love you,” that the girl he had been looking for had always been him.
~
“And they’re not even dating yet!” complains Ciccio, gesturing angrily to a pair of boys across the piazza with a half-eaten scoop of gelato still in hand. “How can anybody—be allowed to be that happy.”
“I’m so jealous of them it’s making me nauseous. I’m actually going to throw up if I watch any more of this,” moans Guido, a miniature pair of binoculars held up to his eye.
“Fuh! Try living with one of them,” criticizes Giulia, looking through the lens of her camera. “Ugh, there’s no way Alberto’s sleeping tonight.”