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“Hey, Abbacchio, would you, uh… would you like t-to have your morning coffee with m—w-would you like to have breakfast with me?”, Bruno blurts out.
“Yeah, sure, let’s do that sometime.”
That’s what Leone kept on saying from around the time that they met—it really had been that long since Bruno had attempted to ask him out on a breakfast date. Leone was, for some reason, more than happy to oblige—relieved, even—if Bruno asked to have lunch or dinner with him, but he kept dodging the thought of breakfast together. It was early days, but even then their pining for each other was evident, and thus Leone accepting to join Bruno for lunch or dinner yet avoiding the matter altogether when it came to the first meal of the day left Bruno with unrelenting anxiety.
“Does he, or does he not…?”
An initial, but inconclusive clue came to him when, one day, the five young gangsters had no choice but to stop at a petrol station for breakfast; they’d had to drive out of Naples to investigate a certain target they’d been paid to eliminate, and their client had been forced to relocate. The client requested an absurdly early catch-up meeting, and couldn’t offer them more than a glass of water as gratitude for making it to his unassuming place of hiding. As they had neither slept nor eaten, their energy reserves were beyond depleted by the time the meeting was over, so they stopped for a mid-drive coffee break.
This was their first time having breakfast together as a group of five ever: Bruno was early to rise and usually had breakfast with whoever went in the kitchen at the same time as him; this was almost always Fugo, sometimes Mista. Narancia tended to sleep in, and so he hardly ever got to join the other three before they were already washing their mugs and plates. And Leone, well… they weren’t exactly sure when Leone had his breakfast. They knew he did, because they always found an espresso cup in the drying rack in the morning that wasn’t there the night before, and their fruit bowl was always a bit emptier. Their working theory was that he had breakfast by about 5 am because he, the fucking madman, went on a run every morning: it was safer for him as a member of a criminal organisation to do outdoor sports when everybody else, whether criminal or law-abiding, was asleep, and other gangsters with similarly nocturnal work schedules tended to sleep in late—but not him, never him, because the morning was all he had to himself.
Narancia had gone over to find a clean and spacious enough table while the others paid, and as soon as they sit down Mista looks around to the others and begins, without so much as letting the others unwrap their sandwiches or pastries,
“Say…”
Oooooh no : it was Mista’s Question Time. Leone sometimes enjoyed how far-fetched the questions were and how they prompted him to think seriously about subjects that he’d never thought much of before, but it was the rowdiness and endless arguing that these questions ensued that made him dread being caught in the game. And this time, without his self-mandated alone time, it was bound to be much, much worse.
“…say, what do you think our Stand powers would’ve been in prehistory?”, Mista asked.
“Huh?”, mumbled Fugo, still munching on a chunk of his ham sandwich.
Narancia, who was sat opposite Leone and next to Fugo, stretched forward to speak to Mista. “Wait, did people have Stands when we were cavemen?!”
Leone winced when he saw Narancia still had food in his mouth.
“I don’t know!”, yelled Mista, “I’m asking hypothetically, dumbass—”
“HEY! Who are you calling dumbass?!”
Luckily for Leone, Bruno intervened before either of them could launch any hits at each other. “Mista, Narancia, behave . Don’t let an empty stomach get the better of you, so have your food first.”
Fugo raised a finger while he finished chewing the first bite of his pastry. “Can I chime in now?”, he asked with a hand still covering part of his mouth, just in case. “I think—I think my Stand would’ve been the hunter-gatherer type, because who knows whether cavemen even got diseases like the one Purple Haze carries, so surely it would have to be a poison from a plant.”
“Whoa, that’s a good point,” Bruno added from behind his cup. “Zippers definitely didn’t exist in the caveman days, so I don’t know what Sticky Fingers could’ve done instead,” he said, suddenly looking a bit dejected.
(Leone wanted very badly to place an understanding hand on his knee.)
“I know!” Narancia said with his face lit up from the joy of having found a solution to Bruno’s disappointment. “You could’ve magicked up caves out of nowhere instead of your zipper voids! How about that?”
Fugo and Mista looked at each other with widened eyes, half amazed by the fact that Narancia could produce such an intelligent answer and half proud of him for suggesting a genuinely feasible option—hypothetically, of course. “Narancia,” Mista shouted unintentionally, “you’re a fucking genius—I mean, if not even Abbacchio thought of that…!”
“I think Abbacchio’s the real loser here, unfortunately,” added Narancia. “Video recording obviously didn’t exist then.”
Bruno wanted to return the kindness of suggesting an alternative to his Stand that wouldn’t seem out of place in the caveman days but, mainly, he just wanted a take a chance to flatter Leone. “Oh, the caveman version of Moody Blues would simply reproduce events with the power of Abbacchio’s good memory, and it would be a huge deal because our brains were far from existing as we know them now.” Looking triumphant he said, emphatically, “Abbacchio’s Stand would reflect the advances of the hominid brain!”
The three younger members stared at him in bewilderment: Bruno hadn’t shown that much interest in one of Mista’s questions before.
Leone, meanwhile, could only stare out the window directly next to him while he tried to hide the fact that he was blushing from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. He attempted to turn enough of his head to speak to Bruno face to face, but not so much that the other boys saw how flushed he was. “Thank you; that’s very kind… Buccellati.”
Fugo, Narancia and Mista couldn’t help but stare at the two of them like three birds gawking at a particularly fluffy piece of bread.
Mista broke the silence. “Anyway!” he said as he munched on a second, chocolate-filled pastry, “what about my Stand? Bullets didn’t exist back then!”
Suddenly, a little rumble could be heard from beneath the table, and the Pistols all erupted with six clicks from the barrel of Mista’s gun, all simultaneously squeaking “MEEEESTAAA!!!”
“What do you mean bullets didn’t exist?!”
“Are we going to DIE?”
Mista instinctively protected his food, realising also that he forgot to get them some salami before sitting down to eat. “No way! I never said that! I’m going to go buy some salami for you to eat in the car but for now don’t make me look like I’m talking to myself like a lunatic!” he yelled, trying to make himself look as though he’d been speaking to Fugo or Narancia all along. “Now bugger off and get in the gun!”
“Okaaaay, Meeeeesta,” they complained in unison.
Thank fuck, Leone thought. It’s too early for one squeaky voice, let alone six.
“So!”, Narancia continued, “what do you all think Mista’s ooga-booga Stand would’ve been like?”
“Hmm,” Bruno mused, “maybe like some kind of slingshot with six little pebbles?”
“That makes sense!”, Narancia beamed. “Buccellati, you’re so smart!”, he said leaning forward to give him an awkward, though very welcomed hug.
“Ah, it’s nothing. Now”—he waited until Mista sat down again, now carrying a salami sausage—“time for the hardest one to reimagine: Aerosmith!”
“Fuck, Narancia, you might not have had a Stand at all in prehistoric days,” Fugo commented before shoving a piece of croissant with strawberry jam into his mouth, “like what even is the prehistoric equivalent of a little plane?”
Mista leaned over to take a better look at Narancia. “That’s what you get for calling Abbacchio a loser, loser!” he said smirking.
Bruno couldn’t help but smile, though he brought his now-empty coffee cup to his face to conceal the instinctive gesture, causing a slight tink! noise as it’s placed back on the saucer.
Fugo remembered to tell Mista what they decided his Stand’s prehistoric equivalent was while he was buying the salami. “By the way, Mista—”
The slurp-slurp of lukewarm coffee being drained out of cups. Tink.
“HEEEEY!” Narancia pointed at him with the fork that he was going to stab the last of his pastry with. “Who are you calling loser, loooooser?”
The screeeech of cutlery against emptied plates.
“—your Stand would’ve probably been a slingshot with six little sentient pebbles; Buccellati came up with it!”
“You, Narancia! It’s not like cavemen had a car like they do in the Flintstones! You’re fucked!”
Clink.
“Nah, shut up! I bet my Stand would’ve been a badass wheel! Just a cool wheel that could roll either on land or on the air! Since wheels were the latest transport-related technology, you know?”
“Mista! Did you hear what I said? MISTA!”
The clank-clanking of forks scraping against teeth.
Slurp. Clank.
“WHAT!”
“All three of you, shut up!” Bruno banged one of his fists against the table, gently, but authoritatively enough that the younger ones would stop at once. “Abbacchio, are you okay?”
Sometime while the three of them bickered, Leone had taken his hands up to his ears, and though his hair was draped over his face it soon became clear to all four of them that he was deeply distressed about something, perhaps even in pain.
He had missed Bruno’s question in his effort to muffle the noise around him, so Bruno stretched out a hand slowly, as close to his field of vision as possible, and finally placed it on his shoulder. “Abbacchio… are you okay?”, he asked again.
(Both their hearts were threatening to jump out of their throats.)
“It’s just a migraine,” he lied. It was a little more complex than that: the conversation was exhausting, far too loud and fast-paced for him to handle without having already had at least two cups of coffee.
“Oh, Abbacchio,” Bruno said rather sheepishly, as if it had been his fault to some extent that he, supposedly, had a migraine. “You could go sit in the car if you’d like while we finish up over here—the overhead lights are really annoyingly bright.”
Bruno understood far more than he could’ve ever known, but he couldn’t find out why just yet.
A few months later, Leone would let him in on his secret.
The owner of Libeccio needed to speak to Bruno with regard to the suspicious businessman that wanted to buy the restaurant to demolish it and use the land to build luxury flats for tourists—he was convinced that the sudden spike in petty crimes in the area were his doing. Nobody could rectify the situation better than the famed Bruno Buccellati and his men: their constant presence in the restaurant would hopefully let the businessman and his men know that he was under the protection of Passione, and that Buccellati’s men were more than happy to give him a grisly end.
Bruno went to meet the owner in his office whilst the rest waited at the table for their food. The meeting dragged for much longer than planned, even going so far as to Bruno needing to have his dinner in the office, but after half an hour they felt all the basics had been covered.
Downstairs, the owner meant to notify the young men that poor Bruno would be released soon when Leone accidentally bumped his shoulder while scrambling to find an empty cubicle where to calm himself.
“Buccellati,” he remembered to say once back in the office, “I think I ran into one of your men on my way out of the toilets—he looked upset for some reason.”
“Oh, God, I wonder what they’ve done now?” Bruno asked with pretend exasperation, trying to conceal how panicked he felt. “How unusual—do you by any chance remember what he looked like?”
“Quite a distinctive look, he had. Tall, long hair—,”
Oh no.
“—black coat, very pale skin. Sounds familiar?”
“Fuck”, Bruno uttered to himself, hoping the owner hadn’t read the word off his lips. “Yes, he’s one of mine. Shall we leave this here?”
It was not long after they’d said their goodbyes that Bruno made out the sound of half-stifled sobs coming from one of the cubicles, and although a distinctive voice couldn’t be made out it still seemed unsettlingly familiar.
“A-Abbacchio…?”, Bruno asked tentatively.
… … …
Bruno thought about Leone’s secret on the way back home, though much of it he did not do since he was holding his hand for the first time, and Leone wasn’t resisting it but indeed clasping it a bit tighter every so often, and even when he gesticulated—teaching him that secret language from his childhood—he never let go of his own hand, not until they got home and neither of them could find their keys.
“Phew!” Bruno sighed once Leone spotted his keys at the bottom of his bag, and let out an adorable chuckle in anticipation of his next thought. “Imagine if we’d had to sleep outside?”
“That wouldn’t have been too bad,” Leone replied immediately. He meant to push the door open, but stopped himself as he preferred to finish this particular trail of thought where the others—if they happened to be awake—didn’t have a chance to hear him. “I tend to run a bit warm.”
Bruno tries and catches his gaze before he has a chance of looking away. “That’s funny,” he says, “I tend to run cold.”
A warm wave of something, he didn’t know what, overcame and completely paralysed Leone right in his tracks—it was similar to embarrassment, but not quite: there was nothing to be embarrassed about. Nervousness? Not exactly; this fell a bit short of it: of course he was nervous to be opening up so precipitously quickly to the person he’d been falling for since the very day he approached him, sad and sorry and soaked to his soul—but there was something else, some kind of excitement: this was the joy and mild desperation of knowing that Bruno longed for him too.
The house was pitch black inside, which was surprising considering tomorrow was their day off; normally, if nothing was expected of them the day after, somebody was always bound to be up playing on their shared Nintendo console.
Bruno thought of what risky, busy lives his young mentees were leading. “The boys must be tired…” he reflected wistfully.
“Mm,” agreed Leone. “You get some rest too. On top of everything you do as a soldato you are kind of like their mum too, and you don’t get a day off from that.”
Bruno imagined himself like a mother hen to three little chicks and had to chuckle. “Especially on days off! My god, I’m going to have to write a sign above the toilet asking them to remember to flush!”
Leone did a strange half-grimace, half-smile, all along keeping his eyes fixed on Bruno’s without so much as thinking about it. “Ew!”
“By the way, Leone—there’s something I want to show you, but it’s in my room. Mind coming over?”
Bruno hoped that it was true that autistic people were a bit gullible.
“Oh, sure,” Leone replied, completely unsuspecting of Bruno’s actual plan.
Bruno’s room was, not to Leone’s surprise, the cleanest and tidiest place in the house other than his own if not even cleaner, though how he managed to keep it like that with his busy schedule was beyond him. He tried to subtly tilt his head to read what names graced the spines of the books on his shelves: as expected given what he knew of his background there were some books on marine life, both in Italy and around the world, but there was a lot more poetry than he thought.
“Have you heard of Pablo Neruda?” Bruno asked, startling Leone slightly.
“Rings a bell,” Leone lied, but he wanted Bruno to get straight to the point. He was feeling a little sick with anxiety.
“He was a Chilean poet—he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in fact. Anyway, he was exiled in Italy for some time. I love his poems—he’s got a great poem about crab stew!—and I thought… I thought I might show you,” he said nervously. “I mean, not just that one! He’s got some… some really good… really good ones.”
He meant to say some really good love poems.
He reached over to grab a bilingual volume called Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and hoped just in case that Leone couldn’t get an idea of what the title meant.
“¿Hablas español?”, Leone asked out of nowhere.
Oh, fuck. How the hell did he know Spanish?
Leone continued as if he’d been gifted with mind-reading. “Yo aprendí un poco en el colegio.”
“Un poquito,” Bruno beamed proudly, trying to hide that he, too, was beginning to feel a bit sick with anxiety. “I taught myself a little bit.”
Ah, a smart fig cookie.
“Muy bien, Buccellati.” Leone replied.
“I told you to just call me Bruno.”
“Okay… Bruno,” he said slowly, with intent. His own name sounded so beautiful when it rolled off those full, seraphic lips.
Still trying to shake off the spell of his name on Leone’s mouth, Bruno handed him the book. “Take a look!”
It sounded almost like an order, but Leone did so out of genuine curiosity.
Bruno’s plan was working: he needed Leone to lower his head a little bit, and keeping him engrossed in a book was the perfect way to ensure that he did that for long enough for him to summon the courage he needed. Why was Leone so goddamn tall? With any given pair of shoes on he could be almost two metres tall, but even without them—they left their shoes by the entrance, of course; they were gangsters but at least they were civilised —he was, Bruno guessed, at least ten centimetres taller. And he was already so focused on the poems that he seemingly forgot to sit down, which would have made kissing him easier.
Still, Bruno stood on his tiptoes, making sure to grab hold of his desk chair with one hand lest he fall on Leone’s arms (ideal otherwise, just not now), and using the other to tuck his hair out of his face, then dig his fingers through it as he leaned, leaned closer, and pressed his lips against Leone’s.
He pressed back—first with tremulous lips, then more assuredly, again and again.
They paused for a brief moment.
“Leone,” breathed Bruno—all he managed to say. His eyes went to Leone’s lips, which he thought were really as pillowy-soft as they looked, then back to his eyes. He could tell there was something he was dying to say, but decided not to urge him on. It was clear from what he’d heard of Leone’s past just moments ago that he needed time to organise his thoughts—Bruno just had to trust that, given how he took to his kiss, he needn’t worry about whatever was on his mind.
Bruno took his eyes off Leone’s to give him a break from making eye contact, since he looked unsure of when to take one himself.
“Bruno, I… I really like you.”
“I really, really like you too, Leone—”
“B-by the way—now that you know about, well, me , and that —I just wanted to say that I don’t mean to dodge your invitations to have breakfast together, in fact I really want to, I really fucking want to—b-but… how do I explain this…”
“Easy, Leone; take a breath. For you, I have all the time in the world.”
He inhaled sharply, then rubbed his eyes as if it suddenly dawned on him how exhausted the eye contact had made him, despite the rather novel feeling that he was enjoying it somehow.
“Bruno, remember when we went on a mission to bumfuck nowhere and we had to have breakfast at a petrol station, and Mista asked one of his weird questions, and after some time you asked me what was wrong because I was covering my ears and I said I had a migraine? I, it wasn’t quite a migraine; it was more like what happened today—too much noise happening at the same time makes me feel, I don’t know, sick? Overwhelmed, completely exhausted?”
Bruno nodded; the thumb that was on Leone’s neck was now caressing his jaw, the other hand rested on his bicep. “I did remember exactly that when I saw you in the cubicle earlier today…”
“Well”—Leone carried on—“that’s why I need to have breakfast by myself. I need the space to, like, adjust to the world, and the time to do it so that I don’t end up wanting to kill everyone later…”
Their eyes were interlocking again.
“…my whole day goes wrong if I don’t start it in silence, but”—his face contorted in anguish—“I want to have breakfast with you so badly, Bruno. Help me… I don’t know how not to be like this.”
“You don’t have to change anything about yourself, Leone, either for me or for anyone at all, I promise,” Bruno explained, now caressing the velvety skin around Leone’s eye. “We’ll figure it out in the morning—sleep with me tonight, and we’ll get up really early, okay?”
He tried to sound cautious in case cuddling through the night was a step too far for now, but it seemed as though that was exactly what Leone wanted. “I’ll go put my pyjamas on and will be right back,” he said with a wide smile that illuminated his face.
In more than one way, Bruno and Leone were opposites in the way they slept: Bruno was a deep sleeper who practically fell asleep before his head even touched the pillow, and Leone was a lifelong insomniac—though this time Leone slept through the night for the first time in many, many years, whereas Bruno couldn’t manage more than a couple of short naps with the added bonus of being able to rest his cheek on his shoulder. It would have made more sense for Leone to embrace him, but he was Bruno’s guest, and all he wanted was to make him feel safe, safe to be himself around him, safe then and safe forever after.
Almost right on the dot at five thirty, Leone inhaled sharply and wiggled a little.
“Morning, handsome,” Bruno whisper.
Leone rubbed his thumb on Bruno’s hand, which the latter came to realise once they got out of bed was unbelievably stiff from being linked with Leone’s all night.
“Morning, Bruno—wow, I slept really well. Did I ever tell you I’m an insomniac?”
Bruno arched his eyebrows in honest surprise. “I wouldn’t have believed you if you hadn’t said that—you slept like a little puppy…”
Leone released Bruno’s hands and turned around to kiss him—Bruno’s lips twisted into a knowing smile, and so they went on for a while until they were interrupted by Leone’s growling stomach.
“Fuck, sorry, this is embarrassing,” he apologised, but Bruno immediately shushed him. “I didn’t really get to eat much yesterday, I suppose.”
“Let’s go get some food in you then,” asserted Bruno.
It was still dark outside, but not so dark that they had to turn on the light. The first rule of breakfast with Leone, Bruno came to find out, was that he hated the overhead light and avoided it as much as he could.
Bruno prompted Leone to take his seat of choice and to tell him how he liked his coffee. “I’ll have to make you a few questions, but it’s so you don’t have to think about these ever again, as long as we sit together,” he explained apologetically while opening the cupboard where they kept the coffee beans. “Other than this small inconvenience, you just sit back and relax.”
Leone nodded before going back to the book of poetry from last night.
From then on, the only sounds were birdsong, the low thud of slices of peach falling on a bowl, the much-anticipated flow of coffee into two mugs, the rasping of a buttered knife on bread from the neighbourhood bakery.
Some seven minutes later Bruno finally interrupted the silence, but hesitantly, in the manner of a student speaking in a library.
“Leone… is this okay? Are you comfortable? Please, let me know—”
“It’s definitely okay,” he smiled. “It’s perfect.”