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The world is a blurred silver bullet as the referee’s whistle blows, but all Michael can hear is a loud thud and a pop, the bass of bodies hitting the ground thrumming under the green skin of the field and through his body, echoing in the open carcass of the stadium. There is no other noise but the thud repeated, repeated, repeated. The ground is soft, mother nature clement under the player’s feet, but the impact sounds too solid, too loud, too there.
Everyone hears it before they see it. Michael was about to score a goal with his infamous Kaiser Impact, was about to be the thing that everyone hears before they see, but of course Lorenzo just had to steal the spotlight. It’s a defender’s job to eat the shots of strikers, but Lorenzo hasn’t eaten anything today—Michael knows this because he heard his stomach grumble while he was pressing him in the first half. Always pressing him, always touching. Not now though. Lorenzo isn’t close enough to touch because he’s on the ground, surrounded by monochromatic skyscrapers, and Michael wants to be shot with the silver bullet that is the world.
The ball is forgotten by everyone in that moment but Michael. He wants to shoot, to bring everyone’s attention to him, to his kick, to the net impregnated, full of food, unlike the dead man on the floor. Who is not dead. Michael is just dramatic. The ball feels like the precipice of the universe under his foot, as if it is stepping on him instead of he stepping on it. Damn this stadium and the number of seats. Damn the recording lens and surrounding bodies. He wants the attention on him and away from Lorenzo.
The ball is heavy under his foot and in his chest and in his stomach. The spherical weight increases when the EMTs start rushing onto the field and the stretchers are being stretched out in the wingspan of a Spruce Goose. Lorenzo looks dead, which isn’t a new look at all, but this one just isn’t right. He doesn’t look right. He must be dead. Don Lorenzo has died on the field by tripping over a ball or being pressed too hard by a finger. Truly an awful way to go out. Michael doesn’t feel anything about it, other than a thousand balls the weight of a thousand suns in the sum of his body. He feels simultaneously too light and too heavy, too here and too there.
It doesn’t matter how much Michael wants to move because if he does, he might float away, or fall through the earth. He is anchored to the ball, which is anchored to the field, and all Michael can do is watch as they lift Lorenzo off the ground that he is not anchored to, his body moving too spaghetti than usual, his face turned away from Michael. All he can see is grey-green and a square centimetre of purple.
The stadium is mute. Michael doesn’t hear anything, and he ceases to see once Lorenzo is out of view and somewhere less crowded, more safe, not recorded. Somewhere everyone else isn’t. Somewhere Michael is not.
He keeps his foot on the ball, every bustling body on the much too lively field than usual forgetting him, like a child forgets that their imaginary friend also has a limited lifespan, blue eyes fixed on the spot where the world last saw Don Lorenzo.
✺
Don Lorenzo is not dead. It’s very rare to die in a sport that deals with more fake injuries than real ones. It is more likely to die in such a sport, in any professional sporting career for that matter, years after retirement when the overuse of every square centimetre of your body catches up to you. This has not yet happened to Lorenzo. He is only twenty-five, soon to be twenty-six, because he is alive. Goodie. Don Lorenzo will live to see his next birthday, and perhaps the one after that, if Michael doesn’t kill him.
He wants to kill him. Or something akin to a killing. There is a want that Michael has never felt before stabbing at his stomach and killing it, stabbing at his lungs and killing them, stabbing at his heart and almost killing it, if only it wasn’t stabbing at the apex, which opens into a mouth like a Venus flytrap and devours anything in its path. This must mean that Michael wants to kill Lorenzo, so he wants to kill him. He wants to kill him because he wouldn’t be in a fucking hospital if Lorenzo wasn’t. Michael Kaiser does not like hospitals. Nor does he like the dark. Or Lorenzo. The more you know.
Michael stands far away, very far away, as far as the size of the hospital room allows. He watches the professionals mulling about and whispering to each other in Russian, bites of aired words registering because Michael's Oma was Russian and she would sing him beautiful lullabies, about babies being eaten by wolves, about a man watching a child sleep. She had a good voice. He wishes she were alive to sing him to sleep, to sing this situation to sleep, so that he wakes up to yesterday, enough time in the past to catch Lorenzo before he falls. Michael stares blankly at the middle of Lorenzo’s noodle body stretched out on the thin bed, daring not to look up any more, pushing his own body further against the wall as if he were a shovel and the wall something to dig into.
It has been some hours since the incident. Everyone who cares swung by earlier when the game was cut short and the players were removed of their leashes to free-roam. The corner furthest from where Michael stands engulfed by the wall is filled with floating helium bodies and other assorted gifts, bright colours against a hospital white wall, looking like throw up on a beige tiled kitchen.
Most of the nurses, or whatever they are—Michael doesn’t fret about the details of hospital hierarchies and such—have left the room, leaving him with a very alive and seemingly well man, and a single whatever-hospital-worker. After fixing the duvet, which already seemed fixed enough, the whatever-hospital-worker turns to Michael with a melee smile. His eyes land on the nametag, physician assistant. Wow. Michael would never have guessed. Just how big is the pyramid?
“He’s going to be alright, it’s just a grade one ACL sprain. His concussion is starting to go away.” Just an ACL sprain. Only an ACL sprain. ACL sprain. There’s the weight of a heart sitting in the cave of his mouth.
„Super.” Michael answers absentmindedly in German, recognising the family name on the physician assistant’s tag to be Austrian. They give him one last smile, this one sealed and not so bladed, before they’re out the door and it’s just Michael left with who seems to be Lorenzo, something inside him wary of the body in the room.
It looks a little too pale, not enough grey-green in the skin to classify as Lorenzo. Michael can’t see the purple in his hair from where he’s standing against the wall, the body alien to his clear pilled eyes that can see through dimensions. Everything in the room looks alien—the balloons in the corner move as if something lives inside them, perhaps a heart or a brain. In Michael’s balloon there is nothing but a stinking corpse that has been there since the beginning of his time, the walls clean of any markings. Just a plain, old skull. An ordinary skull for a not-so-ordinary boy. Man. Boyman. Manboy. Whatever he is at this stage.
The rise and fall of Lorenzo’s unusually straight and poised chest appears steady, moving with breath and alive. Alive. It continues to rise and fall slowly, normally, like a bouncing ball on the verge of becoming still. Through his nose, Michael inhales all the oxygen in the room and keeps the weight of life taut in his chest for one, two, three seconds, and then releases it, air brushing against his lips. Lorenzo’s body does not budge. The edging goes unnoticed.
He doesn’t stop staring at the movement of Lorenzo’s chest, counting the seconds it takes for it to rise and then fall. It takes an average of four seconds to rise, and then three seconds to fall. It’s not intentional, but it feels like Michael’s heartbeat has begun to follow the rhythm of counting breaths, his head lolling back against the wall until the crown of his head is grazing hurt gazelles from the solid pressure, watching the rise and fall from the bridge of his nose.
How is Michael supposed to complete Ghost of Tsushima now? He only started it because Lorenzo kept pestering him to, even chose Kurosawa mode because Lorenzo kept pestering, and pestering, and pestering; his favourite pastime and top skill off the pitch. Seven Samurai is Lorenzo’s favourite movie, and Ghost of Tsushima is his favourite game, purely because of the existence of Kurosawa mode. Just black and white, endless grain. It hurts Michael’s eyes after too long, but still he plays it because Lorenzo autopilots when he can’t be bothered.
They’re not even halfway through the game yet, barely half a third through the main story. And now Lorenzo is lying on a hospital bed in a hospital room in a hospital—very hospital-esque, hospital-ception. How the fuck is Michael Kaiser going to complete the game that dumbass Don Lorenzo pestered him to play in the first place?
Who is going to do the bamboo strikes for him? No one else has Lorenzo’s skeletal hands that can press seven buttons in a randomly generated consecutive sequence at the speed of light. Those mini-games—if you can even call them that, Michael thinks in upper lip raised disdain as he continues to stare at the rising of very-alive-Lorenzo’s chest—are the absolute worst. Michael only enjoys the game when he hits enemy after enemy with Heavenly Strike. The white flash that comes afterwards is pretty, like a meteor splitting through the grainy night sky. He likes throwing black powder bombs at Mongols surrounding a captured peasant, because he’s an asshole, and if he’s going to be a hero, he’s going to rake up a body of innocents next to the body of villains—balance of the universe that is Michael Kaiser, synonymously known as Dolcezza by someone who is half-dead, half-alive, which is an average, but today is not an average. The balance of the universe that is Don Lorenzo is now crooked.
From his grave in the wall, Michael watches Lorenzo for another minute, five minutes, ten. The image of a distant memory flashes behind his eyelids whenever he blinks. His brain doesn’t stop thinking of a thousand cut scenarios as he keeps his eyes on Lorenzo.
“Dolcezza…” A frog’s croak bursts, perturbing the endless thoughts stringing gore in Michael’s head. “Are you there?”
Michael digs his grave deeper, his back beginning to ache from the pressure. He stays quiet, doesn’t even breathe as Lorenzo starts to shift slightly in bed, little sprinkles of flinches throughout his slow movement as he turns. Even once Lorenzo’s dull purple goldstone eyes have landed on their mark, Michael stays still as a cockroach against the wall. Evidently, Lorenzo’s concussion is not on his side. The physician assistant, professional name for whatever-hospital-worker, wasn’t lying.
“I’m here.” Michael says, voice like dust dancing in sunlight. Lorenzo doesn’t crack a joke, or a gold smile. He just stares at the cockroach on the wall, half-dead, half-alive. Somewhat here, somewhat there.
“You weren’t here earlier when the others were.”
It’s an answer to the unasked question that is the elephant in the room. Not a judgement, but an observation with a thousand eyes, a million—however many grains of sand there is on a beach. It stares at Michael like a threat, like a mother. Not much of a difference, really. You either live long enough for your mother to become a threat, or for a threat to become your mother.
“You always do that.” If sandpaper could speak words, it would sound as Lorenzo does now. “Stand off to the side, watching. No matter how much you want to get closer. I’ve watched you enough to know, OK?”
Michael does not say anything. There’s nothing to respond to with what Lorenzo said. This isn’t a court room where Michael is fighting for his defence. This is a hospital room with a hospital bed occupied by Don Lorenzo who has a grade one ACL sprain. There is no law here except for life and death, the offense and defence of living organisms.
“And you call me the stupid man.” It is meant to be light-hearted, the words even come out as such, but there’s no crack of a smile. Nothing but one-on-one stares.
According to Lorenzo, Michael is a man at this stage. A stupid man, but a man. Not a boy, boyman, or a manboy. Just a man. There should come clarity with such an affirmation, but all Michael feels is a stone rolling through his digestive system like it’s a roller coaster made for a physics assignment.
“Go to sleep, Lorenzo.” But none of the usual annoyance is there. It’s just… blank. “They’ve pumped you with drugs.”
Lorenzo tilts his head a little further to properly look at him, his eyes meeting Michael’s lapis, dark beautyberry irises ringed with light. Barely any gold shows when Lorenzo speaks, as if the goldstone isn’t there anymore, as if they’ve run away. Michael’s mother used to say that a lot. Eat your food before it runs away. Take care of the stray you adopted yourself or it’ll run away. Sometimes they did run away. Michael wonders if Lorenzo will—not any time soon, clearly, but someday.
“You’ll stay?”
Two words, two syllables. That’s all it takes for Michael’s thoracic cavity to collapse into itself. He levels his gaze with Lorenzo, static buzzing at the crown of his head as if a balloon had been rubbed there. Well, his head is a balloon, and he’s been half-consciously, half-subconsciously rubbing it against the wall for the past half hour.
“Ja, whatever.” The words come from someplace else other than Michael’s mouth. “I’ll stay.”
Lorenzo smiles. Not an open smile at all, not even a closed one, but even with the distance between them Michael can see that his eyes have crinkled. His eyes always smile before his cheeks or lips. Michael has learnt the exact order.
Almost as if the mere fact that Michael has chosen to stay is temazepam, Lorenzo shortly falls asleep. It’s clear in the change of breaths; the sound and the time in between. Slower, but more precise, like darts being thrown in slow motion and hitting bullseye each time. An average of five seconds to rise, and then two seconds to fall.
Something propels Michael forward, his legs moving with the reception of commands to take a step, but the chain of command doesn’t come from his brain. The only thing on his mind is to stay away, to fly to the other side of the world, but his body moves on its own, and soon enough Michael is sitting in a shitty hospital chair beside Lorenzo’s bed. Despite the fact that he has one of the best rooms in the hospital, the chairs are still awful to sit in. Michael might as well be sitting in an iron maiden.
Although there’s a few bodies of space between where Michael sits and Lorenzo sleeps, the rising and falling is a wind’s breath in Michael’s ears. He doesn’t look at Lorenzo’s chest anymore, gaze focused on the hands laid at his sides.
Michael stares at Lorenzo’s loose hands, the rolling stone heavy in his ileum. His fingers twitch in his lap and they remain twitching like a hare’s ear, the heavy stone growing adolescent.
✺
Michael dreams while he’s awake; about a dream driving down the Nürburgring, unbuckled from his seat and drifting corners and straight lanes, drifting on any and every road, no matter how straight it stretches. Michael dreams about drifting down the Nürburgring.
In the passenger seat is buckled Lorenzo, perfectly intact and smiling the same old planet cores as usual. In this dream, Michael does not hate the sight. In this dream, Michael is focused on the tar of Lorenzo’s body. In this dream, Michael’s eyes are not where they should be.
He’s on the Nordschleife, drifting far too horizontal around a corner, and Lorenzo topples into the driver’s side like a domino. Michael sees it happen scene by scene because his eyes are not where they’re supposed to be. Lorenzo is still smiling, a silent laugh tucked between the gold.
The road is littered with chalk drawings. A bright yellow sun. An angel ascending, or descending. Shooting stars. A warning sign with a cross. Behind them follows a trail of skid marks, black eraser wiping out the chalk on the tar, the car a comet and travelling at the speed of light right into earth’s surface, or into a guardrail. One moment Michael is behind the wheel, and the next moment he’s behind the car, a wide river-road of distance between him and the metal ton.
The metal ton, or as Michael can somehow discern being a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL coupé despite the death of it, is smoking black blacker than the road between him and it. Even the growing fire is dark instead of warm, like the sun hidden behind an eclipse. The road is much wider than it was a crash ago, symbolising the distance that Michael puts between himself and anyone he ever loves, a present the result of a past.
He looks at the smoking crash, the distance shrinking until Michael is right in front of it, close enough to feel the black heat but not feeling it. It’s like his body has become an anaesthetized wound; unfeeling all over. His eye are back to where they were a meteorite ago.
There’s a chalk outline that wasn’t there before, highlighting the mess of Lorenzo’s body. His eyes are open. He is looking at Michael. He is not alive. He is alive. He is not alive.
He looks at Lorenzo in a heap amidst the conjoined metal heap. He sees his Oma. He sees Lorenzo. He sees his Oma.
The unfeeling turns shivered and chilled when Michael senses a presence beside him, or behind him—somewhere out of sight. This presence is familiar and unfamiliar. It is a threat as looming as the impending death of the sun five billion years from now.
When the presence speaks, Michael is overcome with blustering heat all over. His digestive system feels as twisted as the mess before him.
“What did I tell you, Michael?” It is his mother, voice as thick as the tar he is now sinking in. His mother tsks, tsks, tsks out of view disappointedly. “Have you forgotten what I taught you?”
Michael would say something in reply, like fuck you or kill yourself, but he’s sinking in tar and the rest of his head is soon to be swallowed. His mother is still there, he can feel her presence like the heat of the sun during a cloudless day, and she doesn’t stop reminding him as he continues to sink.
“You will never have what you want, Michael.
Never.”
✺
There’s an aquarium swimming in Michael’s stomach, acid creaking like floorboards and fish bubbling as if they’re drowning. He hasn’t eaten since before the match that was cut short because someone doesn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other, a lesson taught when your toes are piddly full stops. Michael hasn’t eaten in close to a day, so his intestines have started to make music with grumbled and flatlined notes. Lorenzo is being assisted into a brace. Michael is still sitting in his chair.
But for some reason, Lorenzo’s attention isn’t on the whatever-hospital-worker in front of him—who isn’t the physician assistant from before, and Michael wonders where they are—instead, Lorenzo’s attention is on Michael.
“You stayed.”
Michael doesn’t look Lorenzo in the eye, or at any point of him for that matter, focused on his steeple-hands as he sits on the uncomfortable hospital chair with his legs spread and his elbows digging into his thighs.
“Yeah,” the steeple crashes and burns as Michael clasps his fingers together, red pumping in and out of his heart, “I stayed.”
✺
Michael Kaiser used to have a childhood friend. An imaginary one, but a childhood friend all the same. It didn’t have much of a physical manifestation, no corporeal dimension to its existence, but it was there, drawing crayon scribbles on the walls of Michael’s skull, filling his head with worlds of several different colours and shades.
It only came out when his mother wasn’t around, when Michael could talk, albeit in a whisper, and communicate with it. When she was around, it was gone, its existence as silent as Michael’s closed mouth. It might sound crazy, but she killed his (imaginary) childhood friend. This much Michael knows because the corpse has been rotting in his body ever since.
Once upon a time, Michael had a childhood friend that would only come out whenever his mother wasn’t watching, which was one of her best skills, if not the best. If there was a professional ranking for watching, his mother would be number one.
This childhood friend would fill his head with golden dreams and reddened wants and blue needs, all to be washed away when his mother appeared, but then the childhood friend would come back and draw more scribbles on the bone-walls. Then his mother would appear. The scribbles would be redrawn. Rinse and repeat.
One day, Michael made a mistake in expressing one of the red wants, and his mother killed his childhood friend. Now all that’s left in the skull-room is a rotting corpse coloured green and brown. The walls are barren. Michael Kaiser no longer has any wants or needs in his head, but that isn’t the only part of the human body.
✺
There is a black brace around Lorenzo’s left knee in support, and a single crutch under his right arm for extra support, because Lorenzo has an awful gait that goes against him more than it walks beside him. It is an enemy of every day.
In a few hours, Snuffy should be arriving at the hospital to pick Lorenzo up because he will be the one overseeing his recovery. Michael’s back and neck hurts from the earlier wall-pressure and shitty hospital chair, and his intestines won’t stop writhing. He needs to eat, but he doesn’t want to—not when Lorenzo looks like that.
They’ve been walking through the hospital garden for the past ten minutes since Lorenzo wanted to get out of the dull room. His doctor was hesitant until Lorenzo said pretty please with a cherry on top. He’ll need to be slowly reintroduced to physical activity anyway, so they gave him an hour, so long as Michael made sure he took a break every ten minutes.
They’re sitting on a bench in the small hedge maze, Lorenzo’s braced knee right next to Michael’s clothed one. He’s wearing sweatpants while Lorenzo is wearing shorts that Michael swears are his, because they’re a bit too short and tight around his chicken thighs. How Lorenzo manages to get his hands on miscellaneous pieces of his clothing, Michael has no clue.
It smells like summer in the air even though it’s still early spring. There’s a distant splashing and tweeting behind them, and Michael assumes that there’s a birdbath nearby, most likely at the centre of the maze. Even though it is spring, Michael feels the chill of winter along his spine.
“You know you can just say it.” Lorenzo says all of a sudden, as sudden as finding the centre of a labyrinth after endless dead-ends.
“Say what?”
“The things going through your head.”
Michael straightens his posture, a habit from being interviewed by professionals and amateurs alike.
“There’s nothing in there.” A lie. If Michael were to specify that there’s nothing living in there, it would be the truth.
He expects Lorenzo to push some more as he usually does, but the silence soon refills between them, the splashing and tweeting of birds gone. The silence pisses Michael off because it’s the complete opposite of Lorenzo, who’s loud and obnoxious and always there, makes it known with his working larynx and lungs and diaphragm. Not now though. None of them are on shift.
“Did it hurt?” Michael whispers, or more like his heart does. The foot of Lorenzo’s crutch grazes over the gravel when he adjusts his position on the bench.
“Sì.” The answer causes Michael to square his tense shoulders with a hurt lessened and still hurting. “But, I don’t know... I forgot all of it when you finally came to visit, you know?”
Michael doesn’t look at Lorenzo even though the social cue to do so passed by. Lorenzo scoffs a light-hearted laugh.
“You know...” Lorenzo digs the end of the crutch into the gravel, and Michael imagines that the ground is his head. "You're allowed to want me, OK?" It comes out a whisper because today is not a day of loudness or summer gold smiles, but the words boom in Michael’s ears as if the moon had just fallen to the earth and the waves took over the land.
His head has turned of its own accord to the direction of Lorenzo, his eyes on the sight of Lorenzo biting his bottom lip enough that he’s almost eating the small forest on his chin like a giraffe, and then Michael’s eyes are on washed royal plum eyes when Lorenzo turns his head to meet him in the middle.
"I give you permission to want me." Lorenzo says, and Michael’s vision turns static.
Want. The red humiliation that comes with being human. A long time ago, Michael admitted that he wanted something and got burnt for it, and he never wanted anything ever again. Which is impossible. He wanted things, sure, but he kept himself separate from his wants enough that they became a separate entity from himself, an entity that had no autonomy of its own, no corporeal form. It learnt to rot and has been rotting since. The corpse in his head wasn’t some imaginary childhood friend, it was just Michael, an extension of himself.
So here Michael is, early spring and sitting in a hedge maze with Don Lorenzo, who is alive and better than ever, with wants pumping through his body like red and white blood cells alike. He’s been wanting for a long time now, but when comes the feeding from a hand comes the biting. He is the spoon and the hand that controls it, and the hand has since rotted away.
"I'm yours.” Lorenzo whispers, and Michael’s skull floods with red and red and red. The corpse is washed in it. The walls are covered in it. ”I've been yours since I first saw you. I gave myself up to you like a prayer since then." Lorenzo is uttering stupid poetic shit as if his ACL doesn’t have a grade one sprain. Michael wants to kiss him.
It doesn’t matter how much Michael buries himself into walls or background guest stars or his own self. No matter how Michael tries to hide himself, Lorenzo sees him marked with an x-ray spotlight. He sees all of him, and chooses to still see. He sees the disaster of the universe nicknamed Dolcezza and loves it anyway.
What Michael wants is the entirety of Lorenzo, to give the entirety of himself to Lorenzo. But the problem is that the entirety of Michael is bloodied, scarred, ugly. And he wants to give Lorenzo something holy. Although what are angels but evildoers of God? What even is holy when under angel plumage is nothing but red? Holiness is bloodied, scarred, ugly. Holiness is red under white. Holiness is a sense of killing out of love, which is a religion, the meaning of life, the centrepiece of the abstract structure of the belly universe.
Fuck his mother and her stupid claims. Michael has always owned himself—it’s the only thing he’s owned since the beginning—and it’s the thing she feared most; the realisation of his own agency over his own self. If she could pockmark his brain with enough of her words, she could store the ends of marionette strings there and then control every area of his brain. That’s why she killed his childhood friend, the extension of himself. It kept cutting the strings and she didn’t like that.
Sure, Michael doesn’t own anything besides himself, never really has owned anything else, and even when he did, he didn’t know how to take care of it—good at taking things apart, awful at gluing things back together—but Lorenzo is good with his hands. Lorenzo has glued himself back together plenty of times. Surely this time, just this once, Michael can let himself want and have. Just this once. Only once.
“I want to kiss you.” The words burn Michael’s throat and his tongue and his clenched fists. “And I want to kill you. But I want to kiss you first.”
There’s a yellow light in Lorenzo’s eyes, a golden dream. His eyes and cheeks are smiling, but not his lips.
“I’m not stopping you.”
The thing about wanting is that it’s humiliating. No matter the want—its size, depth, or its context—it being a want is enough to burn red brands into the heart. Wanting is the most intimate reminder of what one is, but Michael can’t find it in himself to flinch at the reminder of just how human he is to the core. Not with Lorenzo’s face in between his hands, Lorenzo’s own hands brushing constellations on the backs of his, the lock which has been locked for years unlocking.
It feels as if Michael has been drifting through the timeline of his life as the Boötes Void, starving and empty, and he has finally reached the point on the timeline where the sum of him is filled with galaxies, with volume and life. He brushes his fingers against the plum of Lorenzo’s cheeks, the skin warmer than it looks, business bustling with the rush of blood vessels. Don Lorenzo is alive. Of course he is. He is a kind of god, his fingers wrapping around Michael’s touching ones like the serpent of deception.
With blue godless heavens above their heads and green hedges surrounding, Michael kisses the only god in existence to the tune of birdsong that has returned, tips of tongues biting like daggers with an almost bloodlust desire. Lorenzo was serious about not stopping him, leaving the control to Michael just like in the conscious dream. There’s a slight elevation of anxiety in Michael’s abdomen at the chance of the moment crashing, but it flies away when Lorenzo tilts his head to deepen the kiss.
It’s all tongue-slide and spit-exchange, the cold touch of Lorenzo cooling Michael’s throat and his tongue and his flat plain hands, a promise of forever stuck between their teeth and mining cavities. Michael digs his tongue as far as it can go, searching for gold below the surface. Lorenzo doesn’t stop him.
With the brush of their noses as if eject buttons, they pull away from each other, stained red in the cheeks and panting, although Michael is trying to play it cool by breathing in and out slowly. Two seconds to rise, two seconds to fall, perfect balance. It doesn’t matter anyway because their foreheads are pressed together like two planets collided. Lorenzo can hear the stuttering of breath.
"How does it feel to kiss me?" He asks, a smile under his eyes. Michael can taste gold under his tongue.
"Like the weight of God's sins." Michael replies, Lorenzo’s poetic disease infecting his vocabulary. It was the gold he dug from deep below the surface.
Lorenzo laughs from somewhere deep, the sound solid, and Michael wants to eat it.
“The paparazzi’s going to catch us.”
Michael snorts lightly. “Could you fucking imagine?” He rolls his eyes behind closed lids. “I fucking forgot they existed.”
“I could tell. Eating me alive in a hospital garden of all places, dah~?” The words sing like the chorus of a hit pop song. Michael slaps Lorenzo lightly on the cheek, the impact rippling out a laugh. Before Lorenzo can catch him smiling and hang it over his head like a mistletoe every day that is and isn’t Christmas, Michael lets go of the globe of Lorenzo’s face and stands up, his back to the injured man.
“Tell Snuffy I’ll take care of your ass.”
“Is this your ploy to try and kill me?” Lorenzo says, and Michael looks over his shoulder with narrowed eyes, the corners of Lorenzo’s lips upturned. “You sure you can take care of me? You’re awfully good at breaking things and terrible at putting them back together.”
Michael rolls his eyes. “Just because I don’t know how to build a Lego set without looking at the manual every second doesn’t mean I can’t take care of your DSM-five arse.”
Lorenzo laughs in disbelief. “Come on, dolcezza. I’m still in recovery, OK? You’re so mean to me.” Michael pokes his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “As if you’re any better.”
The birds sing a melody as if in agreement, or laughter. Michael imagines them combusting like balloons.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh.” Lorenzo nods to himself as he holds the crutch upright and attempts to hoist himself up from the bench, but the gravelled ground has other plans. Right as Lorenzo stumbles, Michael straightens his posture with an arm around the waist and a hand on the crutch.
“All right, Opa. You can still use your legs.” It’s meant to be a jab, but it doesn’t come out right after the swiftness with which Michael moved to balance Lorenzo. There is another ACL to be injured and Michael isn’t taking any chances. “I want to look after you, so let me.”
No matter how much Michael expresses a want aloud for the first time in forever, the burning doesn’t ease. But it’s necessary. At some bend in the road of the human body, a want becomes a need.
There is one god in this universe, and it is looking at Michael with all the gold and amethyst geode in the world.
“You’re such a stupid man, dolcezza.”