Work Text:
Next December
It sucks to be a loser in love. And Massimo was the loser in this equation. He understood that now.
He’d gotten down on one knee—diamond in hand, heart in throat—and all he’d gotten for his efforts were scuffed trousers.
To make it even worse: watching him lose in love had become the world’s favorite spectator sport. Some had rooted for him (mostly his diehard Italian fanbase). But the other guy’s team had amassed more fans than even Juventus, Italy’s most beloved soccer team.
Because of course there was another guy.
Crown Prince Wilhelm of Sweden.
If he hadn’t waltzed back into Simon’s life, then maybe, just maybe, Massimo wouldn’t have gone home empty handed. Massimo could have won Simon back if he’d been Simon’s only suitor. But once Wilhelm had swooped into the picture, all bets were off. Because of course Wilhelm was everything Massimo was not: royal, white, ancestrally wealthy. No matter that the crown prince had let Simon down once before. That he’d once eviscerated Simon by publicly denying their relationship. That he’d coldly kicked Simon to the curb just four years ago.
Massimo had never been anything but thrilled to be with Simon publicly. From the first day, he’d been peacock-proud of having Simon on his arm. He’d never kicked Simon to the curb.
Yet he was still the villain in the public’s eye. Just because he’d once been caught on camera for a slight indiscretion. An teensy slip-up he’d spent the better part of a year trying to apologize for.
But no.
He’d lost. That had definitely happened. The world had watched Massimo fall on his face.
And the world had celebrated last week. When Team Wilhelm had won.
It had all started last year with Wilhelm’s coming out interview, practically a hand-calligraphed invitation for Simon to date him again. Full of pining and lip biting and royal self-restraint. Massimo had watched it and wanted to spit. Where had Wilhelm been when Simon was just finding his feet in the music industry? Massimo had been there. Where had he been when Simon struggled with his own fame? Massimo had been there.
For the world who’d watched Wilhelm’s coming out interview, following just weeks after Massimo’s botched public proposal, the prince’s interview was a gauntlet thrown down to Massimo. Massimo couldn’t even jet to Paris for a weekend without some grandma approaching him with love advice for winning Simon. Or, worse, berating him for trying to stand in the way of Simon and Wilhelm’s true love.
Wherever Massimo went in public, he felt like a soft-boiled egg freshly peeled from its shell—jiggly and unprotected and about to be eaten.
All his life, the fame Massimo wanted had flitted just out of reach. He’d hungered for it ever since he was little—when his teachers had sneered at him and made him repeat himself because they claimed they couldn’t understand his accent, even though he sounded just like the other kids; when his friends’ parents had asked pitying questions about his immigrant dad who was never around; when, as a teenager, the pretty white boy who’d let Massimo blow him one sweaty summer night in the park had looked the other way and sneered when he saw Massimo at school.
So, with a clawing desperation, Massimo had shoved everything he had into his music. Every free minute went to his rhymes. Every waking thought turned on how he could push himself to be bigger, better, more. He wouldn’t just get out of the mean little town where he’d grown up, he’d ride a fucking rocket out of there. When he became one of the world’s most-loved pop stars, when he was so famous that everyone who’d ever spat on him regretted it so hard that they’d lick the dirty sidewalk he walked on just for a chance to see him again, when he had more money than God—then he’d finally have the fame he wanted.
He’d lived his entire life like a diver following a glittering treasure coin tumbling swiftly below the surface. He’d pushed and pushed, swum deeper and deeper, strained every muscle to catch the bright flickering promise of fame. But it had ever eluded him—that final breakthrough that would make everyone see him.
Last year, he’d felt so close he could almost touch it. While his first four albums had all gone gold in Italy, it was his fifth about his breakup with Simon that had gone gold in seven other European countries, too. The artistic director at his label had promised him he was on the cusp of an American breakthrough. He was poised to become bigger than Italy, bigger than Europe. Global.
Then this had happened: the public’s stupid obsession with the rivalry between Wilhelm and Massimo over Simon’s heart.
That was the thing that had skyrocketed his fame into international regions beyond Europe.
So, now, he found himself in the lightless black of the ocean, the glittering treasure he’d been chasing lost to the depths, oxygen tank empty, with no idea how to get back to the surface. It was a mockery of the fame he’d spent his life chasing. Now, he’d forever be known as Simon Eriksson’s ex who’d gambled everything to win him back and failed.
Was he famous for his music? No.
Did anyone outside Europe know a single song he’d sung? No.
If he could have at least won Simon’s hand, he wouldn’t have minded. Then he could have convinced Simon to do the duet with him, and the world would at least be listening to his music now.
Instead the world would always know him as Simon’s loser ex-boyfriend who’d been rejected over and over.
For months now, the world had been speculating that Team Wilhelm would take home the prize. Simon and Wilhelm had been papped together over and over. Always in a group of friends. Always casually close, never holding hands, never touching.
But their eyes gave them away. Whenever within feet of each other, they gazed longingly at each other. Not looks that friends exchanged. Heads bent together over a vendor’s stall at some leafy green open-air market, Simon turning to grin at Wilhelm’s profile with bright-eyed adoration. Walking close-shouldered down a touristy boulevard, surrounded by friends who might as well not exist because Simon and Wilhelm were sharing some inside joke that had them both laughing slyly. Or the shot from a few months ago when they’d been papped at a concert, Simon watching the stage, Wilhelm staring at Simon like he’d found religion.
Still, Massimo had hoped. Stupidly.
He’d hoped that Simon would understand the album Massimo had penned for him. That Simon would remember how mind-blowing they’d been together. That, with time, Simon would think about what Massimo had said in that cramped bathroom before Simon had shoved him away and told him the only song he’d ever sing about Massimo would be … No, he’d blocked out the memory of what song he’d said he’d sing about him.
He’d hoped, even as he’d ached with bitter longing at the wildly successful release of Simon’s first solo album, The Middle Distance, an odd, sharp-edged little record. Some songs plunged you into treacherous abysses; others rose you soaring above the clouds, breathless and fast and terrified. Massimo had always suspected that, if freed from the constraints of his formulaic boyband, Simon would be a wonder. But he’d had no idea. All the wild, unfettered emotion inside Simon floored Massimo. These alt-pop songs unspooled one after the other as a revelation, a truth, a heart-breaking wholeness.
Simon was listed as the cowriter on all the songs, along with a mysterious J.W. Probably some industry ghostwriter who’d taken the chunks of Simon’s songs and whittled them into these jagged, truthful masterpieces. And Simon performed them with so much heart.
Massimo had only listened to the album once. He’d listened all the way through, start to finish, volume up on his surround-sound system, careening between obsessively looking up translations of the Swedish portions of the lyrics on his phone and tossing his phone away because the poetry of the lyrics burned, even through the hamfistedness of Google Translate. As the final notes of the last song—an achingly sweet, soft little number—faded, Massimo had shaken his head, closed his music app and decided never to listen to the album again as long as he wasn’t with Simon. The way Simon’s music had fisted his heart and squeezed was too painful to repeat.
Not that that stopped everyone else from playing his music. He couldn’t walk into a restaurant or go to the gym or get a drink at a bar without Simon crooning at him. People everywhere had fallen in love with Simon’s music. Not just that, the snobby music journalists were jizzing themselves over him, too—how mature the album was, how thoughtful, how musically advanced. As if to say: who knew there was a brain behind that pretty face?
There was one song he didn’t mind hearing. It was the second hit off the album, an angry beautiful ballad, “Contigo contra el mundo.” And it had hope pushing through the dirt of despair in his chest every time he heard its upbeat aggressive opening. Because Simon had played it once for Massimo when they’d still been together. Back then, it’d been different, just the barest idea of a song, clunky and unwieldy in parts, not the fully formed battle weapon it was in its final version. But, once upon a time, Simon had played it for him and said it was about him, about their relationship.
And he’d included that song on his album! So, surely, he must have been contemplating giving Massimo another shot. Surely! Massimo had clutched that hope tight even as every new picture of Simon and Wilhelm had landed like a punch to the gut.
But Massimo had been stupid. Idiotic. A fool.
He pressed play one more time on the YouTube video that already had fifteen million hits, even though it had only been posted last week.
The video had been professionally filmed, the camera hanging close above the pared-down stage. Massimo wondered if they’d filmed the whole concert, Simon Eriksson’s final concert of his first solo tour, or just the encore. The venue was smaller than the arenas Undercover Strobe had usually toured in, but the crowd still screamed just as loud as the arena audiences when Simon returned to a stage that was bare but for a piano and mic stand.
Sweaty, joyful, loose-limbed, Simon looked amazing. Despite it being the end of his show, he didn’t look fatigued; he radiated ease. His hair had grown longer than Massimo had ever seen it, thick coppery curls that fell just above his shoulders. He wore a skinny black denim vest hanging open over his naked sculpted chest, which glittered with a swath of silver chains. The barely existent top was paired with black wide-legged pants with long slits to just above the knee, so the fabric played peek-a-book with his calves whenever he walked. He looked like the edgiest of runway models, except for the lack of scowl.
He grinned widely, his whole body alive with his smile, and raised his hand as he strutted to the baby grand and sat.
The full-throated screaming of satisfied fans at the end of the night overwhelmed Massimo’s phone speaker.
The stage went dark but for a single spotlight lighting up Simon’ lush hair and half-naked shoulders. He had no right to break Massimo’s heart while looking like some enticing sex god come down to earth.
As the audience quieted, he leaned into the mic, and said casually in English, “Hey, thanks, you guys. You’ve been amazing tonight. Since you’ve been so great, I’ve got a secret to share with you tonight. Ready?”
Massimo’s phone speaker rattled with audience screams.
“OK, here goes: I’m dedicating this encore to my boyfriend. To my one-and-only. To the light of my life.” Each statement slipped out of him with slow dreaminess and a bitten-back smile, like he was trying to school his face but couldn’t keep the joy from bursting through.
A few solo screeches ripped through the quiet of the whole venue holding its breath as Simon paused before continuing.
“He’s here tonight backstage. I asked him if he wanted to come out and say hello, but he’s a bit shy about some things. Which I find incredibly sexy. You all might know him as Sweden’s crown prince. Wille, this one’s for you.”
After a moment of stunned silence, the crowd went berserk, louder than the Eurovision finale when the home country’s performer sang, than Italy winning the World Cup, than Vesuvius erupting.
And then Simon began this throaty sexy cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong,” but the audience’s ear-blistering screams nearly swamped any chance the listener could have of appreciating his skillful interpretation of the song.
The video finished and Massimo pressed play once more. One more knife to the heart. He’d lost count of how often he’d watched it this week.
He didn’t know which of his two primary activities this week was worse: watching the video obsessively or doom-scrolling on all iterations of the hashtag #Wilmon.
Watching the video physically hurt—seeing Simon blissed out and open about being in love, in a way he’d never been with Massimo. But the doom-scrolling made his blood boil.
He’d even gone so far as to install a browser add-on that automatically translated Swedish, so Massimo could read what everyone was saying on Swedish social media. The Swedes seemed particularly impassioned: either fans who’d been cheering for them all along were shitting rainbows about how happy they were, with the grating smugness of couch-spectator winners who had contributed nothing to the win they took personal pride in; or crazy-cake assholes were ranting about how the world was ending because a brown-skinned, half-Costa Rican male commoner was dating Sweden’s crown prince. Sometimes the assholes wrapped their bullshit in subtle window-dressing of “worries”—that Simon was a typical Latin lover, that he couldn’t settle down, that he would break Wilhelm’s heart.
But it was the same bullshit. And everyone was missing the real problem!
No one could see that Wilhelm wasn’t good enough for Simon. He’d apparently left Sweden to live in Berlin and become the world’s most understated influencer, which just made the queers thirst for him even more. With a mullet and an earring, he’d transformed from an uptight rich boy to a club-going slightly reclusive hipster. His Instagram feed was boring and random, but people loved him anyway. Mostly it was pictures of latte art interspersed with soulful pictures of him at a piano alone or late-night clubbing pictures of him with his arm slung around other boys and girls.
And don’t tell Massimo Wilhelm wasn’t living the life of the recently out to the fullest. Of course Wilhelm was fucking every one of those boys he had his arms around and many others who weren’t making it onto his Insta feed. Sweden’s crown prince was nothing more than a bored dilettante fuckboy. Of course he was going to hurt Simon again. How was everyone missing that?
Occasionally on the #WilmonForever hashtag, Massimo would happen across the last holdouts from #TeamMassimo still battling for him. Mostly they were commiserating with Massimo, speculating what his reaction would be. Would he write yet another album about getting his heart broken?
And that, right there, was the million-Euro question that Massimo had zero answer to.
His doorbell buzzed loudly over the screams of the video. He pressed pause and lugged himself off the sofa, giving himself a cursory glance. Huh, he’d been wearing the same boxer shorts for three days. At least he had a shirt on. He picked up the receiver that connected him to his building’s lobby.
“Sir, your sister and her husband are here to see you.”
“Tell them I’m not home.”
“I heard that!” His sister’s shrill voice called out. “Tell them to let me up. Or I’m calling mom.”
Shit. She didn’t pull that threat out often, but when she did, she meant it. He already knew exactly what his mother thought of his lack of progress on his latest album. If she saw the state he was in now, he’d get an earful.
“Fine,” he huffed. “Let them up.”
He ran a hand through his short hair, greasy and unwashed, and glanced around his penthouse condo. He couldn’t remember when he’d last shaved or showered or when he’d last eaten something he’d cooked himself. Despite it being long past lunch, the curtains were still closed on the skyline of Milan. A teetering pile of unopened mail on the dining room table. A layer of dust on the piano keyboard cover. Empty wine bottles. Pizza boxes.
He’d canceled the cleaner this week because he didn’t have the energy to leave the apartment, but neither did he want to deal with Signora Rizzo’s pitying sighs as she mopped his floors; her tutting noises as she stacked empty pizza boxes and took them to the trash; or the love advice she’d dole out during her cigarette break on his balcony, as it took her six chain-smoked cigarettes to tell him everything he’d done wrong with Simon and all the things to look for with his next love. “A boy like you? Forget boys. I’ve been around the block, and I know what men like you need. You like women, too, why don’t you find a nice woman? What you need right now is a woman who can take care of you.” Because even his cleaner thought he’d become a sad sack who needed the proverbial women’s touch to get back on track.
He opened the door to his apartment, leaving it slightly ajar, so his guests could enter, and retreated upstairs to his bedroom. If he was going to see Aurora and Stefano today, he could at least be wearing pants.
His sister found him there a few minutes later, searching through his laundry basket for the least smelly pair of jeans. “Oh, bambino,” she said softly, crossing the room to pull him into a long hug. At four months pregnant with a petite frame, her belly was already jutting out. The hard bump as she reached up to hug him felt odd against his gut.
He smiled at her and stepped back to pat a greeting to her belly. Aurora tossed her glossy dark curls over her shoulder; she was wearing a cute white cocktail dress with a pink blazer, pink lacy hose and precariously high heels that made her look like a model for a high-end maternity catalogue. “You’re the one with the bambino,” he countered, taking her in.
The light colors of her outfit set off her warm umber skin perfectly; she emitted a dewy glow. Pregnancy was finally looking good on her. He’d been avoiding her for weeks, which had been relatively easy since she’d been mostly stuck at home, spamming the family WhatsApp line with complaints about her constant puking. The last video call they’d had—when he’d known that declining her calls one more time would lead to accusations of rudeness—she’d been in a old sweatshirt, her hair hidden under a scarf, and she’d had to end the call early to run to the bathroom.
“And you look amazing,” he added. “Are you feeling better today?”
“I’ve gone three days without wanting to puke. I think the nausea’s finally done. Thank God.”
“And how is she?” he asked, reaching out to pat her bump again.
Grinning, she pulled his hand over the tight swell of her belly.
“Now that the nausea’s mostly gone, she wants me to eat all of Milan. We brought lunch for everyone. I even brought your favorite Pizzoccheri from Al Ghezz.”
“Just don’t tell my personal trainer.”
“I figured it can be our secret.” She quirked one of her perfectly manicured thick brows at him, assessing. “And now that the nausea’s gone and I can leave the house, I can finally track you down in your den. You’ve been avoiding me.”
He swallowed, looked at the laundry basket at his feet. He had really wanted to be wearing pants for this conversation. “And Stefano’s here, too?” he asked, hoping to redirect.
“He’s downstairs cleaning out your industrial wasteland of a kitchen so we can eat. I see you canceled Signora Rizzo again, so I set him to work.” At least her tone lacked the snappish judgement he would have gotten from his mom.
He shrugged. “Last month Signora Rizzo tried to set me up with her granddaughter. And now that she’ll know about Simon and Wilhelm, she’s going to be relentless.”
Frowning, Aurora rubbed her hand over the scruff on his cheek, her hard gaze gentling. “When I called after that video was posted, you told me you were OK. Clearly you were lying. This news has really set you over the edge, hasn’t it?”
What she didn’t say was that he’d already been on the edge for a while. And they both knew it.
He glanced away from her soft stare that saw too much. “I just don’t know what I did wrong, why he didn’t choose me.”
She sighed and wrinkled her nose. “This place smells worse than a boys’ locker room after soccer practice. Probably just my pregnancy supersenses. Sorry, I have to air this out.” She moved to throw open the curtains that led onto his small bedroom balcony. Then she opened the tall balcony doors. Cool winter air rushed into the room like a slew of daggers.
Massimo hugged his arms around his chest.
“Amo,” she said softly, after hanging her head out the window and gasping dramatically for a minute, “you wouldn’t have known what to do with yourself if Simon had said yes to your dramatic proposal.”
“What do you mean?” He spotted a pair of jeans half under the bed that he was pretty sure had been washed within the last month. He pulled them from the floor, sniffed them and sat down on his bed to drag them on.
“Look, I went with you to buy the ring even when I said that stalking a guy to shove a ring in his face is a bad idea, right? But I helped you choose it because I wanted to give you a shot with him.”
“Actually, you said you’d help me choose it because I needed to make my own mistakes.” He stood up and buttoned his fly. At least he now had pants on.
“Ah, right. Well, that was a good decision on my part. And once that prince showed up again, well, I didn’t say anything negative about your chances of winning Simon back, right?”
It was true. She’d been aggressively silent about Simon for the past few months, even as he’d ranted about Wilhelm to her.
“I haven’t wanted to say this,” she continued, “because I thought there was a teensy-weensy snowball’s chance in hell that he wouldn’t start dating that prince, and I wanted to give that snowball its chance.
“But now there’s not even that, so I’m going to be straight with you.” She put her hands on her hips. Standing by the open balcony door in her power white-and-pastel-pink suit, with Milan’s bare winter skyline behind her, she looked fiercely determined. He hated that face because he knew he was going to hate whatever she’d say. “Simon’s a nice guy. I thought he was good for you for a while. But you were getting restless. The challenge of chasing him and winning him thrilled you, but after that, he started to lose his shine. Honestly, I think he was a bit young for you. He didn’t challenge you. He didn’t push you. And that’s what you need to hold your interest. That’s why you cheated on him.”
“No—”
She held a hand up. “Let me finish, please. I haven’t even gotten to the most important part.”
He rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Losing him was painful,” she continued, “but it also led to this massive creative outburst. And that creative outburst ratcheted your fame up several notches, and that felt good, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“That’s what you’ve been chasing for the past year and a half,” she said gently, shifting to fan the door open and closed. “Not Simon, not really. No, you’ve been chasing the creativity and the addictive fame boost that came after. Although, maybe the idea of winning him again was also fueling you a bit. You’ve always gotten off on the chase. But you’ve built this distorted image in your head of the fame and creativity that will come when you win him back. You’ve been chasing an illusion.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He shivered and grabbed a soft cable-knit sweater from the floor, dragged it over his head so he didn’t have to look at her for a minute.
“You tell me everything when you’re drunk, silly. Do you think I didn’t remember what you said the night after your album went gold in Spain?”
The problem was he didn’t remember what he’d said to her that night. He remembered a lot about that party, held at the poshest club in Milan, rented out to celebrate his album going gold outside Italy for the first time: The soft blue lighting over the black marble bar. The vicious champagne cocktails they’d served. The pro soccer players from AC Milan who’d shown up and sung karaoke with him. And at the end of the night, both his part-time fuckbuddies coming home with him. Together. That had been fun. But he didn’t remember confessing anything to his sister.
He stared at her blankly.
“You told me, amo, that while that album was all about losing someone, your next album would be all about winning him back. You’d already written that duet you wanted to perform with him, and you told me you had ideas for dozens of other songs. Songs as beautiful and plentiful as butterflies in a summer meadow, you told me.”
He frowned at her. Yeah, that sounded like bullshit he would say. He never could keep his mouth shut when he was drunk. “Look, can we close the balcony doors yet?”
“Fine.” She stopped airing them back and forth and gently shut the doors before turning her gimlet stare back on him. “But don’t change the topic. You know I’m right.”
He scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, I mean, I had some ideas back then for my next album.”
“It’s not Simon you’ve been chasing. You’ve been chasing a reason to write. You’ve been chasing the idea that if you were happily in love then your next album would write itself. And now you’ve got Mattia breathing down your neck because you haven’t composed a single song beyond that duet you wrote over a year and a half ago, which was supposed to be for you and Simon.”
He couldn’t even lie to her. She knew everything about his life because her paid her well to be his personal assistant, fielding interactions with his label, managing his calendar, and generally functioning as the pit crew so his life hummed along like a track-ready race car. He had no clue how his life would function when she went on maternity leave, even though she’d promised she’d help him hire her replacement.
He had one more month to produce new material before his producer Mattia hauled him into the studio and plopped him down in a recording booth with an album’s worth of someone else’s creations. Which wouldn’t even be that bad; many musicians didn’t write their own stuff, he knew that. Except that he’d prided himself on always making his own rhymes, his own melodies. It had always just been him and his big brain.
Apparently, in a moment of drunken weakness, he’d stupidly revealed his grand plan to his mastermind sister. His stupid plan that had only given him a shitty case of creative block.
Right after Simon had dumped him, his curt rejection via text wielding the blunt-force trauma of a medieval battering ram, Massimo had still believed he could fix it. As he’d poured himself into songs to prove his love to Simon, the sequel album had shimmered in the corners of his mind. He’d make one album about going through darkness, another about emerging into the light, triumphant.
But what the hell was he supposed to do now? The whole point of baring his heart had been to win. But he’d lost. In every possible way. And what was he supposed to do, write another album about being a loser? That would make it true.
He winced and plopped back down on the bed. “I just don’t know what to do now.”
“I know, darling. You’re really lucky you have me for a sister and PA. And what I’m doing goes above and beyond the job description for either role. So, you’re going to have to pay me back in endless babysitting once she’s here. Because I have a plan to save your sorry ass. Now go take a shower. Shave that small fluffy dog off your chin and get dressed, then come join us and eat lunch, and I’ll explain everything.”
He looked at his unmade bed, the weeks-old piles of laundry, the untidy pile of game controllers by his television, his dusty hand weights; he didn’t see any better ideas in the room, so he did what his sister told him to.
&
“What kind of white-person bullshit is this?” he asked after making himself presentable, wolfing down the forbidden carb fest his sister had brought and opening the link she’d sent him.
Ever wanted to just get away from it all and go live on a goat farm? read the website in English with bucolic pictures of, admittedly, pretty cute baby goats frolicking in a verdant spring field. There was a red wooden barn against a backdrop of soft green hills and several fancy gray-and-white solar cabins surrounded by grazing goats. He didn’t know goats came in so many colors; he’d always believed all goats were just plain white. Live your dream of getting back to nature at Goat Gri-La Farms with our on-farm boutique getaways! Long-term discounts available.
He scrolled down to the fine print. “Prices include room and board. An expectation of three daily hours of work included in the rate,” he read aloud. “Why would I pay someone so I can go work on their goat farm? That’s a scam for rich white people with nothing better to do.”
“Oh, give me your phone,” his sister scolded, grabbing his phone from his hand and navigating to a different section of the website. “It’s not a white-person thing. Look at the owners! They’re not white!” She handed the phone back to him.
A young couple stared back at him, arresting him with their strikingness. The tall man had rich brown skin, a riot of curly russet hair, steady sea-green eyes, a smile like a welcome sign and a notable bump in his nose, probably from a break. The boxer’s nose was a striking contradiction to his open, friendly face. He had his arm around a dark-skinned woman with a shaved head and sharp cheekbones. She cradled a baby goat in her arms and quirked an eyebrow at the camera, like she and the viewer were both in on some joke. Both of them wore overalls, checkered shirts and what looked like actual work boots, not the fashionable faux work boots Massimo wore.
There was exactly nothing fancy about them, compared with the people Massimo usually found himself surrounded by. Yet if he’d spotted them in a bar, he would have strode up to them right away and wanted to get to know them. They looked interesting and open—like the kind of people who could tell stories that would make you laugh so hard you forgot the weird things your face did when you laughed.
“How’d you find this place?” he asked, putting his phone on the table, just to give himself some distance from the startlingly fascinating goat farmers.
“Marisol just came back from spending two months at the farm. She’s the one who told me about it, in the first place. Said it was a life-changing experience, and I thought, well, I know someone right now who needs to change his life.”
He wasn’t sure he trusted his sister’s hippie friend Marisol, who was always traipsing off to ashrams in India or mountaintop monasteries in Nepal. Every year she found herself anew. How many times did a person have to find themselves? She was a rare blind spot in his sister’s otherwise sharply logical brain.
“Yeah, but where even is this place?”
“Some place in America called Vermont. It’s in the northeast.”
“Isn’t it cold there? It’s December, for fuck’s sake!”
“Snow and bracing cold air will be good for you. A complete change of scenery.”
He should have told his sister she was being ridiculous. But he couldn’t quite do it.
That couple with their relaxed poses and easy smiles against the backdrop of rolling green hills looked lightyears away from the recording studios, concert halls, swank parties and red carpets that had been Massimo’s natural habitat for the last seven years.
He picked up his phone again and navigated to the guest photo gallery. “Hmm. I mean they are some pretty cute goats there,” he told his sister, showing her the live-action shots of various guests posing with goats, as if the only thing you have to do on a goat farm is cuddle goats. There were also some shots of goats walking on balance beams and stone walls. “Is goat parkour a thing? I bet that those ‘expected three hours of daily work’ involve a lot more than cuddling goats and supervising goat parkour. There will be shit shoveling, for one.”
“And what’s wrong with shoveling shit? Our mom spent her life cleaning hotel rooms and you’re too good to shovel shit now?”
Oh, he’d walked right into that one. “Aurora, you know what I mean.” He put the phone down and looked at her across the table. “How am I supposed to write an album’s worth of songs while shoveling shit at a goat farm? I’ve got one month. That’s not enough even if I do work 8 hours a day on it, and you know creativity doesn’t work like that.”
He’d been trying. For weeks he’d been trying. And everything that came out was crap, so two weeks ago he’d just stopped trying.
“I bought you more time,” Aurora said.
“What?” he screeched, smacking the table.
“I called Mattia last night when I came up with the idea. I told him we all know you’ve written jack shit in the past two months you’ve been holed up in your apartment to write. I told him I was sending you across the ocean to a place where no one is going to pester you about Simon or Wilhelm. And if he can give you one more month to compose, then you’ll get it done. So you’ve got two months in Vermont to write your next album. I think you can manage that while shoveling shit for three hours a day.”
He didn’t love it when his sister commandeered his life like this. But that was kind of what he paid her for: to keep him functional. Objectively, she was right. It was time for extreme measures. But he didn’t like it.
“But that place?” He pointed accusingly at his phone. “This looks so boring. Why couldn’t you send me to that place in Bali where Marisol got her yoga teaching certification? I don’t want to hang out with goats!”
“I know you. When you have a little bit of discipline in your life, you often manage much more than when you are simply surrounded by temptation. If I sent you to Bali, you’d just fuck yourself stupid with all those lithe yoga instructors-in-training.”
Again, she was right. But he still didn’t like it.
“So, Mattia agreed?” he asked cautiously.
“He wants to talk to you, but he said he can probably talk the label into pushing things back one month, especially if you have a plan that he can sell to the execs. Other than sitting around in your apartment and moping. You’ll leave right after Christmas and come back at the end of February.”
“A new album ready by February? I don’t know.”
Aurora leaned forward across the table, took his hand in hers. “Caro, I need you better.”
“I’ll make us coffee.” Stefano, his sister’s husband who’d wisely stayed silent during the conversation, scraped his chair back and carried some plates to the recently cleaned kitchen.
Thanking him, Massimo passed him his empty plate. His sister’s hand was warm in his, but he didn’t meet her gaze, looking instead at his cluttered apartment. In the kitchen, he heard the metal clanking of his brother-in-law screwing together the XL moka.
“Fuck your next album, I don’t care about that,” she said earnestly.
Startled, he looked at her. “What do you mean?” She always professed to be his biggest fan.
“I want my brother back. I know my brother’s happiest when he’s writing music. That’s what I want. I don’t care about the album itself. I just need you to find your way back to yourself. And maybe to do that, you’ve got to get the hell out of here. And then you’ll be able to come back to me and your niece.”
Finally, he looked up to meet her unblinking stare.
“It’s only two months. You can try something for two months, right? And if you can’t create the songs you need, then you’ll have to suck it up and record the music Mattia finds for you when you’re back.”
“You know I hate the idea of that.”
“Well, then, get to that goat farm, and see what happens next.”
Massimo looked desperately around his cluttered apartment for some other idea, but came up empty.
So he shrugged.
“Fine. I’ll go to some American Bumblefuck in the middle of winter to hang out with goats and shovel shit. Sure. But if those attractive goat farmers are fans of Simon Eriksson, or even try to play the Middle Distance album, I’m turning right around and coming back to yell at you.”
She smirked. “Deal. You can yell at me all you want.” She stuck her hand out to shake on it.
Dread a leaden weight in his stomach, he shook her hand, wondering if he’d agreed too easily.
But, what the hell, he’d try anything to get past this creative block. Even shoveling shit.