Chapter Text
Tommaso always sat two rows behind Lucio, to the left, where the sunlight never quite reached. It was the shadowed corner, the one that smelled faintly of chalk dust and dried leaves in the fall, where forgotten homework and unopened lunches gathered.
From there, he had a perfect diagonal line to his desk. He used to pretend he was just spacing out — doodling in the margins of his books, rubbing his fingers over old pen marks — but really, he was watching Lucio. The way the boy leaned over his desk, the way his curls fell across his forehead, the way he tapped his pencil in time with some internal rhythm no one else could hear. When Lucio tilted his head, the light caught his hair like threads of gold. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair how beautiful he was.
Lucio had once told the class he was born at noon. Most kids laughed, thinking he was trying to be poetic, or weird. But Tommaso believed him. Not just in the literal sense — he imagined Lucio being born under the blazing Maremma sun, wrapped in white linen, the world soft and singing around him — but in every other way too. Lucio was noon, was The Sun himself. He had that untouchable radiance, that arrogant calm. He never seemed to rush, never seemed worried, always late, always careless, and yet everything around him bent to accommodate his rhythm. He didn’t force things. He didn’t need to. He could simply be there, and people would rotate around.
She appeared sometime that autumn. No one really knew her name. She was in the other section, a different class, and never even had lunch in the main courtyard with the rest of them. But she had the kind of face you remembered — delicate in some places, fierce in others, like a brushstroke that had paused halfway through. Her eyes had that sleepy, unreadable quality that made teachers lose patience and boys lose all sense. And she walked slowly, as if the world was something she’d already seen too much of.
Tommaso noticed the change in Lucio before he ever noticed her. Lucio stopped spacing out during class — or rather, he started spacing out differently. He’d sit in the back row, glancing through the window with that lazy smirk on his lips, eyes half-lidded like he was hearing a song no one else could hear. Sometimes he’d write in the back of his Italian notebook during math, pages and pages of lyrics Tommaso would have given anything to read.
They started smoking together behind the science building. Tommaso saw it once, through the frame of a broken window in the supply room. Lucio leaned against the wall like he belonged to the bricks, one foot up, a cigarette between two fingers, while she stood close — too close — her hair brushing his shoulder every time she laughed. She laughed with her whole body, tipping forward slightly, like she was afraid she might fall.
Tommaso just stood frozen, his knuckles pressed white against the wooden frame of the window. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he didn’t need to. He knew what softness looked like. He knew what closeness meant.
Sometimes, Lucio would come back to class still smelling of her — that mixture of ash, perfume, and something citrusy he couldn’t name. Tommaso would catch it when Lucio sat nearby, and it made his head spin. It wasn’t fair, how even the air around Lucio started to feel like someone else’s. That scent followed him like a ghost, a reminder, a warning.
The first time Tommaso saw them together outside school hours was by accident — or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe part of him had been hoping. It was a Thursday, early evening, the sky full of heavy gold clouds that looked like they might burst into rain. He’d gone to the woods behind the school for silence, for escape. But instead, he heard a guitar. Lucio’s guitar. That soft, meandering strum that always made the world feel slower, warmer. He followed the sound like a moth, unable to stop himself.
And there they were. Lucio, sitting with his back against a tree, guitar resting lazily in his lap, and she — sat in front of him, arms wrapped around her knees, looking at him like he was the answer to a question no one else had the courage to ask. Lucio sang something under his breath. It wasn’t even a full song, more like a melody he was still searching for. But she smiled like it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. Her hand reached forward and rested on his ankle — casual, but claiming. And Lucio’s smile — that half-sneering, utterly him smile — curled in the corners of his mouth like it was instinct.
Tommaso turned away before the song ended. He didn’t want to know how it would end. He walked back toward the town, not really seeing the road in front of him, just that image burned into his mind. Her fingers on Lucio’s ankle. Lucio’s eyes on her mouth. The way their heads tilted inward, like planets in each other’s gravity.
He didn’t cry.
Not then.
He saved that for later, in his room, when the light coming through the curtains turned pink-orange, and the world looked like it was bleeding at the edges. It reminded him of the light in the woods. Of Lucio’s face, bathed in fading gold. Of something he could never touch. Every evening after, that light became unbearable. Like some cruel god had decided to stain every sunset with a memory.
And the worst part wasn’t that Lucio doesn’t love him. The worst part was that he was so much better off with her.
At least happier.
He smiled differently now. In the middle of the class, when no one else was looking. A secret, private smile, like he was remembering something soft. Something warm. And it hits him so hard in the chest he had to pretend to drop his pencil just to breathe.
It wasn’t him who made him smile like that. It would possibly never be.
But he couldn’t stop thinking.
He couldn’t stop wanting.
TO BE CONTINUED…