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The smell of stale oil filled the Villa ristorante that night. Stale oil, fried fish, and fear….
Mello had chosen this restaurant strategically. The owner owed him some favors and helped him orchestrate the evening entirely to his advantage: the best private room, the finest wine, the chef’s tasting menu on the house, access to the sexiest call girls. Rod’s men were suspicious at first, like they always were – fearful that Mello was tricking them somehow, fucking with their heads – but they warmed up after the first few drinks.
Mello sat at the head of the table with a glass of white wine and a stack of chocolate bars. Rod Ross sat to his right, occasionally conferring with him in low, whispery tones, observing his men with a serious expression, ready to discipline them if they got too out of hand.
The chair to Mello’s left was empty. Reserved. This was a mystery to the men. Was there some sort of merger happening, was Mello bringing on some additional reinforcements to their team? Was he bringing a chick? Mello and Rod didn’t say anything about it, so the men didn’t ask, but by their frequent glances at the empty seat it was clear they were trying to force their sluggish brains to some sort of conclusion.
They didn't have to wonder long. Because soon, Matt arrived.
Eight thick necks swiveled in the direction of the door when it opened. Eight thumb-like faces contorted in confusion, then shock, then horror, as Mello stood to greet the greasy-haired teenager who had shuffled into the room, taking him by the hand and leading him to the empty seat.
The room fell silent. The only sound was the tinny Italian pop music bleeding in through the speakers.
“This is my boyfriend,” Mello announced, throwing his arm casually around Matt’s slender shoulders. “His name’s Matt. I expect you’ll all treat him like part of the family.”
No one moved.
The men were absolutely gagged. Their mouths were agape. Matt started to sweat as they stared at him. He was wearing his goggles and striped shirt and looked like he’d forgotten to shower all week, but next to the mobsters he and Mello looked angelically beautiful, young and small and pretty.
After another minute of silence, Rod Ross slammed his palm down on the table. “You heard Mello,” he barked out. “A friend of his is a friend of ours.”
Matt just blinked. He felt like he was in a dream. Had it really been just this morning that Mello had called him up? How the fuck had he ended up here, pressed against Mello’s side like a trophy wife, scared out of his mind?
That morning he had been minding his own fucking business in his apartment in the slums of LA. Drinking orange juice out of the bottle, speedrunning Casper for PS1. He had a good day ahead of him - enough money to get ramen for lunch, a brand new copy of Glover for N64 for the afternoon, and Home Alone 2 for SNES to wind down that evening. He hadn’t expected Mello to call him, and in fact he’d saved Mello’s caller ID as “NEVER EVER ANSWER” after the last time Mello had come over and wasted three hours of his life complaining about Near. Remember that time Near stayed home from our summer field trip to London just so he could get ahead on our theatre homework and steal the topic I wanted to write about so I had to write about one of Shakespeare’s lesser works and that’s why I got a 98…. kind of complaining. He was psychotic.
But Matt picked up the phone that morning anyway because, fuck. Mello was psychotic, but he was Matt’s only friend.
“Hello?” he said, pausing his game.
“Matt,” Mello said cheerfully. “Thanks for picking up.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I have a request,” Mello said, and Matt’s stomach dropped. He could already tell by the business-like tone of Mello’s voice that this was going to be something awful. Something day-ruining. Last time he’d agreed to help Mello, it had involved 72-hours of surveillance work, no sleep, and no video games. Matt felt his wonderful plans for the day start to slip away.
“...What?”
“So, you understand my current situation,” Mello began. He wasn’t really talking to Matt so much as lecturing him. “I’ve made some powerful connections in the criminal underworld. I currently stand in a good position to catch Kira and defeat Near within the next twelve months, if I continue on this trajectory. But as you might understand, working with the mob presents its own… complex issues. My men aren’t exactly team players. They’re concerned with one thing only, and that’s watching their own backs. They don’t care about the long game.”
Matt unpaused Casper and hummed non-committally while Mello paused to take a breath.
“Recently, I’ve been dealing with a… complicated situation involving some of my men,” Mello went on.
“Really,” Matt said.
“To be brief, one of my best guards, let’s call him José, was recently outed to the rest of my team as a homosexual. Let’s just say… he propositioned the wrong person at the Turkish bathhouse.”
Um. Oh. Okay. That was not what Matt had expected. He re-paused the game.
“Well, word got around, and now José’s gone. He hasn’t shown his face for days now. I’m sure he knows it’s just a matter of time….”
“A matter of time before what?” Matt asked.
“Before he’s whacked.”
Matt broke into a sweat.
“Jesus. They really kill you just for that!?”
Fuck. This was why you didn’t join the fucking mafia. Fuck.
“I can’t afford to lose José,” Mello hissed, lowering his voice for dramatic effect. He was getting close, Matt could tell. He was leading up to the Big Ask. “I barely have enough people as it is, and he’s far too valuable for my mission. I don’t want to replace him with an unknown variable, a new man I don't know or trust.”
Right, that’s why this was an issue. Because it would interfere with Mello’s mission.
“Uh,” said Matt.
“And so, that’s where you come in,” Mello said.
Matt bit his lip, scared of what might come next. What the hell was he supposed to do about it, anyway? Change the minds of everyone in the mob?
As it turned out….
“I understand this is an unusual request,” Mello said. “But I believe it’ll work.”
“Okay…” Matt swallowed. “What is it?”
“I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend,” Mello said.
Matt dropped his controller. It landed on the carpet with a clatter, Casper the ghost jerking wildly across the screen. The logic wasn’t logic-ing. Maybe Mello had been hitting the slopes a little too hard recently.
“You don't know how these guys operate, Matt,” Mello said. “In their world of bullshit macho tough-guy posturing, something like this is a big deal. If José isn't punished, if I show him any mercy, it means a loss of respect for me and my men. It means everyone in the community will think twice before working with us. It means I lose valuable contacts, resources, information. It means I lose to Near. Every day I hear more and more grumbling, more and more calls to do something about the José problem. They want his blood, to protect their own reputations. Do you understand? There's only one way to salvage this situation. Without, that is, killing my best man. I've got to put on a show. I've got to speak in a language they understand. If I've got the balls to tote my ‘boyfriend’ out right in front of them, it might just earn their respect. It might just turn everything around. ‘Yeah, I'm gay. Yeah, I fuck men. So what the fuck are you going to do about it?’ That's the message I have to send.”
“Mello,” Matt said, after a long, awkward silence in which he could hear Mello aggressively eating chocolate, chewing with his mouth open. “Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what if this results in the two of us getting whacked?”
“It won't.”
“Yeah, that's. That’s cool that you say that but can you explain why you're so confident….?”
“I can't, Matt,” Mello said happily. “You're just going to have to trust me on this. You'll do it, then?”
“I don't know,” Matt said. He was suddenly feeling nauseous. Having a friend in the mob was all fun and games and access to the best weed until you were faced with the prospect of having to actually meet the mob. No matter what Mello said, the idea of some sweaty fuck following him back to his apartment and putting a gun to his head was all too plausible and all too frightening.
And it was such a stupid thing to die for.
Mello hummed thoughtfully. “If you're worried about it,” he said, “don't be. It'll be just like when we were kids.”
God, fuck, no.
Matt knew exactly what Mello was referring to. They used to play a game in their early days at Wammy's, when Matt was freshly orphaned and not in his most, let’s say, sane state of mind. Kissing practice, Matt had called it. He'd insisted it was okay back then because Mello looked like a girl. And Mello had willingly gone along with it; he used to be obliging in that way, willing to help a friend out. They had been roommates so, well, it happened a lot.
Eventually it petered out, when they got older and it started getting awkward, and Matt was always grateful that Mello never brought it back up.
It hadn’t crossed his mind for a while. At least, not voluntarily. Was it still fresh on Mello’s mind? After all, he could have gotten any guy to pretend to be his boyfriend for a night. Right?
So what did it mean that he had thought to ask Matt!?
“You can just pretend I’m a girl again,” Mello said, and he took another loud bite of chocolate. “I’d just need you for an evening, anyway. We wouldn’t even have to kiss, if it makes you too uncomfortable. Plus, it’ll be at a really nice restaurant.”
Matt was going to die.
He was going to get executed by the mafia. Because if it wasn’t him, it would have to be someone else doing this for Mello, and for some reason — that did not appeal to Matt….
“If I say no, are you still going through with this? Would you just ask someone else?”
Mello was silent on the other end of the phone. Long enough that Matt was scared the call had dropped. But then Mello spoke, his voice rough with emotion. “Matt, there is no one else.”
Holy shit. Matt started to panic. He was dangerously close to saying yes, on the precipice of possibly the stupidest decision of his entire life.
“Wh-what’s in it for me?”
Mello thought for a moment, then said simply, “Star Wars Battlefront.”
Matt blinked.
“Huh?”
“Goof Troop. Timesplitters. Smash Brothers.”
“Wh-what?”
“I’ll fucking play them with you, Matt.”
Oh, God. Fuck.
“I know you’ve got a whole collection of two player games and no one to play them with. If you do this for me, I promise, I give you my word, I will play them with you. I’ll be your player two.”
Matt basically blacked out. “Fine-- I–” god fuck don’t go on Matt shut up “--I’ll do it.”
Chocolate snapped on the other end of the line. “Hell yeah!” Mello cheered.
“And - and we can do whatever - uh - whatever you need us to do.”
There was a silence on the other end as Mello seemed to process those words.
“I knew I could count on you,” he said. “I promise it’s for a good cause.”
The deal agreed upon, Mello wrapped up the call quickly after that. Matt felt shaky, bordering on ill. He wrote down the details for the meeting on the palm of his hand with a sharpie and took some edibles to get through the rest of the day.
He took slightly too much, however, and found himself hours later, still high, sitting at a crowded table in a terrible restaurant (Mello had lied on that front), getting stared down by eight of the most massive, stupid-looking men he’d ever seen in his life, all of whom looked ready to tear him to pieces.
Mello didn’t seem to give a fuck. It was clear he wasn’t scared of them in the slightest.
“You – what –” one of the men spluttered, eyes flicking from Mello, to Matt, then to Rod, with unconcealed disgust.
“I what?” Mello said, his arm around Matt. “I’m gay? What, like you hadn’t guessed?”
This sent a shockwave through the room. The men began to whisper to each other frantically, a chorus of “I knew it” and “I never would have fucking guessed” and “what the hell should we do!?”
Despite his proximity to Mello, Matt was just as in the dark as they were. Was Mello being honest? Was he gay? Was he anything? Did it make any difference to Matt if Mello was gay, did it change what this was, what they were doing now?
“Since – since when – ” one of the men choked out.
“It’s our sixth month anniversary,” Mello said. He was such a good liar, you could even hear a hint of pride in his voice. “Rod, let’s have some champagne to toast this milestone.”
He ran his thumb softly over Matt’s hand. Matt shivered.
Rod nodded and snapped his fingers at the waiter. “Five bottles of Dom Perignon.”
“But–” said one of the thugs.
But the waiter was already pouring out the champagne for the toast.
“To Mello,” Rod said, lifting his glass. “The smartest fucking kid I’ve ever worked with. And to Matt. …His…ah… his wonderful man.”
“To… Matt….” The rest of the men spoke like they were being held at gun point, and in some sense, they were.
“Drink up, darling,” Mello said, lifting his glass to Matt’s mouth and giving him a sip. Matt squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed every drop. This was Mello's train now. He was just a passenger.
“To love, and acceptance,” Rod went on. “To family.”
He seemed to think he had said enough, but Mello nudged him, hard, and gave him a significant look.
“And to José,” Rod roared. “Who’ll be back from his vacation tomorrow!”
Someone’s glass shattered.
“To José,” Mello cheered, and he grabbed another glass and drained it.
The drinks didn’t stop after that. Early evening bled into late night. Matt drank everything Mello passed his way until he was thoroughly crossfaded. He barely said a word, but Mello spoke enough for the both of them. He wove tales of their history together and the story of how they’d met "through mutual connections"; he bragged about Matt’s talents. Matt sat by his side feeling like an idiot and ate a soggy meatball sub. At one point, Mello hand fed him a square of dark chocolate. He let his fingers linger in Matt’s mouth.
Across the table, Rod’s men watched all of this in a state of shock. At first they were stiff with anger, downing vodka, muttering to each other about how Mello was fucking them over. But as the night dragged on, Mello's persistent chatter and Rod's menacing presence gradually wore them down, and they seemed to fall into a numb, docile state of acceptance. And to Matt's immense relief, they never laid a finger on him or Mello. Rod made sure of that.
Finally, in the early hours of the morning, as the sun began to rise, the party drew to a close.
Matt stood up to leave and felt his head spinning. He took a whiff of himself and realized he absolutely reeked of Mello’s cologne. They’d spent the entire night with their arms around each other. There was never a moment that they hadn't been touching. It hadn’t been that bad, though, overall.
Honestly, Matt thought, it might have felt a little too comfortable.
“Matt,” Mello said softly. “Can you grab my jacket, babe?”
Matt stumbled over to the coatrack and grabbed the smallest jacket hanging there. He hadn't actually seen it before, but it was the only one with flame decals and skull buttons; there was no one else it could have belonged to. He brought it to Mello and held it open for him. Mello slid his arms inside and sighed, sounding perfectly exhausted and in love. He was such a ham.
“Thanks,” Mello said.
Matt blinked down at him blearily. He had such a cute fucking face. Matt had never really noticed that before. A cute fucking upturned nose. Blue eyes.
"Sure, baby," he said. He started to walk away, to clear his fucking head before he did something really stupid, but Mello grabbed his arm.
"You're so sweet, Matty," he whispered.
Then, with everyone looking on, he leaned in and kissed Matt on the lips.
It only lasted a second. One second of Mello’s perfectly soft, warm lips against Matt’s, leaving behind a trace of black lipstick and the faintest taste of chocolate.
One second--
“Let’s go,” Mello said. “I’ll drive you home.”
-- to blow Matt's entire life and understanding of himself to pieces.
Mello dragged him towards the door, waving at his men. “Good night, everyone. Thanks for a great evening.”
“Good meeting you, Matt,” Rod said, pulling him into a firm handshake. “Hope to see you around.”
“Yeah, uh, you too,” Matt said. He felt like he was about to pass out.
“Good meeting you,” the men echoed, in various tones of sincerity, as Matt followed Mello out the door.
It was fucking surreal.
Finally, they were alone together. Mello walked Matt out to the parking lot, and they lingered by Matt’s bike. The sky was hazy, a blur of orange and pink.
“You think it worked?” Matt asked.
Mello nodded.
They were too far apart now. A normal, friendly distance. It felt wrong.
“Are you really giving me a ride home?” Matt asked.
“You shouldn’t drive,” Mello said with a shrug. He hadn’t drunk much himself. Matt knew he preferred to stay sober, to keep his wits about him at all times. Matt hated to inconvenience him.
“I guess I can… drink some water and… call a cab….”
“No,” Mello said sharply. “I want to go to your place.”
“...You do?” Matt said. "Like, in case one of them follows us?"
Mello shook his head. He smiled suddenly, eyes crinkling at the corners, and for a second, he looked just like he did when they were kids.
“....We could play Goof Troop,” Mello whispered. “And maybe get some more practice in.”
“Oh,” Matt said. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah.”
Oh, fuck yeah.
It was the best six-month anniversary of Matt's life.