Archive of Our Own

He has a sense of beginnings, and never more so than when he is in the villa's gardens, lush and fragrant with what seems to be the precise scent of summer itself. From his seat at the table, Oliver can see where fruit has bloomed overnight on the trees to hang suspended like stars with lazy decadence in the bright, still air of the morning. Mist spills in waves from the grass, already evaporating in the rising heat.

It occurs to him that Elio never seems to tan, despite the endless hours spent always stretched out beneath the sun. His skin stays pale yet somehow iridescent, like the tender inside of an oyster shell, but Oliver has noticed the slow scatter of freckles dotting here and there on his skin as the summer climbs into July's clinging embrace, leading his eyes first to collar bone, then wrist, shoulder, thigh. More directions than a compass can hold.

He and Elio are not speaking today. It could be incidental or circumstantial, but with Elio it seems instead to be cloaked in hidden meaning, and their silence has a racing heartbeat that Oliver cannot fathom the rhythm of, although he thinks of it often. He tosses it around in his mind sometimes, in fact, restlessly, the way one might pitch a ball from one hand to the other: the beginning of what? the beginning of what? Oliver has seen things come and go, has witnessed the fits and starts and middles and ends of things, but he has never had this instinctive certainty that he is poised on the exact cusp of something, like the first scythe of a new moon just crowning in the sky. Ignition.

Enough of this. Perhaps there is an innocent reason for their silence in this moment anyway: they are, after all, reading. The Perlmans are nothing if not generous to him and every day since his arrival a week ago a copy of The New York Times has made its way to the kitchen table, as if to perish the thought that the American should ever lose touch with the motherland whilst in their house. There are always two copies, in fact, because such is the veracity of Elio's impulse to read that he cannot bear to wait for Oliver to be finished before he begins. The one unfailing kindness that Elio shows him is this: he places one of the copies in front of Oliver's seat at the table every morning, and after the clutter and noise of breakfast is done there is a peaceful spell where they read together. It is bookended by variables: sometimes by their talking, sometimes by their silence, but the reading has quickly become a constant, at once routine and sacred.

Something about it bothers him this morning, a tiny little peripheral catch that dances just out of reach. Steam rises in tendrils from the French press. Condensation meanders along the silver jug of apricot juice. Pages turn in a chorus, on a loop, again and again.

There it is.

"You're doing that on purpose," he says to Elio, amused, "you're turning the pages with me."

"We read at the same speed," Elio says, airily, matter-of-fact, "It's taken you this long to notice."

Oliver considers this.

"I suppose you noticed right away."

"I did, actually," Elio bounces back.

It always thrills him to hear the echo of his own speech in Elio's; it is the embodiment of that ball passing back and forth in his mind: the beginning of what? I did, actually. There is a code in it, travelling mutely in the undercurrent, one language slipped inside another.

"I'm probably on a different page to you," Oliver says, although he can see that he's not.

"We're on the same page."

Elio is insistent, alight with the instinct to win his point, then breaks into a sudden flush when he sees the double meaning of his words. For all of his eloquence, Elio is sensitive and Oliver has seen quick hurt pierce into his gaze when he accidentally presses too hard. He won't ever tell Elio that his decision to look away and say nothing is a deliberate one, calculated to give him time to recover his equilibrium, but it is and the measure of his own desire to be gentle is, he realises, far from insignificant.

"The point is that we read at the same speed," Elio rejoins a moment later.

"You just rhymed."

"It's true though..."

Oliver can hear the smile in his voice and knows it's safe to tease again. He reaches over and slides Elio's sunglasses down, holds them at the tip of his nose to test the weight of the truth in his eyes. They are clear and bright and a shade of green Oliver thought existed only in the realm of dreams, but Elio stills and startles all at once at his touch and the flush builds again, high and immediate on the crest of his cheekbones.

"What are you doing," he whispers, breathless, the question of it lost in the rushed spill of his words and perhaps that is why Oliver does not answer, nor look away. He thinks Elio suits this garden well, with its endless power to evoke.

"Those sunglasses are too easy to lie behind," he says, intentionally light. He has to work at it, suddenly.

"Oh," Elio says, and swallows hard.

The way his mouth looks around the open sound of the word; that will linger. But all he does in the moment is smile and slide Elio's sunglasses back up with a casual flourish and say:

"You look honest. So maybe it's true."

They go back to the newspapers. The steam still rises off his coffee; the streams of condensation from the silver jug blur into rivers and flow. It is only the turning of the pages that sounds different now: no longer a chorus, but a rolling chatter, the sound of birds taking flight.

He neglects the manuscript for his book. This place in time is ripe with distractions and whilst he makes the daily trip into town to his translator through the winding, sun-drenched roads, cobbles washed snowy white by the footsteps of a thousand summers past, far too often his own earmarked copy lies abandoned next to him in the grass, an old relic waiting idly to be rediscovered.

One afternoon he determines that his only hope is to leave the garden altogether with its sunny temptations and come inside to the shadowy quiet of the villa. The first shot of cool air hits him like a tonic and the couch seems to rush up to meet him when he sits, enveloping him in the villa's scent for a moment: fresh linen and the clean heat of earth warmed by the sun. Work does come to him more easily here, and he sits for a while, tracing out mistakes, dotting notes in the margins, struck with disbelief that he had written some of this less than a month ago, in his cramped apartment at the desk which always rocked unsteadily if he sat too far to the left. There had been papers stacked precariously for grading at one side and he had been by turns tired and bored of the sound of his own written voice in front of him. It is almost impossible to think that it is all still there when he is so many worlds away.

Elio disappeared not long after they had finished reading this morning, but there is no need to wonder where he is now. The sound of the piano wanders lazily, meandering through one scale and another, swelling around the empty spaces in rooms, the pitch one of restlessness, and yet still the music feels like a caress, long-sought and slow. Oliver turns towards it instinctively. Sometimes in the garden the flowers lift their blind, seeking faces up towards the light. This feeling is the same.

The book falls away from him and the thought rushes up unbidden: the beginning of what, of what, of what? On nights when sleep is slow to come Oliver has wondered if he'll go mad with it and now as Elio's music builds towards a quiet crescendo and tapers away to silence he hears snatches of his own thoughts trapped between every trembling note. What he feels is a child's wanting, petulant and hungry, caught in a tenor that knows only how to say: give, give, give.

Elio swims into focus whilst Oliver is still poised towards music that is no longer playing, though traces of it are redolent in the sultry air of the early afternoon. He walks up through the shadows with that straight-backed stride that manages to be both sure and shy at once and stops in the doorway, framed by light, meeting Oliver's gaze with his own and reading the intensity of his expression right away. Something in his eyes softens then, becomes even and quiet, curious.

They say nothing to each other; not then and not for some time after. Yet Elio knows that Oliver has been listening with rapt attention and Oliver knows at last the answer to his question. It is the beginning of everything, everything.

Once he understands it for what it is, Oliver finds that it is much harder to keep his distance. Perhaps that's why he's here, half-hiding, darting glances from behind the diaphanous camouflage of the white bed sheets that Mafalda has just hung to dry whilst Elio plucks peaches under the shady cool of a tree, their skins flushed and boisterous with youth as he drops them teeming into the basket beside him. Adam, at work in his own little Eden.

Oliver had pushed his natural shyness hard away at college and told himself it was a conquered battle, a hindrance of his childhood that had turned flat and drained with time, like an old bloom caught in the suffocating hands of a flower press. Now new vitality has been breathed into it: something about this place, this villa, this family, their son, which has stripped his personality back to the architecture it was built with at birth. So he stands, hesitant, twisting one corner of the sheets in his hand, wondering if he dares to approach, holding his book loosely in the other hand as if it is a talisman. Maybe he likes Elio better this way anyway, neat and compartmentalised: caught in glimpses, fleeting, the flash of an eye or his curls, dark and lustrous, quantified in parts that have not had time to be summed together and add up to so much more.

"Oliver," Elio says suddenly. He doesn't look over to where Oliver is treading hesitant footfalls on the grass, but he gestures lightly with one hand, as if his presence is expected and desired.

Oliver pads over carefully, pleased to have been invited, to have an excuse, and stands just outside the circle of shadow under the tree. He can feel the sun shifting in panels over the back of his shirt, soft fingers of heat unfurling.

"Come here," Elio beckons again, "Will you get these for me?"

He steps beneath the canopy of branches and looks up beyond the stretch of Elio's long-fingered hand, following its direction. There is a clutch of peaches nestled just out of his reach, cradled in the elbow of a branch.

"I can try," he tells Elio, and steps up to reach them. He remembers suddenly being very young and little enough that he could hide behind his mother's skirt, and how when he did it she would sometimes give him tasks to do, small things to wash him clean of his self-consciousness, to make him feel like he had a place and purpose. It occurs to him that Elio might be doing the same thing now and the thought of it is a deep salve to him.

He catches hold of the first peach easily enough and after a moment it succumbs to his gentle tugging. The fuzzy globe of it in his palm is oddly satisfying and when he reaches to the next one Elio places two fingertips over the fragile cage of his ribs, as if to support him. It is such a momentary touch, but Elio does not break it abruptly, electing instead to let his fingers trail down until the natural angle of their bodies means that his hands find air instead of cloth. Oliver regrets it instantly; he wishes that Elio had instead stroked a trail of steady fire down over his stomach, where blood is already rising, and on and ever on with the touch trapped in amber between them.

He hands Elio the last peach, breathless, and even more so when he does not place it in the basket with the others but instead bites into it. Juice spills and catches in the narrow valley of Elio's wrist, where the bones are evident and his veins trace like water across the surface of a map, before beginning a slow, sticky descent. That quick stab of envy: what he wouldn't give, for permission to cling to Elio's skin in this way.

Elio licks himself clean with delicate flutters of his tongue, pink and almost feline. Oliver could die of this, and there would be worse ways to go. But into the heavy silence Elio gestures to his book and asks:

"Is it going well?"

"Slowly," Oliver says.

He has an idea then. It's foolish, perhaps, an invitation to intimacy, but a harmless kind, if such a thing is capable of being cultivated between them. He finds a patch of grass that is particularly lush and settles on it slowly, opens the book to his current page.

"It needs proof reading," he says, "Sometimes a lot of it."

He holds the book to one side of his knee, the way you might if someone else were going to read it with you. Elio takes the cue at once and curls up sweetly beside him, bringing his knees up to his chin so that all Oliver can see of his face are his luminous eyes, and something bright and alive that dances in the depths of them.

They read together and Elio tells Oliver that he is committing crimes against commas, and Oliver makes him laugh by offering to make a dedication to him in the front page once the book is finished, in honour of his services to proof-reading. Elio's laughter is a lovely thing, smooth and unblemished by the cynical hands of time.

"We must be wired the same," Elio says after a while, the dreamy tone of his voice suggesting that he has been turning this thought over for a while. Oliver realises that the sun is beginning to tip dizzily below the horizon, drawing out the shadows in long beckoning stretches and bestowing splashes of honeyed light over Elio's face. They must have spent all afternoon together, then.

He looks at Elio questioningly.

"To read together like we do, I mean," he explains, "Some part of our brains must be alike. Wired the same."

"Wired the same," Oliver mutters, shaking his head, but he's smiling.

They don't speak about it again that afternoon, but it isn't long before the second copy of the newspaper disappears from the breakfast table and they stop sitting at right angles to one another. Oliver sits next to Elio instead, and if ever it is difficult for them both to see the same page clearly, all he has to do is move a little closer.

Elio plays the piano mostly in the early morning or evening, sometimes in the exact moment of sunrise or sunset as the sky emulsifies through a gentle panoply of yellows and pinks and lavenders. Oliver wakes one morning whilst the horizon still nurses a hazy bruise of blue, like the last sip of wine in an almost-empty glass, and lies cocooned in the buttermilk sheets, drowsy and still cloaked in dreams. In the half-light of dawn he lets his mind linger in places he would normally sweep it away from and he is thinking about Elio - Elio soft and pliant in his bed next door, warm to the touch - when the sound of his playing floats up through the floor directly beneath him.

The notes of the music seem to entwine around him, under him, lifting the sheets with feeling, playing the sound of the colour in the sky. Blue is smudgy and lingering and the last star winks out like a kiss goodnight, leaving a smooth skein of fresh skin on the day.

Oliver leaves the bed slowly, unfurling as if it is the music that encourages him along, tugging, teasing, beckoning. He stops only to stretch, feels possessed of a body that is strong and capable and he is a clear, present thing within the centre of it. Strange, how that surety of self that once evaded him so easily has become effortless here.

On the landing, still and hush at this hour, he catches himself for a moment and thinks: this is dangerous, dangerous. Letting himself have these little licks, tastes, glimpses of flavour; soon enough he will long to bite and devour instead. Yet the music carries him down the long flow of stairs with invisible hands and now he is standing outside the door to the room where Elio's music unspools like honey from a spoon.

Unseen, he watches Elio hungrily and without ration. He is wearing only a thin tank top and shorts, his hair still mussed from sleep. The first rays of sun break open across the tender skin at the nape of his neck and illuminate the fine tics and tremors of muscle in his arms as he plays. He folds into the music, languid, the keys trembling beneath his touch, dust motes rising to swirl around the steady pattern of his hands.

"Can't sleep?" Oliver asks softly.

Elio stops playing but is not startled by Oliver's presence. At his last touch, the piano keys yield a soft sound, thoughtful, like a breath.

"I didn't mean to wake you," he says, but they both know that even if he did not mean to bring Oliver to him, he hoped to, just as the flame looks to draw a moth.

Elio begins to play again, light and soft. Oliver studies the sheet music with its calligraphic mysteries and envies every note for having Elio there to read them, to know them and bring them beautifully to life.

"I'm jealous," he confesses.

Elio stops playing again. That halting little breath of the keys, as if startled or curious.

"Why would you be jealous?"

Oliver takes another step forward. He's directly behind Elio now, looking down over the splay of his hair and fighting the compulsion to smooth it through with his fingers. Elio tips his head back to look at him, curls pressing against Oliver's stomach. He raises his hand on instinct but holds it above Elio's shoulder, just close enough to radiate the heat of his palm. It is his longing that he wants to convey, rather than the common currency of his touch.

"It's a language I can't read with you," he explains.

"Then sit and let me read it to you," Elio says simply, and he slides to one side of the bench, leaves his hand resting for a moment where he means for Oliver to sit.

Foolish, Oliver thinks, he's being so foolish. He should have stayed in bed and known only the imaginary Elio who was placid and predictable. When the real thing is in front of him, he can pretend all he wants that it is casual and easy, but the only real certainty is that waters will rise and the drowning seems to always be so very persuasive.

The bench is a tight fit for two people. Elio's body is still vulnerable and tired and the smell of sleep, warm and seductive, rises from his skin. His bare thigh is unbearably close to Oliver's.

"Here," he murmurs, and splays one fingertip at the start of a line of notes. Oliver nods and watches mesmerised as Elio starts to play them, so slowly, his fingers scarcely seeming to move and yet the music rolls and peaks, cascading over itself. He does not know the name of the piece Elio is playing and nor does he need to; it is the way he plays it that matters, every line of the unknown language becoming a secret sound meant just for him.

"Do you hear it?" Elio asks him.

"Yes," he says, breathless, watching. The hypnotising touch of Elio's hand to the page and then the piano over and over takes root in his chest, unfolds wings there that flutter and pulse as the keys give their shy little gasp of air every time Elio's fingers stray away. Sunlight, bolder now, floods and tessellates across the wall, an attentive audience of one. When Elio suddenly replaces the piano with the delicate inside of Oliver's wrist he jumps, the skin thin and sensitive in a way he had never truly felt until now.

"Which notes are they?" he asks, smiling, and Elio points them out on the page, ticking his fingertip along beneath them whilst the other hand glides deftly over the veins and tendons of his arm.

"No offence," Elio teases, "but you need re-tuning."

They both laugh, the feeling of it glowing and good.

Gradually Elio stops playing. He makes no move to lift his hand away and Oliver does not dare move, breathe, think, for fear he will shatter this.

"I looked it up," Elio says eventually, and he is the one confessing now, "Dad has some old medical books and I looked it up. The place in our brains that lets us read together. The place where we're wired the same."

There is no need to whisper, but here in the heart of the villa with a beautiful morning unfolding before them like a red carpet, they find that they do.

"Where is it?" Oliver asks. When Elio raises his hand from his wrist to dredge his fingertips through the hair just behind Oliver's temple it is all he can do not to sway into the touch. His eyes flutter closed without asking his permission first.

"Right there," Elio tells him.

He loses track of how long they stay that way, his nerves singing under Elio's fingertips, the weight of Elio's gaze on his skin a steady, constant buzz of feeling.

"It's still early," Elio says gently, still stroking him, "We could go for a swim."

"Or we could go back to sleep."

He means it lightly but there is the subtle insinuation of together, we could go back to sleep together laced through it and all Oliver can think is how deeply he craves that. To climb the stairs, crawl back beneath the sheets with Elio in his arms, embryonic, and sleep, just sleep. He would be good, he wants to be good; he wouldn't even ask to ever wake up again if he could just have that one last thing.

"Let's swim," he says quickly.

Later that morning at breakfast, Elio sits with his hair still slick and sparkling from the lake whilst Samuel scolds him without heat for his dawn chorus at the piano.

"You must have woken Oliver," he says, tipping a munificent nod in his direction.

"He doesn't mind," Elio says knowingly, and reaches beneath the table cloth to trace music lazily over Oliver's wrist again.

Not long before Elio's nosebleed, Oliver is visited by a childhood affliction of his own. Anywhere else and he would be poised and quietly alert for signs, but here pain seems to have no place and perhaps that is why he is so quick to miss them. Instead the day sits askew, passing in unsettled lags and jumps when he flinches suddenly away from the molten afternoon sunlight and the sound of the radio reverberating from Anchise's shed, which is gritty and hard today, devoid of its usual melody.

In the end he only realises what is going on when Annella sweeps past him with the cutlery for dinner and the light scent of her perfume sends him into a driving, hot clutch of nausea that has him reeling away from the table. He hears himself, vague, making an excuse, catches a brief impression of Elio's face clouded over with worry before a terrible fist of pain clenches shut behind his eyes. It's been there for hours, he sees now, drifting, and if he had caught it whilst it still existed only in that nebulous fog then he might have evaded the full force of it. But it is here, my God it is here, and like every migraine Oliver has ever had, all he can do is hope that it will relent enough to let him sleep until the worst waves have ebbed away.

The soft snick of the door latch is the first thing that announces Elio's arrival in his room. Oliver is flung untidily across his bed, groaning indistinctly under the thunderous, aching swell. Quick footfalls and then Elio says, from very close by:

"Oh Oliver."

Even in the plum depths of this ecstatic agony, Oliver finds space to relish the way the "oh" tumbles from the plush balcony of his mouth.

"Mom said to come and check on you. She was worried," Elio says.

"I'm okay. It's just a migraine."

"I would have come anyway. Even if she hadn't said to."

"I know," Oliver murmurs feverishly. He realises that he can't, he cannot, he must not have Elio with him right now, even though it is all he wants. Like this, he cannot trust himself - he is too messy, too flayed open by the hurt of it; every pore is an open door through which Elio will step, lightly, and see the truth of his desire, etched in thin fronds of colour like the tangled web of nerves that are exacting such vicious revenge on him now.

"Take these," Elio says, "It will help."

The rattle of a bottle, tablets jangling inside. Oliver sits up slowly, trying not to startle the pain into throbbing rebellion. He doesn't dare open his eyes, but he opens his mouth obediently when Elio holds first one, then another pill to his lips. Chalky and acidic on his tongue for a moment, then he closes his hand blindly around the glass of water Elio is holding up for him and sips, once, twice, spreads himself back across the pillows.

"You shouldn't spend your Saturday night like this," he says, and he means it. "I won't mind if you go."

He hears Elio cross the room and the impression of light in front of his eyes fades to dusky grey as the curtains are drawn.

"I don't think you want to be alone right now."

He can't stand the way Elio extracts the core truth of his emotions with such casual precision. To be known like this, to be seen centre-stage and in the spotlight; it's more than he can bear.

"I'll be fine."

"I didn't say you wouldn't be," Elio replies, not unkindly, "I said you don't want to be alone."

Oliver does not know whether it will be his head that bursts first with pain, or else the rest of him with the weight of feeling for Elio. What he does know is that his resistance is beginning to leak away from him, melting like a thin glaze of ice. The next day he will kiss Elio on the Berm and think, this, this is where it started.

"Is the pain very bad?" Elio asks.

He pauses and fights and fights it and then he gives in and nods with a tiny breaking sound like a child, yes, yes, it is awful and I don't want you to go. You're right, I can't be alone with this. Stay. All the things he thinks but does not have to say, because Elio knows, and it is no surprise at all when his hand covers Oliver's forehead, cool and soothing.

"Show me where it hurts."

He takes Elio's slender fingers, those fingers that have pressed music into his skin like ink, and brings them through the storm to rest over the eye at the centre of it, his eye in fact, behind which the steel tightness is twisting. The soft pressure of his touch eases and unlocks it, divides and scatters the pain like dust; he could tell himself it's the pills, but the ache comes in waves and it is Elio who stands and commands the tide to turn.

He has no sense of falling asleep, but when he wakes later Elio is still beside him and his voice is low and gentle. Reading to him, Oliver realises; Elio is reading to him again, and it's no less than Celan: he recognises the rhythm of it, and some of the words. They had spoken about it on the piazza once, with Chiara draped around his neck like a vine, and even now he recalls how traitorous he had felt, to posture with her when Elio was right in front of him, in touching distance.

"Thank you," Oliver says now, "Elio, thank you."

Elio shrugs as if to express that it is nothing, but a light flush washes over his face.

"How are you feeling?" he asks, "Better now?"

"Better now," Oliver agrees, a half-truth: the ache in his head has faded to a ghost, but the one in his chest only seems to build.

The trattoria is lively and already almost full by the time they arrive. What started as a migration of four - him, Elio, Samuel and Annella - has turned into a collective of eight or nine as friends washed up along the way, flitting through the long streets like stones flowing along a river bed. He and Elio are glad for the camouflage of other bodies: time froze for them both at the first blush of Oliver's touch across Elio's lips and two days later, they are eagerly looking for the space to feel it melt and thaw. This is what they need: to be alone in the presence of others.

Twilight has begun and between the dotted canopy of pines behind the piazza he can see the first stars budding, throwing the darting figures of children still playing into sharp relief. Every shop front is a little amber globe of light, studded with the tall crowns of candles burning long and sweet to keep the liquid buzz of the cicadas at bay.

Oliver takes a seat at one end of the table and Elio sits perpendicular to him, the way they once did at breakfast. The seat opposite Elio stays empty as the others filter into chairs around them and both are glad that there will be no unwanted visitors to their party of two.

When the carafes of wine appear, Oliver tips the long stem of Elio's glass towards him, pours with a generous hand, then his own. They snap the menus open at the same time and when they click shut in tandem a few moments later Elio's gaze catches his for a private little heartbeat, the suggestion of a smile playing around his mouth. It's wrong of him, probably, to enjoy the sweet stir of tension between them, but Elio's leg brushes his under the table, tentative, asking, and Oliver folds in at once, answering yes, yes, yes as he brackets the delicate stretch of Elio's ankle, one bare foot on either side, cupping the ball of bone with his left foot, dipping into the hollow of the tendon with his right. Elio sighs and smiles properly this time, cuddles his other foot comfortably over the top of one of Oliver's, settles in.

His glass is almost empty already and when he moves to re-fill it, wine swishing stickily, Oliver spreads the palm of his hand over the top and plucks the carafe lightly from his grip.

"Hey, Italiano, what's your hurry?"

Elio shrugs, still smiling.

"Come on, eat something first. Share the antipasti with me."

"Fine," Elio says, not sullen. He sounds light and happy.

The antipasti comes spread like a banquet over a long wooden board: cream puffs of mozzarella, a thin pink canopy of prosciutto edged with white-marbled fat, then the artichokes plump and lustrous with oil, cherry peppers a bright, scarlet punctuation. Elio picks one up and bites into it slowly, winces when he tastes the snowy white stuffing.

"What?" Oliver asks, laughing, "You look horrified."

"Goat's cheese. Can't stand it," Elio explains. He drops what's left of it into Oliver's waiting palm and watches as he eats, non-plussed by the trace of Elio's bite over the red flesh, Oliver shooting him a look that says: why pretend? It's nothing that he is not already familiar with, after all. He turns the board so Elio can better access the rest of it and studies him unguardedly: the quick flash of an incisor as he cuts through the gossamer sheets of meat, the flick of his tongue to capture the last drop of wine. Increasingly it is only the thin flame from the candle that lights the table and Elio's skin with abstract patterns, slow and unhurried. Oil glosses his fingertips.

It's around that time that Oliver lifts the embargo on the wine. They stay eating this way, sharing, for the rest of the meal, Elio diving playfully for prawns from Oliver's plate until he begins to pre-empt him, digs through for the ones that are rich and dripping in sauce and extends them willingly for Elio to take.

"Look at your boys, like family already..."

One of Annella's friends, the tone indulgent and approving. Elio's toes squeeze over his own for a moment and Oliver sees with an intense clarity which the wine should have compromised by now that yes, somewhere along the way he has become this. At the other end of the table, there is talk of a nightcap, coffees, moving the evening on to a villa on the other side of town from the Perlman's, and when Elio flits away to wash his hands in the fountain half-cloaked in shadows across the square, Annella comes over to him, the question already forming in her eyes. Sometimes Oliver finds that he can read her the same way he can her son: a familial similarity, perhaps, passing through the blood.

"It's okay," he says, "You go. I'll take Elio home."

She beams at him and reaches for her purse, looking for money to cover his and Elio's share of the bill.

"Here..." she starts, but Oliver shakes his head, meaning it.

"No, no, please. Let me," he says.

"Oliver..."

"I mean it. It's the very least I can do."

She presses a kiss to his forehead and disappears into the velvet darkness with the others, the bright sound of their laughter and Samuel's cheery have fun, boys... rushing back like the trail left by comets through the sky. Oliver gestures to the waiter and pays, stands and feels the full hit of the alcohol spilling pleasantly through him as he ambles towards Elio.

The square is all but deserted now: the lights in the shops have blinked out one by one, the candles withering into a finale of thin smoke. As he walks, he can see the sudden flicker of bats darting from one tree to the next, hiding in the frail skeletons of the pines. His footsteps echo around the sun-bleached walls and in the moonlight the little stone fountain carved into one corner looks so bright that it is almost otherworldly, bathing Elio in a milky glow.

It is quiet enough to hear him breathe. Faster than usual; Oliver would know the usual rhythm of it anywhere.

"Ready?" he asks lightly.

Elio nods. His hands are cupped beneath the clear stream of water trickling from the fountain and as he watches Elio brings it back through his hair, closing his eyes as it remedies the heat of the long, burning day.

"C'mon," Oliver gestures, "I promised your mom I'd get you home safe."

Elio straightens up, instantly stung.

"I'm not a kid, I don't need a babysitter. I -"

Oliver lets Elio cut loose with his tirade, waits until he drops into a spiky silence before he speaks.

"Elio," he says, "You know it isn't like that."

You know what things.

It comes to them both at the same moment and even in the darkness Elio catches the thought as it passes whisper-quick between their gazes. His smile changes, becomes wolfish as he prowls back and forth in front of Oliver, restless, always so restless. How to still him? Oliver has a few ideas.

"Wired the same," Elio mutters, and leans back against the wall, ivy crawling up lustily behind him. The moonlight catches in his eyes and there is a challenge in the cool silver gaze: you have crossed this line already, Oliver; what's once more for luck, between friends?

He already knows the way the wine will taste in Elio's mouth, and his, if they entwine. He looks up to the sky and in the full darkness the stars promise to hold secrets like water in the cupped bowl of their hands. What does getting Elio home mean, anyway? Does it stretch to buying Annella's seventeen year old son dinner and then kissing him breathless, senseless as the clock ticks over into a new day?

He sighs. No. But maybe it means more than just making a smooth transit from one place to another. Maybe it means loving him in her absence. And maybe the villa is not the only home that Elio needs to be brought to safely.

"Let me," he says, and reaches to hold Elio's jacket, which he has been passing irritably from one hand to another. Elio is tipsy, he thinks, the stain of wine splashed bloodily over lips that were already crimson to begin with.

"You don't have to," Elio says, eyes closed. Head tipped back, his long throat pale and bare.

"I want to."

"Oh," Elio whispers.

That word again, round and wet. Then Elio sighs and rubs his eyes like a child, the tension of his body slipping away as if he is a live wire cut abruptly flat.

"I had too much wine," he says, as if Oliver might be angry about it, "I had too much wine and I'm tired."

He steps forward, once, twice, still holding his jacket, precariously now, by one sleeve. All this time spent bluffing and hiding, playing games, getting close and then pulling back; all this time and now Elio's absolute honesty is a perfect thing to him, jewel-bright and shining.

"I know," Oliver says soothingly, "Elio. Give me that."

He reaches out for the jacket again, but when Elio reaches out in turn it is with his other hand, the one which is empty. The tiny fragment of open air between their fingertips becomes bendable, heated, expectant, and when Oliver hesitates, his hand trembling, Elio makes a low whining sound of frustration in the back of his throat. Oliver looks at him, sees his lowered lashes spreading a fan of shadows over his face and his pulse quick and shivering beneath his shirt. He sees it now, this simple truth that he has tried to blur all summer: that this is Elio's trust, Elio's heart being delivered gladly into his hands. He will not crush this, he will not take this lightly.

"Shhh," he whispers, and he bridges the gap, folds Elio's hand carefully into his, as if for safekeeping. It is not electrifying or thrilling, there is no shock or shaking of foundations; instead here it is, the relief, the missing limb returned and reunited at last. He leads Elio through the square, and he does not let go of his hand when they reach the dark and winding roads, nor when they pass the lemon groves so heavy and fragrant with their bounty, nor when they walk through the rickety gate to the villa; no, he does not let go until they reach the bottom of the stairs and then it is only to guide him up with a hand on each shoulder. Up to the landing, up to Elio's closed bedroom door, and when they get there Elio turns to him and Oliver crowds in against him, close and tight.

Elio's arms twine around his neck, loose and openly adoring. It occurs to Oliver that in a place rife with casual touches and kisses on each cheek, they have never hugged before; how strange that this should be the first time they have ever embraced, when they have grown so close. Oliver slides his hands around Elio's waist, feels the heat of him, squeezes back.

"You don't feel sick, do you?" he asks, suddenly worried.

"No."

"Go straight to sleep."

"I will."

"No reading."

"No reading," Elio repeats, laughing softly. Oliver could laugh at himself too, how he can be so many things: brother, father, partner, wanting to protect Elio, guide him, press him through this door and undress him all at once. Yet when he is with Elio he is big enough, important enough, to play these roles like cards, every one of them easy, every one of them an ace.

He pulls away just far enough to cradle Elio's porcelain face in his fingertips, all eyes with their longing, liquid heat at the moment.

"Go," he says tenderly, "go", and ushers Elio softly through the door, closes it behind him, rests his forehead there and breathes, just breathes in the night that has become suddenly airless. He says it to mean go, before I do something I shouldn't. Once, it would have meant go, before I do something I regret, but he can no longer pretend even in dreams that he would.

And so to midnight.

Under him, Elio traces his hands over all of the places on Oliver's body that he has already known this summer, different now with both of them like this, naked and entwined on sheets that have carried the golden burden of his desire for so many nights. The butterfly kiss of Elio's fingers to his ribs, lingering like he had once wished they would, the almost-press of their thighs at the piano real now as Oliver pushes one of his gently between the creamy stretch of both of Elio's and feels the skin there, merciless in its softness, a siren call to touch.

Elio is all instinct, slow and languid, when he slides up from beneath Oliver and turns to reveal the smooth, sweeping line of his back with its crests of spine dotted like seashells just beneath the surface, and how fitting that should be, because at the sight of it Oliver's blood becomes oceanic, fierce and rising. When Elio raises up onto his hands and knees, hesitant, as if he is confessing some unspeakable secret, Oliver encloses him easily within the dark-shadowed shelter of his own body over him and Elio dissolves at once into a spell of shaking that tells him that this is not merely a fresh and fleeting need, but a memory of some private moment of wanting, unseen by him but buried deep within the core of Elio's desire. Tomorrow he will ask, he will ask and Elio will tell him about the red swimsuit and how the matching scarlet wave of lust had tasted so darkly forbidden, but now all Oliver does is trace his tongue over the sweet dew of sweat that glosses Elio's skin, pressing open kisses to it as his fingers slide down, down over the trembling sides and the private flesh of Elio's lower belly until he finds what he wants: aching hardness, the heat of it in his hand, Elio's spine arching so delicately beneath him and his breathless moan, Oliver, Oliver, yes.

Later, there is the slow meld of Elio's thighs locked around his waist and Oliver inside him, deep, hitching a shaky breath into the shallow cocoon of Elio's collar bone before he kisses it, then back up to his lips, inside everywhere he can be at once. He's careful at first, gentle, and then both of them shift somehow and with the next roll of his hips Elio presses his lips flush against his ear and murmurs his favourite word, "...oh", soft and silky, surprised, the ghost touch of his fingers on Oliver's back tensing and reflexive. Oliver locks his hand around one willowy thigh, presses it apart a little more and lets himself fill up the new space, tight, not careful now, knowing he doesn't have to be because Elio is clinging to him, pulling him in flush against his burning skin and still he whispers like this? against Elio's bitten lips just to have the thrill of his sobbing breath catch and then, falling in a rush from that rosebud mouth, you'll kill me if you stop.

After that, caught in the rising swell of their rhythm, Elio reaches one hand feverishly above the dark spill of his hair against the sheets and Oliver, shaking, sudden, brings his own hand up to join it, twining their fingers tight together. The rush of movement sends his scattered clutter of things spilling everywhere: a flutter of papers, their clothes, a book, whether his or someone else's, all falling to the floor. As if disturbed, the moon rises sleepily from its pillow of clouds to cast its cool, appraising eye upon their bed. When the waves of white light tumble down over Elio's long neck still flushed with Oliver's kisses and his lips parted softly on a moan, in the last trembling, begging second before he understands nothing but the exquisite oblivion of Elio's body beneath him, Oliver moves to shield him, to hide him in the nakedness of his pleasure, protective and possessive. For this chapter does not belong to the moon or the sun, the night or the day, to the darkness or the light or the language, but to him and Elio alone.