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Because Luca is paranoid as fuck, it’s his fault we’re at this big chateau in the Italian Alps in January to do initial script read-throughs for Find Me and start talking through the characters. Because Luca made me drink too much wine last night, it’s his fault that I slept in so late, even though we knew a snowstorm was coming. But snowstorms are no big deal, right?
Yeah, in America, Armie. In northern Italy? A snowstorm throws the entire country into chaos.
Outside, it’s … well, it’s gorgeous honestly. There’s at least a foot of fluffy, shining white, and it keeps coming down. I watch the TV as the weatherman speaks in rapid Italian, gesturing to a map of northern Italy. A map covered in waves of purple, blue, and white: the universal colors for ice, snow, and catastrophe.
Behind me, Timmy is like a beacon of irritation. I can actually feel how annoyed he is as he paces and pulls on his hair, long and standing up in the back because he didn’t think to style it. We were supposed to be jumping in the car and driving to the airport, and everyone knows he flops a hat on his head when in airports.
Not that it ever hides his identity (that ship sailed after Little Women and Dune). I think he does it now out of habit. Or because he doesn’t like to “do” his hair. For someone who looks picture perfect on red carpets, Timmy is lazy about his looks most days. I would know; I’ve been his best friend for, Jesus … five years? Has it only been five years? I feel like I’ve known Timmy since forever.
“I can’t believe I let you sleep in,” he says, louder than strictly necessary considering my red wine hangover.
Because he’s Timmy—because we’re us—he waited for me so we could leave together. Everyone else drove away two hours ago, before the roads became impassable. I already went outside and checked. Even though the car has winter tires, there’s no fucking way we’re getting down this mountain. It’d be a death sentence, and I can’t do that to Timmy or to my kids. Thanks to last year’s messy divorce, Liz probably wouldn’t give a shit.
I turn to face him, trying not to be amused, but he’s wearing oversized sweatpants (that probably cost five-hundred bucks) and a hoodie that once belonged to me (he’s a notorious clothes thief). His hair looks like dark chocolate meringue, and his brow is one huge furrow. “Timmy, relax.”
“Ha! You would say that. You’re the one who would go Jack Nicholson, and I’d be Shelley Duvall.”
I cross my arms. “You’re saying you expect me to go all Shining and chase you with an ax?”
He flails his arms at me and then at the windows, covered in white.
I snort-laugh and quickly put my hand over my mouth when Timmy gives me a death stare. “Dude.” I struggle to put away my chuckle. “It’s only supposed to snow today, which means they’ll have the roads clear tomorrow and we’ll be the fuck out of here. There’s leftover pizza in the fridge, and there’s wine. I can build your skinny ass a fire and wrap you in twenty blankets, okay?” I swear the man is always cold. “We’ll change our flights. No big deal.”
He sighs and chews on his tongue. The pink tip of it pokes out from between his parted lips. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling and groans. “If your eyes start looking shifty—at all—” He holds two of his fingers up like horns. “I will knock you out and tie you to a chair.”
Okay, I can’t contain my amusement anymore. I bend forward at the waist and laugh. “I can’t believe you think I’m going to kill you.”
“Arms, you know that movie scared the shit out of me, and now, we’re in a remote location, alone, and trapped by snow!”
Kubrick’s The Shining is both one of Timmy’s favorite movies and also the one that gives him nightmares every time he watches it. I love scary movie nights with Timmy. Anything to make him cling to me, need me.
Full disclosure: I’ve been in love with Timothee Hal Chalamet for the last four years. Maybe four years and six months; not sure. I felt the stirrings of infatuation upon our initial meeting in Crema, which didn’t concern me. I’ve been infatuated with plenty of people. Infatuation is fun in small doses.
Love? Fuck me, man. I never intended to fall in love with some twenty-year-old kid. I never intended to drop a nuclear bomb on my marriage (ka-BOOM!). I never intended to still be in love with said kid years later, even though, at twenty-five, he’s really not a kid anymore.
Although he still acts like one sometimes. Right now, for instance, as he removes his backpack from his shoulders and slumps onto the couch in front of the TV, pouting.
I linger above him. “Is it really that terrible to be stuck here for a day?”
He glares. “Yeah, if you murder me.”
I dive down and squeeze his sides. He yelps and bats at my hands as I kneel on the couch and keep tickling. I straddle him, and he tries to scurry away, but I bury him beneath my body weight with my face pressed to the side of his neck as he giggles below me, still fighting with flailing kicks and punches that never land.
Eventually, he sighs and melts into the furniture. “See?” He bangs his fists ineffectually on my back. “I don’t stand a chance!”
I laugh, out of breath, and melt on top of him with my face on his chest. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes, his chin on the top of my head.
This is the torture of our relationship. We have always been like this, ever since Crema. We have always touched, tickled, and wrestled. Always cuddled. In private, we play with each other’s hair. Timmy sits in my lap to watch TV. I’ve seen him naked a gazillion times because, post-shower, he always walks around naked and doesn’t give two shits if I see. We even shared a bed last night, long legs tangled and Timmy once elbowing me right in the face.
Since I’m in love with him, I treasure these moments. I treasure “how we are.” But it’s torture because it’s just a friendship to Tim. It’s just “how we are.” Nothing more.
He yawns beneath me.
“Why are you still tired?” I ask because I’m pretty sure he got plenty of sleep.
“I didn’t have coffee this morning because I thought we were, you know, leaving.”
I do a push-up above him and stare down at his ruffled clothes, his face half covered by shaggy hair. “I’ll make you coffee.” I roll off the couch and stand. “And call Luca to let him know we’re still up here. And we both have to call about our flights.”
He rolls onto his stomach and hugs a pillow. “Blah, blah, coffee.”
“Fucking princess,” I mutter fondly.
He doesn’t retort; just stares at the Italian weatherman on TV. While I prep Timmy’s French press (he likes it black as tar), I call Luca, who berates us for getting trapped but laughs because at least we’ll be comfy. His buddy owns this chateau and keeps it stocked. By the time I call my airline to change my flight, the coffee is ready and Timmy has dragged his overnight bag in front of him.
I hand him a steaming mug just as he pulls out the script for Find Me, the sequel that the entire world seems to be screaming about. He curls into a pretzel on the couch and sips loudly. “Dude, you make the best coffee,” he says and leans his head back on the furniture.
I sit next to him and sip my own bit of black. “Nah, Luca does.”
“You do,” he reiterates and uses his free hand to flip around in the script. “You know what I like best about it?”
“My coffee?”
He grins and shakes his head. “No. Find Me.”
“That you get to spend so much time kissing me again?”
Timmy’s nose wrinkles. “Yeah. Weeks of whisker burn. Awesome.”
I nudge him with my elbow. “Told you I’d shave every day for this.”
“I’m messing. I don’t give a shit.” He slouches lower in the couch. “The ending, though. I like that it’s so … anticlimactic. Like, they end up together after twenty years, and …” He chuckles. “There are no fireworks or, I don’t know, a big musical climax. No epic kiss. Oliver just comes back, and it’s like he was just gone on a business trip or something. Like they always knew they’d end up there and were just waiting. Or maybe they were both so much a part of each other, they were never separated, not really.” He looks at me. “You know?”
“Yeah, or like a paper cut waiting to heal.”
He grins. “What?”
“The kind you get on the tip of your finger. You can’t believe something so small would hurt so much, and you keep hitting it on shit and it bleeds again and again.”
He shifts around on the couch so he’s facing me. “You’re saying their separation was like an open wound.”
The truth is I bleed for Timmy every day. I say, “Somehow, it’s both. All those years, they were together but not.”
He pokes me in the shoulder. “Or they shared the same wound. Across an ocean and time, the same paper cut.”
“That didn’t heal until they found each other again.”
His fingers tickle down the side of my neck. “You’re so much smarter than you look.”
I laugh so suddenly, I almost choke on coffee and turn to find Timmy with his mouth open, teeth on full display as he giggles. I shake my head. “Oh, I’m definitely murdering you now.”
“We’re stranded up here together. You’d never get away with it.”
“I’d blame Bigfoot. Yeti did it.”
His giggles morph into silent, breathy chuckles. “Dude, you are Bigfoot.”
I’m laughing so hard, I have to wipe tears from my eyes. We both lean our heads on the back of the couch so close that his curls tickle my cheek.
He smacks my thigh and points at the TV. “Do you suppose everything is in Italian?”
I lean forward and grab the remote. A swift winter wind rattles the huge windows at the back of the chateau that overlook a bunch of white. I know there are trees out there somewhere, but due to what can only be termed an apocalyptic blizzard, I can’t see shit.
There’s no channel guide, so I flip around blindly. When I land on a familiar snow scape and hear a familiar score, I cackle with my face toward the ceiling. Timmy claws at my hand and starts repeating, “No, no, no, no.”
I reply, “Yes, yes, yes, fuck, yes.”
“Armie,” he pleads.
“Come on, what are the odds?” I wave at the TV. “It’s a sign.”
“That you’re going to kill me?” he asks.
“You know, now that I think about it, I’m kind of offended that you immediately assumed I would be Jack Nicholson in this scenario. Why the fuck am I the one going crazy?”
By now, Timmy is grabbing my wrist in an effort to get me to change the channel away from The Shining, dubbed in Italian. “Because I’m too soft to kill anyone.”
“And I’m not?”
He lowers his eyebrows. “Come on, Armie, you could totally be a serial killer, and no one would know.”
“Ha, I’m not that good of an actor.”
The tone shifts. His face changes. He looks sad and then angry. “Yes, you are, you moron.” He gives up on fighting for the remote and slumps back into the sofa. “All right, since it’s in Italian, let’s write new dialogue. Ready? I’ll be Shelley.”
“You would.” I elbow him in the side, and he just smirks.
On mute, The Shining isn’t that scary. It’s pretty easy to narrate for Nicholson’s eyebrows, and Timmy assumes a high-pitched whiny voice as his character bemoans all her bad fashion choices. God, I love him.
After an hour, I’m exhausted from laughing, and Timmy is red in the face, wearing a permanent grin.
That is until the TV screen suddenly goes black. The lights in the kitchen blink out. The fridge stops humming.
Timmy sits bold upright. “Oh, my God.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, prepped for a total meltdown. “Calm down. It’s all right.”
“All right?” he squeaks. “We’re going to freeze to death. Oh, my God!”
I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate me laughing, but he’s just so fucking cute. “Tim, there’s a fireplace and probably two year’s worth of wood. We’re not going to freeze.”
He takes a big heaving breath. “Sorry, sorry. I don’t like being trapped in places.”
I’m sure this is true considering he grew up in New York City and could go anywhere, do anything, at any time, regardless of weather. In the Big Apple, I doubt cabin fever was a thing. Also, from what I know of Timmy, he’s not great at sitting still; he’s pretty much always on the move. I’ve wondered on more than one occasion if the man I secretly love is running from something.
“All right, um …” I stand. “So don’t open the fridge unless you need to. I’ll start a fire.”
He nods but doesn’t look at me, staring outside as wind whips a bunch of white against the windows.
It doesn’t take me long to get the fire going. To try and distract him from panic (Timmy currently resembles a nervous fawn), I lean down and scoop him off the couch and over my shoulder.
“Ack!” He claws at my upper back even though he knows I won’t drop him. I’ve carried him like this several times, including when he is Drunk Timmy. Drunk Timmy is a wiggly, wily thing, so if I can keep Drunk Timmy steady, I can walk a tightrope over the Grand Canyon.
I’ve already arranged a pile of blankets on the thick throw rug. I drop Timmy on his ass in the midst of all the fluff. He grins up at me, so I can’t resist ruffling his hair. He’s always had the softest damn hair.
Since the gas stovetop still works, I prep us some hot cocoa for our next beverage. It’s a little early to bust out the wine. By the time I return to the roaring flames, the chateau smells like wood and warmth and a touch of smoke. Timmy has dragged books down from the nearby shelves—a random mix, it appears, of classic fiction like Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray along with big picture books with glossy images of Italy.
I sit at his side and point at Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece. “You should play Dorian Gray in a movie.”
His chin dips toward his throat in disbelief. “Why?”
“Well, you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.” I’m not embarrassed to admit this; I’ve admitted it before, and Timmy always turns red when I do.
He turns red again before leaning his head on my shoulder while staring into open flame. “Are we like them, do you think?”
I have zero clue what he’s talking about, which is rare. I’m an advanced expert at Timmy-speak. “Hunh?”
“Like Elio and Oliver?” he asks.
I still don’t understand. “How so?”
He sighs. His fingers circle my kneecap through my jeans. “Do you suppose it’ll take us twenty years?”
Oh. Oh, shit. Is he asking … Shit, he is asking. Does he know how I feel? How long has he known?
I should panic, but I don’t. Instead, I simply say, “I hope not,” and put my arm around his shoulders until his face rests against my chest. I kiss the top of his head because it seems the appropriate thing to do.
Timmy’s next question, though, almost shocks me onto my back.
“Did you get divorced because of me?”
A piece of wood crackles and pops in the fire.
“I, uh.” I choke on some of my own spit and cough. “Not exactly.”
He tilts his chin up so his forehead presses to the underside of my jaw. I regret making a fire, because frankly, it’s now two million degrees in this snowbound chateau.
“Does ‘not exactly’ mean yes?” he asks.
“Well, she certainly didn’t like me being in love with someone else.”
“Yeah.” He twirls his fingers between mine. “Neither did Lily Rose.”
They were off and on for almost two years. The “off” times certainly now make sense.
I move my hand from his shoulder and tangle it in his hair. “So you love me, too?”
“Yeah,” he says and nuzzles closer, wrapping his arm around my chest.
We sit like that for, Christ, I don’t know how long. It’s like time stopped. It’s just Timmy and me alone in a storm where no one and nothing can touch us.
He eventually breaks the silence with a quiet hum. “No fireworks,” he mutters.
I look down, and he’s grinning at the fire.
“No big musical climax,” he continues. “No epic kiss.”
He’s talking about Elio and Oliver’s reunion in Find Me—but, it would seem, he’s now also talking about us.
“Find me, Armie,” he whispers.
I kiss his forehead once, twice. “I never lost you.”
“No.” He pulls away so he has space to get up on his knees and straddle my legs. He takes my face in his hands and stares down at me. From this vantage point—and only this one—Timmy is taller than me. “Wouldn’t mind that epic kiss, though.”
When he leans down smiling, I grip his thin hips. When our lips touch … when our mouths open … when he tickles his tongue with mine … It’s all so familiar. Granted, we’ve kissed on film, but that was years ago. He’s still familiar, like I’ve spent the last five years kissing him before bed. Timmy’s mouth is and always has been pressed to mine.
He pulls back, positively glowing. Literally, the ends of his shaggy hair glow gold with firelight. “Five years,” he says as though he heard my thoughts a moment ago.
“Better than twenty,” I reply and push my hands beneath the hem of his hoodie so I can feel his bare skin. Like his mouth, familiar.
Again, the winter wind rattles the windows. Timmy turns to look, so I admire the sharp cut of his profile, including the nose I decided years ago was the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen. I kiss beneath the ledge of his sculpted jaw, and he hums in response.
He turns his head, again looking down at me, and licks his lips. “Do you suppose Luca’s friend has lube here?”
His words startle a laugh out of me before I wrap my arms around his skinny waist. Timmy will probably always be skinny. He’ll also always look nineteen. “Dude, it’s Luca’s friend. Of course there’s lube here.”
Timmy rubs his nose against mine. “I’m topping our first time.”
Apparently, I can’t stop laughing. “Oh, really?”
“Mmhmm.” He nods. “I’ve always wanted to with you.”
I drag him closer with my hands on his upper back and kiss the soft skin of his neck. “Yeah? And why’s that?”
“Because all the fan fiction authors assume I’m the bottom.”
I chuckle, open-mouthed, against his flesh. “You read fan fiction about us?”
“Yeah.” He hugs me close. “It’s hot.” He gives me a big, wet smooch on the head before leaping from my lap and moving quickly for the stairs.
I turn around, still on my butt. “Where the hell are you going?”
He pauses with his hand on the fancy wooden bannister. “Lube, Armie! Chop, chop!”
“Chop, chop?” I push myself to standing. “See, you’re totally the Jack Nicholson here.”
“Heeeeeere’s Johnny.” His grin is positively wicked; Timmy would play an excellent villain.
“You’re terrifying,” I say.
He just keeps grinning, staring at me.
Then, I have an idea. “Do you want to get married?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Probably should.” And he’s off like a bullet up the steps. I watch his bouncing hair disappear down the hall with my hands on my hips.
I’ve loved him for so long and hidden it for so long. Then, a snowstorm hits and changes everything. Amidst the sound of his feet pounding from room to room, I wonder why I hid my feelings. Didn’t I always know this was coming? Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe I needed him to tell me it was time. I needed him to whisper without words, “Find me,” but not find him in our usual way. Not meeting up for drinks whenever we’re in the same city. Not play-fighting in hotel rooms before binging Netflix. No, I had to find him not as Timmy, my best friend, but as Timmy, my love.
My greatest love.
I hear a victory howl. Seconds later, Timmy stands at the top of the steps with a bottle of lube held above his head just as the lights come back on in the kitchen. No need to worry about the heat, then, although I have a feeling we're about to turn up the temperature around here, electricity or not.
“What are you still doing downstairs?” He leans his elbows on the bannister and nibbles his tongue between his teeth. “Come on.”
I take the steps two at a time, crowd him against the wall, and kiss him with lots of tongue. He tastes like coffee and chocolate and Crema. When I pull back, he stares up at me with hazy eyes and a wet mouth.
I grin. “Well, what are you waiting for? I’m not going to finger myself.”
“Pfft, oh, my God.” He turns me with a shove on my shoulder and keeps on pushing until I wrap him in a headlock, and he flails like an injured bird. Nothing feels new. We’ve been here before. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, we’ve always been here.