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Luca isn’t that kind of boy. Really.
He was just bored. And when Luca was bored, he made it everyone’s problem.
The problem with Portorosso is that it is an inherently boring place to summer. Especially when trying to come into one’s own. Trying to explore parts of himself was rather easy in Genoa; there the city was bigger. Luca had options there. But in Portorosso, interest required intention. The small fishing village was a lot of things. It was attractively unusual, old-fashioned. There was a sense of a slower pace of life. Its proximity to nature was charming—and its authenticity was distinctive; something not evident in larger places. It was self-reliant and it was affable. Maybe even charming.
But it was boring .
Still, that wasn’t a problem a bit of romance couldn’t fix. Life was more interesting if one could romanticize it to an extent. After all, Luca was a dreamer—he had the natural inclination to make everyday things seem cinematic. The bathing of the cat or the taking out of the trash all conspire for his first kiss. If he flipped his collar up, his chances rose considerably. And yes, Luca had plenty of romance in his life. (Really.) Boys in Genoa, his romantic novels. Boys in Portorosso. Alberto.
Well. Sometimes Alberto.
It was romantic whenever he was around. Which isn’t as much. Not as much as Luca would like. Because as much as he loved the hot, lingering gazes and the flitting touches—he was beginning to grow rather bored of it all. And boredom was romantic, wasn’t it? It was Alberto himself who had coined the household phrase of There isn’t much to do around Portorosso.
And he really hadn’t been kidding.
How Luca wished Alberto were a man of his words. If he truly believed his own expression, why was he never around? Why must Luca lie awake and wonder and long and yearn for his touch?
Why must Luca stay indoors, wondering when his prince would come? It was gross, that’s what it was. He felt like a washed-up housewife. And they weren’t married. Alberto didn’t owe Luca anything no matter how close they’d come to crossing the line.
…Or maybe that was just Luca sulking again. He tended to do that during the long and stagnant summer days.
It was fine, really. Alberto had his niche and Luca had his.
(Now, all he needed to do was find out what exactly this aforementioned ‘niche’ was.)
“Here,” muttered Giulia, covertly passing Luca a pair of white cateye sunglasses. “You almost forgot your secret weapon.”
He was just bored. That was all.
(And what wouldn’t an unstimulated boy like Luca Paguro do for a little bit of excitement?)
Under pressure he worked best. They had almost been caught. There were a few things in the general vicinity of the pool that he’d like to blow, but his cover was certainly not one of them. So he unfolded his sunglasses, slid them on his face and dove gracefully underneath the water.
He flinches, ducking out of the way as a perfectly pedicured foot swings past his face. He lets himself sink to the bottom of the pool as he waits for The Signal.
Tap, tap. Giulia knocks her ankle against the tiled side of the pool, and Luca pops back up again. He lifts his sunglasses a little, letting the water drain out so that he could shake himself dry. Or, his upper half at least. Most boys weren’t particularly sexually attracted to green scales, after all.
“He went back inside. The hairy guy?” Giulia nods vaguely, gesturing toward the small sunroom that the host of this particular shindig has fashioned into a snack bar. She rests back on her elbows, hooked over the edge of the pool. Her back is to the snack bar as she gazes over the slick, wet, bikini clad bodies in the pool. Her yellow cateye sunglasses leave onlookers none the wiser.
Luca grins to himself, turning his attention toward the snack bar. “Yep. That’s the one.” He lays his folded arms over the edge of the pool and rests his chin on his hand.
(Waits patiently.)
Nobody was catching his eye. Being surrounded by boys his age in too-tight swim trunks and nothing else usually worked. It didn’t usually take this long to find someone . Eye candy was eye candy after all—and Luca was open to almost anything at this point.
It was true; he was still thinking about Alberto. And what a shame it was too. He had gone through all this trouble to go against his own desire. This was supposed to be his lidocaine—a respite from the constant burn that was his insatiable hunger for his friend. Yet instead it was only making him feel worse.
And anyway—ogling half-naked boys at the pool was never even Luca’s idea to begin with. No, this had been Giulia’s thing; her favorite pastime being a fellow teenager in Portorosso. She was bored, she was growing up, and her interests were changing rapidly.
They had simply become a pair of raging hormonal crust buckets, and Luca was tired of fighting it. So if Alberto didn’t want him, someone else at this pool would.
(Now… back to the task at hand. Or was it ‘at length’?)
If only he could find a boy cute enough to even be worth considering.
It wasn’t that there was a shortage of conventionally attractive boys at this lovely establishment. But Luca had quite the ambitious criteria when it came to looks, and he wasn’t about to settle for just anyone. He needed another Alberto. Someone disgustingly handsome while being too dense to actually utilize his effect on people. He needed to be easy. Relatively romantic. He needed to have strong looking arms, a laugh worth daydreaming of. Large hands to take him w—
Oh? Oh, hang on a minute.
With deft subtlety, Luca lowers down a bit in the pool so that only his eyes are above the water. There’s Hairy Guy again. He has reemerged from the snack bar with a dripping wet can of aranciata rossa. Effortlessly, he pops it open with his fingers—that’s a good sign, his hands are strong—and takes an exaggerated swill the way guys do. It seemed to be a trend. You know the one; the head tilted backwards, the groan of pleasure, the bobbing Adam’s apple. The works.
(It was all very lewd.)
What’s more, amidst the boy’s desperate guzzling of added sugars, he forgets to swallow. A translucent stream of orange-ish carbonated liquid spills down the boys bare pectorals. All the way down to his inward belly button, and finally into the tuft of hair right below it. What’s below that is entirely up to the imagination.
“Gracious,” Luca tilts his chin down, peering indignantly with wide eyes over the rims of his sunglasses. Slowly, his brows lift at the scene. Hairy Guy has, against all odds, inexplicably made the hit list.
Pressing his tongue to the tip of his razor sharp canine, Luca chuckles delightedly to himself. I'm a monster, he mused.
(His Achilles heel. Body hair.)
Of course, it would never measure up to Alberto’s own impressive amounts of body hair; the bushels that grew underneath his armpits, the coarse strands along his forearms and legs, the ones the boy seemed thoroughly embarrassed about. Alberto dutifully shaved himself, but Luca thought it was such a waste of natural beauty. Why throw away what your body has worked so hard to give you? It was particularly egregious to the eyes of someone that couldn’t grow body hair to save his own life.
He wished Alberto would stop being such an idiot. Let himself be appreciated for once. Every inch, all of him. Luca had so much appreciation to give. He had to get rid of it somehow, else he might burst.
Hairy Guy may just be the perfect target.
~
Nobody’s the perfect target. Because nobody’s the one he really wants.
Luca liked to think himself a master of his craft. He knew how to pick an eligible bachelor right from the crowd. He considered the process an art, really: parsing out the truly messed up ones from the ones that were only curious. In such a situation, Luca knows how to present himself.
Unfortunately, Alberto consistently gave Luca nothing to go off of. That’s why, in all his glory, Luca becomes a sputtering mess around his best friend.
It wasn’t that he was nervous. Luca was just like a machine; he had programmed himself for different protocols. Boys were prototypes, and Luca had logged each version with its own cheat code.
(And sometimes, by nature, machines malfunction.)
So, no. While Alberto wasn’t prototype A, or B nor prototype C, Luca hadn’t just comforted his friend with the universal subject changer of, “Do you want me to suck your dick?”
“What?”
Luca blinked. Once, twice. Too many times. Oh. Oh god. “Did I say that out loud?”
Alberto nods, curt and dismissive. He buries his face in his hands with a low groan. The expression on Luca’s face, from a retrospective point of view, is priceless.
Of course, it didn’t help that they were currently in the midst of a family crisis. Signor Marcovaldo has just been transferred to some faraway hospital in Rome. For the past three months he had complained of some sort of insistent chest pain, and well…
Alberto was not taking it well. Again, rightfully so. That was his father after all. And suddenly the whole picture becomes visible to Luca. Suddenly he realizes that this was not—nor has it ever been—about him.
Alberto was coping. Sneaking off during the day, not coming home at night; worrying he and Giulia sick.
And Luca had just made a huge mess.
“I… I am so sorry—” he places a shaky hand on Alberto’s knee, out of instinct. The older boy flinches, and Luca quivers even more as he pulls his hand away. “I… that was wrong. Of me. So wrong. I should have never— I don’t know what took over me—”
“Really, Luca?” Alberto doesn’t even spare him a glance. His jaw clenched as he continued. “Because I do.”
Luca blinks again, shaking his head in disbelief. “Of course,” he laughs. Shakes his head again. “Of course you do.”
“Do you want to ‘suck my dick’?”
What was he trying to do? “Of course I do. Only, I won’t.”
This time, Alberto turns to glare at Luca. He opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, then decides against it. A bitter looking grin spreads across his face, and a pang of fear strikes Luca. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have a life of my own? Some girl I’m crazy about?”
“You don’t like girls,” Luca points out. His voice is so small that it sounds like he’s whispering. Alberto draws back a bit, his eyes widening calmly. “If you did, you wouldn’t have been making out with the pastor’s son behind the pescheria.”
“Were you spying on me?”
Luca is indignant. “Yes!”
Alberto scoffs. He shakes his head as if to physically clear the clouded thoughts away. “What kind of a silly thing was that to do?”
“To fall in love with you, that was the idiotic thing.”
“Good grief,” Alberto groans again, louder this time. He turns away from Luca and scrubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm. “You’re in love with me?”
“I can’t think of a person who isn’t . ” He pauses. “For some reason I thought I was special.”
“You are.”
“You’ve never given me any reason to believe that.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t love me.”
“Perhaps.” Luca grins, despite everything. Che romantico, wasn’t this? “Though I’ve never been known to take other people’s suggestions.”
“Yeah, I bet you’re real proud of that.”
“Really, I am. For example: I want to kiss you. I always have. But you’d probably tell me that I shouldn’t. It’s not a request, but a suggestion. Would I really be wrong for kissing you anyway?”
Alberto looks at Luca with a pained expression. If it discourages Luca, nobody would know about it. “If I kissed you, would it shut you up?”
“I think it might make things worse.”
“For me or for you?”
Luca raises his eyebrows.
“God, Luca. You’re such a pain in my ass.”
“I always pictured it the other way around.”
“…I suppose you’re right,” Alberto agrees with a huff. Luca can tell that it pains him to do so. Still, he sits up, resting on his knees again. Unceremoniously, he reaches up with one hand and caresses Luca’s jaw. A jolt of excitement rushes along the younger boy’s spine, and he grins maniacally. “May I?”
Luca readjusts, folding his knees underneath himself and shuffling closer to Alberto. Primly, he folds his hands on his lap and settles. “Please, yes.”