And that’s exactly why I just asked Tony for a drink.
The sooner I extricate myself from this situation, the quicker I can move past these feelings and return to the status quo.
As I get up, I adjust the stack of three coffee table books on the table in front of me, lining up the spines. I count my steps to the door in threes and when I don’t quite come to a number divisible by three, I step back and then forward again.
I buzz Marcello in and open the door. The minute or two it takes for him to finally emerge at the end of the corridor I’m staring down seem to go on forever. I start to tell myself that it’s ridiculous. It’s just Marcello. The guy who makes my coffee. My training buddy. The man I’m helping get ready for a triathlon.
But then I see him and there’s no rationalising away how my body reacts to him. His face seems to be all smile and beard and sparkling browneyes that shouldn’t be so bright and warm from so far away, especially when I know only too well how dark they can be. I think about those eyes far too often.
“Hey!” he calls out as he approaches and I see he’s got something in his hands again, just like he has the last two times. But it’s not a bottle on this occasion. It’s a box. A box wrapped in brown paper. Like a gift.
“Hi,” I say, pulling my eyes away from the box. But that’s when he becomes more than his smile and his beard. That’s when I see the wrinkles around his eyes, the pink of his lips, and something new, the stretch of his pectorals pressing against the material of his T-shirt.
“Looking good,” he says and does something that makes replying impossible. He leans forwards and kisses my cheek.
I can’t remember the last time somebody did that. Radia and I aren’t touchy-feely, but even at the times we have been – her birthday or mine, or after one of us takes a long holiday – we would always go for a hug or a high five. And my friends, the few of them I do have, we shake hands or fist bump with awkward side hugs, or nothing at all.
A startling thought slices through me. What if the last time somebody kissed my cheek was my dad? He used to do that a lot, even though I sometimes asked him not to. I know he did it the last time I saw him when I left to return to uni.
“You okay?” Marcello pulls back and there are two pinched lines between his thick brows.
“Yeah,” I say, still feeling stunned. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good. And you recovered from our ridiculously long run. And don’t you dare say it wasn’t ridiculously long because my thighs, and interestingly, my toenails beg to differ.”
“You did brilliantly,” I say and I finally feel like I’m coming back to the present day and not lost in a memory I don’t always allow myself to revisit.
“Please tell me you are a bit sore. Like, just a little bit,” Marcello says pleadingly as he walks past me and toes off his shoes. “Like maybe a hair follicle in your groin over extended itself or something.”
“You know,” I close the door behind me, “my glutes have been feeling a bit tight today. They could maybe do with a massage.”
Marcello’s eyebrows shoot upwards and those lines between them have long disappeared. “Are you flirting with me, Mr Rivers?”
“I don’t know. Would you like me to flirt with you, Signore Donati?”
That gets me a reaction, a quick one, as he throws the box onto the counter, darts forward and grabs me. One of his big hands is on the back of my head and the other is on my hip and he pulls me into his body and kisses me. I kiss him back, matching his pressure and his strokes and his little grunts too. We travel across the kitchen floor until my back is pressed up against the fridge.
When he finally pulls away, he’s as breathless as I am.
“Is this okay?” he asks. “Only I want to… I don’t want to talk. I mean, I do. I have to talk to you about something, something important, but can it wait? Because I can’t. I really can’t wait to have you.”
His words pique my interest, bringing with them a dash of panic, but then he dives down into my neck and kisses me over and over again. When I feel his teeth grazing the sensitive skin there one of my knees buckles.
“I can’t wait either,” I say and I don’t think truer words have ever been spoken.
“Are you… ready? For me again, I mean. To top you?” He rests his forehead against mine.
“I am,” I say.
“Thank fuck,” he exhales, “I also… I want to go down on you.”
“You do?”
His hand slips between our bodies and finds my dick. He squeezes it through the material of my cotton shorts.
“I’ll be terrible at it. Awful. Disastrous. But I want to try. When I masturbated last night, I could only come thinking about you filling my mouth.”
My other knee buckles.
