“Cup or cone?”
“Ah! Una coppetta, per favore.”
Ramin paid, took his cup, and found a stool in the corner, facing out the windows to people watch. He tucked his bags beneath his stool and dug in with the little plastic spade. The gelato was smooth and creamy,a perfect balance of rosewater and cardamom, with just a bit of crunch from the ground pistachios on top.
He never expected to find bastani in a gelateria in Milan. Italy reallywasmagical.
As Ramin savored another bite, the door chimed, letting in two new guests. One was a man about Ramin’s age, resting a gentle hand on the head of a boy who looked so similar they had to be family. Ramin did a double-take, seeing a blue Kansas City Royals T-shirt on the father, but then shook his head. He’d only walked a few blocks today, and he’d already seen a ton of folks wearing US team apparel, though mostly basketball now that he thought about it. He’d thought they were tourists, but most had been speaking Italian.
He wondered if these were Italians, too, until the son started talking in English.
“I want one scoop. No, two! In a cone.”
The dad laughed and played with the kid’s messy chestnut hair.
Ramin’s heart clenched at the sight.
Adopting kids had been part of his plan, once he and Todd were married. Ramin hadn’t given much thought to having them when he was newly out and in his twenties, but as he’d gotten older, he realized that he kind of wanted children. He thought he’d be a good dad. And he liked the idea of having a family.
But that was probably boring, too.
“Do you think they have bubblegum?”
“Hah, I don’t think so, buddy, but let’s look,” the dad answered.
Ramin’s heart skipped a beat. The man’s voice was deep, mellow, the tiniest bit grainy, and weirdly familiar.
Ramin tried to eye him without being super obvious. He had messy (but nottoomessy) black hair and a sharp jaw. He looked strong, with broad shoulders, a defined chest, and arms that filled the holes of his shirt. He wore a pair of light blue jeans, and his thighs filled those out, too. He looked like he spent time in the gym, but nottoo muchtime; he seemed built for practical strength rather than for vanity.
The man turned, staring at one of the signs on the wall, and Ramin glimpsed warm brown eyes, a day’s scruff on his cheeks, and a cleft chin. Ramin nearly dropped his cup. He gripped it tighter and hoped the guy hadn’t noticed him staring.
Holy shit. It was impossible. Wasn’t it? His heart skipped another couple beats. Could the whole gelateria hear it?
But no. The probability was basically zero.
“Okay, buddy. You know what you want?” the man asked, and fuck it, Ramin could swear he knew that voice, even twenty years later.
Noah Bartlett. His old classmate. It couldn’t be, could it? No. But what if it was? Fuck, the guy even looked like Noah. Noah, if he’d aged like fine wine.
Ramin had never thought that about a person before—that they had aged like fine wine—but damn. He risked another glance. There were laugh lines around the guy’s sparkling eyes, and way more hair on his forearms. He looked like a man, not a teenager. But he knew that face. That voice.
Impossible. Right?
“Mmmmmm, pistachio!” the boy said.
“Two scoops of pistachio in a cone, per favore,” probably-definitely-not-Noah said. “And one scoop of lemon for me. Grazie.”
“What about Mom?” the boy asked.
“We’ll let her pick when she comes.”
Okay. Ramin had—very occasionally, and only when he couldn’t sleep—looked Noah up over the years. Well, tried to look him up, because Noah didn’t seem to have a profile onanysocial media, at least not one that Ramin could find. Even combing through his exceedingly neglected Facebook account (because seriously, fuck Mark Zuckerberg) to see if he could find mutual friends had yielded nothing. As far as the internet was concerned, Noah Bartlett didn’t exist.
So this couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be Ramin’s first crush. Not that he’d understood it was a crush. He’d been seventeen and growing up in suburban Kansas City andcloseteddidn’t come close to describing it.
He hadn’t been able to put words to the strange draw he’d felt toward Noah. He told himself it was jealousy—that Noah was handsome and fit, while Ramin had felt fat and ugly, his nose too big for his face, his stomach too big for his shirts. He told himself it was friendship, that Noah had everything going for him, that by all rights he should’ve been awful to Ramin like all the other popular white boys, but he never was. He told himself it was admiration, that he wanted to be like Noah, who had half the girls in their class crushing on him, or dating him, or whispering about him and giggling every time he walked by…
Ramin shook himself.
