“At least he’s eating,” Ma says to me privately after a family dinner of grilled salmon and roasted vegetables over brown rice. “But what about you, my son? No pasta? No cheese?” She shakes her head grimly and pats my tummy. “My poor boy.”
“I am allowed some cheese and pasta,” I inform her. “Just not as my main staple.”
“But this is the food of our people,” she says, gesturing with both hands.
I smile at her dramatics and lay a hand on her arm. “This is Giovanni’s way of telling us he cares. Go with it, Ma.”
To help Giovanni with his routines, I join him for yoga on the mornings I’m on the island. Giovanni instructs me on the various poses, and though I’m not nearly as flexible or limber as he is, I am improving. Mostly, I like to watch him twist and bend while thinking of the many ways I will restrain him with my rope. I fantasize about fucking him too, but I am resolved to wait for him to make his arousal known. My passions will not wane, and patience is a virtue of both the Dominant and submissive.
As part of our new exercise regimen, we go running three days a week along an island route that ends at my dock. I like to check on both the house and my boat regularly. The main house is largely untouched, still decorated with all of Valentin’s things, so it’s nice to be surrounded by my own possessions from time to time. I’m looking forward to getting back on the water soon. The chill of winter is beginning to thaw, and I’m hoping Giovanni will be up for some adventure.
One afternoon during our cool-down, while we’re drinking water in the boathouse kitchen, a picture of my brother and me captures Giovanni’s attention. It’s from when I was a teenager and Valentin a man in the prime of his life. Both of us are smiling, standing on this very same beach, looking windswept and carefree. I say to Gio, “That was taken before Valentin purchased the property and built his villa. We were here on vacation, just the two of us, because I was getting into trouble at home. We fell in love with the island, certain that it was enchanted. Valentin asked me, if I could have anything in the world, what would it be? And I told him, a sailboat. He made me keep after my dream until one day, it came true.”
Giovanni smiles, cradling the framed picture in both hands to study it more closely. “He had a way of making the impossible seem possible.”
“Do you want to talk about him?” I ask because he sometimes needs prompting.
“What is your very first memory of Master?”
I have to think about that, because Valentin had always just… been there. Even when he moved to America, he was still more involved in my life than our father who was distant and somewhat cold, spending most of his time at the pharmacy or else buried underneath the mountain of paperwork that went along with running a small business.
“I remember sitting on his shoulders while strolling through town,” I tell him. “How big he made me feel.”
“He made me feel that way too,” Gio says. “He always spoke to me as an equal, even when I was little. Even when I misbehaved.”
His phrasing makes me wonder just how old he was when they first started their relationship. Valentin was always frustratingly brief on the details of Giovanni’s past.
“What is your first memory of him?” I ask.
He draws one fingertip lovingly along my brother’s face. “I used to jump into his arms at our swimming pool. And later, when I was a bit older, he would watch me practice my dives. I remember him in his bathing suit with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other, saying, ‘That’s a seven, Mattie, maybe a seven and a half. Point your toes next time.’”
“Mattie?”
Giovanni looks up in alarm. Valentin had called him that name a few times toward the end, and I’d written it off as a sign of his advancing illness, but the memory Gio describes makes it sound like hewasa little boy when they met.
“How old were you when you met him?” I ask.
“I was seven.”
Seven years old? How is that possible? Valentin told me he’d picked him up off a park bench in Central Park and rehabilitated him, that he’d had to tell the mob I’d sent him from Milano because of some scrape he’d gotten into with a rival family. Now I wonder if any of that was even true.
“So, who’s Mattie?” I ask again.
“Poor, poor Matthew,” he says hauntingly and sets the frame back on the shelf. “Matthew had to die so that Giovanni could be born.”
I know that his Italian is near-fluent by now, so if it’s not a language barrier, then the only other explanation is someone is lying to me.
“Come with me.” I circle my arm around his waist and lead him to the sofa in the living room. “Sit with me, Giovanni, and tell me the story of how you met my brother. The truth, this time.”
“I’ve never lied to you, Sir,” he protests, looking wounded, and while that may be true, he also never corrected my brother’s untruths.
“I’m not accusing you, princess. I only want to hear your side of things. Now, tell me about it.”
“First, you must know that resurrection as a motif is fairly common throughout many religions,” Giovanni says in his scholarly way, “Osiris and Tammuz of ancient Egypt, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysus of the Greco-Roman era and our very own Jesus on the cross. The phoenix dies every 500 years in a show of fiery flames only for its successor to rise from the ashes.”
Eyes the color of sea glass stare back at me as if I could possibly decode his meaning from this explanation alone. Perhaps my brother could have, but I cannot.
“Valentin told me he found you on a park bench.” I smooth my hand over the top of his. “That you were near death.”
