André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

It never occurred to me, as I was going through the heady motions of feeling over and done with him and even a tad disappointed that I had so easily recovered after a spell of so many weeks, that this desire to sit and discuss Haydn in so unusually relaxed a manner as we were doing right now was my most vulnerable spot, that if desire had to resurface, it could just as easily sneak in through this very gate, which I’d always assumed the safest, as through the sight of his near-naked body by the swimming pool.

At some point he interrupted me.

“You okay?”

“Fine. Fine,” I replied.

Then, with an awkward smile, as if correcting his initial question: “Are you okay everywhere?”

I smiled back faintly, knowing I was already clamming up, shutting the doors and windows between us, blowing out the candles because the sun was finally up again and shame cast long shadows.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. Sore.”

“But did you mind when I—?”

I turned my face the other way, as though a chill draft had touched my ear and I wished to avoid having it hit my face. “Do we need to speak about it?” I asked.

I had used the same words that Marzia had uttered when I wished to know if she liked what I’d done to her.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

I knew exactly what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to go over the moment when I’d almost asked him to stop.

Now all I thought of, as we spoke, was that today I’d be walking with Marzia and each time we’d try to sit somewhere I would hurt. The indignity of it. Sitting on the town’s ramparts — which was where everyone our age congregated at night when we weren’t sitting in the caffès — and be forced to squirm and be reminded each time of what I’d just done that night. The standing joke among schoolboys. Watch Oliver watch me squirm and think, I did that to you, didn’t I?

I wished we hadn’t slept together. Even his body left me indifferent. On the rock where we sat now I looked at his body as one looks at old shirts and trousers being boxed for pick up by the Salvation Army.

Shoulder: check.

Area between inner and outer elbow that I’d worshipped once: check.

Crotch: check.

Neck: check.

Curves of the apricot: check.

Foot — oh, that foot: but, yes, check.

Smile, when he’d said, Are you okay everywhere : yes, check that too. Leave nothing to chance.

I had worshipped them all once. I had touched them the way a civet rubs itself on the objects it covets. They’d been mine for a night. I didn’t want them now. What I couldn’t remember, much less understand, was how I could have brought myself to desire them, to do all I’d done to be near them, touch them, sleep with them. After our swim I’d take that much-awaited shower. Forget, forget.

As we were swimming back, he asked as though it were an afterthought, “Are you going to hold last night against me?”

“No,” I answered. But I had answered too swiftly for someone who meant what he was saying. To soften the ambiguity of my no, I said I’d probably want to sleep all day. “I don’t think I’ll be able to ride my bike today.”

“Because…” He was not asking me a question, he was supplying the answer.

“Yes, because.”

It occurred to me that one of the reasons I’d decided not to distance him too quickly was not just to avoid hurting his feelings or alarming him or stirring up an awkward and unwieldy situation at home, but because I was not sure that within a few hours I wouldn’t be desperate for him again.

When we reached our balcony, he hesitated at the door and then stepped into my room. It took me by surprise. “Take your trunks off.” This was strange, but I didn’t have it in me to disobey. So I lowered them and got out of them. It was the first time I’d been naked with him in broad daylight. I felt awkward and was starting to grow nervous. “Sit down.” I had barely done as I was told when he brought his mouth to my cock and took it all in. I was hard in no time. “We’ll save it for later,” he said with a wry smile on his face and was instantly gone.

Was this his revenge on me for presuming to be done with him?

But there they went — my self-confidence and my checklist and my craving to be done with him. Great work. I dried myself, put on the pajama bottoms I had worn last night, threw myself on my bed, and didn’t awake till Mafalda knocked at my door asking whether I wanted eggs for breakfast.

The same mouth that was going to eat eggs had been everywhere last night.

As with a hangover, I kept wondering when the sickness would wear off.

Every once in a while, sudden soreness triggered a twinge of discomfort and shame. Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It’s the asshole, stupid.

When he came down for breakfast he was wearing my bathing suit. No one would have given it another thought since everyone was always swapping suits in our house, but this was the first time he had done so and it was the same suit I had worn that very dawn when we’d gone out for a swim. Watching him wearing my clothes was an unbearable turn-on. And he knew it. It was turning both of us on. The thought of his cock rubbing the netted fabric where mine had rested reminded me how, before my very eyes, and after so much exertion, he had finally shot his load on my chest. But what turned me on wasn’t this. It was the porousness, the fungibility, of our bodies — what was mine was suddenly his, just as what belonged to him could be all mine now. Was I being lured back again? At the table, he decided to sit at my side and, when no one was looking, slipped his foot not on top of but under mine. I knew my foot was rough from always walking barefoot; his was smooth; last night I had kissed his foot and sucked his toes; now they were snuggled under my callused foot and I needed to protect my protector.

He was not allowing me to forget him. I was reminded of a married chatelaine who, after sleeping with a young vassal one night, had him seized by the palace guards the next morning and summarily executed in a dungeon on trumped-up charges, not only to eliminate all evidence of their adulterous night together and to prevent her young lover from becoming a nuisance now that he thought he was entitled to her favors, but to stem the temptation to seek him out on the following evening. Was he becoming a nuisance going after me? And what was I to do — tell my mother?

That morning he went into town alone. Post office, Signora Milani, the usual rounds. I saw him pedal down the cypress lane, still wearing my trunks. No one had ever worn my clothes. Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself — like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are, the foreign body, the pacer, the graft, the patch that sends all the right impulses, the steel pin that keeps a soldier’s bone together, the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.

The very thought of this suddenly made me want to drop everything I would do today and run to him. I waited about ten minutes, then took out my bike and, despite my promise not to go biking that day, headed out by way of Marzia’s home and scaled the steep hillside road as fast as I could. When I reached the piazzetta I realized I had arrived minutes after him. He was parking his bike, had already purchased the Herald Tribune , and was heading for the post office — his first errand. “I had to see you,” I said as I rushed to him. “Why, something wrong?” “I just had to see you.” “Aren’t you sick of me?” I thought I was — I was about to say — and I wanted to be—“I just wanted to be with you,” I said. Then it hit me: “If you want, I’ll go back now,” I said. He stood still, dropped his hand with the bundle of unsent letters still in it, and simply stood there staring at me, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea how glad I am we slept together?”