André Aciman - Call Me by Your Name

I shrugged my shoulders as though to put away another compliment. I was unworthy of compliments, most of all coming from him. “I don’t know.”

“It would be just like you not to know. I just don’t want to regret any of it — including what you wouldn’t let me talk about this morning. I just dread the thought of having messed you up. I don’t want either of us to have to pay one way or another.”

I knew exactly what he was referring to but pretended otherwise. “I’m not telling anyone. There won’t be any trouble.”

“I didn’t mean that . I’m sure I’ll pay for it somehow, though.” And for the first time in daylight I caught a glimpse of a different Oliver. “For you, however you think of it, it’s still fun and games, which it should be. For me it’s something else which I haven’t figured out, and the fact that I can’t scares me.”

“Are you sorry I came?” Was I being intentionally fatuous?

“I’d hold you and kiss you if I could.”

“Me too.”

I came up to his ear as he was just about to enter the post office and whispered, “Fuck me, Elio.”

He remembered and instantly moaned his own name three times, as we’d done during that night. I could feel myself already getting hard. Then, to tease him with the very same words he’d uttered earlier that morning, I said, “We’ll save it for later.”

Then I told him how Later! would always remind me of him. He laughed and said, “Later!” —meaning exactly what I wanted it to mean for a change: not just goodbye, or be off with you, but afternoon lovemaking. I turned around and was instantly on my bike, speeding my way back downhill, smiling broadly, almost singing if I could.

Never in my life had I been so happy. Nothing could go wrong, everything was happening my way, all the doors were clicking open one by one, and life couldn’t have been more radiant: it was shining right at me, and when I turned my bike left or right or tried to move away from its light, it followed me as limelight follows an actor onstage. I craved him but I could just as easily live without him, and either way was fine.

On my way, I decided to stop at Marzia’s house. She was headed to the beach. I joined her, and we went down to the rocks together and lay in the sun. I loved her smell, loved her mouth. She took off her top and asked me to put some sunscreen on her back, knowing that my hands would inevitably cup her breasts. Her family owned a thatched cabana by the beach and she said we should go inside. No one would come. I locked the door from the inside, sat her on the table, took off her bathing suit, and put my mouth where she smelled of the sea. She leaned back, and lifted both legs over my shoulders. How strange, I thought, how each shadowed and screened the other, without precluding the other. Barely half an hour ago I was asking Oliver to fuck me and now here I was about to make love to Marzia, and yet neither had anything to do with the other except through Elio, who happened to be one and the same person.

After lunch Oliver said he had to go back to B. to hand Signora Milani his latest corrections. He cast an instant glance in my direction but, seeing I hadn’t responded, was already on his way. After two glasses of wine, I couldn’t wait to take a nap. I grabbed two huge peaches from the table and took them with me, and kissed my mother along the way. I’d eat them later, I said. In the dark bedroom, I deposited the fruit on the marble tabletop. And then undressed totally. Clean, cool, crisp-starched, sun-washed sheets drawn tight across my bed — God bless you, Mafalda. Did I want to be alone? Yes. One person last night; then again at dawn. Then in the morning, another. Now I lay on the sheets as happy as a stiff-grown, newly sprung sunflower filled with listless vigor on this sunniest of summer afternoons. Was I glad to be alone now that sleep was upon me? Yes. Well, no. Yes. But maybe not. Yes, yes, yes. I was happy, and this was all that mattered, with others, without others, I was happy.

Half an hour later, or maybe sooner, I was awakened by the rich brown cloistral scent of coffee wafting through the house. Even with the door closed I could smell it and I knew this wasn’t my parents’ coffee. Theirs had been brewed and served a while ago. This was the afternoon’s second brew, made in the Neapolitan espresso coffeemaker in which Mafalda, her husband, and Anchise made coffee after they too had lunched. Soon they would be resting as well. Already a heavy torpor hung in the air — the world was falling asleep. All I wanted was for him or Marzia to pass by my balcony door and, through the half-drawn shutters, make out my naked body sprawled on the bed. Him or Marzia — but I wanted someone to pass by and notice me, and up to them to decide what to do. I could go on sleeping or, if they should sidle up to me, I’d make room for them and we’d sleep together. I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard cock. I know you’re not sleeping , they’d say, and gently press the soft, overripe peach on my cock till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s ass. The idea seized me and would not let go.

I got up and reached for one of the peaches, opened it halfway with my thumbs, pushed the pit out on my desk, and gently brought the fuzzy, blush-colored peach to my groin, and then began to press into it till the parted fruit slid down my cock. If Anchise only knew, if Anchise knew what I was doing to the fruit he cultivated with such slavish devotion every day, him and his large straw hat and his long, gnarled, callused fingers that were always ripping out weeds from the parched earth. His peaches were more apricots than peaches, except larger, juicier. I had already tried the animal kingdom. Now I was moving to the kingdom of plants. Next would come minerals. The idea almost made me chuckle. The fruit was leaking all over my cock. If Oliver walked in on me now, I’d let him suck me as he had this morning. If Marzia came, I’d let her help me finish the job. The peach was soft and firm, and when I finally succeeded in tearing it apart with my cock, I saw that its reddened core reminded me not just of an anus but of a vagina, so that holding each half in either hand firmly against my cock, I began to rub myself, thinking of no one and of everyone, including the poor peach, which had no idea what was being done to it except that it had to play along and probably in the end took some pleasure in the act as well, till I thought I heard it say to me, Fuck me, Elio, fuck me harder , and after a moment, Harder, I said! while I scanned my mind for images from Ovid — wasn’t there a character who had turned into a peach and, if there wasn’t, couldn’t I make one up on the spot, say, an ill-fated young man and young girl who in their peachy beauty had spurned an envious deity who had turned them into a peach tree, and only now, after three thousand years, were being given what had been so unjustly taken away from them, as they murmured, I’ll die when you’re done, and you mustn’t be done, must never be done ? The story so aroused me that practically without warning the orgasm was almost upon me. I sensed I could just stop then and there or, with one more stroke, I could come, which I finally did, carefully, aiming the spurt into the reddened core of the open peach as if in a ritual of insemination.

What a crazy thing this was. I let myself hang back, holding the fruit in both hands, grateful that I hadn’t gotten the sheet dirty with either juice or come. The bruised and damaged peach, like a rape victim, lay on its side on my desk, shamed, loyal, aching, and confused, struggling not to spill what I’d left inside. It reminded me that I had probably looked no different on his bed last night after he’d come inside me the first time.