The Italian Word for Kisses

by Matthew J. Metzger

  “I want you to fucking cut it out.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t just magically change how I feel any more than you can,” Daniel said. He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder. “That’s what tolerance actually means, Tav. It weirds me out, doesn’t mean I don’t know that’s my problem and not yours.”

  Tav snorted, unwilling to hear it, and scowled after Luca and Aaron, who were rapidly disappearing towards their own form room. “I’ll catch you later,” he threw over his shoulder, ignoring Daniel’s annoyed huff, and stalked after them. “Luca!” he yelled as he shouldered through the glass doors into the corridor, and a dark head halfway through the milling crowd turned.

  “What,” Luca said shortly as he caught up.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Do we.” It was a statement rather than a question, and Tav scowled.

  “Yeah. Look―”

  “I don’t fancy another fight, and you need to not get suspended,” Luca said shortly, and turned away.

  “Wait,” Tav said, and seized his arm to turn him back.

  “Piss off, Tav, you’ve made it perfectly clear you’re not with me on this one.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have to be,” Tav said. “I don’t have to just agree with you all the time because we’re dating, that’s not how it works.”

  “I still expect my boyfriend to actually be on my side!”

  “I am on your side—that’s why I don’t agree with you,” Tav snapped. “You’ll get hurt if you do nothing, you know that.”

  “I’m not arguing about this again, Tav.”

  “So let’s…actually talk about it,” Tav said, and squeezed Luca’s elbow. “I don’t want to fight with you right now, not when Jack’s doing that enough on his own.”

  Luca shook him off. He was as angry as Tav had ever seen him, his arms folded belligerently over his chest in a stance more like Tav’s default setting than Luca’s. It made Tav both angry himself, and a bit upset. Luca went off like a firework when he was pissy, but it usually wasn’t directed at Tav.

  “I don’t want to fight with you, Luc.”

  “Maybe I want to fight with you right now,” Luca seethed.

  Tav bit his lip. “Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. I was in a temper and you just hit a nerve, you know? I mean…Aaron’s still shadowing you everywhere, right? And me…”

  “Not that I need you to do that either,” Luca said snidely, and Tav frowned.

  “Don’t.”

  “So stop assuming I’m a fucking moron,” Luca snapped, “and let me make my own calls, Tav. I’m not letting that little shit chase me away from my own life, and I’m not dropping him in it when he needs help, not prison.”

  Tav fought—desperately—against the urge to shake Luca again and open his eyes to Jack being way, way less important than Luca, thank you very fucking much, and took a deep breath. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll stop…I’ll stop pushing you to tell the police—this time, if nothing else happens—but you have to let me…you’re not to go off on your own, alright? Like me and Aaron sorted out. That stands.”

  Luca’s scowl deepened for a moment, and he pushed off the bank of lockers like he was more than done with Tav and the entire conversation. “Whatever,” he said irritably. “Fine, stalk me around. But I’m going swimming after school with Az, and I don’t fancy you tagging along after yesterday. You can piss off until I don’t want to punch you in the face anymore.”

  Tav winced. “Um. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Whatever,” Luca repeated, stalking ahead of him. Tav clenched his jaw, trying very hard not to lose his temper again—he knew Luca would calm down over the course of the day, but Christ, he was an annoying fucker when he was in a mood—and followed Luca to his form room before peeling off and heading to his own. He was late, but who gave a fuck?

  In the near-deserted corridors, he saw Jack. They exchanged scowls, but nothing else, and Tav resolved to go for a run after school if Luca was going to sod off with Aaron for the afternoon. He could seek Luca out after dinner tonight. He’d be more amenable then. And if he wasn’t, then…well, then Tav might actually have to let this thing with Jack go.

  Which was something he felt way too uneasy to do.

  * * * *

  Aaron was waiting when Luca’s final class got dismissed. “You calmed down yet?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Luca said ruefully, shoving his books into his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “Lockers for my kit, then let’s blow this joint.”

  “That just sounds wrong in your accent.”

  “Hey, fuck you, too.”

  “You are feeling better,” Aaron observed. “You still pissed at Tav?”

  “Yeah, but not as much,” Luca said. “I mean, I get it, I get he’s worried, but he needs to not treat me like some prissy girl who swoons all over the place, too, you know.”

  “Pride,” Aaron said.

  “Shut up, it’s not just―”

  “It’s pride,” Aaron repeated, then shifted. “But I kind of agree with you, too, you know. I mean, not about Jack, but about Tav respecting your decisions, like. He shouldn’t just order you around.”

  “Finally,” Luca grumped as they jogged down the stairs and shouldered their way through a melee of Year Nines. “I’ll string him out a bit later and forgive him in the morning, I reckon. I know he means well, he’s just such a twat about it sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think he agrees with you that Jack’s got problems.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Mate, I ain’t your boyfriend. I can call you a dick when you’re being a dick and not give a shit if you go all bitchy for a week.”

  Luca shoved him in the shoulder, and Aaron sniggered.

  “You’re the dick,” he said.

  “Why are we talking about Aaron’s dick?” David asked, materialising like a ghost by the lockers.

  “We’re talking about the lack of it.”

  “Hey!”

  “He’s right,” David said. “You sat through a four hour ballet recital for Emily’s little sister, you have no dick.”

  Aaron whined they were bullying him; David continued to do it. Luca felt his blood pressure coming right down as he gathered his kit bag from his locker and dumped his books in it instead. Not like he was going to bother doing any of his homework tonight, right? He’d either have another row with Tav, or they’d patch up yesterday’s row. Enthusiastically. And Luca quite fancied the second option.

  He texted Tav on his way out of the gates, a quick going swimming c u later, as a little thawing in frosty relations, but left off the kiss. Let Tav work a bit for it. Luca was wary of Tav getting away with too much twattishness, because he had a lot of it floating around, and maybe some people liked that whole knobhead dominant guy thing, but not Luca. If Luca wanted someone to boss him around, he’d go over to his uncle and aunt in Hillsborough more often.

  KK luv u x came the unusually affectionate reply, and Luca clicked out of it and pocketed the phone before he could be tempted.

  “I vote,” David said as they headed down the hill, “that we walk for the exercise, and then we can fuck about instead of doing Coach’s exercises. Not like he’s gonna know.”

  “Coach always knows,” Aaron said.

  “Yeah, but―”

  “Don’t ‘but’, David, that’s how he keeps catching you out, ‘cause you think he won’t,” Luca agreed.

  “Fine,” David said. “Coach’s warm-ups? Then we can…”

  Luca tuned it out, half-heartedly engaging in the banter, and just trying to relax. He wanted this all the time, just being able to joke around. It felt like he hadn’t been allowed ever since Jack had come along, and Luca wanted to go back to Jack just being the quiet new kid at swimming club who did a mean front crawl, and wasn’t really anything to do with Luca at all. He wanted to get back to that headspace where being gay was nothing, that headspace he’d struggled to find in the first place. He wanted it to just be like thi
s, running across Hunter’s Bar roundabout in between the cars and jeering at grumpy taxi drivers that beeped at them. He wanted to just muck about, drag Aaron past Sainsbury’s without letting him buy more chicken bites that Emily was trying to get him to stop eating because of animal cruelty or whatever it was she hated, make fun of David for suggesting getting the bus halfway down Ecclesall Road even though he’d suggested walking in the first place, and—

  “Aw, man, you’ve gotta be kidding.”

  That was the warning. And then Jack Collins was there, stepping out from a bus shelter with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and a dark scowl on his face.

  “C’mon,” Aaron said, hooking his hand into Luca’s elbow. “We can cross the road or something.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jack called. “Not fancy another go at fucking up my life?”

  “Fuck off, Collins,” David said brusquely, closing in on Luca’s other side. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  “My aunt went mental ‘cause of you,” Jack shouted after them, and Luca dug his heels in. “Thought I was packing and getting into crime. Cops showed up at our door after you ragged on me.”

  “Ragged on you?” Luca asked incredulously. “You got out a knife in a busy changing room. I’m about the only person who didn’t rag on you.”

  “Fuck off you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t,” Luca insisted, shaking off Aaron’s hand. “No, fuck him, Az, he’s gonna hear it. I didn’t talk to the cops about you, Jack.”

  Jack visibly stiffened. “My name’s not for you to use.”

  “Grow the fuck up!” Luca cried, exasperated. He spread his hands, palms open and fingers spread. “What are you afraid of? Yeah, I’m gay, get over it. I’m not interested in you. I’ve never eyed you up, I’m never gonna touch you up, and I’m. Not. Interested. Do you get that? I know something happened―”

  “You don’t know shit!”

  “―but it’s meaningless to me,” Luca continued hotly. “You’re the one getting yourself in the shit, Jack. You’re the one who freaked out after the pool accident and started attacking me. If you’d just leave me the fuck alone, we could ignore each other and everything could just go back the way it was before, no―”

  “Before?” Jack scoffed. “Can’t undo what you know, Jensen. I wouldn’t have joined swimming if I thought they accepted faggots.”

  “Collins, just shut your gob, yeah? Ignorant twat…”

  “What’d you call me, Kowalski?”

  “Nicer’n you called Luca!”

  “Just shut it, yeah? Everyone!” Luca yelled, and Jack took a heavy step forward.

  “Cops turned up ‘cause of you. Coach suspended me, even right out said I can only come back if you allow it—what kind of fucking system is that, where―?”

  “You got a problem with Coach’s system, you take it up with Coach, we’re going,” David said, reaching forward for Luca’s elbow.

  “I got a fucking problem with this―”

  “Why?” Luca challenged. “‘Cause someone touched you up once?” Jack went white. “Is that it? Who was it, Jack? Your dad, your uncle? Some pervy granddad? Some family friend? What’d they do, huh, just a bit of touching up, or you get raped? And you know what, if you did, then I hope they castrated the fucker, I hope they put him down, but that’s not being gay, that’s being a fucking rapist or a paedo. That’s―”

  “Shut up!”

  Jack’s voice was little more than a scream, and the white had gone grey.

  “You shut up, you shut the fuck up, you shut your fucking mouth before I fucking kill you, you fucking disgusting piece of―”

  Luca ducked the heavy blow that was aimed at his head, and shot past to shove Jack in the back, towards the shop window beyond the bus shelter. Passers-by were stopping to stare. A woman was getting out her phone, and there’d be cops soon, but Jack was―

  Luca was wrong. He’d never seen Jack Collins angry before. Because he barely paused, simply turning and swinging at Aaron after Luca pushed him. He swung at David, too, then punched a jogger heading in the opposite direction.

  “Oi!”

  “Watch what you’re doing, you little bastard!”

  “He’s on something.”

  “Someone get a bobby out here, kid needs locking up―”

  “Are you alright, sir?”

  “Jack,” Luca said loudly over the chaos. “Just calm down, yeah, mate? You need fucking help, but you’re not―”

  Jack turned on him, and the blow cracked hard across Luca’s cheekbone. Instinct overrode compassion, and Luca fought back, headbutting Jack’s twisted, reddened face until a starburst of pain exploded across his own forehead and he staggered back. Someone’s hand—David or Aaron, he wasn’t sure—paused for a moment on his sleeve, then Jack was on him again, fists swinging without any sense of aim or mercy. It was all Luca could do—Luca, third of five boys and proficient in fighting over various household objects—to hold his own.

  “I won’t have it again, I won’t have it again, you’re fucking dead, Jensen, you fucking look at me and you’re fucking dead.”

  It was a ramble. A desperate, incoherent ramble. With an almighty shove, Luca managed, with Aaron’s help, to break Jack’s flailing attack and shove him back towards the shops.

  “You need help,” Luca repeated breathlessly. “You need—I don’t know, you need a psychiatrist, you seriously need some help, ‘cause, Jack, you are fucked up if you think every gay guy who gets near you is gonna fucking rape you or something!”

  And Jack—lunged.

  It all just sort of…happened.

  Jack shoved, the heels of his hands hard in Luca’s chest. Luca felt his bag shift over his shoulder, and the curb drop. Falling off the curb, it was like a rollercoaster. His stomach lurched, his centre of gravity thrown off, and he instinctively threw his arms wide, staggering back and one heel finding the hard, cracked surface of Ecclesall Road. “Fuck!” he yelped, as a horn blared, and Jack’s face was—

  Twisting. Anger gave way to fear.

  And then—

  Luca wasn’t sure what then.

  Because suddenly the air was crushed out of him. His elbow exploded in pain, his skin was smeared with something cold and wet, and he was being lifted, just tossed like a rag doll, like he didn’t matter. The sky was underneath him; there was this squealing noise, like the movies when the runaway train finally applied the brakes, and somebody screaming over the top of that, someone with a familiar voice that Luca knew from somewhere, and—

  Oh.

  Brakes.

  A car.

  Then he hit the road.

  Chapter 22: “He’s…not very well.”

  Thu-duh, thu-duh, thu-duh―

  There was a rhythm to this. Heartbeat, speeding up and up. Feet, going from soft thudding to hard banging. The rock and roll of shoulders and biceps. The stop-start of hands forgetting they existed, remembering, and forgetting again.

  And—as Tav rounded off the first lap and started on the second—a peacefulness about it.

  It was hard to think when running. Jogging, that lazy wander of some of the other club members, that was a thinkable thing. But not running. Not flat-out sprinting the way Tav liked it best. That hard hammer that had brought him back from the edge of anger more than once. That burning, bursting feeling in his chest from overexertion that had quelled more than one furious outburst, that had tempered his aggression growing up.

  He didn’t run so much these days, not since Luca had come along and made Tav’s life better, not since he had proper reasons not to get into brawls and get sent off to juvie, but—

  The effect hadn’t changed. Thu-duh, thu-duh, thu-duh―

  This was calming. The T-shirt sticking to his back from sweat even though it was the middle of winter. The harsh rasp of air—inoutinoutinout—and the stuttering punch of his heart against his ribs. The shriek and burn of muscles both eager to stop and eager to be stretched even further. The rough shock of a hard runnin
g track shooting up his legs with every step.

  “Tav!”

  Tav had no intentions of ever going pro with this—much as the coach wanted him to—but he could see why people would. To get away from everything, every day. To be able to just switch off and not let anything bother you, like…like Luca’s stubborn face at the lockers and his bloody-minded refusal to fucking act about Jack Collins being a fucking psyc―

  Thuduhthuduhthuduh―

  “Tav!”

  Don’t think. Push harder, don’t think, push harder, don’t think―

  “Tav!”

  The shrill squeal of a whistle broke the hazy reverie, and Tav skidded to a halt on the frozen tracks, shoes squeaking on the rough surface for a moment. Gasping for air, he blinked blindly in the direction of his coach, and then a head of reddish-blondish-sandy-brown-or-something hair, the exact strange colour of his own, caught his attention.

  Mam?

  Coach Evans was beckoning. Numbly, Tav staggered off the track, and broke into a loose jog to get to them. He could feel his legs already tightening up, and his brain kicking into gear. Why was Mam here? Mam didn’t even collect him from athletics practice, and he’d texted her to say he was going, and—

  His stomach clenched. And Mam looked miserable. She was in her blue coat, and her hair was still tied up with her housework bandana, the red-and-black polka dot one Tav had got her for the last Christmas Dad had still been with them. Tav had thought, back then, that it would turn his mam into a super-cool pirate or something; she’d used it to keep her hair out of the way of baby fingers and housework ever since, and to see it outside the house…

  Something was wrong.

  “What’s happened?” he barked, and broke into a sprint to reach them faster. It had to be one of the girls, if Mam was coming to collect him. He knew the other kids could give Becky a hard time for being mixed race sometimes, but Becky could hold her own, so—Amy? “Is it Amy?”

  “Go and get changed,” Mam said briskly. Tav stopped dead in front of her, staring between her and the coach like they’d just blurt it out. “Quickly, Tav!”

  “What’s happened?” he insisted.