by Alexa Land
I thanked him and gave his arm a squeeze before turning to look out the window. All of Los Angeles stretched into the distance. It was just after sunset. The sky was purple, and lights were coming on all over the city.
If Erik still had the same shift at the hospital, he’d be coming home to a pretty, white house in the hills right about now and turning on one of those lights. Gavin, my former best friend, would get home soon after. I pictured them in the kitchen making dinner together, my kitchen, which I’d painstakingly renovated when Erik and I bought that house. I’d done a lot of the work myself. It was a labor of love. I’d thought I was making a home for us and that we’d live there forever. I’d been so naïve.
Chapter Two
The overnight flight from L.A. to Rome was capped off with a second flight from Rome to Catania, on the east coast of Sicily. Jessie’s suitcase and all nine of Nana’s bags made it. Mine did not. I sighed quietly as the gate agent assured me they’d put a trace on it and deliver it to my hotel when it was found.
A town car and driver were waiting for us in Catania. It took another forty-five minutes to drive down the coast to Viladembursa. I’d never been able to sleep on planes, so by the time we arrived at our destination, I was pretty much ready for a cameo on The Walking Dead.
Our hotel was the same one my family had stayed in when we visited over ten years ago, and it had changed very little. The lobby was opulent with a tasteful undersea theme, and decorated in rich shades of gold and royal blue. Big sculptures that looked like coral and lavish floral arrangements punctuated the huge space. I noticed the flowers only because I almost knocked over a vase as I leaned on a side table and waited for Nana to complete check-in.
We had a spacious suite on the top floor. Three bedrooms surrounded a light, airy living room with high ceilings. I got a vague impression of pale blue walls and blue-and-white pin-striped furniture as I said goodnight to Nana and Jessie and made a beeline for my bedroom. I had no idea what the local time was, and I didn’t care. I dropped my backpack on the floor and collapsed face-down on top of the fluffy, white duvet.
*****
I awoke with a start sometime later. The room was dark and stuffy. The clock read five-thirteen, and my jetlagged brain eventually worked out that it was early morning. I swung out of bed and crossed the room to a set of double doors, which opened to a narrow balcony overlooking the town’s piazza. The suite was on the top floor of the six-story hotel, and since it was the tallest building around, the view was terrific. Viladembursa had begun as a quiet fishing village in the sixteen-hundreds, but it had expanded over the centuries to a city of nearly thirty-thousand people. You’d never know that from my vantage point, though.
The large hotel made up one side of the historic town square. Directly across from it was a row of businesses, including a bakery, a couple shops and restaurants, and a café, all of which I remembered from my last visit. The sea was directly behind us, and beyond the piazza, the original part of the city blanketed the hillside. To my left was an ornate building that had been divided into apartments at some point, and to my right was a farmer’s market which probably hadn’t changed at all since the town’s inception. I took all of that in before turning my attention to the large fountain.
It wasn’t dead-center in the square, though it had been when the piazza was built. The fountain now stood quite close to the café and bakery across from the hotel, since that row of businesses had been added in the eighteen-hundreds and encroached into the public space. Viladembursa was the type of place where people still complained about the ‘new’ buildings on the piazza centuries later. The rest of the town might have grown exponentially, stretching its arms along the shoreline in either direction, but here at its heart, change wasn’t welcome.
I leaned on the balcony’s iron railing and stared at the fountain for a while. Then on impulse, I checked my pocket for my room key and left the suite. The hotel was perfectly still. Downstairs, the lone clerk behind the front desk glanced at me before turning his attention back to a computer screen. I cut through the lobby, pushed open the heavy door and crossed the worn cobblestones to the fountain.
It had seemed huge when I was younger, and it really was quite large. Disproportionately so, actually, for that not particularly grand piazza. The round base was easily twenty-five feet in diameter. In its center, three bigger-than-life horses bucked and reared up on their hind legs, ridden by angels with outstretched wings. I sat on the wide edge of the fountain and ran my hand over it. The stone was smooth and cool to the touch.
All of it was familiar: the smell of the sea and of the baking bread in the shop just a few feet away, the light breeze on my skin, the sound of the water splashing in the fountain. It was exactly as it had been on another August night, years ago.
I’d been fourteen. My parents had talked about bringing my brother and sister and me to Viladembursa for years, since we had a lot of relatives there and a family history that went back to the town’s founding. There was always some reason the trip got postponed. Often it was because of my dad’s job, which didn’t give him much time off. But that summer, we’d finally made it. I didn’t know it would be our last vacation as a family at the time.
My fourteenth summer was when everything changed. That was when Dad stopped living with us. It was when I heard my mom cry for the first time, and my brother started getting in trouble at school and eventually was sent to live with relatives in New York. It was when my sister started caring about her friends far more than her family and turned into someone I barely recognized. But our trip to Sicily happened just before all of that, and had come to symbolize the end of my childhood. It also encompassed my most precious memory.
I’d gotten up far too early on the last day of our family vacation, the day we were going to fly home to Marin County. Dawn was just beginning to color the horizon as I slipped out of my family’s suite and went down to the fountain. I wanted to say goodbye to the stone horses. I had gotten attached to them during my two weeks in Viladembursa. I was weird like that.
I closed my eyes and remembered that morning twelve years ago. It felt exactly like this one, the same sounds and smells, the same breeze stirring my hair. I’d replayed it a thousand times and did it again as I sat in the town square, watching it like a movie in my mind’s eye:
“What exactly are you doing?” The conversation had begun in Italian, but when I replayed it, I heard it in English, a trick of time and memory.
I’d jumped at the voice behind me, and turned to face a tall, thin, good-looking boy of about fifteen or sixteen, with thick black hair and a quick smile that showed off a chipped front tooth. “Nothing,” I answered automatically, feeling a blush warming my cheeks.
“You were talking to someone, but no one’s here.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Were you talking to the angels in the fountain, and if so, do they answer?”
“Of course not,” I’d said indignantly. “I was talking to the horses.”
Instead of laughing at me as I’d expected, the boy just asked, “Why?”
“Because I like them, and after today it’ll be a long time before I see them again.”
“So you’ve come to say goodbye.” I nodded and the boy grew serious. “Where are you going?”
“Home to California.”
He switched to perfect English at that point and said, “Oh. You’re American.”
I also switched to English. “Yeah. You too?”
He shrugged, which made one of the straps on his oversized tank top slip off his shoulder. I noticed three fairly prominent freckles in perfect alignment on his left collarbone, dark against his olive skin. “I’m not anything. I’m a citizen of the world.”
“What does that mean?”
“Mom and I travel around a lot. No place is really home. Or everyplace is, depending on how you look at it.”
“It’s too bad I’m leaving.”
His expression grew thoughtful, and I looked u
p into his eyes. They were light, but I couldn’t quite make out the color in the soft illumination from the street lamps that ringed the plaza. “Don’t you want to go home?”
I’d pushed my glasses further up the bridge of my nose and said, “I did. But, well, you seem like a nice guy and I have a feeling I would have liked getting to know you.”
“Based on what?”
“The fact that you didn’t laugh at me for talking to stone horses. Any guy that doesn’t make fun of me for something like that is clearly friend material.”
“But if you stayed, I wouldn’t want to be your friend.”
“Oh.” I stepped back awkwardly and looked at the cobblestones.
He went right along with me and tilted my chin up with a gentle touch until I was looking at him again. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I’d want to be more.” As I tried to make sense of that, the boy cleared his throat and broke eye contact. When he looked at me again, he asked, “Would you find it weird if a guy told you you’re beautiful?”
“Yes.”
Now it was his turn to step back, releasing my chin and dropping his hand to his side. “Sorry,” he mumbled, clearly embarrassed.
“I wouldn’t think it was weird because a guy said it,” I quickly amended. “I’d think it was weird if anyone said that about me.”
He looked at me through thick lashes, and a little smile returned to his full lips. “You don’t think you’re beautiful?”
“Dude, what planet are you from that you’d think that, Krypton?”
The boy chuckled and lightly traced the frame of my thick, black glasses. “Clearly you’re the one from Krypton, Clark Kent.” He took them off and placed them beside us on the edge of the fountain. “Can you see without those?”
“Only close up. Everything more than a foot away is a blur.”
He stepped forward, so that our bodies were only a few inches apart. “Can you see me, Clark?”
I nodded and said, “If I’m Clark Kent, then who are you?”
“I always fancied myself as a Bruce Wayne type.” A slight British accent slipped in when he said that.
“Wow, modest,” I said with a big grin. “Rich, handsome, brilliant. Is that how you’d describe yourself?”
“Well, obviously!” He beamed at me and held his thin arms out to the sides, as if to display his worn out tank top, cut-off jeans and very Italian leather sandals.
“You’re a master of disguise, Bruce,” I told him. “No one will suspect you’re a billionaire playboy in that ensemble.”
“Barefoot boys in pajamas shouldn’t judge other people by their clothes,” he said, his eyes sparkling.
I looked down at my white t-shirt and plaid pajama pants and said, “I totally forgot I was wearing this.”
“I like it. Makes you look a little like you just escaped from the nut house. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and all that. It’s a good look for you.”
“First you call me Superman, then you call me a mental patient. You have an interesting approach to making conversation.”
I started to reach for my glasses, but he caught my hand and held on to it. “No, don’t. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s easier to see your eyes if you leave your glasses off. What color are they? I can only tell that they’re dark.”
“They’re brown,” I told him. “Like mud.”
“I bet they’re gorgeous and decidedly un-mud-like. You’ll have to stay with me until the sun comes up, so you can prove me right.”
I grinned again and said, “I have no idea what to make of you, Bruce. That sounds like such a line. I’d almost think you were hitting on me.”
“Almost? The fact that I’m holding your hand in the middle of the town square doesn’t make that a definitely?”
“You’re not really holding my hand, you’re just trying to keep me from my glasses.” I started to reach for them with my other hand, but he caught that too and held it.
“I’m doing both simultaneously.”
“I’ll take them off again when the sun comes up, if you’re actually interested in seeing my eye color.”
“That’s not the only reason I want you to leave them off. As long as you’re not wearing them, I’m literally the only thing you can see, right?” When I nodded, he said, “I like that. I like being your whole world.”
I chuckled embarrassedly. “You’re an odd person, Bruce.”
“I know.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot and said, “Since you don’t think it’s odd that a guy called you beautiful and seem to have no problem with him holding your hand, how would you feel about him kissing you?”
My heart leapt at that, and I looked around automatically. I couldn’t actually see the plaza, but I knew we were all alone. “Is that, um, I mean, are you planning on that?” I stammered, stalling for time as my thoughts and emotions ricocheted wildly. I’d always been pretty sure I was gay, but I’d never acted on it. I’d gotten the impression it was something I was supposed to keep secret, but here was this guy, talking about kissing me like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Only if I think it won’t result in me getting punched in the face.” He tried to make it sound like a joke, but obviously it held some real concern.
“It wouldn’t,” I managed as my heart raced. The conversation felt a bit surreal. I’d wondered at the time if I was dreaming. In the years afterwards, I wondered how much of it I misremembered as time passed.
The words might have been distorted and embellished over time, but there were two things I remembered with absolute clarity: the boy, and that kiss. As the sunrise colored the sky pink and orange, he leaned in and brushed his lips to mine, gently, tentatively. When I responded, he kissed me with a little more confidence as my heart pounded. He cupped my face between his palms, and my hands automatically went to his waist, holding on to him as if trying to ground myself.
It was my first kiss, and it was also the moment I knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that I was gay. It felt so right, so utterly perfect, that it left no room for doubt. The kiss went on for a long time, both of us melting into each other. It might have lasted for hours if we hadn’t been startled by the baker, who opened the side door of his shop and pushed a big, clanking metal rack out onto the cobblestones.
I stepped back quickly and grabbed my glasses, pushing them in place as a delivery truck bounced and rattled into the square. The boy stepped back too, blushing shyly. When he looked at me, I said softly, “They’re green. I’d wondered what color your eyes were.”
“Yours look like a wildfire, seen through a bottle of Coke. I knew they weren’t mud-colored.”
I chuckled at that description. We stood there awkwardly for a few moments, and then I murmured, “I have to go. My family’s probably awake by now and they’ll wonder where I am.”
“Not yet. Just five more minutes, please?”
“I really should get back.”
He grinned mischievously and took my hand. “You can’t go yet. You haven’t said goodbye properly.”
“Goodbye. It was great meeting you.”
“Not to me. To them,” he said, tilting his head toward the fountain.
I burst out laughing when he jumped into the water and started to drag me in with him. As I exclaimed, “What are you doing? We’re going to get in trouble,” I leaned back and dug my heels in.
“Totally worth it. Come say goodbye to the celestial rodeo.”
“It does look like a rodeo! I can’t believe I never saw that before!” He scooped me up in his arms, carried me into the fountain and put me down beside one of the horses while I flailed and protested. “Oh my God, the water’s freezing!” I shouted as it soaked into my pajama pants.
“You’ll get used to it after a minute,” he said. “Now tell me, what’s this horse’s name?”
I forgot the cold and looked up at the bucking bronco. “Zeke.”
The boy burst out laughing. “Why Z
eke?”
“I dunno. Seemed like a rodeo name. The other two are Clem and Billy Joe Bob.”
“You’ve never been to a rodeo, have you?”
“Hell no. Have you?”
“I’ve been to a bullfight,” he said. “It’s kind of similar.”
“It’s not at all!” While we debated the parallels between bullfighting and rodeos, I waded around the fountain to each of the three huge horses and gave them a hug. I then splashed over to the side of the fountain and crawled over the wide ledge. When I looked back at my companion, he was leaning against one of the horses with his arm around its hind leg. I grinned and said, “Aren’t you coming out?”
“In a minute.”
“I really have to go. I don’t want my mom to worry if she wakes up and sees I’m not there.”
“I know.”
I hesitated and said, “I hate to say goodbye.”
“This isn’t goodbye, it’s just so long for now. I don’t know when or where, but I’ll see you again someday, Clark.”
“I hope you’re right.”
He smiled at me and said, “Oh, I am. I’m always right about everything. You and I are meant to be, I’m sure of it.”
“Think so?”
He nodded. “Absolutely. Who else besides Bruce Wayne would be good enough for Clark Kent?”
“What are you doing?”
I jumped a bit as my eyes flew open. Jessie was standing right beside me, dressed in flip flops and green pajamas with a repeating pattern of cartoon T-rexes all over them. I blurted, “Nothing.”
He sat on the edge of the fountain and said, “I saw you from my balcony when I got up to let in some fresh air. You okay, Nico? You looked like you were a million miles away.”
“I was just remembering my first kiss. It happened right here, when I was fourteen.”