by Willa Okati
“Get off me,” Rick demanded, trying to jerk free.
“No. You stand there as if you are the injured party. Do you know how insane you drive me? You, with your airs and graces as if you have done not one single wrong thing since the day we met.”
“I haven’t!” Rick protested, stung.
Adriano scoffed. “See? It is as I have said; you know nothing.”
“Then tell me, if you’re so all-fired convinced. Go on.”
Adriano’s cheek twitched with rage. “No. If you cannot look back and see the problems, I will not waste my breath trying to open your eyes. I have another story to tell, Rick. Do you want to know how I came to be out here? Though by all the saints I would that I had washed up on some other shore than yours.”
“You’ve made that abundantly clear ‑‑”
“Don’t change the subject.” Adriano’s grip tightened. He leaned closer, so intimate that the heat of his scorn burned Rick’s face. “After we parted, I grieved for you, Rick. Believe me or believe me not; I do not care. You left me when I needed you.”
“Balls! You were the one who planned to shunt me aside for some high-maintenance princess to please your father.”
“I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice ‑‑”
“Shut. Up.” Adriano shook him fiercely, sending stabs of pain through Rick’s abused elbow. “That no longer matters. I mourned for you, and I sought to lose myself in the things that palliate, if only for a little.”
“You mean you dove deeper than ever into drugs and drink and loose women, or looser men ‑‑”
“I do not deny it. I did these things because I had lost you, so what reason did I have to take a care for my own life?”
Rick snorted in disgust. “As if you ever did. The way you were going before and after we met? I’d wake up in mortal terror of finding you sprawled out somewhere, dead of an overdose, or with your throat slit by a jealous boyfriend.”
“You never told me that.”
“I would have, if I’d thought for one second that you’d listen.”
“Stop it! Let me finish this, Rick. Please.” Adriano reached to stroke Rick’s face, almost desperate, yet startlingly tender at the same time, stunning Rick into silence. “This is how I came to be here. Or why. Drugs, drink, yes, yes, I cannot lie about them. Too much, too often. After a ‑‑ a particular upset ‑‑ when I could not come home to you ‑‑ do not say a word about ‘home,’ Rick, or I shall shake you until you rattle, do you hear? I went out with ‘friends’.”
“I can guess what sort they were. Not friends at all. Friends have a care for you, Adriano, not just for your wallet and how much they can milk out of it.”
Adriano didn’t argue the point. “They were, they are, bright and beautiful enough to dazzle, and to make me ‑‑ forget.” He laughed, bitter as myrrh. “Such a joke on us all. We drank all through one day, and into the next, and perhaps longer; I doubt any of us knew for certain how much time had passed before one of our number ‑‑ a rat-faced terrier of a brat ‑‑ who’d left some while before, returned with a plastic pouch of pills.”
“And you took them, didn’t you?” Rick didn’t try to hide his disgust.
“I would have swallowed powdered glass by that time. The drink? The whoring? They did not work, Rick. Everyone who moaned beneath me or above me? They wore your face. I drank to the bottom of so many bottles, and I found no bottom to the wellspring of my sorrow.”
“Poetic,” Rick scoffed, more than uncomfortable. He’d heard Adriano lie time after time, and he thought himself to be a fair judge of the man’s falsehoods. But now…now, what he said had a desperate ring of truth to it.
Ye gods, he’d never thought of it like that before, that he’d wronged Adriano. How could he have? He was the one cheated on and abandoned! It made no sense, yet to Adriano it did. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to kick the man’s arse out right now, or indulge his sick curiosity and find out the “why.”
“So you were nineteen sheets to the wind and out of the rest of your mind on mystery pills. What then?”
“This, Rick, this I recall now with perfect clarity.” Adriano’s fingers dug miserably hard into Rick’s joint. “I wept, and they mocked me. I fell to the floor, and no one picked me up. I lay there for hours, until ‑‑” His throat worked with a painful rasp. “Until one of them, a pretty lady, decided it would be fun to ‘kidnap’ me.”
Rick frowned, eyebrows drawing close together. “How?”
“Do you think they had a clue how? No. I could not fight them off, had I even known how to at the time, and so between them they carried me, dragged me, manhandled me around as if I were a doll. We drove for hours, myself face down in the backseat with a prissy pretty boy perched on my arse, and when they grew bored, that winsome thing who used me for a chair opened the car door and bundled me out while the driver accelerated to seventy kilometers per hour.”
“God almighty.” Bile rose in Rick’s throat. Without thinking, he reached to touch Adriano’s head with his free hand, aiming for the old, nearly-healed wound trauma scar on his scalp.
Adriano shook him off. “Yes. I remember the pain when I landed, and no more. Until now. When I can recall it all, perfectly, as well as the miseries of ‘then,’ how you cared for me when you found me. How you loved me, and how happy I ‑‑”
He stopped, swearing viciously under his breath in Italian, nearly puffing up a blue cloud between them. “I had hoped it would last forever,” he muttered at last. “But then you crashed your car, and ‑‑”
The tenuous thread of willingness to listen? ‑‑ belief? ‑‑ snapped as easily as brittle spider silk. “So this is my fault yet again, is it?” Rick tried once again to jerk out of Adriano’s hold; his fingers had gone slack with his dismay and Rick succeeded. He walked backward, fast, hissing when he touched the rising bruises on his inner elbow. “From what you’re telling me, this is all down to me, from the breakup to the bump on your noggin. You mourned for me? Too bad and so sad, you bastard. I only left because I wouldn’t be your dirty little secret.”
“That is not why I ‑‑”
Rick was abruptly, unbearably tired. “D’you know what? I’ve had enough of this. The phone’s in the hall, Adriano. Use it as you will. Take the check from Juliano while you’re at it and use it to finance your way to a new life. I don’t care, so long as you get out of here and leave me in peace.”
Adriano stared at him, fists clenching. “Is that what you want, Rick? Is that truly what you want?”
“It’s all I can have without waiting for the day when you’ll leave again because you’re ashamed not only of me, but who you are yourself!” Rick held up his hands, palms out. “Go away, Adriano. We’re done.”
With that, he turned his back on the man he’d once loved with all his heart ‑‑ and still did, damn him ‑‑ and stormed out of his own home, away from the rolling clouds of fury and into the crisp Italian night air, sharp and clear as new wine. He threw his head back and drank deep of the chill, hoping he’d get drunk on it and stay like that forever.
Better that than to be a fool for love, forever yearning for what he couldn’t have, Rick thought. And if it wasn’t better, not truly? Tough. It would have to be enough.
He sat down under a stunted cypress tree with a heavy thump and shut his eyes, refusing to believe that they prickled with evidence of sorrow. He would not waste a single tear on Adriano. He would not.
The front door to his villa slammed, and Rick’s shoulders sagged. There, you see? It’s done. “Good-bye and good riddance,” he said, spitting into the dirt. “And the curtain falls.”
Chapter Eighteen
Rick’s invective had barely left his lips before he heard it: footsteps, soft and crunching as if someone walked over the grass without shoes or socks, coming around the house and headed his way.
He groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Can you not just leave well enough alone, Adriano?”
“There’s a shocker.” Rick massaged his temples, aching from the stress. “Fine, then you’re invited to park your arse. Whatever it takes to get this done with.”
“Are you so eager for me to go? Yes, you laugh through your nose, as if I am a fool for even asking. But I do. Do you want me to go, Rick? Look at me. Please. Look in my eyes and tell me to leave.”
“No.”
“I will not give you a choice in this either.” Adriano knelt perpendicular to Rick’s side and lifted his chin with two fingers, then caught it in his palm and turned Rick’s head gently but firmly.
Rick did his best to avoid Adriano’s gaze. He couldn’t help shutting his own eyes, though, nor exhaling softly when Adriano’s touch, light as a feather, drifted over his cheeks and under his eyelashes, brushing them.
“What do you want, Adriano?” he asked, feeling helpless as a kitten and utterly worn-down. “I can’t keep doing this at your say-so. Can’t it just be over for good and all? Save us both the heartbreak. Please.”
“You said ‘both,’” Adriano noted, far too perceptive now. “Do you understand, now, how it was that I missed you so?”
“Then why did you ‑‑” Rick struggled for words. “Why, Adriano? With the woman and the high-handed dismissal and ‑‑”
“Because I was afraid.”
The direct simplicity in Adriano’s statement surprised Rick into opening his eyes, whereupon he immediately met Adriano’s, dark with equal parts sorrow and pleading. “You what? Adriano Dominici, afraid of anything? I can’t believe that.”
“You lie. I think you do believe, at least a little. There is more to tell you. May I?”
Rick half-laughed. “This is another one of those questions without an option to decline, isn’t it?”
“I confess that it is so.” Adriano refused to let up on the far-too-light, barely-there caresses to Rick’s face. “I loved you from the moment I met you, Rick.”
“Oh, God. Don’t.”
“I must. I owe you this, regardless of whether or not you wish to accept it. I lay on my back under the grapevines, idling away my life even as I pretended to work. It was all play to me, all games.” He pressed his fingers lightly over Rick’s lips. “Let me finish.
“I was a fool to do what I did. I acknowledge that. I knew it at the time, though I would not admit it. I was a childish dolt who did not allow himself to understand that the best thing he would ever know in life had been placed in his path.”
“Adriano…”
“Shh, my heart, shh ‑‑”
“Don’t.”
“There is not much more to tell. I loved you then, Rick, loved you even when I cut you to the quick ‑‑ and loathed myself for it even as it happened ‑‑ and loved you so that when you were gone, I did finally understand how you must have hurt, too. Wine, women, song, and all the rest, they did nothing to palliate my grief ‑‑ not only sorrow for myself, to my shame that I wallowed so, but misery when I thought of what agonies you suffered.”
“Adriano. Stop. Please?”
“No.” Adriano pressed the faintest of kisses to Rick’s lips, a brush of mouths that was as chaste as could be. “There is more. I must tell you of what happened with Father.”
Rick exhaled wearily. “This part of the story, I think I know,” he said, remembering Juliano’s icy wrath that, even third-handed on the grapevine, had nearly made a murderer out of him with the need to make the bastard eat his words.
“You only know one side. Shh.” Adriano kissed him again, the pressure barely there and gone almost before it could be registered. “Father swore that he would disown me if I ever shamed the family so again. Yes, Rick. I was confused at first, some, but I remember now. Every vicious word. He vowed that I would no longer be his son. Do you understand this? And since I was certain, so miserably certain that I would never see you again, I obeyed him.”
Rick’s chest ached. “What then?” he asked, despite not wanting to hear.
“He arranged a marriage for me, claiming he should have done it long ago and had me affianced while I was still in the cradle.”
“That’d be like him. He’d have been happier by far as a feudal lord.”
Adriano inclined his head in agreement, then pushed his thumb over Rick’s lips to quiet him. “If I let you speak to answer this riddle, I think you would know the answer. Who do you suppose he would have had me marry?”
Rick frowned briefly before stunned realization sank home.
“Yes. He wished for me to marry Antonetta,” Adriano said, as simple as that. “You know she is a cousin only very distantly, and not of our direct blood, though she was raised as one of our own. As a sister to me. Under Father’s ‑‑ Juliano’s ‑‑ thumb just as much as I. We had no choice, either of us.”
Adriano swallowed hard and leaned into Rick, pressing their foreheads together. “But when I thought of this, my stomach soured, and I could not bear it. I knew she could not, either, though between the two of us we had not the courage to stop it. I am a shameful excuse for a man, Rick.” He tapped Rick’s lips. “Shush, I know you agree. But perhaps there is hope. At the grand engagement gala Juliano hosted, with the two of us pale and trembling at the top of the grand stairs, we looked at each other and finally we broke, she and I.”
Rick asked, with his eyes, what had happened next.
“I ran away,” Adriano said plainly. “I kissed her good-bye ‑‑ on her cheek ‑‑ and ran back in the direction from which I had come. Climbed down some vines, nearly broke my leg, and drove away, knowing I had alienated Juliano forever. But I could not go where I wanted most to go. To you.” He feathered his thumbs over Rick’s eyebrows, looking at him as if he was something peculiar and cherished at the same time.
The way Adriano stared made Rick deeply uncomfortable, itchy beneath his skin. It was too much. He couldn’t bear this.
“In my anger, I cursed the circumstance that brought me here. Now, I thank it. Otherwise, I would never have tasted this chance.”
“Adriano. Please. Stop.”
“Not yet, my heart, not yet. Only a little more. You must hear this, Rick. I love you. When you do not make me angry enough to break my teeth from the grinding of them, I know this with all my being. I love you more than the wide world and everything in it.”
“No more of this!” Rick dug his fingers into Adriano’s forearm, trying to wrestle him away. Pretty words, yes, pretty words, but…did Adriano not understand that the rage and pain was all he had left to cling to? If he let himself believe this…how would he stand up again when Adriano…when Adriano left him again?
Adriano refused to let go. “This is what I give you now, Rick, as I should have done long, long ago. This is myself, without lies or artifice. The choice is yours, whether you wish to take it or not ‑‑ and in this matter, you may say ‘no,’ though it break my heart all over again. I shall end up actually dead in a ditch this time, you realize.”
Rick bit his lip, tasting blood, trying his damndest not to respond. His defenses were crumbling too quickly.
“I cannot live without you, Rick. I would rather not even try. I love you, and if you only let me, then I will never leave your side. If you could put up with me. Can you try?”
Rick’s breath burned in his throat. He tried to look away. “You’ll do it again.”
“I swear I will not. I love you.” Adriano kissed him a third time, with none of the gentleness and care he had shown before. This time around, he crushed their mouths together and slipped his tongue in Rick’s mouth, swallowing his protest, stroking him, conquering him.
When Rick could barely breathe or keep from toppling over out of sheer need, the downward surge of blood dizzying him, Adriano let go. His words tingled on Rick’s kiss-swollen lips, but
Rick had to pay far more attention to Adriano’s hand moving confidently to his groin, palming Rick’s erection. “And I think you love me, too.”
Rick laughed breathlessly. “That, my friend, is not proof of love.”
“Perhaps not. But the way you cared for me when I was injured and crazed? That is all the proof a man could ever want. You love me as I love you, Rick. The Fates are kind and have given us a second chance. I will swear not to break your heart again.”
Rick shook his head. “I wish I could believe you. All right? I wish so much. But I know you, Adriano, and I can’t.”
Adriano withdrew at that, though he didn’t relax his hold on Rick, and studied him through narrowed eyes. “Very well,” he said at last. “You cannot accept this from the man I was. But here, let me show you…” He blinked rapidly, a familiar confusion filling his face, badly acted and painfully fake, but far more welcome than bright skies after rain. “Rick?” Adriano asked, blinking comically at Rick. “Is that you?”
“Oh, God in heaven. You great git. Don’t play about with me; that’s not funny.”
“Are you Rick?” Adriano wriggled closer, anxiously stroking Rick’s face. “I must find my love. My home. I need my Rick, for he will know what to do. I am not whole without him.”
Rick’s heart finally cracked; he could feel the dust from the stone crumbling around it, his walls coming down. “What’s done can’t be undone, Adriano. Your pretending you’ve not gotten your memories back doesn’t fool me. Will you not understand what a bad idea this is?” For all that, Rick couldn’t stop grinning. “It’d never work. You’re an idiot and you’ve no common sense to boot.”
“I know I am, signor. I forget things so easily. But can you help me find my heart?”
“Would you shut up already and come here?” Rick demanded, fisting Adriano’s shirt and pulling. “I’m as mad as you are, it seems, because if this is what it takes to keep you, I’ll play your game. Shut up and kiss me.”
Adriano did as he’d been told and kissed Rick with all his heart, all his body, and all his soul. He threaded his fingers through Rick’s hair and held on as if he’d never let go.