All I Believe (13 page)

“If we both got to live our fantasy, I would have swooped in and saved you from the giant insects.”

“My hero,” he said, and pulled me down into another kiss.

*****

Nana and Jessie showed up early with a big crate of booze. Luca and I had pretty much been making out like a couple high school kids when they arrived, and we were both a bit flushed and tousled. “You two can go back to what you were doing,” Nana said with a knowing wink. “Jessie and me got some work to do in the kitchen. We’re gonna try to recreate this drink I had in Hawaii. It was a real humdinger!”

We decided instead to get the casseroles going. I pulled them out of the refrigerator and set them on the counter, and as I preheated the oven I told Jessie, “I wanted to give you a little taste of home, but I’m not sure which of these are what you’re used to, if any. I kind of had to fake it with stuff I could find at the local market.”

“Are those tuna casseroles?” he asked.

“The fact that you could recognize them is a good sign. That’s what I was going for, but like I said, there was some improvisation involved.”

Jessie grabbed me in a hug and sounded a little choked up when he said, “Thank you. I can’t believe you did that for me. It’s because of what I said when I was drunk, right?” I nodded and he stretched up and kissed my cheek before tightening his embrace again. “This was incredibly thoughtful. You even put crushed potato chips on one of them! That’s perfect.”

“Oh good, that part was right. I’ll add them on the other two variations, in that case.” When I let go of him and reached for the bag of chips, I noticed the little parcel I’d bought earlier and handed it to Nana. “I got you something,” I told her. “I hope you like it.”

When she unwrapped the tile, she got a little choked up, too. “It’s my hometown, under a big gay homosexual rainbow! This is the best present ever. Thank you, Nicky!”

“You’re welcome.”

She pulled me down to her height and kissed my cheeks. “You’re such a good boy, and I’m so happy you found yourself a hottie to have gay sex with.” An embarrassed bark of laughter slipped from me.

“Me, too,” I said, glancing at Luca. He was biting his lip to keep from laughing.

Soon people began filtering in for the impromptu party. Fiona got home from work, kicked off her shoes, and gladly accepted the big glass of wine I offered her. Matteo and Allesso showed up with even more alcohol, followed by ten more cousins and their partners. While people snacked on pigs in a blanket (the most American appetizer I could come up with from the Sicilian market), Nana decided to record a quick segment for her cooking show and Jessie began filming with his phone.

She stood up on a little stool behind a rolling cart holding a huge ceramic bowl, and said, “We’re gonna try to recreate this cocktail I had in Hawaii. It was called something like Sex in a Volcano.” She put a glass vase in the center of the bowl, which stuck out a couple inches past the rim, then began pouring stuff around it. “Since we’re not in Hawaii, I had to improvise a bit. I think the drink I had contained rum and some other stuff. I grabbed whatever sounded good at the market.” She poured in a bottle of gin, followed by a smaller bottle of brandy. “Just go nuts. Add what you like. Me, I like vodka.” She poured an entire bottle of it into the bowl, which filled it nearly to the rim.

Nana picked up a bottle of hundred and fifty proof rum and filled the vase to the top. Then she reached into a little paper bag and said, “Now we’re gonna garnish it up.” She pulled out a huge handful of condoms in every color of the rainbow and threw them in the bowl. Their clear wrappers had pictures of smiling cartoon cocks on them. “Any great bartender will tell you, it’s all about presentation. This drink is called Sex in a Volcano, so we gotta make it lively. Oh, and there’s one final step.”

“Wait, Nana,” I exclaimed as she produced a lighter from her pocket, but it was too late to stop her. She held the flame over the rum, which ignited instantly and produced a good-sized fireball. Everyone jumped back as Nana swore vividly. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief because the apartment hadn’t gone up in smoke.

“I don’t see how we’re supposed to drink this though, since it’s on fire,” Nana said. She picked up the small shopping bag that had contained the condoms and tried to fan out the flames, and suddenly it caught fire too. “Oh shit,” Nana exclaimed, waving the burning bag around as she jumped off the stool.

Everyone tried to help her at once, and Jessie tripped in all the commotion and gave the cart a hard push just as Nana threw the burning bag on the floor and stomped it out with her shoe. The cart shot across the living room and out the open door to the balcony with Luca and me in hot pursuit. It crashed into the low railing and momentum carried the bowl forward, but by some miracle Luca caught it and the vase and kept it from going over. The same could not be said for the couple gallons of alcohol. A flaming waterfall of booze sloshed over the railing and rained down on someone on the sidewalk. The alcohol burned off in the next instant, so the person was unharmed, if soaking wet.

When the dripping figure looked up at us, we saw that it was a Catholic priest. “Sorry, Monsignor,” Luca called. The man glared at us and plucked something off his cheek. His frown deepened when he got a look at the condom wrapper. We ducked back into the apartment, and then we both doubled over laughing. When he could speak again, Luca said, “We’re definitely going to hell for laughing about this.”

“For sure,” I agreed, drying my eyes. I was still chuckling.

All of that proved to be one hell of an icebreaker, and the party was really festive after that. Everyone proceeded to get pretty drunk, which helped the appeal of the tuna casseroles considerably. Since there weren’t many chairs in Fiona’s small apartment, Luca and I sat on the floor as we ate, leaning against each other and one of the living room walls. He pretended to be afraid of the casserole, but went back for seconds.

While we ate, Luca entertained us with humorous stories about his travels. This led to my cousins trying to one-up each other with the funniest travel anecdote. They were no match for Luca though, who brought the house down with a story involving evading a pack of amorous wild monkeys, a case of mistaken identity, dressing up like a Buddhist nun (complete with shaved head, per local custom) and fleeing in a miniature three-wheeled car called a tuktuk to avoid false arrest in Thailand. “You have to be making that up,” Matteo said, gasping for breath because he was laughing so hard, but Luca swore it was a true story.

I watched his profile as he spoke. I was absolutely charmed by him, no doubt about it. Everyone else was too, including my grandmother, who hung on every word.

We visited well into the evening, and eventually my cousin Remy said, “I hate to break up the party, but our babysitter can’t stay late. We should go.” He slid his arm around his wife’s waist and she gave him a hug.

“We need to go too,” Matteo said. “Allesso and I have to be in the studio at seven a.m. We’ll be back to help out tomorrow night, when Nana tries to set up every single person on the east coast of Sicily.”

“Oh wait, I forgot about dessert,” I exclaimed. I’d baked chocolate chip cookies and turned pairs of them into ice cream sandwiches with a scoop of vanilla gelato in the middle. I handed them out to my departing relatives, and we sent Nana and Jessie home in a cab with two desserts each. Both of them were all smiles and thanked us for a wonderful night.

Luca and I helped Fiona clean up. When we finished, we said goodnight to my cousin and decided to walk back to the hotel, since the night was clear and beautiful. Luca tucked my painting under his arm and held my hand, and we shared an ice cream sandwich as we strolled through the quiet streets. Fiona’s neighborhood was up on the hillside, so it was an easy downhill walk back to the piazza.

He took a bite of the dessert as I held it for him, and when he got some gelato on his lower lip, I licked it off and kissed him. That made him smile. When I fed him the last bite of the sandwich, he took my index finger between his lips and sucked it clean, holding my gaze.

Lust flared in both of us simultaneously, and he veered off the main road and led me up a little dirt path that ended at the edge of a cliff. Down below us, the lights of Viladembursa hugged the curved coastline and sparkled like a crescent moon. We were shielded from the road by overgrown bushes and the nearest building was over a hundred yards away, so we had a bit of privacy. We were going to need it.

Luca set the painting down carefully before grabbing me and kissing me with raw passion. I moaned as he rubbed my growing hard-on through my shorts, and I fumbled with his belt and zipper. As soon as I freed his erection, I dropped to my knees and began sucking him urgently, feeling him swelling between my lips while my cock throbbed. He let me suck him for a while before pulling me to my feet, and kissed me as he pushed my shorts and briefs to the ground. When I stepped out of them, he spun me around and rubbed his cock on my bare ass. A tremor of pure lust shot through me.

I was aching to feel him inside me. I bent over a big tree stump and spread my legs, displaying myself brazenly. As I watched him over my shoulder, Luca pulled a bright yellow condom from his pocket with a cartoon cock on the label. A couple condoms had survived the flaming drink incident by landing on the rolling cart, and apparently he’d thought to hang on to one. We both chuckled when we saw it glowed in the dark. He located a little packet of lube in his wallet and used both items quickly, though it felt like ages as my need all but consumed me.

Finally, he grasped my hips and mounted me with one hard push, only stopping when his hips rested against my ass. I actually breathed a sigh of relief. I fought back a moan as he pulled almost all the way out, then drove himself into me again. He did that a couple more times, pulling back, then impaling me deeply, driving me wild as the thick head of his cock pushed past my prostate again and again. “Oh fuck Nicky, you feel so good,” he murmured.

When Luca grasped my hips and began fucking me hard and fast, I cried out with pleasure. I couldn’t help it. I pushed back to meet each thrust, slamming myself onto him. He began taking me harder and harder until he was absolutely pounding me, my body swaying from the force of his thrusts. It was wild and dizzying and so completely, utterly, absolutely perfect. It was exactly what I needed.

I braced myself against the stump and jerked off while he fucked me, and shot onto the ground a minute before he came, gasping for breath as my orgasm overwhelmed me. Luca pushed himself deep into me, moaning and thrusting hard enough to raise me up onto my toes. He kept thrusting as his body shook and his arms went around me, clutching me against him, until finally he collapsed on top of me, breathing heavily. When I could speak again I said, “So. Public sex. Kind of a thing with you, huh?”

Luca chuckled at that. “It’s not at all, but you’re so irresistible that I keep finding myself unwilling to wait until we get to a bed.”

He eased himself from me carefully and peeled off the condom, then tied it off and tucked it in a pocket for later disposal. While he did that, I got dressed and sat on the stump. As Luca put himself back together, he said lightly, “Thanks for risking arrest for public indecency with me.”

“Totally worth it.”

He sat beside me with his arm around my shoulders and we enjoyed the view for a while. Once we’d rested a bit, we resumed our walk. Luca held my hand and carried my painting again as he entertained me with stories about some recent scandals that had rocked the art world, including an eight-story public sculpture in Paris that looked exactly like a giant butt plug. The forty minute walk passed quickly, and when we reached the hotel he turned to me and said, “Please spend the night with me tonight.” I readily agreed.

When we reached his suite, I unwrapped the painting and propped it up carefully on the mantel in the bedroom, so we could both enjoy it. We stripped down to our briefs and curled up under the covers, and as Luca held me, I whispered, “I was so lonely for such a long time. Right now, I can’t even remember what that feels like.”

He kissed my forehead and held me a little tighter as he said softly, “Me too.”

The next morning, Luca and I lingered over breakfast before he had to go check on his grandfather’s remodeling project. When we finally got up from the table, he gathered me in his arms. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” he told me, and kissed my forehead. He made no move to let go of me.

I hugged him and said, “Looking forward to it.” I didn’t let go of him, either.

“What are you going to do today?” he asked as he stroked my hair.

“Whatever Nana and Jessie want to do. I assume they have all sorts of plans in the works for the singles mixer tonight, so I’ll probably be helping out with that.”

“I’ll help too, when I get back.”

“Thanks.” I brushed my lips to his, and we kissed for a long time before I made myself let go of him.

“I’ll walk you to your suite,” he said. I picked up my painting and took his hand and we walked slowly down the hallway. When we reached my door, we kissed for a few more minutes, and then he sighed and rested his forehead against mine. “I hate saying goodbye to you.”

“It’s not goodbye, it’s ‘see you in a few hours.’ I feel the same, though.”

“Can we leave first thing tomorrow for our weekend away? I’m dying for an uninterrupted block of time with you,” he said.

“Sure. I can’t wait.”

He kissed me again, then took a step back and touched my cheek. “Have I told you lately that you’re absolutely beautiful, Nicky?”

I grinned and said, “I’d be more likely to believe you if I wasn’t all rumpled and unshaven.” I made an effort to smooth down my rampant case of bed head with my palms.

Luca said, “The tousled look suits you,” before kissing me one last time and heading toward the elevators. He looked back and waved goodbye before he rounded the corner. I was right where he’d left me, watching him go.

When I stepped into the suite, I found that Nana had company. Lots of it. She and her sister had apparently made up. They were sipping coffee and eating pastries in the living room, along with several of Nana’s cousins. I called good morning as I waded through the sea of little old ladies and fielded questions thrown at me in Italian, including, ‘Are you just getting in?’ (Yes). and, ‘Who did you spend the night with?’ (A friend).

I closed and locked the door to my room and carefully positioned my painting on a side table, propped up against the wall. Then I noticed my suitcase, sitting beside the bed with several long strips of airline barcodes attached to the handle. I’d given up on ever seeing it again. I unzipped it and grabbed my toiletry bag, but left my clothes in the suitcase. Instead, I reached for a pair of the sexy briefs Nana had bought me, along with a nice new outfit I’d bought myself, and headed to the shower.

When I returned to the living room sometime later, dressed in sandals, blue shorts and a short-sleeved white button-down, I found that all the little old ladies were mobilizing. Most of them were tying scarves over their hair. I knew what that meant.

Jessie came up to me and said somberly, “We’re going to church. Everyone wants to light a candle for Nana’s son Paulie and his wife and daughter. It would have been baby Sophie’s birthday today. Do you think it’s okay if I come along? I’m not Catholic, and I don’t really know what to do.”

“You should definitely come. I’ll walk you through it.”

Nana was uncharacteristically quiet as our group left the hotel and walked the two blocks to the huge, ornate Catholic cathedral. She and her sister linked arms as they walked, their recent conflict water under the bridge. Jessie and I stayed at the back of the crowd, and he said softly, “It breaks my heart that Nana lost her son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter to such a senseless act of violence.”

I didn’t really remember my Uncle Paulie, but I knew his face from the numerous photographs on Nana’s shelves. I was four when a monster named Sal Natori broke into my uncle’s home with a bunch of men and tried to kill the entire family. They murdered my uncle and aunt and their baby daughter in their sleep, then went after their four sons. Somehow my cousin Dante, who was just seven at the time, managed to kill one of the men with a shotgun and hold the rest at bay while his younger brothers, Vincent, Gianni and Mikey, escaped out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house. The shotgun blast woke a couple of Paulie’s men who were staying at the house, and they rescued Dante right before he would have been killed, too.

I’d heard that story a hundred times over the years, and I still couldn’t come to grips with it. The Natori and Dombruso families were bitter rivals, the feud spanning generations. I had no idea what started the conflict, and maybe no one else remembered, either. Lives had been lost on both sides over the decades, but when Sal Natori decided to break into my uncle’s home and murder innocent children, it crossed a line. A couple years ago, Dante finally managed to track down and kill Sal Natori, which gave my cousin and our family a bit of closure. But of course, he still bore the scars from that night. To varying degrees, we all did.

When we reached the cathedral, I guided Jessie through the rituals and linked my arm with his as I lit a candle for my baby cousin and her parents. A flood of emotions made my throat close up and I swallowed hard. I put my other arm around Nana’s shoulders as she lit another candle. One by one, all her relatives did the same. A tear rolled down her cheek and we stood there for a long moment, watching all those little flames flickering in their red glass votives.

After that, Nana and her family joined a mass that was just getting under way, and Jessie and I sat in a polished, dark wood pew at the back of the huge building. Soft light filtered in through the massive stained glass windows, and melted wax and incense delicately perfumed the air. I looked up at the high, gilded ceiling and sent a prayer out into the universe for my uncle and his family. I thought about their smiling faces in a photograph on Nana’s mantel. It was the only picture taken of the entire family of seven, my uncle and aunt and baby Sophie, along with Dante, Gianni, Vincent, and Mikey. Three of the seven were killed less than a month after the photo was taken.

I took a deep breath and looked around me, trying to get my emotions under control. The cathedral was beautiful, and being there was bittersweet. I’d grown up going to church, but when my parents decided to get a divorce, they both distanced themselves from our religion. By that point, I already knew I was gay, and had begun distancing myself as well, since I knew where the church stood on homosexuality. My religion was a part of me, but at the same time, they told me I was wrong for being what God made me, and there was just no reconciling that.

I got up after a few minutes and slipped out the back, with Jessie right beside me. “It’s amazing in there, and so different than what I’m used to,” he said once we were outside. He hadn’t said a word while we were in the cathedral. “The church I grew up in was a plain wooden building with a steeple.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Yeah, I do, which surprises me. I think I told you my father’s a minister, and I spent so much of my childhood in that place. Back then, it felt pretty oppressive. I always had to watch what I said and I tried so hard to fit in, even though I never really did. That was pretty miserable. So I don’t really get why I miss it now.”

“Come on,” I said, “let’s go back to the hotel. Nana and the ladies are going to be a while. We can sit by the pool and relax a bit before we get caught up in all the preparations for tonight.” He nodded in agreement.

When we reached the town square, Jessie pointed and said, “Hey, isn’t that Luca?” I spotted him arguing with a tall, muscular guy in his early thirties. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was definitely an argument, judging by their body language and emphatic hand gestures. “Who’s he talking to?” Jessie asked.

“No idea.”

Luca yelled something and threw his hands in the air, then climbed into a waiting cab. It drove off in the opposite direction from which Jessie and I were approaching. The tall stranger, meanwhile, turned and entered the hotel lobby. “Should you maybe call Luca?” my friend asked. “He looked pretty upset.”

I considered that before saying, “I’ll talk to him later. For now he probably needs some time to cool off.” Once inside the hotel, I looked around but didn’t see the man anywhere. I could only wonder what all of that had been about.

*****

When Nana and her sister and cousins returned from church (and shopping, lunch, and some more shopping), we all turned our attention to that night’s singles party. Nana and her family brainstormed ice breakers, Jessie handed out flyers in the piazza, and I began returning calls, because people kept phoning the hotel with questions about the event (the staff was getting a bit annoyed).

Shortly before eight that night, all of us were showered and dressed up, including Nana. She wore a sparkly white suit, had put on a lot of red lipstick (some of it actually on her lips), and seemed giddy as a schoolgirl. A tall, thin guy in a dark blue suit came up to us and said hello. It took us a moment to recognize Rafi without his makeup. “I came straight from work,” he explained. He held a garment bag and a big makeup case, and said, “I need someplace to change. The rest of my dance troupe is right behind me, most of them need to get ready, too.”

“Where do you work?” Jessie asked him.

Rafael looked a bit embarrassed as he admitted, “I work in a funeral parlor, doing hair and makeup for our clients.”

“Wow, how is that?”

“Not bad. I know it sounds depressing, but it’s actually a pretty good job, and I get no complaints from my customers.” He grinned a little.

Nana linked arms with him and said, “Come on, I’ll take you to my suite to change, then you can help me with my makeup, too. If you can make a corpse look good, just think what you can do with all of this to work with!”

Giorgio was almost unrecognizable, too. He came up to Jessie dressed in a dirty pair of coveralls, and told me shyly in Italian, “I wanted to clean up after work, but Rafi told me I couldn’t be late. Jessie’s probably not going to like me now that he sees I’m just a mechanic and not glamourous at all.”

When I repeated that to Jessie, he exclaimed, “Are you kidding? I love mechanics! I work on cars all the time! Tell him that. Or better yet, I’ll tell him.” He pulled up a translation app on his phone, typed something quickly and announced,
“Io amo meccanica!”
That made Giorgio smile. The two of them followed Nana and Rafi.

That temporarily left me in charge, which became a little worrisome when I looked up and saw several dozen people heading for the bar. That was just the first wave. Twenty-somethings to eighty-somethings, gay and straight, they just kept coming. Fiona soon joined me, followed by Matteo and Allesso, and we all acted as greeters and started directing everyone out to the beach, since there was no way the bar could hold everyone.

“Holy shit,” Matteo said at one point, “how many people is this? Two hundred? Three? What are we going to do with them?”

Nana appeared at my elbow just then. Rafi had done a great job on her makeup, and she looked radiant. She said, “We’re going to get ‘em drunk, entertain ‘em, and try to make some love connections! Come on, boys!”

The DJ she’d hired had moved from the bar to the beach, and began playing dance music as Rafi and his friends ran out and began performing. The wait staff looked like they were on the verge of panic, so Nana instructed them to bring up wine by the case. Once they did that, a couple waiters and I started filling dozens of glasses with wine, rather than trying to take individual orders. They were plucked off the long table before us as quickly as we filled them.

The party just kept growing. It felt like it was right on the verge of careening wildly out of control. But somehow, by her sheer force of will, Nana held it all together.

She’d hired a lot of entertainers, and instructed them to spread out along the beach. In addition to Rafi’s troupe, there was a mime, a clown making balloon animals, a magician, a sword swallower, a senior marching band (which ended up playing along with the DJ instead of competing with him), some fire dancers, and a group of acrobats. I had to chuckle as I took it all in.

She climbed up on a table with the DJ’s microphone at one point and said in Italian, “Now look. You’re all here to meet people, so don’t be shy. You know what you want, so go find it! Everyone’s here for the same reason, just remember that. I’m gonna come down there in a minute and I’m going to help you out. But before I do, I’m gonna say one more thing. If you’re straight and a gay boy shows an interest in you, take it as a compliment! They got damn good taste, let me tell you. If you act like a shithead about it, you’ll have to answer to me!”

Nana climbed off the table and started playing matchmaker on a massive scale. It reminded me of a giant game of Memory. She’d talk to one person, find out what they were looking for, and then lead (or sometimes drag) them up to someone in the crowd who she felt was a match. Most of the time, the two people in question would end up talking, and I saw plenty of phone numbers being exchanged.

Of course she couldn’t get to the entire crowd that way, but then she had a flash of inspiration and put everyone to work doing the same thing. She pointed to a young man and yelled, “You! Go up to that woman in the green dress and find out what she wants! Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s someone else. Your job is to help her find whatever she’s looking for! Then after you help her, she can help you!” She started mobilizing blocks of people that way, and to my amazement, it actually seemed to work. A lot of people started talking, asking questions, and making introductions.