Page 37 of Duke for the Summer

Jacopo made a face. “That sounds–much too sandy.” He straightened up, stretching out his arms. “But we could go swimming.”

“Swimming? I didn’t bring–”

“It’s fine.” Jacopo stood up. His fingers were brisk, unbuttoning his shirt and starting on his pants. Nate watched in amazement. Jacopo was a different person under the night sky, confident, his spine long and straight and his movements fluid as one of the cats’. The moonlight loved him, turning his goldenskin to ivory, and Nate couldn’t help but grin at the tan line across his lower back, the bright white cheeks of his ass. All the places the sun didn’t see.

He let out a passable wolf-whistle. Jacopo just smiled over his shoulder, and then Nate was following him, shucking off his clothes and dropping them in a pile next to Jacopo’s perfectly-folded ones.

He had been in the water before, but he caught himself holding his breath nevertheless, still expecting the ice-cold shock of the Pacific. It didn’t come. The ocean was calm, dreamy, warm as the night air around them, and once Nate got out past the breakers, the waves were lazy and undulant, barely disturbing his balance as the water lapped at his waist. He kicked off, into an inexpert breaststroke, and then dove under, suspended for a moment in the inky cocoon of the water before coming back up for air, his hair dripping water into his face. Jacopo was floating on his back nearby, splayed out under the pale moon. There was a peace and a stillness to him that made Nate think the invitation to swim hadn’t just been some scheme to get them both naked, so he paddled around, staying in Jacopo’s periphery, enjoying the stretch of his muscles and the caress of the water on his skin.

Eventually he began to talk, idly, about the ocean back home, about how it was so freezing that even in the summer, you needed a wetsuit. He told Jacopo about the tide pools on the Oregon coast, how the rocky beaches looked like they were studded with opals after the tide went out, how he and Thea, feet numb enough not to register the bite of the barnacles, had clambered around as kids, looking for sea creatures and shells, poking anemones and shrieking at the feeling of their velcro-like tendrils on their fingers. He talked about their tree house, a sketchy construction of ropes and jagged two-by-fours that he had wedged into the crook between branches (Barb hadn’tallowed him to use nails, saying it would hurt the tree), and how it had collapsed one day, resulting in a broken arm and a scar that Nate still had on his shin.

“So you’ve always been accident-prone,” Jacopo said fondly.

Nate flicked water at him. “Mom said I shouldn’t have been up in it anyway. I was fourteen, too big to be climbing trees. And I made it for Thea, really.”

“How much younger is she?”

“Six years. But she’s so confident, she seems like the big sister half the time.” Nate looked at his own hand underwater, a pale smear. “And she had to grow up fast. I think we both did, with mom moving around a lot and never having a steady job and all the shitty boyfriends.”

“Dave isn’t Thea’s father, then?” Jacopo asked. “Sorry,” he added quickly. “If my curiosity is rude.”

“No, don’t be.” Nate shrugged. “Thea’s dad was actually nice, though. When Mom got pregnant, I thought maybe–” He scratched his neck. Beads of saltwater were starting to dry on his nape, making the skin tight and itchy. “But it didn’t last, you know? He left. People always do.”

“Nate–”

“I’m getting pruny,” Nate said. “Can we get out?”

Jacopo made a fire, and they sat in the wash of heat from the flames, half-dressed, their hair salt-stiff and their limbs grainy with sand. In the firelight, Nate showed Jacopo the catalog of his scars, starting with the one on his shin and moving on to the collection of scuffs on his elbows and knees. Jacopo traced his fingers over Nate’s skin, making sympathetic noises. Nate felt a pleasant emptiness come into his head as he watched the shifting colors of the fire, his eyes drooping, thoughts ebbing away. He snuggled into Jacopo’s side, and even though he was filthy and there was a knot of driftwood digging into his back andthey weren’t even doing anything, just touching, just existing there with each other, he couldn’t remember a time he had felt more content.

He woke with his head on Jacopo’s chest, his mouth full of sand, the two of them curled up together in a nest of their discarded clothes. The fire was a pile of embers and dawn was seeping up from the horizon and the waves had gotten bigger, coming in to devour the beach, and it was time to get up, and get back to the real world.

*

Summer was ticking down, the days still long and languid but getting incrementally shorter, every sunset shaving off another little piece of the day. Sometimes when Jacopo woke before dawn, in the quiet before the birds began to sing, he could feel a chill, a brittleness to the air that hinted at the coming change of the seasons. He couldn’t get back to sleep on those mornings, and so he lay there watching Nate as the light spread over him, wondering what he dreamt about and finding every little snuffle and snore and twitch in his sleep hopelessly charming.

He’d thought once that he needed to make a dictionary of Nate’s American slang, but what he realized now was that he needed to make a dictionary ofNate, to file away every impression he could before the man was gone from his life, to keep the memory of him alive and beating and close to his heart. Being here with him already felt like a dream, and soon enough it would only be a memory, the colors faded, the sensations growing dull. To hope otherwise was stupid. Nate had made it clear that this thing between them was limited to the summer, and anyway, there was no way that Jacopo could take anything–or anyone–with him when he left. He had piled up the things he was hiding too high, and if he dislodged any of them, they wouldbury him. His only option was to make a clean break: from Carmosino, and from everyone.

So he studied Nate in the early morning light, cataloging everything he could.

This morning, though, Nate had risen before him. Jacopo found him out in the courtyard, head bent over his sketchbook, a watercolor palette lying open on the grass beside him. The intense focus of his face in profile, the confident movements of his hands, sent a little tingle down Jacopo’s spine. There was a steadiness to Nate when he drew, so different from the usual nervous energy that overflowed in him.

“Hey.” Nate looked up. His hair was in his eyes, and Jacopo bent down to brush it out of the way.

“Your hair’s getting so long.”

“I know,” Nate said, with an embarrassed smile. “My mom’s not here to trim it.”

Jacopo played with a lock of it, feeling the texture between his fingers. He looked down at what Nate was working on. The castle, half rosy pinks and yellows, half in shadow as the sun slowly crept up the sky. It was so foreign to him, being able to take the shapes and colors of reality and put them onto paper like this. He squeezed Nate’s shoulder and pressed a kiss to his temple. “I’m impressed. I haven’t seen you paint before.”

“It could be better. I don’t have the right paper for watercolors.”

Jacopo frowned. “Then we’ll get you the right paper. You need to have good supplies. The best.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Nate put the painting down. “I have to stop working on it, anyway. If I add more, I’m going to crap it up.”

“Stay here,” Jacopo said. “I’ll get breakfast.”

He smoked and drank espresso as Nate started another sketch, a basket ofbombolonion the ground between them.Jacopo had noticed that Nate favored the Italian doughnuts more than any other pastries he’d brought back from the market, so he’d continued to buy them, despite Nate’s insistence that he didn’t need the calories. The wiry, overgrown grass of the castle courtyard still glimmered with drops of dew, and the earth was rocky and hard beneath Jacopo’s tailbone, but he felt luxurious and almost decadent sitting here, his foot idly rubbing against Nate’s bare calf and the sun’s warmth spilling over his head and neck as it crested the ramparts of the castle.

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