Page 38 of Duke for the Summer

“What are you drawing now? Not me again, I hope.”

“I was trying to get Pennywise over there, with his little tongue out.” Nate nodded toward the cat, who was dead asleep in what had once been a flower bed. “But I should draw you. I don’t have enough pictures of you.”

“Michelangelo used to draw his lovers, you know.” Jacopo watched smoke swirl up into the sky from the tip of his cigarette.

“Are you saying I should draw you naked?” Nate looked up, grinning. “Or, like, immortalize your ass in bronze?”

“Nate, if anyone’s ass deserves to be immortalized in bronze–”

“Oh my God,stop.” But he was laughing, his face lit up and achingly beautiful. Nate put the sketchbook down and grabbed a pastry from the basket. “Didn’t Michelangelo also paint his enemies into things? There’s a guy somewhere in the Sistine Chapel getting his dick bitten by a snake or something, right?”

Jacopo nodded, warmth blooming in his chest. He loved Nate’s thirst for historical scandals. “Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of ceremonies at the time. He complained about the nudity in the painting, so Michelangelo painted him into it. With–a snake biting his dick, as you said. But conveniently, the snake covered up the nudity, so there was nothing he could say about it.”

“Wow, the original shady queen.” Nate took a bite of hisbombolone, getting powdered sugar on his chin. Jacopo’s fingers itched to wipe it away. “You know, I thought it was so cool, when I learned that he had male lovers. Da Vinci, too.”

“Yes. So did I, when I found out in university,” Jacopo admitted. “It made me feel–less alone, I think.”

“Is that when you figured it out for yourself?” Nate was doodling again, not looking at him, but there was a tenseness in his shoulders that Jacopo couldn’t miss. “In college?”

Jacopo sighed. He didn’t want to get into all that, didn’t want to bring the ugliness of it here, into this little pocket of sugar and sunshine, the stillness of early morning and the comforting smells of coffee and tobacco. That day in the kitchen that his parents pretended hadn’t happened and that Jacopo couldn’t forget. He looked away, smoothing the front of his shirt.

“I knew earlier,” Nate said. “Like, way early. My mom didn’t know until I was in middle school though. She found some drawings I’d done.” Red was creeping up his neck, but he kept scribbling on the paper in front of him, his pencil moving in rapid circles. “You know.Thatkind of drawings. And then we had to have a talk. And she wasn’t unhappy about it or anything, just confused, because I liked skateboarding, and I guess skateboarding isn’t gay? But the only reason I started skateboarding is because there was this guy, Travis, who I had a crush on, and–” he cut himself off, taking a deep breath. “Never mind. Sorry.”

“I knew earlier, too,” Jacopo said. “But in university was when it really sunk in.”

“Did you have a boyfriend?”

“No, never. But I had a best friend, a girl, and she was the only one I told.” He thought of Lucia, then, the memories of that other life suddenly so vivid that he felt tears coming to his eyes. The two of them always together, a strange pair, Jacopogawky and unpolished, with his outdated clothes and his rural slang that hadn’t caught up to what they were saying in the city, and Lucia, serious, quiet until she had an opinion, endlessly intense with her notebook full of poetry and her fishnet tights and the streak she had bleached in her own hair. Something dark squirmed in his chest. What would Nate think if he knew? His skin felt too tight all of a sudden, and he fumbled in his pocket for another cigarette.

“Are you still in touch with her?” Nate asked.

Jacopo shook his head. He had said too much already.

“I get it. People come and go.” Nate looked up at him. His cheeks were flushed, and there was a funny little half-smile on his face. “I wish I’d met you in college.”

“You would have been too young for me then.”

“Not too young to have a big, fat crush on you. You could have corrupted me.”

Nate’s hair was in his eyes again, and Jacopo tucked it behind his ear, running his knuckles down his cheek, across his lips. His heart was pounding, and his pulse felt lodged in the back of his throat. “I think you’re corrupting me,” he said. “I like it.”

14.

Nate was trying to learn Italian, and he sucked at it. It wasn’t that Jacopo was a bad teacher: in fact, he was a good one, very patient, passionate about the subject, and full of fun asides about Latin word roots. It was Nate who was the problem. Nothing seemed to stick in his head, and he could recite conjugations until his tongue fell out (io sono, luiè, noi siamo) but he still didn’t understand what anything meant, or even really what a verb was. He felt bad, because Jacopo had offered, and Nate knew why he had. Because he’d be leaving soon, and Nate would be on his own.

“I’m hopeless at this,” he said, leaning his head against Jacopo’s shoulder. They were in the library, dust particles suspended in the late afternoon light coming in through the windows, and the weathered spines of the books seemed especially forbidding today. “I’ll have to just rely on Google translate.”

Jacopo made a face. “Google translate cannot capture idioms.”

Nate looked up at the stacks, noticing the clear delineation where Jacopo had stopped organizing. The shelves went from dust-free, orderly rows, to piles of books, jammed together and stuffed with papers. It would never get finished.

“Then just teach me the idioms.” There was more frustration in his voice than he intended, and he squeezed Jacopo’s knee, adding more softly, “That’s your favorite part, anyway, isn’t it? The slang?”

“Nate, learning the slang first is like–having the dessert before dinner.”

“Yeah, but you know I’m bad at delaying gratification.” He let his hand creep up Jacopo’s leg, thumb digging into his inner thigh.

Jacopo chuckled. “No shit,” he said, with perfect inflection.

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