Cele pulls his legs up. The sun is moving quickly, slipping under the shade and biting at the tops of his feet. He hears the magazine flip closed and cracks his eyes open. Luca’s pushed himself to sit, spine curved and head tipped down. There’s a cigarette perched gently between his first two fingers and held to his lips, and a lighter trying to spark in his other hand.

It catches, and Cele feels himself mirror the quick breath that Luca takes, the first taste. Luca’s eyes flick down to meet his.

“You don’t smoke,” Cele says. Not that he knows that, just that he’s never seen Luca do it before. He doesn’t even go for Bez’s vape on a night out, when they’re drunk and pushing their limits. Luca makes a noise in the back of his throat and parts his lips. The smoke fountains out like a waterfall up his top lip and into his nose.

“It’s Vale’s,” he shrugs.

“Oh.”

Luca blinks out at the track and raises the cigarette to his lips again, and Cele should really turn away, quit staring. Even in the shade, he’s overheating. Sweat beading on the back of his neck, warmth pooling in his gut. Luca exhales. Cele can smell the tobacco, hot and acrid. He lets his eyes blur, and then it’s like he’s watching Valentino. From his Honda days, maybe. Young and lean and gold at his edges, sanded smooth. 

Luca looks back at him — catches him. Cele can’t move his eyes. Feels like he’s sunk into the dirt, like the skin has split up his back and he’s started to melt into the grass, guts dripping through the soil. His hands flex, packing dirt under his short fingernails. 

The daydream takes him. Blue eyes, the mountain range of Luca’s ribs and the tan skin stretched over them. His mothwing imagination flutters the picture of Valentino over Luca’s elegant face: that same cigarette balancing on his bottom lip, the knowing tilt of his brow. Cele doesn’t talk about that. Hasn’t told anyone, never will. And there’s no need — most of them know, have the same secret, revelatory want of a teenager buried deep between their lungs. Posters on childhood bedroom walls, figurines and signed hats. Valentino’s so indulgent with all of them that it’s easy to forget he was ever out of reach like that.

Cele swallows. Luca leans closer, and then he’s just Luca, peering at Cele like he’s unfolded the creased paper wrap of his psyche and seen the burnt sugarwater colour of his want.

“Celestino,” he mutters. Cele blinks. Long fingers come into focus, Luca’s hand, the cigarette. Offered to him. He sits up too quickly and squints past the stars that spin across Luca’s patient face. The cigarette is warm when he takes it, or Luca’s fingers are warm, and the brush of skin stuns him so bad by the time he’s got his lips around the filter, he can’t even remember if they touched at all. It’s damp, just a little. Where Luca’s tongue must have pushed against it, or where his lips were wet. Cele stops looking at Luca so that he can put 100% of his attention on not choking on his inhale like an idiot.

Heat blisters on the side of his face, on his fingers where they maybe-touched. He can feel Luca watching him as he breathes in. The smoke is too thick; catches in his throat and chest and threatens to puff out of his lips before it’s even reached the bottom of his lungs, but Luca is watching, so he holds it down and seals his mouth shut until the urge to bluster passes, and then he releases it through his teeth like he knows what he’s doing.

Luca takes the cigarette back with a quiet laugh, as if Cele’s been seen right through. Their fingers do touch, this time, and Cele feels it all the way up his arm. He knows the headrush isn’t from the nicotine. It feels like Luca has moved closer — escaping the sun, maybe, chasing the shifting shade. Cele can — it’s fair for him to do the same, to pull his knee from where it’s turning red and shuffle across the grass till his shoulder’s brushing the umbrella pole, till he can feel the prickle of Luca’s fine leg hair against his own.

“Why didn’t you go to the beach?” Luca asks several minutes later, and Cele can’t help but feel like it was almost a different question, the way Luca’s voice dips so low as he poses it.

There’s a pile of grass collecting by his hip, where the hand that hadn’t taken the cigarette has been plucking mindlessly at the ground.

“I just did not want to,” he offers. Luca hums. “What about you?”

The cigarette has burnt down now, and Luca takes a final drag before he puts it out in the dirt and then tucks it into the pocket of his shorts. Vale would probably spit if he found a butt just lying around, and Luca likely wouldn’t get the blame.

“I don’t know.”

Cele ‘ah’s. Emboldened, suddenly, he opens his mouth again and the words just fall out.

“I hope I am — good company, then. That you are not regretting it. Not going.”

Luca slants his attention to the track, shimmering with a heat mirage. The sun has almost hit its peak, and the warmth of a cloying morning has well and truly become a stinking afternoon. Cele drags his eyes from Luca, because it seems like an age since he’s done so. He feels Luca look back at him; can see at the edge of his vision the slow smile that spreads across Luca’s face. He’s waiting for the laugh — the tease. What a strange thing to say, Celestino. Don’t make it weird.

But Luca murmurs, “Of course, Celin,” and a long-fingered hand suddenly curls around Cele’s wrist. Cele jumps to find Luca’s eyes, to derive a meaning from his expression. It’s like there’s a joke coiling in the air that Cele isn’t in on — curling around him like smoke, something he can’t grab at. Luca’s grip tightens almost imperceptibly. “Do you want to go back to the house?”

Cele does. It’s hot and he’s boiling, sweating even half-undressed, hair damp across his forehead and the back of his neck.

He says, “Okay,” and Luca releases him to pull the umbrella from the ground and scoop up his magazine and empty bottle, and then he’s trekking back towards the house before Cele can split the question in half and stare too long at the sticky cherry pit centre of it.

In the kitchen, Luca takes Cele’s bottle and rinses it with his own. He leaves them upside down on the side of the sink and Cele stands and watches it all, feeling like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands and like Luca is going to turn around and the elegant planes of his face are going to be Valentino’s, and the warmth in his belly has gone molten, but kind of empty like he really has left some of his guts back on the grass by the track.

Luca’s watching him again — again — when he pulls himself out of his head.

“I’ll turn the fan on in my room,” he says, and Cele does peel the pith from that one, because it’s so obvious; they’re going to go sit in Luca’s room, and there’s not a chair so it’ll either be on the floor or on the bed, and if it’s on the bed, then —

Here, Luca’s bed is pressed into the corner. At his actual apartment, it’s square in the middle of the wall opposite the door, which TikTok had told Cele was bad Feng shui, and Cele hadn’t passed that on to Luca because it seems like the kind of thing Luca would already know about so he must just not care. He has a headboard and everything. It’s really — adult. Everything about Luca is just… more complete, Cele thinks. He even seems older than Vale, sometimes. Wiser.

Luca sits on his corner-bed just further than halfway down with his back against the wall, which means Cele has to sit by his pillows or they’ll be touching. The whole room smells like Luca. Not like cigarettes, because Cele’s really never seen him smoke before so he musn’t do it often — and Cele can still smell it on his breath when he talks, which is — something. The room smells clean. Orderly and fresh, and the fan is lifting up every scent; the cologne on the dresser, the sea salt room spray on his nightstand, whatever fucking detergent he uses for his sheets. It’s like being dunked in a Luca bath.

“Celin,” Luca says, and everyone calls him that but Luca is — looking at him in this certain way, and his mouth hardly moved when he said it, so quiet. Cele’s stomach turns in on itself.

“Yeah,” he croaks. The word sounds desperate. Sort of like he’s agreeing to something, to everything, even though Luca hadn’t asked any question at all.

And then Luca does ask a question. Cele doesn’t even think he hears it, too busy focusing on the fan of Luca’s eyelashes, the bow of his mouth when he speaks, and how he might actually be getting hard in his shorts just fucking sitting next to the guy. 

But he did hear it, through the fog.

Luca had tipped his head, feline and unfazed, and said, “Do you want me to suck you off?”

“What?”

He doesn’t ask again. Cele heard him, and Luca knows that. He’s suddenly closer again, like he was under the umbrella. There’s a hand wrapped around Cele’s bare ankle. It’s branding, hotter than the sun outside. This isn't really happening.

“You don’t have to say yes.”

“I’m going — I want — I know, but, are you—?” Jesus Christ.

Some of the poise falls out of Luca’s posture, replaced with a little shake of laughter and a teeth-baring grin. He slides his hand up Cele’s calf till he can press at his knee, split his legs apart.

“Come on,” Luca says, “if you want.”

Cele shifts himself away from the wall, keeps himself up on his elbows so that Luca can push forward into the gap of his legs and blink sweetly down at him.

“Okay, yeah, okay,” he garbles, voice ripped up by the shakes. Apparently that’s all that is needed to free Luca from the confines of moving like honey, because then his fingers are working Cele’s fly down and getting his shorts and briefs around his thighs in the next breath, before Cele’s even taken one, probably, and his cock is out — completely hard, which had happened without his permission between Luca asking and then starting to do.

Luca drags his thumb over the weeping slit, no preamble, and Cele nearly fucking chokes.

“Jesus,” he says, “Jesus, Luca, I.”

The sentence, as useless as it was becoming, dies on his tongue. Luca curls his whole hand around Cele and drags it down to the base, hot and dry and just this side of too tight, and then he smiles at Cele one more time before ducking his head and opening his mouth and making Cele’s arms give out from underneath him.

He hits the mattress right as Luca’s tongue flattens against the underside of his cock and wrenches a terrible, destroyed noise from his throat. He’s gotten head before, in highschool — hidden in the thick scrub of a hedge and that wasn’t very good or very long. But Luca is — must be some sort of fucking — like, he’s into it, because Cele can’t even keep his hips flat against the bed. Luca’s swallowing him down to his fist and squeezing when he pulls off, swirling his tongue around the head, cheeks carved out and Cele’s not going to last even a fucking minute. Maybe blowjobs just never last very long. Maybe Luca is just — insane at it.

“Fuck, Luca,” he manages again, limited to like four words and a name, completely stupid with how hard he’s about to come, fucking up and chasing Luca’s mouth because he can’t not.

Luca hums around him, vibrates all the way to his skull and rattles his brain around. An arm lands heavy across his hips, pinning him to the bed.

“Sorry, I’m — sorry, shit,” his hands scramble up into Luca’s hair, fingers twisting, spasming with the need to just hold Luca there and finish himself the rest of the way in the velvet vacuum seal of Luca’s mouth. Deliriously, he wonders briefly if Luca would let him — let him pull him all the way down till Cele’s cock hit the back of his throat and then hold him there.

Teeth scrape over the head of his cock and he has to choke back a scream, flying up onto his elbows to gape down at Luca, who raises his eyebrows pointedly, like are you still here?

He is. He fucking is. Too here, because he’s going to come in the next five seconds. Luca smoothes the hand that had been wrapped around Cele’s dick up across his twitching stomach, and then he takes a breath through his nose and closes his eyes and takes Cele to the hilt.

Cele whites out. Stars burst on the backs of his eyelids — he’s probably ripping hair from Luca’s scalp, arced up and curled over him, legs shaking on either side of Luca’s head as he comes straight down Luca’s throat. Luca swallows, makes a small choking sound, heaves another breath through his nose and swallows again, and Cele feels it in every fucking nerve ending, and then in an instant it’s too much and he’s falling back against the bed croaking, “Fuck, fuck, Luca.”

Luca pulls off him with a wet noise and sits back on his haunches. When Cele feels like he can see again, he blinks away from the ceiling to Luca’s expectant face, chin shiny, pupils blown. He’s not smiling, but it’s there like a threat, desperate to pull at the corners of his mouth.

“Jesus, man,” Cele says, so fucking lame. He can’t even think. Can’t even breathe properly. Luca laughs, then, all white teeth and wet lips, drags his arm over his mouth and then reaches for Cele to pull his underwear up over his cock and make an attempt at closing his jeans, but Cele’s laying on the waistband weird so he doesn’t get very far.

Cele gives it another minute, till he’s sure the next thing he says isn’t going to be something stupid, like I love you.

He hefts himself up to lean against the wall again. Luca folds a leg and rests his chin on his knee, watching Cele zip up his jeans and wipe the sweat from his top lip.

“Is that why you — why you didn’t go to the beach?”

His voice only shakes a little bit.

Luca snorts.