Work Text:
Speaking
“I just want to know, as a matter of academic curiosity,” Giulio Cardinal Sabbadin says, “what in the name of God you were thinking.”
Aldo bites the inside of his cheek so as not to laugh. He’s being scolded. He should at least pretend to embarrassment, or Giulio will think he’s losing his touch.
“Well, I was 33 in 1995,” Aldo explains.
Giulio called him at 6:30 a.m. on a December morning, knowing he’d be on the treadmill in the bowels of the Vatican gymnasium. Where better to pin him for 45 minutes of criticism!
It’s been a week since Innocent XIV’s election. Sequestered as they were, it turns out they missed a news microcycle that had been devoted to Aldo’s second book. Several particularly foamy rightwing pundits did not like that a priest wrote a forgotten book an erotic subject.
Ordinarily this is the kind of miniature scandal that would keep Aldo up in a cold sweat, but the delicate vibrations that had gripped the Sistine Chapel in the hours between the explosion and Vincent’s election have held his heart in stasis, even these many days later. Talking heads can say whatever they want, because Aldo will never be pope and never really have to answer for it. The chalice has passed.
His niece told him he’s remaining Galadriel. He sent her a thumbs-up emoji and made a note to ask Thomas if he knows what that’s all about.
“Oh, 33?” Giulio chirps. “So you figured someone was going to nail you to a tree any second now? You had to get your magnum opus out, before you hit your expiration date?”
“Of course not! I only mean that I was young. And it seemed like a fruitful topic for theological consideration.” Perhaps, with raging egotistic hubris, he’d harbored a little hope that he would be for kissing something like what Freud had been for dream analysis.
“And at no point did you consider that it might be relevant to mention to me, your—” ‘Campaign manager’ hangs on the line between them, but Giulio says, “—advocate? In case I had to answer questions about it?”
“Which you didn’t, did you? I don’t think anyone in the entire College of Cardinals remembered it, before this little fluff.”
Giulio makes an exasperated sound.
Aldo adds, “Besides… almost immediately afterwards I got busy with the Savonarola thing. Honestly, I'd forgotten about it until now. After all, it didn’t come up when I became Secretary of State.”
“Bless you, caro, that’s because nobody cares who is Secretary of State. We give that role to our most powerful and intelligent bores. Ask Lawrence.”
Fair’s fair. Giulio would have been the very first interesting one. Oh, what might have been.
“Anyway, I’m hurt you didn’t already know,” Aldo puffs. “I thought you liked my work.”
“Why on this green earth would anyone know about a 500-copy run of your racy dithering about Frenching!”
“It is not exclusively about Frenching! ‘Heal Me With Your Mouth’” (he can hear Giulio groaning over the title) “is about all forms of kissing! I cover kissing between relatives and friends as well. I even had a whole analytical framework built in..."
“How, o Socrates, could it be otherwise.” Giulio sighs. “They’re posting about it, Aldo.”
“Not where I can see it. And it’s definitely not the topic du jour now—although you’ve got to admit that if what sinks my career in the new administration is a 30-year-old book about kissing, that will be very funny.”
“Good thing your next project was Savonarola. That way there will be no surprises for you, if it turns out the new boy is a zealot.”
“Well, I never claimed I thought that punishment fit the crime, either,” Aldo puffs, a little out of breath. “May I go now, Mother Superior? I do still have a job to do, for the moment.”
“Yes, fine. Let me not stand in the path of the interim Secretary of State’s official work.” Giulio sighs. “Finish your stupid vanity-laden exercise routine and then go confess. I’m preemptively assigning you 10 Hail Marys for pissing me off.”
“Bacio, caro,” Aldo says, making a pronounced effort not to sound like as much of a little shit as he knows he is being.
“Mwah,” Giulio drawls, and hangs up.
Looking
“Good morning, Eminence,” says Raymond O’Malley pleasantly.
Aldo raises his eyes from his itinerary and examines Ray as he falls into step beside him, hurrying down the hallway. It's not that it's suspicious, per se, for Ray to seek him out. They’ve worked together many times, both with and without Thomas’ intervention. For one thing, Aldo wouldn't dream of going to any one else, if he's looking for a good whip to get his brother cardinals on the straight and narrow when it comes to synodality, or when he needs to know who’s sleeping with whom.
Yet Ray rarely looks this transparently gleeful, even when Thomas lets him off the leash.
“Good morning, Monsignor O’Malley.”
“I had the great pleasure of reading one of your early books this weekend. I did not know you were a poet.”
Oh, Lord. Aldo rolls his eyes. Two poems! Can’t a man write two poems, without being subjected to unseemly labels?
“That old thing,” Aldo grumbles. “Yes, Eminenza Sabbadin told me people were posting.”
“Well…” Ray’s expression takes on the regretful yet minimally sympathetic cast one assumes for those with their arm stuck in a vending machine, spiritually speaking. “But posters will post, Eminence. I did a bit of looking and I believe the author of the most derogatory article was 17.”
“I suppose he can't help that.”
“And you were very emphatic about the book not being based on your own experience, but so few people bother to read a preface any more…”
“But you did. How, may I ask? It’s been out of print for 20 years.”
“I found a copy that had been uploaded to Medium.” Perhaps propelled by the habit of having to explain technology to Thomas Lawrence, Ray adds, “It’s a website that publishes web-logs.”
“I didn’t authorize that. That’s got to be a violation of my copyright,” Aldo grouses. “Although I suppose I abdicated personal property, including intellectual property, when I took the vow of poverty. But it would be nice to be asked.”
Ray's expression brightens and sharpens. “Would you like me to find out who uploaded it? I’m sure it wouldn’t take a moment.”
Oh, poor lamb. To hear Thomas talk, Ray really got to indulge in his inner bloodhound during the conclave. It must be a struggle, readjusting to the relatively dry and tranquil processes the Secretary of the College of Cardinals must endure.
“I couldn’t put you out,” Aldo demurs.
“It would be no trouble at all.”
Aldo shakes his head. "No, thank you. It’s for the best if the whole matter simmers down, and we can focus on the present. I don’t even remember precisely what I wrote. I’m not ashamed of it, but I don’t particularly want to have to defend every single thing I thought back then.”
"Ah, yes. But I wouldn't worry too much about it, Father Bellini," Ray says. His voice is bright; nothing but clear blue sky. "It’s a perfectly reasonable little book. It says more about a reader’s weaknesses of understanding, rather than your actual ideas, to pretend it’s more scandalous than that. And besides a few posts, I wasn't able to dig up anything else that seemed significant."
Aldo makes a low noise in the back of his throat. The Lord gave Raymond O'Malley very far-seeing eyes. "I hope you're right. And if you cannot find anything else with which to rebuke me..."
“Not a thing, Eminence. It’s a fruitful topic for theological consideration. I thought it was very nice.”
“Well. Thank you, Ray. That’s sweet of you.”
They’re almost at Aldo’s office. At the threshold, Ray bows, and offers his hand. Slightly perplexed, Aldo takes it, only to snort when Ray presses a light kiss to Aldo’s ring.
“Yeah, you’re real funny,” Aldo mutters.
Ray rises with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “Thank you, Eminence.”
Touching
They were not fighting. Not for more than those 12 excruciating hours, at least.
No, Thomas had completely accepted Aldo’s apology—that dear, fond smile in the loggia could not have meant anything else—and his sincere forgiveness is not in question.
It’s just that for a few weeks they were not entirely comfortable with one another. Aldo's heart had turned itself inside out over it. Quite apart from his disgusting cowardice and his lack of self-knowledge, he’d been willing to sacrifice Thomas to the papacy, no less than Thomas had been willing to sacrifice him. Were they livestock to each other? Had they been refusing to see one another as whole people for so long that they could no longer recognize each other?
But of course that kind of thinking can’t last, not when Thomas Lawrence is around. One day, during mass, Thomas simply reached out and touched Aldo’s hand, when it came time to greet each other in peace. Thomas held him, and pressed him, and just like that they slipped back into a rhythm they’ve kept for more than two decades.
Now, in the garden, Thomas leaves off contemplation of the view and sits beside Aldo on the bench with a little throaty grumble. Aldo sets his hand down by Thomas’ on the seat, their fingers brushing. Thomas’ skin is warm and soft and dry, his touch as familiar as Aldo’s own hands. Against his knee, Aldo can feel his leg, still strong and firm.
A wilting willow, is Thomas, but rooted deep and not easy to budge.
“Ray mentioned that your book on sacred intimacy was getting some attention,” Thomas observes.
“Intimacy? You’re such a diplomat.”
Thomas smiles. “On the contrary! I am simply a great fan of your work. And I particularly like to see your more creative efforts being praised.”
“I believe Giulio encountered quite the opposite of praise, when he went looking.”
“Well, man’s nature is fallen,” Thomas sighs.
Aldo smirks, reaching for Thomas’ arm. He tucks his hand into the bend of Thomas’ elbow, tugging him a little.
“I wrote that thing in a college-ruled composition book over the course of about two weeks,” Aldo says. “Do you remember? You were visiting the Nuncio.”
“I seem to recall some fervent scribbling between services. But in those days you were determined to make me read Melville and you were very firm that I keep my nose in the book. I didn’t often get to look around.”
Aldo laughs. "Poor baby. Was I so cruel to you, when you had all New York laid out at your feet?"
"You were," Thomas intones with faux solemnity, "but I didn't hold it against you. It was for my edification. And when you did drag me around, you tried your best not to let me stumble into subway turnstiles."
Aldo gives him a squeeze. "Forgive me. I just had to make sure you knew about the duodecimos. It couldn't wait."
"Indeed. Such information is more precious than rubies. As we say, 'the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.'"
Aldo turns to look at him, and Thomas smiles when he turns.
Okay, smooth operator.
They lean in at the same time and meet in a kiss on the lips. It’s soft, and chaste, Thomas’s beautiful aquiline nose touching Aldo’s cheek right beneath his eyeglasses and spilling warm breath down his skin. Neither of them are able to resist the urge to smile against the other’s mouth. In pitch-black moments of despair, Aldo had torn himself to pieces imagining he would never kiss this man so easily and freely again. But thank God for touchy-feely, affectionate Thomas Lawrence. They linger together just for a few heartbeats, and when they part Thomas squeezes Aldo’s hand.
“Peace be with you, Aldo.” No one else makes it sound so sincere—perhaps because no one else can give Aldo peace, just by wishing it for him.
“And with your spirit.”
They rest with their shoulders pressed together, looking out at the brilliant winter sunshine on the empty boughs in the garden.
Aldo allows a few seconds to pass, but his nature cannot take any more. Thomas’ sense of humor has come back in the weeks since the conclave. It makes Aldo feel puppyish, somehow, his heart tumbling inside him. He’s not sure why he should wish to button such a tender moment with playfulness instead of perfect, silent earnestness; but Thomas likes him, imp of the perverse and all, so perhaps it’s not all bad.
“See?” Aldo says in an undertone. “That sort of thing is why I quoted you in the book. Expertise.”
Thomas laughs softly. "I do not remember what I must have said."
"Neither do I, really," Aldo admits. "But we'll go pick the most profound quote and say it was that."
Creating
On his way into his 9 p.m. meeting with His Holiness, Aldo stops in front of the portrait.
It’s new enough that he hadn’t yet had a chance to see it in its frame. It’s beautiful. His old friend’s face is rendered simply but clearly, contours and wrinkles and sag and all. Warm white gilds the silver glint of his eyeglass frames. He is lit in a style that puts Aldo in mind of Scandinavian masters—clear, almost brazen light on his face, but a deep, dark chocolate brown background. An earthen darkness that hums.
Aldo gazes into the painted eyes. The expression of the eyes is warmer than it was in the end, and there is only the shadow of that uncanny perspicacity that so deepened in his final days. He looks like he did about 5 years in: tired, of course, but still hopeful. Aldo's heart is drawing itself out of his body, reaching for the portrait. Dear father. Dear, dear friend.
“What do you think?” Vincent asks. He’d arrived in a quiet swish of white silk, but Aldo hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away to acknowledge him.
“It’s very competent,” Aldo says, trying to be composed. “I’m glad they didn’t make him too young.”
Vincent huffs a quiet laugh. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. I know he would’ve bridled at having his portrait in oil… and hung in the Apostolic Palace, moreover. But I live here, and I would like to have him close.”
Aldo swallows. “At his most exacting, he could not have seen anything wrong with that.”
Vincent gives him a grateful smile as he moves away from the painting. Aldo slowly follows. They have work to do, beyond admiring the artwork, but Vincent lifts his eyebrows as he speaks.
“Speaking of him… we might be on the road to canonization.”
Aldo cringes. “Really?”
“You’re not pleased?”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t feel any particular way about it—I just know he wouldn’t like it. He wanted nothing but ‘poor sinner’ on his tomb, after all.”
“Yes. And I agree; his modesty would have forbidden it. Nevertheless, there is a report of something having happened at the moment of his death, in Ecuador.” Vincent shrugs his shoulders. “Someone is looking into it, of course.”
Have there been two other miracles already? Aldo hadn’t heard about them. He can imagine the Holy Father telling him, with that quick impatience for anything but work, ‘Bury it.’
But the man is gone, gone; and he was gone before he died. Before even his dying weeks made him secretive and strange. In becoming pope, the late Holy Father became both man and godly vessel for more-than-man. Looking back, Aldo cannot help resenting the way they kept filling that holy bag up, crowding out the few spaces where the man could live. He doesn't like the idea of shoving more in.
“Did he ever drawl at you, when he spoke of St. John Paul II?” Aldo asks.
Vincent smiles, sweet and solemn. “No, but I can certainly imagine it. Still, if there are miracles… we would have no choice but to acknowledge them.”
“Yes,” Aldo allows, taking a seat as Vincent gestures to an armchair. “If.”
“Why, Cardinal Bellini! Do you not believe in miracles?”
Aldo gives Vincent a look over the rims of his eyeglasses. Vincent adopts an expression of perfect innocence. They both know too much about the world to disbelieve in miracles, but neither do they ever count on them. Or find them particularly helpful when they do appear.
“I believe in the church he was trying to build,” Aldo says loftily. “Which would be akin to a miraculous revolution towards Christ, if we managed to pull it off.”
Vincent sits beside him. He’s silent for a moment. “Do you? Believe in that church, I mean.”
Aldo’s guts twinge. All of a sudden he feels a ferocious protective drive, tension all over his throat and jaws, as if he would bite anyone who would attack his good faith, his friend’s true sincerity—and then he remembers who he’s speaking to. It’s an earnest question. More importantly, it’s a serious theological inquiry.
And it’s not as if it’s not a question Aldo’s asked himself before. The late Holy Father is dead, and his pontificate is concluded, and his portrait is in the hallway, where it can’t see Aldo.
“I think I do,” Aldo says. He drops his eyes and reaches for his ring, turning it on his finger, gripping and twisting at his knuckles. “If only because the vision has not yet been realized. There’s so much that’s left undone. So many wrongs to right. Giulio started me thinking again… We could have dragged the sex abuse out into the light, as far as possible. Closed the clinics. Excoriated John Paul II and Benedict for their complicity.”
Old confusion, old helplessness, turns into a slow but deep anger that makes his nose hot.
“Forgive me,” Aldo mutters; possibly to Vincent, but probably not. “But I wonder sometimes if the late Holy Father actually wanted that, or if he only wanted to want it, and that’s why he didn’t make changes by fiat. We’re not Borgia popes, demanding excommunication and execution, and for far more slight crimes! But we were cautious, in everything, so much so that sometimes I see 60 years of progress and sometimes I don’t see an inch. Even if he'd picked something that had no explicit share of blame to accord—women’s ordination, for example. It would be a positive thing, a liberation; but he didn’t do that. I’m not an anarchist. I recognize that doing the right thing too quickly can have as awful a consequence as doing a wrong thing. It risked schism… possibly some kind of war, even, thinking of Ireland. Or, God forbid, the collapse of the whole organization of the Catholic Church. No matter what happened, any radical movement would almost certainly present a massive diminution of our prestige and authority on the world stage.”
Guilt washes in as he hears himself speak. And what is that earthly prestige, against eternity? How many souls has Aldo saved? Who knows. How much earthly misery has Aldo, personally, alleviated? Somedays, staring at an unwritten email, coddling the egos of heads of state and other moral imbeciles, he truly doesn’t think he’s ever helped anyone at all.
The late Holy Father often found it necessary to remind him that the administration of the Catholic Church was a good place for Aldo’s mind to nest for his earthly season, but it was not his home.
And yet. Aldo twists his fingers. Though the God-given authority is all any individual truly has, the existence of a large political administration behind them, supported by 1.4 billion people across the globe who will heed their call, has often kept those individuals alive to do what they are called by God to do. Not against the world, but within it.
“He should have done something. So should I. But whatever I believe,” Aldo says, “whatever I say now about the previous administration, I still work here. I behave as if I think the organization and hierarchy is valuable. And we are what we do.”
Vincent clears his throat. “Is that Aquinas?”
Aldo sighs and crosses his legs. He tosses his fascia restlessly to the other side. “Oh, close enough. I shouldn’t get started. I’m even more of a windbag than d'Aquino was.”
Vincent’s face creases with both apology and amusement. “I’m sorry. That came out more facetious than I intended.”
Aldo shakes his head. “It was appropriate. You get this from all sides, I’m sure. Thomas and I both default to lectures, when we’re on the spot. And it feels absurd to talk about believing in ideals and the work other people leave undone...” ‘To you,’ he manages not to say. “... when I do what I do. Here on my ivory perch.”
“The church we build will take every one of us,” Vincent observes. “And despite clear instructions, it seems we all go grasping in the dark. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, to rejoice when we find one another, and hold hands as we go.”
It’s a pretty way to think about it, though Aldo struggles to imagine anyone in the dark being delighted to find a spreadsheet. Perhaps it would be a comfort, in its way. An illusion of control isn’t exclusively an illusion, if it organizes thought enough to make coordinated action possible.
Still. It’s pat, too. Vincent is being kinder than he needs to be. Maybe that’s because the hammer’s going to fall, soon—Aldo has been waiting for a big swing, and he can see no reason to suppose he’ll remain Secretary of State once Vincent is confident enough about how the system currently works to make the radical clean sweep this organization so evidently needs. Maybe Vincent doesn't want Aldo to think about his patent unsuitability for that new world. Maybe it's cruel to rub it in, when Aldo obviously already knows.
Or maybe Vincent is being kind because it’s getting late, and neither of them have enough gas in the tank for a debate about the soul of the church; not when making even one life even a bit easier requires years of labor and mountains of treasure, and they can see all-too clearly the work that’s cut out for them.
Aldo allows the pretense of consolation to smooth over the space between them, and launches into his report. It takes a while. He’s still finding out how Vincent prefers to be briefed. Active listener though Vincent is, Aldo can’t help but notice that Vincent doesn’t like a mere report. Aldo's patented 10 bullet points with verbally-delivered details are not enough. His Holiness prefers a real conversation, and so a real conversation is what he shall have.
At the clock strikes 11, Aldo folds his notes away in his leather portfolio. “... I think everything else will keep until the morning. Thank you, Your Holiness.”
Vincent stifles a yawn and rises to walk Aldo to the door. “You are going to bed immediately, I hope?”
“This was my last meeting,” Aldo says. A non-answer. But better than lying, even if he doesn’t really consider checking email and reading articles in bed to be massively unlike rest.
“Good. Thank you, dear Eminence.”
At the door, Vincent tilts his head, offering his cheek. Aldo is bewildered for a moment, until it twigs and he blurts out a laugh.
“Oh! Not you, too!”
Vincent smiles widely. “I was interested to see that it was back in the news! The Holy Father let me borrow his copy, you know—”
Aldo stares, brain stammering over the thought that the late Holy Father even owned one. Did he like it? Owning one would suggest as much, and lending it to a bright young man would suggest he even loved it.
They never talked about it. Loss yawns between Aldo’s lungs.
“—but I’m afraid I lost it in a move. I remember thinking it was very good at the time.”
“It was me at my most radical,” Aldo says.
“Monsignor O’Malley told me it was available on the internet. I read a bit during lunch today… I liked the interviews with people who kiss. Some of them were quite funny.”
Yes. They were funny. For a second Aldo can almost feel the tattered cocktail napkin under his fingers, and see the blotchy ink as he writes down what a tipsy friend claimed about ‘the art of kissing.’ Aldo’s heart beams with longing—for youth, perhaps, or at least its invulnerability. For all the people he can never speak to again.
He can’t imagine the late Holy Father reading his book. What kinds of conversations could they have had, if he’d known?
Here and now, Vincent angles his head to remind Aldo of his offered face.
Aldo leans in, letting their cheeks touch, as he kisses the air by Vincent’s ear. He moves to the other side and kisses again, listening as Vincent kisses back. He’s still such a pretty, young thing—54, soft skin, and those curls that have lit a fire in the breast of every Catholic matron on the planet. His breath is warm against Aldo’s ear, and it curls down beneath Aldo’s collar. He turns, at the very last minute, to brush his lips directly against Aldo's cheek. Moved, Aldo matches him, caressing his skin with his lips.
“Thank you. Good night, my friend,” Aldo murmurs.
As he closes the door, Vincent replies, “Sleep well, Eminence.”
Yes. Aldo will need it, if he’s going to get up and build a church.
On his way to his private apartments, Aldo passes the portrait. He gazes into his friend’s face as he lifts his fingertips to his lips and kisses the skin. He grazes his fingertips across the carved frame, thinking of the gold, and the filigree, and the paucity of what they allowed each other.
“Good night, my friend,” he repeats.
Seeking
He has an unwelcome visitor.
Aldo’s assistant, Sister Bianka, made a valiant effort to keep him at bay, but it seems the Innocent XIV administration is old enough for Goffredo Cardinal Tedesco to think it’s ripe for its first beating.
In a sick way, it’s comforting. Having the man himself come down for a roar is at least handling the matter internally, rather than having it out in the press.
Aldo is not above savoring the deliciousness of having Bianka tell the Patriarch of Venice that the Secretary of State is simply too busy to attend to him. Tedesco ignored him for almost the entire conclave. Even if it was much too little too late to convince anyone Tedesco truly didn’t think about him as a viable candidate—some dipshit internet loser might attempt to hound a pope to death and not know anything about those working to advance his agenda, but Tedesco is known to know too much about Vatican realpolitik to make that argument stick—it still stung.
Aldo’s been trying out frosty dignified silence lately. He’s beginning to think it probably just makes him look like a stubborn tit, but for Tedesco he’ll take the hit. He’s worked late the last two days, both because he must and because it gives Thomas time to work his charm and see if he can talk Tedesco off the ledge. He's actively avoided the man in the halls.
When he hears his office door slam open, he instinctively checks the clock. 8:47 p.m. Bianka clocked out 4 hours ago. There's no one to stop what's coming.
Aldo schools his expression into one of perfect disinterest, listening to the angry Versace footsteps coming his way.
“Do not smoke in my office,” he barks, a fraction of a second before Goffredo Tedesco appears in the doorway, silver vapor pouring out of his nose.
“You!” Tedesco snarls, and then: sturm und drang.
Aldo keeps his seat, for the insult of it, as he watches Tedesco pace and blaze with outrage over (of all the books Aldo’s ever written!) Heal Me With Your Mouth.
Disgustoso! Terribile! Lascivious, lecherous, salacious depravity, imperdonabile in un sacerdote! Aldo should be rebuked! Defrocked! He's a shame of God, strutting around with such blasphemous semi-intellectual justifications for licenziosità! To imagine, he was wearing the collar of God and still had the brass neck to go publishing his handwritten erotic poetry, like the worst kind of pornographer! Observing the mystery and sacrament of the Eucharist, and then turning around to interview slutty 90s libertines and loose women to find out what they think about labial congress!
At first Aldo is content to let Tedesco wind himself up. There’s almost always a moment in a Tedesco tantrum where it’s possible to slip the knife in and drive him to abject incoherence.There’s a lot of intellectual muscle there, and sharp horns and trampling hooves, but if you let him roar long enough, he gets sloppy. Aldo’s better suited as a matador than a charging buck, angling to lock horns.
But as he listens to the froth, it dawns on him that this is nonsense. Tedesco is a modern man, for all his pretensions; he has a phone. This haranguing could have been an email, or a phone call, or more profitably an op-ed at whichever rag will still publish his sort of dreck.
He’s as angry as if he’d never spoken to Thomas, or to Vincent, for that matter. He’s more angry than he could possibly have been, after two days in Rome with almost no incitement from Aldo.
The hairs on Aldo's arms rise. If Tedesco’s here, it's for something that must be done in-person.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Aldino, he thinks, hearing the late Holy Father’s voice.
Aldo locks his computer and makes a little one-eighth revolution in his swivel chair. He sits back.
"Riveting as this review is, you should learn what it is you came here to learn, Patriarch," Aldo says. "Or you'll wonder for the rest of your life."
Tedesco’s expression is thunderous, but he’s stood stock still on Aldo’s carpet. Aldo gives him a beat, then tips up his chin and lifts his eyebrows.
Tedesco rounds Aldo’s desk in an instant and seizes the arms of Aldo’s excellent ergonomic chair. He glares, ferocious, and uses the chair to pull Aldo bodily away from his desk. When they're too close, he closes his eyes and smashes his face down against Aldo’s, teeth hard against his lips, bristly mustache and beard burning against Aldo’s face.
Aldo grabs his head with both hands to force him to be gentler. He grips Tedesco’s jaw, digging his fingers into his skin to hold him tight. Turning his head to let that handsome broken nose nudge alongside his own, Aldo parts his lips to fit Tedesco’s mouth to his. He takes a little sip of him, the tip of his tongue flicking against the tip of Goffredo’s, retreating when he feels the sharp cool inward dart of a surprised breath. He arches up to press closer, sucking at him instead, pulling the soft swell of Tedesco’s lower lip into his mouth and biting him, quite gently. Come and play.
Tedesco, bent over to pin Aldo to his chair, makes a helpless little noise and sets a hand on Aldo's shoulder. His thumb brushes Aldo's neck.
Aldo breaks the kiss with a hum.
“Been thinking about that for a while, have you?” Aldo asks. His voice is a low, unmistakable purr; an awful lack of diplomatic dignity on his part.
Tedesco swallows hard, then sneers. Attitudinal or not, he still presses his face against Aldo’s hands like a pussycat.
“È quello il tuo cosiddetto ‘penetrating kiss’?”
“Oh, so you read it cover to cover, didn’t you? But no. That was not a penetrating kiss.” Aldo licks his lips, making sure Goffredo watches him do it. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the difference…?”
“Of course I do!”
“Prove it.”
Tedesco does know what a penetrating kiss is. Breathless, Aldo locks their lips together as Goffredo makes a valiant effort at eating him alive. His head whirls at the thought that this is such a much better use for Tedesco’s mouth than talking. He sucks Goffredo’s tongue, tasting artificial cherry and squeezing silver curls between his fingers. He's getting a contact high. Maybe it's the nicotine. Maybe it's being kissed, hard and hot, by a good-looking man.
His own words come dancing back to him. 'That abyss which I fear, but that flame and that trembling that I expect.'
He wrote it long before he’d ever heard of Goffredo Tedesco. And yet. Here they are.
They are not so much interrupted by the bells ringing 9 o’clock as they start to surface, dizzy, at the sound. Aldo takes a deep breath, trying to remember what he’d been doing—what he’d been chasing before he found himself caught.
“If this was your idea of giving me kisses of peace to offend me,” Aldo murmurs against Goffredo’s mouth, nudging Tedesco with the tip of his nose so that their lips brush again and again. “Keep going.”
“Sapientone,” Goffredo grumbles. “I know who Lope de Vega is. You write one smutty book, and suddenly you think you are God’s expert to mankind.”
Aldo beams, feeling Tedesco peck the corner of his mouth. “But I am. You can quote me on it.”