Drawn to You

by Jerry Cole

  “Jesus,” Max whispered.

  “You shouldn’t avoid the things you want the most,” Mario murmured. “It will poison you from the inside, out. You must know that.”

  Max stepped forward, his hands falling to his side. From there, Mario could see the red indents, where his teeth had sunk into Max’s lips. Why did it already seem like he’d known Max Everett for years? Max reached for Mario’s waistband, snapping at it, then shrugging it lower, over his thighs. Immediately, Mario’s cock sprung up, red-hot and thick, pointing directly into Max’s leg. Max let out a guttural noise, showing how much he wanted this. How much he ached for it. He fell to his knees, forcing Mario back on the bed. Mario brought his legs on either side of Max’s head, dropping his naked feet on his shoulders. His cock pointed toward Max’s mouth. Mario thought of a million little things he might say to any other lover. Come on, eat up. Or, What are you waiting for. But Max Everett, no. He couldn’t say those words to someone like him.

  “You’re—you’re perfect…” Max said. He stretched his chin forward, wrapping his lips around the edge of Mario’s cock. Mario’s back arched. His toes latched onto Max’s shoulders, gripping them, as he fell back, deeper, on the bed sheets. Max’s tongue wrapped around and around the thick end of Mario’s cock, drawing his cock deeper into his mouth and then, finally, into the top of his throat. Mario allowed a loud moan to escape his throat. It echoed from the top of the boat ceiling, through the open windows and out across the canal. That family across the water from him, they surely heard. The baker, who lived on the fourth floor; he’d heard, too. Though, Mario didn’t give a shit.

  Max sucked Mario’s cock beautifully, dropping deeper on his knees like a dutiful man, and allowing Mario’s fingers to trace across his head, beneath the curls. When Max dropped his head back, making his lips pop off of Mario’s cock, his eyes were heavy with need, with want. Mario knew nothing else to do but undress him, quickly, moving his fingers across his shoulder blades and tossing his shirt to the floor. God, he was hungry for this man. When he ripped his pants open, a button popped to the floor. Then, another. Mario marveled at the expensive pants, which lay, splayed out at the bottom of his boat floor.

  “You should hang those up,” he said, his voice heavy with want. He was joking, but he realized that the joke didn’t really land; he was too pent-up, too, oddly, emotional.

  “Fuck that,” Max said, so flippantly. He shot his leg out, kicking the pants further across the room. He’d become an animal, uninhibited. He brought his body over the top of Mario’s younger one, thinner one—his bulkier and more muscled, aging, with a few white and gray hairs across his chest. His cock ticked against Mario’s, between his legs, and he peered down at their two members touching, their juices slipping against one another. This made him impossibly hard.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Mario asked, marveling at how this man had seemed like a plaything to him, only an hour before. Now, their roles had switched. He was the younger one. The less dominant. Certainly, the less famous.

  Max gave him a half smile and flipped Mario over, so that his back was splayed out and shining before him. Reaching for the side table, Max brought up a vial of lube, squeezed a small amount onto the tip of his finger, and laced it around Mario’s asshole. Mario allowed a small gasp to escape his lips. He reached for his cock, gripping it and bringing the skin forward. His brain seemed to explode, with Max’s fingers deepening into his ass.

  “Deeper. Deeper. I love feeling you so far in there…” Mario muttered.

  Suddenly, Max brought Mario’s ass cheeks apart, wide, creating a cavern. The tip of Max’s cock found the end of Mario’s asshole, and began to slip through it—creating such an intense, tight feeling. Mario sprung up on his hands, and Max lifted up to his knees. He pounded into him, thrusting so that his asscheeks were tight, his thighs pushing against the back of Mario’s. Max reached forward, drawing Mario’s curls back away from his ears. “Jesus, you’re so tight. You feel so fucking good,” he whispered. “You feel so fucking good.”

  Max’s thrusting alternated, it was forceful, then tender, then ramped up again—becoming wild. One of his hands found Mario’s cock, removing Mario’s hand so that he could have full control. Mario gasped, feeling sweat ooze down every orifice of his body, between the muscles of his chest and down his calves and between his toes. The boat beneath them rocked wildly. He imagined it beginning to sink, stirring their bodies into the bottom of the sea. Making love, into infinity down there. It was like an old Italian poem about love. One you read over and over again, until you had tears in your eyes and you didn’t know how to stop.

  When Mario did finally cum, his body throttled forward, his cum screaming across the sheets and against Max’s leg. Max had been jerking him off, gazing into his eyes from just beside him as Mario’s face contorted and scrunched, showing the wide range of emotions. Max gazed at the cum, smeared across the sheets, and then reached for the dribble along his leg. He sucked the cum off his fingers, allowing his tongue to flick down over his knuckles.

  “You’re destroying me, doing that,” Mario sighed. “I don’t think I have the energy to go again.”

  “You have to,” Max said, teasing him. “Who knows when I’ll have you alone again?”

  Mario propped up on his elbow, shifting closer so that his chest was just an inch away from Max’s. Their chest hair stirred together, both so black and curled. “You’re an artist. Don’t you know that you can make up your life however you want it to be? You can do whatever you want. Stay here. Go.” He shrugged. “It’s all yours to create.”

  Max’s eyes shadowed for a moment. “You say that like it’s the only thing that’s ever been true. It’s never that simple, you know? Although, I’m sure it’s easier to convince yourself of that. You’ve never been married. Had a kid. Had to make those huge, horrible decisions that suddenly land you with a life you never thought you really wanted…”

  “What was the plan, then?” Mario asked. He remembered, in an off-hand way, that he had marveled at the fact that Max Everett, acclaimed architect, had such a “stable life,” back in Chicago. That he’d apparently given up, so swiftly. At nineteen years old.

  “Come to Europe. Explore the world as an unknown man,” Max said. He turned toward the window, slipping a finger along the pane. “Maybe be a little bit more like you.”

  Mario felt his heart sink slightly. Become like him? Despite his frenetic attitude, his life on a boat, the painter professor at his father’s old art institute, he was truly lost. He hadn’t a single thing to latch his life to. In fact, the boat was a metaphor, constantly rocking him, making him feel unstable. Unlike the rest of the population, who seemed able to latch themselves to whoever was around, to love freely, to feel.

  “Maybe there’s no right answer,” Mario heard himself whisper, dropping his head into the fluff of the pillow. “Maybe neither of us got it right, and we’re doomed to be faced with our decisions. Always forced to look over the fence, wishing we had what the other had.”

  Max’s face grew slack. It seemed almost too filled with emotion, heavy with feeling. He reached for Mario, bringing his lips around his bottom one and snaking a finger along the edge of his jawline. The kiss meant, shut up. The kiss meant, it’s all getting to be too heavy. However, the kiss also meant, damn, we’ve latched onto an understanding, together. One we haven’t been able to verbalize to other people. Not before. And maybe, never again.

  Chapter Seven

  Max

  Mario splayed out on the sheets of the bed, just his calves tucked beneath the tossed white linens. The boat rocked beneath them, creaking against the edge of the canal. Through the foggy windows, Max spotted another bleary fall day in Venice; an impossible, daydreamy city, its church peaks tipping into the clouds. In the distance, a bell blared once, twice, up to eight times. It was morning, a few hours before Christine’s first studio hour.

  Max’s body ached. Naked, sticky with sweat and cum, he swept hi
s leg out onto the wooden boards of the boat, walking in a hunched motion toward the doorway. He stood in the haze of the light, watching as Italians filtered past—their fingers snapping, their hair whipping behind them, caught in the frenetic autumn breeze. Everyone seemed pulsing between one realty and the next; their cozy worlds of home, before their long hours stretched out before them at work. They sucked at espressos, wrapped their teeth around croissants and tore. At the doorway, Max was completely naked, almost like a statue, built up by a long-lost Italian artist. He liked imagining that Mario was that artist. That he’d molded him.

  He marveled at it, at this deep, life-affirming fatigue in his belly. He hadn’t felt it after fucking anyone before. This assertion that whatever they’d created together had been bigger than themselves. Always, he’d assumed that fucking was just that; a physical encounter, almost a game. Even with Amanda, it had come from a place of banter, of play. Never had it been so violent, so charged. Never had it demanded so much of his mind.

  Max reached for his pants, tugging them over his thighs and snapping them into place around his flat stomach. He remembered Mario’s lips on that stomach, ducking deeper toward his cock. It had seemed so necessary, that motion. More fluid and biological than anything else Max had experienced.

  With his pants on, he perched at the edge of Mario’s bed, enjoying the calm before the storm. Loving the peace between things. It was akin to being inside one of the empty rooms of a building he’d designed, inhaling the weight of the space. He’d crafted that space, and he was the only one to experience it, at least in that moment. It was his gift to himself.

  Mario’s eyelashes batted open. He gasped, then stretched his arms above his head—in an almost childlike way. Always, Max had felt that Europeans were much more in-tune with their child-like personas. That they were more in-tune with their hunger pangs, their sleeping cues, their desires. Something within Max had forced him to shadow his internal clock. To not pay attention to his needs, all the time. It had been the reason he’d been allowed, internally, to marry and sleep beside a woman for the previous nineteen years.

  Nineteen years of his life, when he could have had so much more.

  “Good morning,” Mario whispered, his voice a bit more accented than normal. Perhaps he had to warm up to English. He rolled onto his side, so that his cock slid onto the sheets. Max watched the light shine across his thighs, showing the depth of his Italian leg hair. He grumbled to himself, sliding his fingers through his mustache.

  Normally, Max would have retreated, flung himself through the door and strutted off to wherever he was meant to go next. Here, with Mario stretched out before him, he felt youthful again. He allowed himself to ease into the space in front of Mario, to place his lips before him. Mario crept closer, allowing his mustache to flicker across Max’s. His eyes remained, burning into Max’s. It was like no time had passed, between the very late night and the morning—sleep had been only a necessary, biological pause, to allow them space to fuck, and fuck, and fuck.

  When it was over, when sweat boiled in the space in the center of Max’s chest, Mario drew his tongue out between his lips and licked that sweat, inhaling it. He gave Max an almost mischievous grin, then hopped up from his bed. Max watched his tight legs as the danced toward the dresser. He hunted in the wardrobe for cigarette papers, for tobacco, and flicked together a thin cigarette for himself. He popped it in his mouth, leaning naked against the wardrobe.

  “Max Everett. In my very own kingdom,” he said, his voice gravelly and almost animal-like. “I like seeing you there. All vulnerable, on my sheets.”

  Vulnerable wasn’t a word anyone had ever used to describe Max. His lips parted in protest, but he didn’t have the words to respond, no words that seemed heavy enough to convince Mario otherwise. In some ways, he’d given Mario far more of himself than he’d given anyone. So perhaps Mario was the only one who had the proper vocabulary to speak about him. Despite English being his second language, perhaps he was the only one with the proper poetry…

  “I better be going,” Mario said, stabbing his half-smoked cigarette into a small basin beside him. He tucked his arms into a large black shirt, beginning to button it. The edge of the bottom splayed around his cock and waist, curving along the tops of his hips.

  Max had the instinct to raise his finger, to declare that Mario couldn’t leave the boat. That to leave would betray everything they’d built together, that night. He’d had one-night stands—Jesus, an infinite amount. This hadn’t been that. Had it?

  “What should I tell Christine?” Max heard himself blurt, allowing his feet to hang off the edge of the bed.

  Mario dipped his legs into his pants. He gave Max a small shrug, then ducked his head outside the boat. He would return to the school unwashed, still smelling of Max and his musk. Max drew his nails across his chest. His face scrunched with pain. He wanted to create that pain in his own body. Why? To distract himself from what was in front of him? To make him painfully aware of where he was?

  “I don’t care what you tell her. I’m not going to tell her a thing,” Mario said. “We’re all just humans here, Max. We have to be selfish. Take what we want. I know you know that better than most.”

  Mario sped down the road, not bothering to lock the boat behind him. Max remained at the edge of the bed, his knees far apart, his feet flat on the ground. He remembered having Mario’s mouth around the tips of his toes, his tongue curling around them. What a delicate thing for a man to do to another man, he thought. Such a contrast to the other, darker moments. The hand, wrapped a bit too tight around his neck. The bite across his ear…

  By the time Max returned back to the hotel, Christine had already left. Her bed was unmade; the bedside table was cluttered with food packages and half-drunk bottles of wine. Max charged his now-dead cell phone and waited, watching as it purred with several of her messages. “Where the hell are you, Dad?” “Whatever. I hope you’re not murdered.” “Seriously? Okay, I’m ordering another bottle.”

  Max texted his daughter, his thumbs heavy. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep and I just… walked the streets.”

  “All night?” she responded back, with an emoji that Max couldn’t quite understand. “Jesus. You’re worse than my friends.”

  “I know. Still got it, I guess,” Max responded. He stared through the window, his body awash with a sudden jolt of feeling. He’d long read poems and novels about love, about what it meant to meet “the one.” There was a pit in the stomach, a kind of certainty. He’d read once that it was like seeing your own face, reflected back to you in the face of another. Actually, as he stood there, he couldn’t remember exactly what Mario looked like. Could only remember the sounds he’d made when he’d climaxed. Could only remember what it felt to dream in peace, beside someone who was so entirely right.

  Max showered, hating the feeling of Mario dripping off of him, and donned one of his business suits. The site of the hotel he’d designed was just a few miles away—outside of the more “touristy” areas of Venice, closer to another town (where it was less of an inconvenience to build). He made his face stony, angular, and set out into the world, buying an espresso along the way. When he reached the site, which was a few weeks behind according to the head builder, he busied himself with meetings—analyzing the structure, the fine lines of the arches and the ways in which the building “worked,” when surrounded by the scheme of Venice. Several of the builders recognized him, tipped their worker’s hats toward him in allegiance. He was their architect, their god.

  The head builder, a man named Carter from England, spread out the blueprint on a wide table near the water. Max sipped his third espresso of the day, trying and failing to peer beyond the black dots of his fatigued eyes. Carter drew a line along the areas they’d completed thus far, explained the portion that had given them pause due to the ground beneath. “We keep finding old architecture, and then we have to call in a historian,” Carter offered, shrugging. “I know you’ve built in Italy be
fore. It’s my first time. Not always sure how to attack this scheduling backlog…”

  Max lifted the blueprint, spinning it toward him. His head spun as he blinked from the blueprint, toward the growing building before him. “I can stay and help you, if you want,” he heard himself say, his voice almost a growl.

  Carter bucked up, tilting his head. He was an up and coming architect, himself, and Max knew that working alongside an architect of Max’s caliber would give Carter a bump up in the industry. Beads of sweat curled down Carter’s cheeks, edging along the line of his collar. “What?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m not really needed in Chicago at this time,” Max said. “My daughter’s here in Venice, studying. I’m looking for a kind of vacation for myself. You see…” He trailed off, trying to draw out the truth, make it sound more dramatic, rather than hopeful. “My wife and I, we’re ending things.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Carter said, spewing the words he was meant to say. The only dialogue that you were ever supposed to use. “I really am.”

  “It’s fine. It’s necessary,” Max said. “With that, I’ll be staying here. Overseeing this building. As you can see from the plans, it’s a bit more elaborate than my more recent hotels…”

  “It harkens back to the older style, it’s true,” Carter said. He sounded romantic, gazing into a daydream of, perhaps, what he thought architecture was supposed to be.

  “That was purposeful. Maybe it’s a passion project. I don’t know,” Max said, sanding his palms across his thighs. “Regardless, it feels right to stay. It feels right to be here. For now.”

  He hadn’t expected this to happen. Hadn’t expected that a one-night stand might lead him to demand more time to look at himself, to analyze his life, and to do it from this hiding space in Venice. If he could stitch together a better relationship with Christine, in the meantime, then maybe it was all worth it. Maybe, it meant something.