Chapter Text
New Hampshire, early 00’s.
”Sugar,” she repeats his request, surprised, simultaneously making it sound like a pet name, and Oliver smiles, distractedly, his lecture starts in approximately five minutes, and the past couple of days, he’s been -- out of sorts. Not himself. Definitely not himself. He asks her if she’s ever been to Italy, the barista, and she shakes her head, no, to which Oliver nods, smiles again and says, “believe me, they all take it that way over there.” Then, he grabs his espresso to go and turns away, in a hurry. Constantly on his way, isn’t he?
It's as he’s mid-pivot that he spots him.
The curls first, always the curls with him. Oliver stops dead, staring at the other man’s turned back, he’s dressed in a t-shirt, awning-striped, completely out of fashion and besides; it’s fall. Not t-shirt weather, exactly, even at its mildest. He looks like he’s stepped directly out of the sun, off some private tennis court in Northern --
“Elio,” he says out loud, some young man on his left turning his head, also full of curls, yes, but a lighter brown, not anything like Elio’s hair looked, felt, and besides; he knows, does Oliver. It isn’t the right name. Elio won’t answer to it anyway.
However, in the second it takes him to consider whether to use the right name, his own, he gave it to him, Elio – striped shirt, denim shorts and all – simply gets up and vanishes. Not like people do, on their own two damn legs, but the way a dream fades just as you have managed to fold your fingers around it, and Oliver finds himself standing in the middle of the small campus square – two minutes late for his own lecture already – looking around for a spectre that might never have been there to begin with.
Except at the back of his mind, right? It’s a fantasy. A memory. The wasteland between those two concepts. Every time he blinks, there are stripes dancing, green and white, before his eyes and there are curls, bouncing, but they’re darker than anything you find on this side of the pond, more depth to them. Shaking his head, Oliver bins the espresso without as much as having given the sugar-coffee ratio a try, heading for the northern auditorium, beeline.
Elio said he was staying one night, he’s long gone. It’s been fifteen of them now. Nights. Years.
Oliver has counted.