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“What are you doing?”
“Taking you home.”
Aldo sighed and got into the car, but left the door open. Giulio slid in behind him, glancing at Aldo’s profile as his eyes shut. In the daylight, he still looked like shit. Giulio felt a spike of annoyance. Typical of Aldo’s Vatican circle to think of neglecting the body as some sort of virtue, and typical of Aldo to go along with it. He didn’t know much about the man they’d just elected, but Giulio hoped that he’d set a better tone over his pontificate. There was always work to do. That didn’t mean they had to kill the men who did it.
Aldo’s apartment hadn’t changed much since Giulio had last seen it, a hurried visit a year and a half ago that was barely enough time for a glass of wine. Papers were crammed haphazardly into overstuffed bookcases, most flat surfaces held at least one small figurine or curio, but it was clean in a way that suggested the housekeeper came through regularly. At least Aldo was allowing himself that.
“There. You’ve seen me home.”
Giulio ignored the waspish tone and went into the kitchen. After days of Nespresso and the cafeteria, he knew Aldo would want one of his own coffees. “And I’m staying,” he called over his shoulder as he inspected the refrigerator, noting what had been stocked and what he’d need.
From the living room, there was a sigh. “Are you.”
Giulio didn’t dignify that with a response, just started Aldo’s ridiculous pink coffee machine and watched as it began to drip. The kitchen, too, had been scrubbed clean, as well as given a veneer of organization, which suggested that Aldo was not using it much. Shaking his head, Giulio took two cups from the cabinet and filled them, adding sugar to one before taking them back into the living room.
He handed the un-sugared coffee to Aldo and sat down with his own. The furniture was the same as it had been for the past ten years, although the lamp in the corner was new, something vintage that he was sure had a story. He’d have to ask Aldo about it when he was back to himself.
After a few moments of silence, Aldo put his mug down on the coffee table with a click. “You don’t have to stay, you know.”
“I know,” Giulio replied.
“I’ll be shit company.”
“I’m not here to be entertained.”
Aldo pressed his lips together, eyes fixed on his tightly-clasped hands. Giulio watched the emotions play out on his clenched jaw. He wouldn’t leave regardless, but he wanted Aldo to accept his presence, to, as he so rarely did, not fight something that would do him good. Finally, Aldo sighed and fell back against the couch in acquiescence. “You’re such a bitch.”
Giulio shrugged. “So I’ve been told.”
-
Once, there were two priests. Young, in the way you could only be young in the Vatican, with an adult’s knowledge and a child’s sense of potential, ready to operate in the slim space of change that seemed to be opening up. One knew the world he was in, a son of a family just a little too notorious, who’d turned to the Church as a way to focus on what really mattered. One was freshly arrived, as brash as he was anxious, burning with the desire to say something and have someone else listen. Giulio propositioned Aldo in the library of the Gregorian and that was it. No one had been more ready for the paradoxical freedom of clerical Rome, and no one more prepared to introduce it.
(Giulio knew that had gained him the reputation of corrupting America’s golden boy, but he’d never shown Aldo anywhere he didn’t want to go.)
A formal attempt at romance fizzled out. Neither were equipped for the weight of it, the seriousness, not while there was so much to do. Not while Aldo was finding his voice in theology and Giulio in advocacy, neither quite fully trusted but interesting enough to be marked for big things, by some factions at least. It was a time of possibility. They welcomed the future.
Then Aldo’s mentor got himself elected Pope.
Then he went and died.
-
Give him a couple days, if just to catch up on his sleep. He’s been through it. Giulio was stopped from adding any more to his message by Aldo’s appearance, bleary in flannel trousers and an ABBA Museum T-shirt. He looked a bit better than the day before, although that could have been gentle lighting and wishful thinking.
“The coffee’s still fresh and there’s gado-gado in the refrigerator. Wasn’t sure when you’d be up.”
Aldo nodded and shuffled off, returning with a mug and a bowl. He poked the bowl’s contents with a fork as he sat down, squinting at it in concentration. “I don’t think I had tempeh.”
“It’s nearly noon, Aldo. I had plenty of time to go shopping.” Aldo’s kitchen had clearly been stocked on a standing order, either by the housekeeper or one of his assistants, and the only thing not fully shelf-stable was a tub of yogurt. Not out of the ordinary for Aldo, but somewhat depressing nonetheless. Giulio wondered when the last time he’d had dinner anywhere but the Vatican.
Aldo conceded the point with a nod and started to eat. “How long are you here?”
Giulio shrugged. “I’m dealing with Curia business. Could take a few weeks. Luca’s already prepared, he’ll call if he needs anything.”
“I’m hardly Curia business.”
“Aren’t you?”
Aldo flushed and looked down, nudging something around with his fork. “I don’t know if I can show my face there again, really.”
There. That would be the shape of Aldo’s crisis, at least for now. An old one, an old hurt. Aldo had always been an uneasy mixture of prideful and insecure, desperate to be recognized and terrified of judgement. To be measured so thoroughly and found wanting, Giulio knew that it cut his old friend deeply. Not fatally, never fatally, but enough.
“You’re still three years off a state pension,” Giulio said dryly, pleased when he got a scowl off Aldo for it.
“Well, I didn’t say I was resigning as a cardinal. I still get my stipend.” Aldo began to eat again, and Giulio smirked in satisfaction.
“So you’re becoming a hermit?”
Aldo sighed dramatically, dropping his head back against his chair and shutting his eyes. “That sounds so glorious, you have no idea.”
“That bad?”
“It…yeah, it has been. For a while, longer than we were letting on,” Aldo admitted, and sighed again, less dramatically, eyes still closed. “Paranoid. Frantic. The work, it’s always been crushing, but it felt like there was so much more to do and nothing was ever enough. And Tedesco sniping in the press, Joseph and Joshua practically measuring the place for new curtains…it’s been exhausting. I’m exhausted.”
Giulio had been struck when he arrived from Milan how drawn Aldo had looked, thin and pinched, heavy around the brow. He’d put it down to grief, a little to age, but Aldo hadn’t looked much better last year if Giulio really thought about it. Someone should have been taking care of him, but it was clear not enough people did. Aldo could be so difficult. But Giulio was here now. He squeezed Aldo’s knee gently. “Then rest.”
When Aldo lifted his head, his eyes were wet.
-
“I’m sorry I was such a bitch yesterday.”
Giulio blinked up from his book, almost asleep, lulled by Nina Simone in the background. “What?”
“Yesterday.” Aldo smiled sheepishly, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. “It’s been a fuck of a month and…well, that’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”
It was classically Aldo, the anger and the apology, taking it all on himself. It was also disarmingly sweet, in the way he could be, with his deeply earnest eyes and sincere tone, always embarrassed by kindness. Giulio huffed and waved his hand, dismissive. The least he could do, after everything, was make sure Aldo was all right. “No apologies.”
“I think I just wasn’t expecting you to stay.”
“Of course I am.” Giulio tried to shove away the guilt creeping up the back of his neck. He should have been here sooner, after the late Pope died. Come to Rome more. With the clarity of hindsight, there were so many things he could have done. When he’d taken over in Milan he thought he was coming home. And yet, this was the longest amount of time he’d spent with Aldo in years. That sat ill.
Aldo smiled fully. “I’m glad.”
-
Sex had always been part of their relationship, with the exception of that three-month period after they broke up. Distance and work had kept it an option less exercised in recent years, but an option it still was, and Giulio couldn’t help the shiver along his spine when Aldo asked if he wanted to come to bed.
Aldo had always been so handsome. Aldo was still handsome. He’d grown lean with age, sinewy in his well-muscled shoulders, slender in his waist. Deceptive, under those robes. He’d always been diligent about exercise, claiming it was for the way it calmed his mind, although Giulio knew there was also a lingering vanity (he’d always appreciated the way that Giulio touched his shoulders, his back, the way he watched as he slid off his clothes). He’d always drawn eyes. He’d always drawn Giulio’s.
There was a rhythm to this, to them, that Giulio sought as he pressed Aldo into the bed. Like skiing on the first trip of the season, recalling how to move and what to look for, the satisfying click of it becoming once again effortless. Giulio could drift his fingers across the soft skin of Aldo’s inner thigh and Aldo would gasp, flushing high on his cheekbones the way he did in his thirties, shaved-clean head making it all the more stark. If Giulio bit the right place on Aldo’s collarbone he arched, legs falling open. Always so sensitive, Aldo, so responsive, so Giulio could feel when everything fell into place.
Nothing rushed. Giulio had never liked to be frantic. There was no need, not when he knew, habit becoming instinct, just what he needed to do to have Aldo the way he wanted him. To have Aldo whimpering for him, his self-consciousness dropped, that quick brain shut off. The gratification of knowing that he was the one who did it. It was always better to make the feeling last, to make sure that Aldo was wrung out, scraped clean. It was what Aldo always needed.
Giulio liked to give Aldo what he needed.
-
On a plinth in Aldo’s bedroom there was a meter-tall statue of the Virgin Mary covered in disco mirrors. There was a light angled so that it would sparkle when wanted.
“Isn’t she too much?” Aldo giggled and flicked the switch, letting the reflected light fill the otherwise darkened room. “I found her at a market last year. I had to call Carles to help me carry it back, poor boy. It’s a good thing he’s used to it by now.”
Aldo’s personal assistant was a bright-eyed Catalan priest in his thirties who would run through walls for Aldo. Carrying one questionable statue would be an easy request. It amused Giulio anyway to picture the pair taking it through the streets of Rome, the delighted expression on Aldo’s face as he got to add a particularly prize specimen to his collection of just-shy-of-inappropriate Catholic kitsch. Giulio had missed that expression. He used to bring things back from his travels for Aldo, over the years figuring out the arbitrary but exacting standards he held for that kind of thing, always pleased at the way he managed to drop the seriousness from Aldo’s eyes with a well-chosen glowing saint or overly ornate rosary.
“Can’t you just imagine her in the Apostolic Palace? Maybe somewhere with gilded columns, you know, really set her off.”
“You’d have gone there?”
“Madonna, yes. Stay in Santa Marta, can you imagine?” Aldo shuddered dramatically. “I don’t know how he managed to live in that place, it’s utterly ghastly.” He quieted then, contemplative, drumming his fingers on Giulio’s chest even as he kept his eyes on the Mary. “I’m glad I’m not, though,” he finally said, softer. “Going.”
Giulio squeezed Aldo’s shoulder, letting the statement hang in the air. He’d made his peace with it before leaving Milan - that, if all went well, he’d no longer be meeting Aldo here, but somewhere much less private, far less peaceful. It was sad. It was necessary.
“Is that terrible? Doesn’t every Cardinal want to be Pope?” A well-worn phrase, one that Giulio suspected came from the previous Holy Father, who had tolerated Giulio as an ally but little more. Aldo was his project. So much for that.
“Do we?” Giulio asked, as delicate as he knew how.
“I…wanted to want it,” Aldo said carefully, every word deliberate instead of its usual rush. “I wanted…to be that kind of man, you know? To be what he thought I could be. To think of the good I could do, or maintaining his legacy, or anything but sheer, crushing terror at the thought of having to be Pope.”
Giulio tightened his grip on Aldo, holding him close. He knew all this. It was one of the reasons, maybe the main reason, he’d supported Aldo, pushed so hard for him. Giulio had grown up around power and the men who wanted it. There was his father and his behavior. There were his memories of bombings and assassinations and paranoia - the Years of Lead were such a poetic name for the dread that shaped Giulio’s youth. If someone had to be Pope, it was better to have someone who was afraid of power. Power made people do terrible things.
After all, he himself had been willing to sacrifice his sensitive, clever Aldo.
God had spared them both.
“I would have been horrible at it anyway.”
“Never,” Giulio said, low and firm. There were other reasons, of course. Giulio held them in his heart, but he’d never spoken them. He was not a demonstrative man. It had been a point of contention between them, once. Here, though, lit only by the fractured light of the mirrors, Aldo vibrant and vulnerable against him, he had to give the man what he needed. “You have the intelligence, the experience. You care about the things that matter. You’re the best of us, and you would have been brilliant.”
Aldo pressed his face to Giulio’s chest and released a long, shuddering breath. It was a long moment before he spoke again. “Thomas told me I lacked courage.”
Giulio curled his hand protectively over the back of Aldo’s head. Aldo, who hated leaving Rome, who was always more confident with a text he could lean on, who never fought for what he needed, much less wanted. No, Aldo was not the bravest of men. But that changed nothing to Giulio. “There are worse things,” he said, and meant it.
-
Aldo smiled at him over his mug of coffee, pale in the weak morning sun, and Giulio thought, yes, I’d like to do this forever.
For once, that didn’t scare him.
-
When Giulio went to the kitchen to contemplate lunch, he found Aldo sitting at the table, frowning at a spread of papers in front of him. He stepped behind him, pressing gently at Aldo’s spine so that he straightened with a sigh. “What are you up to?”
“Seeing if any of these notes make sense.” Aldo stretched, wincing slightly. Kitchen chairs weren’t good for the back at this age. “I had an outline, ten years ago.”
Ten years ago, or thereabouts, when the last conclave happened and the late Holy Father had been elevated. Aldo had been the man’s personal secretary, a privilege for a clever young priest he felt was wasted in the academy, keeping him out of Benedict’s purges and allowing him some time to spend on personal writing projects. After that, a swift rise through the ranks of the Secretariat of State to end up as Secretary himself. If one didn’t know Aldo, it would seem like the ideal career.
But Giulio did know Aldo, and he knew how much the man had struggled, adjusting from an academic career to a political one. The young Aldo Bellini was many things but Giulio had never thought of him as diplomatic, far too hotheaded, no sense of strategy. Aldo at thirty and forty liked to argue with his fellow theologians, to spend his afternoons locked in his study reading, to pick apart texts and weave them into something new. It was Giulio who’d been off to the Americas, southeast Asia, learning Church diplomacy and governance, hoping to temper the legacy he couldn’t leave behind with its discipline.
Aldo had adjusted, adapted, tightened his shoulders and put aside his books. Learned to play chess. When he and Giulio found the time to talk he’d claimed he was fine, rising to the challenge his mentor had set for him, finding the work “really quite interesting, in an anthropological sense.” He was so determined to prove he’d been worth the old man’s favor. There wasn’t time for any new projects. Or to finish old ones.
“Do they?” Giulio asked, leaning over to look at the papers, placing his hands on Aldo’s shoulders.
“Mmm. Maybe.” Aldo leaned back into the touch. “If it wasn’t a decade out of date, I might have something. Central argument isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever come up with.”
Giulio pressed his thumbs into the center of Aldo’s back, just below his neck, drawing out another sigh. “I’m sure you can update it. I’ve seen how you read.”
Aldo snorted in something that was a little too bitter to be amusement. “Not sure what the point would be. A book from a failure, ten years too late.”
Giulio pinched him.
“Sorry. Sorry.” Aldo rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s just. I talked to Pieter at the conclave and it was like…suddenly, I could breathe again. I knew what I was doing for once. But now that I look at all this, I don’t know. Maybe I’m fooling myself.”
Pieter Cardinal Vandroogenbroek was the one of Aldo’s friends Giulio liked the best, an arch, flamboyant Belgian theologian with a famously sharp tongue and little tolerance for political games. “What did Pieter say about it?”
“Gave me a reading list. Told me if I was willing to return to the fold, he’d wrangle a panel slot at the ESCT Congress next year for me.”
“Would he just humor you?” Giulio asked, rubbing Aldo’s shoulders gently.
“Pieter? No, not like that.” Aldo laughed softly. “But he always thought I was mad for staying at the Vatican. He’s been trying to get me to trade it in for the Gregorian for fifteen years, at least.”
Giulio had always thought that Pieter was uniquely sensible.
-
“I don’t get what the point of this is.” Giulio frowned, gesturing at the screen. “What are they even fighting about?”
“It’s about what Monica said in Palm Springs.”
“Okay.” Giulio could not remember what Monica said in Palm Springs, or which of the women was Monica. He was also not sure where Palm Springs was. He furrowed his brow, trying to make sense of it.
Aldo laughed and kissed him.
It was unexpected. They didn’t tend to kiss outside of the bedroom, and certainly not like this, casual while watching some inexplicable reality show. “What was that for?” Giulio asked, his voice a bit less steady than he wanted it to be.
“Surrendering to the inevitable,” Aldo replied, amused.
Giulio flushed and looked down. “Aldo…”
“Giulio.” Aldo took Giulio’s hand, waiting until he looked at him before continuing. “I think we should try again. Us, I mean. For real this time.”
Giulio’s breath caught at the idea. Dropping the shield that had protected them for so long. They’d tried a relationship, it hadn’t worked. It was a fact Giulio cradled, the excuse he made for himself when he felt overwhelmed. They weren’t right for each other, and it was for the best. It let Giulio keep his freedom all these years, build the life he’d built, spare his own coward’s heart. He couldn’t be the kind of person Aldo needed. You could forgive a friend for that.
But then, no one else seemed to know what Aldo needed.
And he had the life, and still wanted Aldo. Aldo, who’d been spared, maybe for a reason. Aldo, now something approaching free.
Giulio raised their clasped hands and kissed the back of Aldo’s, gently. “All right,” he said. “Let’s try again.”