Spokes (30 page)

Whoa. Too much. The honorable, humble Luca he thought he knew, coming
that
close to doing the unforgiveable? And Rolf.... None of this made
sense. "Uh, Luca, why would you even think of doing something like that?"

Luca yanked his hair out of his face, though errant locks flew back in when he whirled away from Christopher. "Because he sabotaged me. Maybe not
on purpose, but sabotage all the same. You read my palmares back in Boulder. You said you knew I made national junior team. Made that team when
I was eighteen. But tried first when I was seventeen." He spun, facing Christopher now, his eyes wild. "Failed by three places. I
should have
won
that race, I could have started my career earlier, been top young rider two years earlier, could have been lieutenant for big name
and maybe taken his place, could have... My whole life would have changed."

"But he sabotaged you. Oh man, I thought you'd been hurt bad by someone... This is about as bad as it gets." How
could Rolf break his boyfriend's heart like that, even if he was only a teenaged dumbshit? If he weren't dead, Christopher would have
to kick his ass from here to Harelbeke. Stupid shit had left such a lasting mark on Luca, but how? No wonder he went straight to goodbye when Christopher
fucked up. He couldn't fix the past but maybe a hug would help now. He pushed his chair back enough to get up.

"Wasn't so bad when it was happening," Luca whispered toward the floor, the fire gone. "Was wonderful."

"Really? He was screwing over your chances?" Christopher leaped the rest of the way out of his chair. He ached to hit something. Rolf
was out of reach and the walls were rock. "And it was wonderful?" What the fuck? How could this even be?

"Was wonderful," Luca repeated. "Then. Next day, not so wonderful. Couldn't ride fast enough. Couldn't
stay on the saddle. I finished too far back to make team."

Eighty kilometers on bike tomorrow.
It was always about eighty or a hundred kilometers on a bike, wasn't it?
I like, but...
"Well damn it all to
hell!" Christopher burst out. "The one thing you never even consider doing, and you did it. With him." Damn it, damn it, damn
it, he'd take his chances with his knuckles on the granite.

"We didn't plan for that. We... played. Touched... It happened, and, Christopher, I don't want to tell you
details, but wonderful happened, and stop didn't. And he was sorry, as sorry as he could be about wonderful, but I lost that race and all the
chances for that year." A tear dripped down Luca's cheek. Christopher couldn't lift his untrustworthy hand to wipe
it--he still wanted to hit. But not Luca.

"So I wanted him to know what riding with wrong feeling in his body was like. A little, but enough to make the difference between fast and fast
enough to win." Another tear dripped down. "But I didn't, because it's different to change a bike in secret. It was
wrong, so I stopped, but his brother never believed I didn't do it, and Rolf only half-believed me."

And then all these years later.... "Did the directeur sportif know how awkward it was going to be to have you guys on the same team, and
Rolf being your lieutenant?" Getting up to see your old lover every morning, never quite trusting, and maybe the attraction still being
there... Shit. Christopher half-fell into his chair.

"Little awkward, but Christopher, we got over it. Mostly got over it a long time ago. We had success on different teams, couldn't
change the past. Coming to Antano-Clark was great career move for us both. We really were friends again." Luca pulled out another chair to sit
close enough to take one of Christopher's hands.

He wanted to jerk away, to hide his hand far out of reach, but he held still. Luca cradled Christopher's hand with both of his. Christopher tried
to relax, but his fist stayed closed.

"And that's all we were. All I was. Those days were gone ten years ago. If I wanted him, he would have come back. Would have been easy.
Easier than you. Rolf gave me shit about you, didn't like you. Was jealous of you." Luca rubbed his thumbs against
Christopher's wrist. He softened under the pressure and let his fingers unclench. "No interest--he wasn't you. But
he was a friend, and important in my life. And I rode away and left him to die." Luca raised Christopher's hand to press against his
cheek. "Can't forgive myself for that."

Oh fuck. Maybe the past was the past, except it dragged into the present so damned much. Christopher turned his hand to cup Luca's cheek.
"You didn't hear when Michel said what happened. He wasn't dying when you left."

Luca flung himself out of the chair, his eyes wide. "I don't understand."

Christopher scrubbed his face to buy enough time to explain. "He was down, but he was talking. He had bone sticking out of his shoulder, but if
he'd stayed still he might have lived. Some big veins go under the collarbone." He rose. If he was standing he could make sure Luca saw
what he meant. He drew two fingers along his own ridge of bone. "Michel said Rolf was talking while he was down, and he was just broken. But he
tried to get up and then 'there was so much blood.' The sharp bone sawed through a big vein when he moved. And he bled out.
I'm sorry, that's horrible, but it's not like you left a dying man. You left a man who should have lived."

"He... should have lived." Luca breathed the words. "But he didn't."

"No. He didn't." Christopher pulled Luca close enough to touch foreheads. "I'm sorry he didn't.
But you didn't abandon a dying man." He massaged the back of Luca's neck and willed him to believe what fit the facts.

"You're sure?"Luca peered into Christopher's face, his eyes wide and blue as the lake outside.

"I'm not a doctor, but I know some anatomy, and it all fits. He must have been hurting, but you said he even made a joke."
Men busy bleeding to death didn't crack funnies. "The butcher's son knows what happens when a big vein gets cut."

Luca slipped his hands around Christopher's waist. The heat of his body felt like hope: hope for healing, hope for the future, hope for something
more than tears on his shoulder. "He said I should go, that I didn't ride off a cliff."

"Even if you had ridden off a cliff, he'd expect you to keep going." Christopher slipped fingers into Luca's hair,
massaging the back of his head. Trying to chase away the pain. "You're as strong a man as Johan Bruyneel. And almost as
crazy." Bruyneel would understand exactly why Luca completed Mont Zoncolan.

"Maybe." Luca pressed his face into the curve of Christopher's neck. "I finished the stage."

"It's a good kind of crazy." Rubbing his face into Luca's curls felt like another kind of hope. "You
don't give up."
Don
'
t give up on me. Don
'
t give up on your career.
"Rolf would be kind of pissed if you didn't get back on your bike."

Christopher had an armful of nothing, and Luca stood three feet away, breathing fire. "The bike, the bike, it's always about the bike!
Fuck the bike!" He swung his fists in the air--Christopher flinched in spite of the gap. "Everything in my life has been about
the bike! School, travel, friends! What I eat, when I eat it. All about the bike! Who I can have sex with. How I can have sex. All about the fucking bike!
Everything in my life is about the fucking bike, for years, since I was child. Enough! I hate the fucking bike!"

He turned and ran, through the glass door to the back garden where the pool glittered in the sun. Clothing fluttered in his wake--Luca was nude
before he hit the water. Christopher chased after, ready to wrestle a madman to the surface, but Luca dove in smoothly, surging half the length of the pool
in two strokes. His hair streamed behind him, straight and half down his back, his arms and legs tan, his body pale where his clothing stopped the sun, and
mottled all over with the blue/green bruises from the crash. All the scars that traced his career rippled under the water, blurring him. He flipped and
came back the other way, turning again when he ran out of pool. Back and forth, back and forth, like a lion in too small a cage.

But hey, Luca was outdoors under the cerulean sky. First time in days.

He swam hard for over an hour, his strokes smooth and efficient. Maybe he would make a good triathlete, if he wanted to change, but... one third
of the events needed the bike. He came to a halt at last, his arms crossed on the lip of the pool, his hair dripping down, and the ends drifting in the
slosh of the water. He rested his head on his arms for a long time, and when he finally lifted it, Christopher decided towel service was in order. Luca
accepted his hand to rise from the water, droplets shedding from his skin and hair.

Christopher pulled Luca's wet form against his own body, soaking his clothing into tissue and wrapping the big striped towel around him from the
back. Luca settled against him, his heart rate nearly normal from resting in the water, but thumping hard enough to feel through two sets of ribs.
Christopher rubbed terry-cloth over Luca's back and squeezed water from his hair, curling already once the weight of the moisture no longer
pulled it down. "How many of those thin linen towels do you need to dry your hair?"

"One, if I twist it four times." He seemed content to stay, and Christopher would have remained with him until the sun went down.

The ends of Luca's hair were dry when he spoke again. "Why do you put up with me?"

Easy to answer, harder to answer without spooking him again. Telling half was still telling all. "Because I think I love you."

"Even after I yell and say goodbye?" The trembling in his frame might have been from the breeze pulling his heat through the wet towel.

"It's not a switch, Luca." Christopher tipped Luca's head back enough to brush a quick kiss across his lips.
"I can't turn it off just like that."

"That goodbye was the most awful word I ever said."

"
Ciao
means hello or goodbye, doesn't it?" Christopher dared to ask. "Whichever you want it to mean at the
time."

"Means 'hello' right now." Luca pressed more tightly against him. "
Ciao
, Christopher."

***

Blessing Damiano and his housekeeper while foraging in the freezer, Christopher found more frozen dishes whose names he had to ask Luca. "More
variety in Italian cooking than spaghetti and pizza, Christopher." Luca chose a pot of something he called
risotto alla pitocca
to heat.
"It's better fresh."

If it was better fresh, Christopher might find himself whimpering on the floor. Who
knew
such things could be done with chicken and rice? Luca took
seconds, instead of leaving all but three bites on his plate. He even spoke during dinner, of nothing important, but responses, even if they were only a
few words, made an excellent change from his silence and half-hearted toying with food that didn't deserve such treatment. His shoulders drooped,
but his kilometers in the pool accounted for it, and he started yawning even before Christopher stowed the leftovers in the fridge. Maybe Luca would want
them as a midnight snack.

Christopher slid Luca into bed and followed even though he wasn't really tired. If Luca needed his shoulder for a pillow, his shoulder better be
there.

Christopher woke feeling strangely alone. He patted for Luca and found only wrinkled sheets. A dim light shone from downstairs. He followed it to the
source. Luca sat at the kitchen table, the laptop open.

A video clip from the Giro played. Cyclists heaved themselves up from a pile of men and machines to ride away in ones and twos. The fallen rose, until only
turquoise and black riders remained on the ground. Luca twisted to sitting, pulling his leg from beneath his bike. Rolf stayed down but turned to
talk--his lips moved but the sound didn't carry to the camera. The team car pulled up behind them to disgorge Michel and a mechanic, who
ran to lift Luca to his feet and right his bike. Michel knelt at Rolf's side, running his hands over Rolf's torso, searching for
damages. Rolf spoke--he might not have quipped about cliffs in English. Luca mounted, and with his assistant's pushing, started after
the escaped peloton. The moto followed Luca. Of course. The leader.

The scene dissolved to an aerial shot. The helicopter zoomed in to Rolf, Michel, the mechanic, and two additional men who had arrived in a pink Giro car.
The race doctor? They hovered around Rolf, staying on the clean pavement. A pool of red grew, flowing downhill, away from the man who lay unmoving under
their efforts.

With one hand on Luca's shoulder, Christopher confiscated the mouse to minimize the window. "How many times have you played
it?" He'd already seen this clip and didn't need to rewind to the beginning to see the black and tan dog dart out into the
road.

"I have to be sure..."

Luca might watch a hundred times, but he wouldn't see more than this. "He talked to you as you left. Michel told you what happened. You
didn't ride away from a dying man."

"Some of the press say I did."

"You were there. Michel was there. They weren't. And some of them might be trying to provoke you into responding." Maybe a
shoulder massage would relax him into listening and not just hurting. "You haven't talked to the press officially."

"I can't."

Digging his thumbs into the rock-hard tension in Luca's shoulders, Christopher reminded him, "You already have. You talked to me. All
you have to do is make it official and I could quote you."

"You said you didn't come here as journo."

"I didn't, but the whole racing world already knows me as someone who's interfered in your business enough to make you trust
me. It makes sense you'd talk to me, after the FIC incident." He tried to work the tension out of Luca's back.

"You can talk some more, and I can leave out the parts that aren't anyone's business and put in the parts the world needs to
know. Then your side is out there. You've probably said most of what I'd need to ask, anyway."

"Most. Not all." Luca felt like an oak plank under his hands.