Breakout

"I'm sure he just wanted to share the good news with someone," Lagosa was saying on the TV. "We believe he has distant relatives living in Venice, and we are trying to contact them now. He'll be playing solo violin in concert at the Teatro alla Scala on Saturday two weeks hence in Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I'm sure he'll . . ."

"Turn it off," I said, and Luca did.

"So, is that him?"

"Yes, I guess it is," I answered.

"And he's been here those two days? In your bed? Your cock inside him?"

"Yes."

"So, you have to tell someone? You have to tell them what?—that you've had him here for two days, in your bed, fucking him? He's eighteen? He's a count?"

"He was here willingly. He wanted it all as much as I did. He initiated most of it. Eighteen is legal. You're eighteen, and I fuck you."

"I let you fuck me—for money. I'm a male whore and you're a john. You crawl to me to get it inside me," Luca said. He wasn't helping.

"Let me think. We might as well do the painting session this afternoon. Let me think what to tell them. Maybe it will all work out before we're done. He left here. Maybe he's going back and he'll have his own story to tell them."

"And maybe, as you Americans say, pigs fly," Luca said, and laughed. "Maybe after being fucked by you, he'll want to give his kingdom and fame up and come live in your bed with you." He laughed again.

But I could have thought of worse choices Nick could make.

Luca didn't know all I had to consider. From what Nick had said while he was talking in circles, he left because some big-dicked guy named Giovanni was fucking him—and not exactly by the teenager's choice. The symphony conductor interviewed on TV was named Giovanni. That probably wasn't a coincidence. "Maybe I should try finding him myself after you've posed for the painting. And maybe it will have resolved itself by then."

There wasn't just the posing for the painting, of course. There also was the fuck afterward, with Luca on his back on the blue velvet coverlet, his legs spread and raised, his fingernails digging into my shoulder blades, and his head arched over the end of the studio couch, his eyes flashing and his mouth blowing bubbles in a perpetual yawn, while I covered him, mounted him, penetrated him, and fucked him deep and hard.

I'd been right, though, and pigs were flying that day. When we were done and back in the kitchen, turning on the TV, there was video of a smiling eighteen-year-old Conte Nicolo della Mirandola, back on the front steps of the La Scala Theater, home of the Milan Symphony on Scala Square, nestled into the embrace of Maestro Giovanni Lagosa. He was explaining how he had started out to visit his distant relatives in Venice but had been lost for two days. And, yes, being chosen as the violin soloist for the symphony was a great honor, he said, and he was looking forward to the concert of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in two weeks' time.

And that, I assumed, was that. Just a pleasant little fling for both of us, although I have to admit that he was spacey most of the time he was with me. I did feel a twinge of guilt that maybe I had been taken advantage of him in a crisis.

I took Luca to my bed that night and banged the hell out of him. Luca was a fickle young man, though. One day of me was enough for him, money or no money. He was off to do his own free-spirit self-pimping and we knew we wouldn't couple again until I wanted to do another painting of him or he needed money. One day of Luca was usually enough for me as well. He was a cocky little son of a gun.

* * * *

I was fooling myself on the thought that it had just been a fling with Nick—well, with who I now knew was the Conte Nicolo della Mirandola, the last of a long hereditary line of nobles from the time of the Italian prince states. I looked him up. The rest of his family was gone and, though there was money and a villa or two with miles and miles of vineyards still there, he was a ward of the Italian state until he gained his inheritance rights, which had been set by his family as twenty-one. Because of his musical talent, the state had turned him over to the organization managing the Milan Symphony Orchestra. He was in residence with the symphony's conductor, Lagosa, and had begun his musical studies at the University of Milan, although the Net references to him said he was a child prodigy in violin and would be teaching students at the university as well as studying there. So, he had thus been turned over to Giovanni Lagosa, who apparently had trained the young conte to serve under men—or Giovanni, at least—as well as play the violin. There was no hint that any distant relatives still lived—in Venice or anywhere else.

I had found other divine aspects to him. I wasn't the least bit surprised he was a prodigy; he had shown himself to be quite precocious in matters of the flesh and adult in experience. Over the next week Nick's sweetness and special talents kept popping up in my mind and kicking me in the ass. I'd let him ago. I'd let Luca and Giovanni snatch him from me.

And then a week after Nick left my apartment, I let him go again. I was painting in the studio when I heard the door to my apartment rattle on the lock and then knocking. After a few minutes the knocking came again, a little louder. But then it stopped. I wasn't in the mood for Luca, so I didn't answer the door. I did, though, go into the living room and over to a window that overlooked the entrance of the building four flights down. I got there in time to see Nick's departing figure.

What I'd once thought was over but had since realized wasn't over for me maybe . . . just maybe . . . wasn't over for Nick either. I was painting in the nude, so there was no hope of catching him before he was around one of the corners. Nevertheless, I threw on trousers, a T-shirt, and a pair of loafers and went out. I went the only place I thought he might go for me to find him—to the Piazza San Babila fountain.

But he wasn't there.

The Saturday after that, I paid for an expensive seat in the orchestra ring for the Milan Symphony Orchestra's performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Scala Theater. When Nicolo della Mirandola stepped forward and started to play the "Summer" Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor on the violin, I was as transported and mesmerized as everyone else was. I was the only one in the section, however, who stood up from my seat when he was finishing. There were gasps all around me and hands pulling at me to bring me back into my seat. The symphony wasn't over. But I didn't let them pull me down until I was sure that Nick had seen me standing there, rising above the audience, giving him a plaintive, worshipful gaze.

After the performance, while everyone else was leaving the hall, I remained in my seat. That's where Nick found me.

"Quick, we need to go out of the front of the theater while we can move with the crowd," he said, standing by me and tugging on my sleeve.

"But you'll be going home with the conductor, won't you? He'll had a car waiting for you by the stage door, won't he?" I asked.

"Yes, he will," he said. "That's why we have to go out the front. I think it's time for me to visit some nonexistent relatives in Venice for a couple of days over near the Piazza San Babila Fountain. I have Giovanni primed to cover for me now—if he doesn't want a scandal. We have an understanding now. I came to see you the other day, but you didn't answer your door."

"I'll give you a key." Which was more than I intended to do for Luca. Maybe my days of begging and paying for the sex were over.