The Fire Hazards of Chasing Perfection - 3. 3. Blue

Lucas Valverde had never counted himself lucky when it came to fathers.

For instance, he never met his biological dad.

He did know his biological mom, though the scarce memories he had of her were not particularly fun to revisit. He remembered her voice solely for one sentence she’d uttered sometime before he was taken away on his seventh birthday:

“All your dad ever did for you was get you in me and sign his name on your birth papers.”

Growing up, he would sometimes wonder what his birth father was like. He would imagine him as a fireman, or a pilot, or a rock star, or whatever daunting job was most impressive at the time, whatever cool thing he’d last seen on TV.

Later in life, however, Lucas’s interest diminished, replaced instead by the cold realization that his birth father was probably just a sad blackguard like his birth mother.

Lucas could’ve sought after him if he’d wanted. He had the name and the national identity number—that was enough to go a long way in the internet age—.

But he never did. Never even tried.

And he liked telling himself it was because he didn’t need it: everything he’d achieved in life, he’d achieved without his birth father by his side; so why would he want to seek him out now?

On odd late nights, an insidious little voice would slither into his conscious mind and answer that question with mordant candor.

Lucas hated that voice.

***

Lucas woke up alone.

The bed was an ocean of white satin sheets. A subtle breeze made its way through the door, making Lucas shiver.

He checked the time. Pascual had long gone off to work, and he should’ve been in class hours ago too. He left the phone on the nightstand again.

He scanned the room, bigger in grey daylight. His eyes lingered on the closet.

He knew he shouldn’t.

He slowly made his way over.

The disapproving tug of his superego was swiftly cast aside as his hands wandered over the different fabrics, each giving off a barely perceptible whiff of that familiar cologne upon being touched. He recognized many of Pascual’s dressing shirts and sweaters and suit jackets, and some of the leather belts and suede boots.

Almost without thinking about it, he grabbed a clean striped button-up shirt and put it on, cotton cold against his skin.

Pascual had worn this one for a congress at the Hilton Hotel just a few weeks ago, he recalled.

Then, Lucas’s attention went to the walk-in closet to the side, and soon he found himself surrounded by classy cocktail dresses, tweed coats and pumps in sensible shades.

Beatriz Di Falco was an art curator—though she’d been known to dabble in auctions from time to time—and her taste, conventional as it was elevated, definitely made that come across.

He looked around for a good while, his hands more restrained than they’d been with Pascual’s clothes. If asked, he could probably not have come up with an explanation for what exactly he was doing. He only knew there was no one around to stop him.

Suddenly, his eyes caught a familiar shiny little thing carelessly discarded on a low half-open drawer.

White gold and 950 silver. The watch was out of the box it’d come with, but it didn’t look like it’d been used.

That, Lucas touched. He took it in his hands and gave it a good look from up close.

Something about the sight of Pascual’s old Rolex and Beatriz’s precious new watch side by side on his left wrist made Lucas feel a sadness unlike anything he’d ever felt before. A gaping void installed deep within him, something so old and primal he wished he never had to tap into it ever again.

He left the watch right back where he’d found it.

With nothing but Pascual’s shirt—three sizes too big—and his underwear to cover him, Lucas went out to wander around the empty Di Falco family home, a cozy—if not obnoxiously ample—apartment with rows of picture windows along one of the main avenues of the city. His brief stride through the kitchen revealed he had not the slightest appetite, despite having eaten nothing since dinner the night before.

So he sat at the window sill and lit up a cigarette, watching the mid-morning traffic pass by the avenue. If he focused hard enough, he could hear the dissonant sounds of cars and hollers some ten storeys down below.

So hard did Lucas focus that he didn’t hear the noise of the opening door down the hall, nor the footsteps making their way into the living room.

“It would be great if you could put that out,” a tranquil voice jerked him away from his reveries. “Mom hates the stench of cigarette smoke.”

Startled, Lucas turned to find a young woman standing by the entrance, carrying with her a suitcase and an impossible number of bags.

“Delfina? I, eh, Pascual didn’t say you were coming–”

Her lips pursed. She had her Pascual’s eyes, blue of piercing ice.

“I’ll go put these away,” she said. Then, with that acute irony she’d undoubtedly inherited from her father, she added: “Isn’t it a bit too cold to be rocking boxer briefs?”

Lucas felt a warm discomfort travel up his neck, and he was momentarily reminded of that humiliating exchange in that first international private law class with Pascual a good year and a half ago.

This, however, was monumentally worse than that.

A few minutes and an appropriate wardrobe change later, Lucas rejoined Pascual’s eldest daughter at the kitchen.

He tried to find any clues as to what she was thinking, but in her eyes he found nothing avert, nothing at all. She kept herself busy brewing a pot of coffee, minding herself, as if instead of her dad’s half-dressed TA in her living room she’d found a plate out of place.

Lucas cleared his throat.

“Pascual didn’t say you were coming back to Buenos Aires this week.”

He realized, perhaps a little too late, that he’d already said that before.

“That’s because I didn’t tell him,” she said, her attention still posed on getting the old moka pot to work.

Lucas shifted his weight from one foot to another, discomfort bubbling at the pit of his stomach.

“Perhaps I should leave…”

“For how long have you been sleeping with my dad?”

There was no anger, nor sadness, nor outrage in her voice. It was as if she’d just asked what size shoes he wore. Lucas found himself thanking his earlier lack of appetite.

“I don’t–”

She raised an eyebrow at him, as if daring him to test her wit.

He looked down, to his fingers toying with the edges of his sleeves.

“A few months.”

It dawned on him she was the second person he’d ever told about Pascual. The first one had been the natural choice. The second, he bitterly thought, had never even been shortlisted for consideration.

The sound of the coffee pressing on the pot briefly filled the silence that formed between them. For some reason, even wearing his usual day clothes, he felt even colder than before.

Lucas asked: “Are you going to tell your mother?”

Delfina sighed in what was perhaps the first display of an emotion rationally associated with the magnitude of the situation.

“No,” she said, and for an instant, Lucas allowed himself to breathe normally. Just for an instant, though, as she followed up with: “But my dad will.”

Lucas had enough dignity within him not to beg, not to attempt to dissuade her. He’d seen the look in her eyes.

“I think you should go now,” she said. And he couldn’t help but agree.

***

Hugo Valverde was a terrible person.

Lucas tried to focus on the good things. It was a thankless mental exercise, digging through the years of morally questionable parenting to find the good parts of what was essentially a broken man. But there were some salvageable aspects to him.

He and Mariela had taken Jose and Lucas into their home.

He’d given them his name when the ones they’d brought with them felt too much like ashes on their mouths.

He’d made sure they always had a plate of food on their table and a roof over their heads.

And for as long as he was around, he never stopped pushing Lucas to do better.

“Do better.”

Lucas told himself that it was enough; he need not look much beyond that. Hugo was, for better or for worse, the father he’d ended up with. And, in the very least, he could say Hugo had actually wanted him, which was more than he could say about his biological father.

It did not matter that he disliked almost every other thing about Hugo. It did not matter that the taste of beer would forever make Lucas gag, or that these days Mariela would smile only once in a blue moon, or that no matter how much he excelled at everything he did, it would never feel like enough.

“Do better.”

Lucas tried. God, he tried. He'd spent his whole life trying.

So why did it never feel like it was enough?

***

Lucas spent the whole afternoon after that run-in with Delfina trying to reach Pascual, to no avail. The messages went unseen, the calls unattended.

His mind wandered to dark places, the darkness of which was not entirely devoid of rationale. He knew what would happen next. He knew, and yet he desperately wished he didn’t.

Lucas had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of lying to himself, but not even a master perjurer could escape the reality of what was unfolding before him.

He cried. First, in panicked heaves; the sort of ugly cry that was only expected—and then, still found unacceptable—of ill-behaved toddlers. Then, when his throat started feeling sore and his head began to hurt, he simply lay in bed, feeling the tickle of silent tears running down his face and pooling on the pillow.

He cried far too much for someone who hated crying as much as he did.

And when the texting, the calling, and the crying all proved ineffective, Lucas turned to the best next thing he had to cope with what was starting to feel like a crisis of magnanimous proportions.

Luckily for him, he’d remembered to do his groceries.

***

At some point he must’ve texted Jose.

At some point, she must’ve arrived and he must’ve tearfully told her everything.

He must’ve—the certainty wasn’t there, as he had no recollection of doing any of that—because she was now in his small kitchen, preparing mate as a kettle boiled on the stove.

“You’re a mess,” she said.

He didn’t refute that. He didn’t have it in him to lie to her.

“You need help,” she said, and Lucas didn’t know if she meant help for what was happening with Pascual or for the growing collection of empty bottles under the sink.

He didn’t refute that either, though his idea of help probably differed greatly from hers.

He mumbled: “I need him to text me back.”

Jose didn’t refute that. Not because she didn’t have it in her to tell him the truth, but because he was still too drunk for it to matter.

***

Lucas didn’t see Pascual until the next week at class. The texting and calling had continued up until that point, but by then he’d stopped expecting Pascual to answer. He simply kept doing it because it was all he could do, and because doing nothing hurt like nothing had ever hurt before.

Pascual didn’t meet his eyes as he entered that lecture hall—fashionably late as usual—, but Lucas never stopped looking forward to the front of the hall, waiting, waiting, waiting.

He was still waiting by the time the class ended.

“Hi.”

Only a few students remained in the room. Pascual made no indication of having heard him. His eyes were posed on a pile of papers on the desk.

“Can we talk?”

He looked up, and in those eyes Lucas found nothing but a desolate wasteland.

“Can we please talk?”

Pascual cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, fixed his tie.

“I believe… I believe we should stop seeing each other.”

And that hurt even more than all of the above.

***

Lucas should’ve stopped then.

It was the rational, adult thing to do.

He’d been rejected. He’d been the meddling third party, and he’d been stupid enough to get caught.

But how could he stop?

Could he?

He kept texting and calling, despite never getting an answer. He was sure Pascual had blocked his number. He would skip class to sit outside that old lecture hall on the first floor of the school building, listening to the echo of that familiar voice going over theories of extraterritorial jurisdiction he’d spent so many sleepless nights memorizing just a year before.

And, on bad nights, he’d find himself taking the bus line 17 that passed by the corner of that Napoleon III-style building in the Retiro district.

He would never get down. He’d never been drunk or desperate enough to do that. He simply watched from afar, letting the sting of those memories from the office fill him up with a venom that was not harmful enough to kill, but came excruciatingly close enough.

For eighteen months of his life, Lucas had breathed, eaten and slept for Pascual Di Falco. He’d given and given up everything for him.

Could anyone have expected him to simply let go?

Someone else might’ve, but he knew Pascual didn’t.

One night, having downed the one, two, three criminally cheap boxes of red wine, Lucas finally got drunk and desperate enough.

***

Pascual had never asked him to return the office key.

It’d probably been a mistake. The whole thing—even the alcohol couldn’t drown out the voice of reason in his head—felt like a mistake as well.

And yet, here he was, standing in the claustrophobic corridor outside the office door, his head and his heart engaged in a competition for which could pound harder inside him.

His hand trembled as he reached for the doorbell.

It’d felt wrong to simply barge in upstairs. It was funny, how his sense of right and wrong seemed to show up at the most random occasions.

“What on Earth are you doing here?”

His arms wrapped around Pascual the moment he opened the door. His tongue turned to stone in his mouth, unmovable. His eyes itched with blooming tears.

“Lucas, you can’t be here.”

He shook his head against Pascual’s chest, tightening his grip on the older man.

“Let me in?”

The two stayed put for a minute or two.

Then Pascual let him in.

Breathing in the familiar scent of old book musk and concentrated cigarette smoke felt like coming home, and Lucas realized, rather sadly, that no place had felt as much like home as this.

With heavy steps, he stumbled in and plopped down on the laid out futon.

Pascual threw his glasses on the desk with a deep sigh.

“I’ve been staying here. With everything going on at home, I…”

Lucas looked up, his vision blurry. Everything was spinning still.

“You’re shitfaced,” Pascual said.

Lucas made a prolonged humming noise in assent.

“Lay down with me.”

Pascual’s stare was a glacial gust on him.

“You really shouldn’t be here.”

“I missed you.”

“You…”

Lucas stood up with impossible balance, landing straight in Pascual’s arms.

“Can I kiss you?”

Pascual didn’t get a chance to answer.

He really had missed him. He’d missed the way each kiss ticked with the soft caress of Pascual’s luscious beard, the way their tongues felt like they’d been made to spar against each other.

“You reek of–”

“I misssssed you.”

Lucas reached for another kiss, but this time it landed on a turned cheek.

He whispered a plea in Pascual's ear. His hand travelled down and found its home on the tent that had formed in the older man’s pants.

“Lucas…”

Then came a succession of sounds that went as follows: dull, his knees on the parquet; metallic, the clinking of an unbuckling belt, deafening; the shuffle of jeans slipping down; wet, the slurp of his tongue around Pascual’s hard cock.

The hand on the back of his head seemed unsure of its purpose there; first it held him back, then it pushed him in. And Lucas was all too eager to oblige.

“Aah…”

He’d missed this too. This, too, felt like home.

The hand on the back of his head got too greedy. A string of spit fell on the ground as he gasped for air.

He looked up with unfocused eyes.

“Professor…”

Pascual picked him up from the ground. And they kissed again, and again, and again, and the whole world kept spinning even as Pascual made away with all of Lucas’s clothes and as they fell without grace on the futon in a mess of mingling limbs and pained moans.

“Professor…”

A languid sob died on his throat as he felt Pascual entering him again, for the first time in what had already been too long. Each forceful thrust he felt fuller, each heaving breath he came closer to being whole.

It hurt, but it hurt so good. He was doing well. This was how it was supposed to be.

His nails dug deep on Pascual’s back, his legs too weak to hold the lock.

“Papá…”

The warmth of Pascual’s come inside him was all too short-lived. Before he could react, the older man was dressing up again.

Lucas shivered in the sheets.

It’d started to rain.

Pascual said: “You've got to go.”

He held himself up on his elbows.

“I thought–”

“What did you think, Lucas?! For the love of God, you’re…”

Something about Pascual had changed, but Lucas couldn’t tell what it was. He looked worn down. He looked old. And when he spoke, his voice carried with it the cadence of defeat.

“You ruined my life.”

Lucas shook his head.

“But… I love you.”

It all happened so fast.

Namely, the crushing weight of Pascual’s whole body on him, the hands enclosing the width of his neck with deadly intent, Pascual’s face contorted into a deranged grimace above.

How many times had Pascual choked him before?

Many.

How many times had Pascual tried to kill him before?

“My wife won’t look me in the eyes,” the professor spat. “My daughter, my Delfina… She hates me. All because of you…”

Light-headed. Lucas felt light-headed.

His hands clawed instinctively at Pascual’s hold, his legs flailed hopelessly on the bed.

Blue, blue, blue. There was so much blue…

How strange was it, the similarity it had with being drunk.

He made a terrible noise as the air returned to him, followed by a flurry of coughing. None of it was enough.

Old book musk and cigarette smoke had never been meant to be breathable air.

Pascual spoke from somewhere outside his line of sight:

“Leave, now.”

The lingering buzz of last-year Malbec had died on Pascual’s hands. Lucas was sober enough to silently put his clothes back on.

It was still raining by the time he stepped out of the Napoleon III-style building.

It was also sometime close to midnight.

Lucas walked. One, two, five blocks under the gelid rain. He knew all too well how to return home, but going home was the last thing he wanted right then.

The remaining battery on his phone was spent trying to call Jose, but the voicemail was the only voice he heard on the other side of the line.

Home?

No, there must’ve been a mistake.

Lucas Valverde had no such thing.