FATHER AND SON: Chapter 5: The Choice

The following weeks passed faster than I expected.

At first I thought it would be the opposite. I thought every day would be harder, living with that strange mix in my head. Roberto on one side. Apolo on the other. Two completely different forces pulling at me, and both forces under the same roof.

But something curious happened. The obsession with Apolo began to loosen. It didn’t disappear, not by a long shot. But it became less urgent. As if my head had found something else to lean on.

Roberto.

For about a month and a half, Apolo and I crossed paths several times. Just two or three. And as usual, it felt like a tug-of-war where he always seemed to be two steps ahead.

“Fuck,” Apolo said, lowering the window one of those times. “You’re getting bigger every day, Hulki.”

He was driving an old gray Opel his father had bought him, according to him, so he could go to work. It was second-hand, but Apolo drove it as if it were a Ferrari.

I took out one earbud.

“Hi, Apolo.”

He smiled that crooked smile of his, the one that always seemed to be hiding something. His eyes dropped for a second to my sweat-soaked shirt.

“Are you training for Mister Universe, or are you just doing it to impress me?”

“Always so egocentric,” I replied.

He burst out laughing.

“That’s what everyone says who sneaks into my work to see me naked.”

He rested one arm on the window and drove off before I could answer. That was always how it was. He appeared. He provoked me. And he disappeared.

With Roberto, however, it was different from the beginning.

After the date on the mountain, we started seeing each other quite often. Two or three times a week, almost always in brief moments, stolen from the day.

Sometimes only twenty minutes. But that seemed enough to me.

One afternoon he wrote to me as I was leaving university.

“I’m nearby. Shall I pick you up for a quick coffee?”

I accepted. When I got to the sidewalk where he said he’d be, the SUV was parked with the lights off.

I got in.

“Hi, handsome,” he said, leaning in to give me a kiss. “I only have half an hour,” he said. “I have a meeting afterward.”

“I’ll try to let you talk,” I said, kissing him again.

We went to a small café near campus. We sat at a table in the back.

“Tell me how your studies are going,” he said.

That was something that surprised me about Roberto. He listened. I told him about a paper I had to hand in, about an annoying professor, about how tired I’d been lately.

“Normal,” he said. “You’re doing a lot of things at once.”

“Like what?”

He looked at me with a half smile.

“Training like crazy. Studying. And seeing me.”

“That last one isn’t tiring.”

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