elio perlman was your best friend. that was indesputable, considering that he had only really taken to crema because of your insistence that it was paradise. with the summer sun casting a golden glow and the saccharine aroma of apricots intermingling with the subtler undertones of jasmine, it indeed seemed a veritable eden.

this summer, however, you found yourself enduring a profound emotional neglect, exacerbated by the inescapable reality that you were irrevocably in love with elio.

it was stupid, perhaps, young love. you were mourning a relationship you never had, while he was out with marzia and pursuing the 24-year-old american, oliver, who was shadowing samuel perlman's research over the holidays.

your disaproval of this development had to fester in your mind in isolation, considering no one else knew of it, and frankly, probably would have let it pass if they did.

bullshit at its finest.

elio, who you had hoped would fall off his bike and break his very pretty face, finally spoke to you one afternoon, which was what lead you here, to a quiet stroll through annella's apricot grove with your best friend.

"you know how i mentioned i was going to laghetto dei riflessi with oliver, right?" elio was practically aglow, his demenor buzzing with a giddiness you had rarely seen. "well, we kissed there, on the grass."

if he harbored any reservations about what had occured, he certainly did not show it. he was simply a boy gushing about a rather dismaying obsession.

"mio dio it was good." he exhaled, running a hand over his face, a beam quirking his rosy lips, his brown curls awry from his mother's earlier fussing. to you, he was a painting, a beautiful creation wrought of blood, sweat and tears. it didn't distract you from the topic, however: bloody fucking oliver.

"i've never experienced like that, what i felt. i thought i'd died then and there."