Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

Had he noticed I was ready not just to yield but to mold into his body?

Why had I swooned? And could it happen so easily—just let him touch me somewhere and I’d totally go limp and will-less? Was this what people meant by butter melting?

Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that

All this I could have denied. And believed my denials.

But I was too self-conscious, like someone trying to feel natural while walking about naked in a locker room only to end up aroused by his own nakedness.

Nothing he did or said was unpremeditated. He saw through everybody, but he saw through them precisely because the first thing he looked for in people was the very thing he had seen in himself and may not have wished others to see.

How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking? How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself?

his ability to intuit things in exactly the way I myself might have intuited them.

So he smiled to confess he’d been caught but also to show he was a good enough sport to own up to it and still enjoy going to the movies together. The whole thing thrilled me.

he too had found something to smile about in me—namely, the shrewd, devious, guilty pleasure I derived in finding so many imperceptible affinities between us.

That evening, as we biked to the movie theater, I was—and I didn’t care to hide it—riding on air.

So, with so much insight, would he not have noticed the meaning behind my abrupt shrinking away from his hand? Not notice that I’d leaned into his grip? Not know that I didn’t want him to let go of me? Not sense that when he started massaging me, my inability to relax was my last refuge, my last defense, my last pretense, that I had by no means resisted, that mine was fake resistance, that I was incapable of resisting and would never want to resist, no matter what he did or asked me to do?

it was simply so as not to show that I couldn’t gather sufficient breath to speak, that if I so much as let out a sound it might be to utter a desperate confession or a sob—

I was still under the illusion that, barring what I’d read in books, inferred from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with men and women. I had wanted other men my age before and had slept with women.

the words I’d been rehearsing for days now, Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.

Here was someone who lacked for nothing. I couldn’t understand this feeling. I envied him.

How I loved the way he repeated what I myself had just repeated. It made me think of a caress, or of a gesture, which happens to be totally accidental the first time but becomes intentional the second time and more so yet the third.

How I loved it when he broke the silence between us to say something—anything—or to ask what I thought about X, or had I ever heard of Y? Nobody in our household ever asked my opinion about anything.

“You didn’t have to,” I finally said. He let just enough time go by for me to register that his answer might not be casual or carefree. “I wanted to.” He wanted to, I thought. I wanted to, I imagined him repeating—kind, complaisant, effusive, as he was when the mood would suddenly strike him.

Omg just kiss

To me those hours spent at that round wooden table in our garden with the large umbrella imperfectly shading my papers, the chinking of our iced lemonades, the sound of the not-too-distant surf gently lapping the giant rocks below, and in the background, from some neighboring house, the muffled crackle of the hit parade medley on perpetual replay—all these are forever impressed on those mornings when all I prayed for was for time to stop. Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I’m asking for very little, and I swear I’ll ask for nothing more.

I would have been satisfied and asked for nothing else than if he’d bent down and picked up the dignity I could so effortlessly have thrown at his feet.

What I may have wanted instead, from the moment he stepped out of the cab to our farewell in Rome, was what all humans ask of one another, what makes life livable. It would have to come from him first. Then possibly from me.

There is a law somewhere that says that when one person is thoroughly smitten with the other, the other must unavoidably be smitten as well. Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona.

Later! always left a sharp aftertaste to what until then may have been a warm, heart-to-heart moment. Later! didn’t close things neatly or allow them to trail off. It slammed them shut.

But Later! was also a way of avoiding saying goodbye, of making light of all goodbyes. You said Later! not to mean farewell but to say you’d be back in no time.

No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

liked him, I had to say I liked him too. I was like men who openly declare other men irresistibly handsome the better to conceal that they’re aching to embrace them.

Don’t let him be someone else when he’s away. Don’t let him be someone I’ve never seen before. Don’t let him have a life other than the life I know he has with us, with me. Don’t let me lose him. I knew I had no hold on him, nothing to offer, nothing to lure him by. I was nothing. Just a kid.

Not knowing whether he’d show up at the dinner table was torture. But bearable. Not daring to ask whether he’d be there was the real ordeal.

I wanted him dead too, so that if I couldn’t stop thinking about him and worrying about when would be the next time I’d see him, at least his death would put an end to it.

Then it hit me that I could have killed myself instead, or hurt myself badly enough and let him know why I’d done it. If I hurt my face, I’d want him to look at me and wonder why, why might anyone do this to himself, until, years and years later—yes, Later!—he’d finally piece the puzzle together and beat his head against the wall.

What I didn’t realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.

But when my heart jolted the next morning when I saw him at our usual spot in the garden, I knew that wishing them my best and longing for recovery had nothing to do with what I still wanted from him. Did his heart jolt when he saw me walk into a room?

Did he ignore me the way I ignored him that morning: on purpose, to draw me out, to protect himself, to show I was nothing to him? Or was he oblivious, the way sometimes the most perceptive individuals fail to pick up the most obvious cues because they’re simply not paying attention, not tempted, not interested?

Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven. To be happy like this maybe wasn’t so difficult after all. All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.

When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.

It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.

Try again later were the last words I’d spoken to myself every night when I’d sworn to do something to bring Oliver closer to me. Try again later meant, I haven’t the courage now. Things weren’t ready just yet. Where I’d find the will and the courage to try again later I didn’t know.

A more canny observer, however, would have considered it a lead-in to an entirely different truth: push open the door at your own peril—believe me, you don’t want to hear this. Maybe you should go away now, while there’s still time.

Better break down now, I thought, than live another day juggling all of my implausible resolutions to try again later. No, better he should never know. I could live with that. I could always, always live with that. It didn’t even surprise me to see how easy it was to accept.

And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth.

You can always talk to me. I was your age once, my father used to say. The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me, I’ve lived and suffered through all of them, and more than once—some I’ve never gotten over and others I’m as ignorant about as you are today, yet I know almost every bend, every toll-booth, every chamber in the human heart.

Just say something, just touch me, Oliver. Look at me long enough and watch the tears well in my eyes. Knock at my door at night and see if I haven’t already left it ajar for you. Walk inside. There’s always room in my bed.

They had always said I got too easily attached to people. This summer, though, I finally realized what they meant by being too easily attached.

Tell Oliver. There is no one else to tell, Oliver, so I’m afraid it’s going to have to be you…

One day he asks her point-blank: “Is it better to speak or die?” I’d never even have the courage to ask such a question.

Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own,

This was my moment in heaven and, young as I was, I knew it wouldn’t last and that I should at least enjoy it for what it was rather than ruin it with my oft-cranked resolution to firm up our friendship or take it to another plane.

They’d remind me of him, of this day, I thought, realizing that in less than a month he’d be totally gone, without a trace. This was probably the first time I allowed myself to count down his remaining days in B.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” I looked at him. This was my moment. I could seize it or I could lose it, but either way I knew I would never live it down.