May 2005
The night Milan loses the Champions League final, Kaká crashes Sheva's hotel room armed with several bottles of very expensive, very potent liquor, persuading Hernán to switch with the promise of multitudes of cute Brazilian girls the next time he's in Kaká's mother country. He doesn't need to persuaded, exactly, but Kaká likes to be polite even when he feels like the world has suddenly crushed him and refuses to get up.
They don't actually drink that much.
One, Kaká has the alcohol tolerance of a sixteen year old, and two, they both know they'll have interviews and press conferences and all kinds of shit to deal with tomorrow. Sheva has been around long enough to have learned that purging your misery one night only exponentially increases it the days after. All the windows are closed but the sound of Liverpool supporters and car horns and singing still comes through clearly, even five floors up - the red colors and noise and smoke, bloody and raw and vital, so different from Milan's red, makes Kaká's head hurt. As it is, the two of them sit shoulder to shoulder against the wall furthest from the windows. All the lights are off. Everything is very deliberately still. Kaká wants to say, I'm sorry, and, I don't know how this happened, and, This was supposed to be the best night of my life.
He doesn't.
They just sit, Kaká's thumb pressed lightly above a skipping vein in Sheva's wrist, counting his pulse, breathing almost as one, the room utterly dark but for the wrong, wrong redness that illuminates Sheva's profile in wavering light - the curve of his eyelashes looking down, his steady mouth. Later (Kaká's not sure how much later, it could be minutes or hours or even days; night has a funny way of stretching, compacting, twisting time to its own devices), Sheva undresses Kaká with heavy, almost clumsy hands, unlike him. Hesitant. They lie next to each other on the white sheets, joined only by a narrow strip of skin pressed together from hip to shoulder.
Sometime before Kaká falls asleep, Sheva takes his hand, presses those knuckles to his mouth softly, and says, Spiacente. Sono spiacente. For the first time that entire night, Kaká feels almost like crying.
When he wakes up, the first thing he sees is Sheva standing by the window, the dip at the small of his back a solemn, quiet thing. He gets up, curls his arms around that waist and breathes very, very carefully against the skin at the back of Sheva's neck, barely moving because, as he realizes then (looking at the strange cast of Sheva's eyes, how many miles they seem to be seeing), Sheva is the one thing he wants most, the one thing he will never, ever wholly have.
In Istanbul that morning, in an expensive hotel room in Asia Minor, Kaká gets the feeling for the first time that Sheva will not always be as he is in this moment. That he will instead always be on the verge of disappearing into the cold, smoky sky that first appeared twenty years ago and has been killing people ever since. You'll die if you don't breathe and you'll die if you do and what kind of fucking choice is that? He doesn't quite know it in those words, then, on the twenty sixth of May.
No, he'll know them later, but what he knows now is that in losing that final, some little piece of Sheva has buried itself away and vanished, escapism of the greatest proportion.
Kaká's always had a surprising amount of intuition.
*
May is when they lose, May is when the season ends, May is when Kaká cleans his flat, flies back to Brazil, and tries to forget for two months the soft pressure of Sheva's lips moving against his hand. This is simple like Sheva never is.
Buenos Aires, Brasília, São Paulo, Porto Alegre. Alligator meat, black beans, okra, mangoes that stain his shirt. Rain dripping warm and heavy down the eaves of his house, Caroline's hands around his waist in the mornings, Rodrigo playing football with him near the beach, the kind of football that carries no weight. These are familiar things, routine, and an easy comfort Kaká does not protest. He dreams about winning. He dreams about softer cities, ones not as viciously alive and wild around the edges, ones which have been cultured and crafted and carefully preserved for centuries. He dreams in Italian, Italy, the cold Milan moon a curve of light on a bare shoulder.
He dreams, still.
Note: Spiacente. Sono spiacente - Sorry, I'm sorry.