An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: Not Rated
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Additional Tags: prosey, Regret, idk man, POV First Person, Love Letters, In a way, I suck at tagging, Sad, I Was Drunk When I Wrote This, and so was Oliver
Summary:
In which, years later, Oliver faces the part of him that knew better and the part of him that was and still is utterly obsessed with Elio
A/N: this is built on the noncomittal headcanon of Oliver wearing glasses simply for the sake of metaphor and my own personal experience.
excerpt under the cut
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Love.
It would have been too soon to say. You must know this now. And if you know that, then you know saying it would have been the right thing to do, while also being the worst thing I could have ever done to you. I told you I loved you in a thousand different ways. You had to have known.
But to say it out loud? To take what we had and reduce it to a phrase people used as a pick-up line, with enough alcohol in their systems? To take a phrase my mother used with me while allowing my father to treat me as a problem to be corrected? No.
Our love wasn’t, “I love you, but I won’t protect you from the one thing you fear most.”
Our love is summer. Sunny ocean water, glittering over the waves. Sun-bleached manuscripts and transcriptions dotted with dew from the grass when we couldn’t stand another second not lying on separate blankets in the yard. Fresh rolls and apricot juice and Bach or Liszt or Elio. Elio, Elio, Elio.
Third in the New York 1988 series. After getting married in the Summer of 1989, Elio and Oliver continue their life together in New York with their young sons Simon and Noah.
New Chapter: Simon Turns Five
Simon turns five. And his dads are a little angsty, of course.
The Life We Needed All Along is third in the New York 1988 series. After getting married in the Summer of 1989, Elio and Oliver continue their life together in New York with their young sons Simon and Noah.
Pssst! In case you missed it, I added a bonus chapter to New York 1989. It takes place between that story and the new one.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Chapter 29
There’s a ten day hiatus before he’d picked up the book again, and just like back then, Elio’s knuckles blanch white on the aged cover.
There was a man today, in the square, he’d mentioned that Saturday evening, still rattled by the encounter. I was sitting by the fountain opposite the tabaccaio, and he walked right past me wearing khaki pants and a light blue shirt, reading a copy of the Herald Tribune. He was slightly shorter than you -
Even with a pair of off-white Converse All Stars giving him an extra boost.
- but his hair was the same shade of blond, and he held himself in that meticulously contained way you used to when we first met. When it was there in every word and action until suddenly it wasn’t. As if you’d stopped fearing you’d be judged for being your true self.
i just rewatched cmbyn after like two years of not touching that movie (it makes me sob every damn time) and it is taking everything in me not to write a newtmas cmbyn au
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
There’s a garden-variety postcard of the Lincoln Center on the following page, the breezy Wish you were here! just as unpalatable now as it was back then. He must’ve fumed at that image for a good five minutes when it first arrived in the mail, and it wasn’t until he saw Oliver’s one-liner that the urge to tear it apart finally faded.
