𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐎𝐌

25| V E N T I-C I N Q U E

We continued telling each other stories. After all the stress these days I felt relieved. Armando always knew how to make things better.

"It took me a bit to learn how to aim, man, all the training I took, the hardest was aiming. I even slit someones chest instead of throat" This fucking dumbass. "Armando I know you're a dumbass no need to prove it"—"Alessandro, aiming used to be my weakness, now it's my power don't tempt me" he held up a fork, backwards, sigh. "Armando" I matched his tone "make sure you don't accidentally stab yourself with..that" I looked at the fork pointed to his chest with a raised brow.

He let out a loud laugh, and I mean loud that I slapped his mouth and held it shut. "Do you want to die. You haven't even reached your thirties" He laughed on low while clenching his eyes shut, I missed his presence more than I thought. My heart was softened by my return, our reunion, and such a change had come to pass, that I felt like one who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings had lasted many years.

After all those years apart, it felt great being around Armando. All the memories, all the hours spent together replayed into my head all over and over. He always stuck to my side no matter what.

There we often walked along the shore, listened to the sea, and thought as I had done in my youth, with amazement and horror, about the sad and senseless confusion of life, that one could love in vain, that people who meant well toward each other should work out their destinies separately, each one going his own inexplicable way, and how each would like to help and draw close to the other and yet was unable to do so, as in troubled meaningless dreams. One of my favorite nights when we were young replayed the most.

Armando dodged, I threw a punch at him. He turned around and froze as my fist met his face. "Ow, what!!?" he groaned in pain "I told you to dodge it" I snapped back "yes, yes you did, but you didn't give me time to process. I'm not a professional fighter you know" Armando screamed "Alessandro DODGE" I backed off and he fell on his ass. I quickly collapsed laughing and laid beside him.

Armando chuckled at my mention of a childhood memory of ours, that was one of a kind. Armando getting punched in the face "You should stop bullying me" he winded like a baby "Deal with it" I told him as I took a bite "but-" I cut him off "Stop being a pussy, yeah?" He groaned in annoyance before looking at me and sighed. "I guess you are what you ea-" he fake coughed and continued "I mean, yeah sure" I chuckled darkly and got back to eating. This bitch.

We finished breakfast with rambling about bullshit that happened to both of us. We're going to head to his family, a fifteen minutes drive. I barged into my room and got dressed quickly. I didn't even take my morning cold shower, the fucker decided to tell me last minute. I went downstairs, past venom's room. Not a single sound was coming from inside, I decided to stop being a creep and ran downstairs to where Armando was waiting.

He opened the door for me. "Armando i'm this close to shooting you" I told him, holing both my index finger and thumb so close to each other "i'm just being a gentleman, geez" Sigh. "Gentlemen my ass" We both got in with stupid smiles and I drove off. Armando wrote down the address to his families address and continued talking shit on our way there.

Finally my torture minutes with Armando ending, we arrived at his families house. It was a large dark brown mansion, with a thick wall surrounding it and trees around the garden along with fountains. The backyard was covered in roses, white roses. His mothers favorite I suppose, there were small pipes on the ground that sprayed water around the garden, it sprays every hour so the flowers are kept fresh and healthy, it was beautiful.

After showing me around the back-yard and front-yard, we walked inside. It's stunning. A shiny chandelier was hanging down, making the floor shine by its sun reflection. He showed me the ballroom, it was large, really big and fancy. There's a library attached to it, that stood behind two large dark brown doors. He showed me the kitchen, living room and guest rooms. Everything was on spot, absolutely beautiful.