After Tony Stevens
This is a journal entry from Andreas Cantacuzino after the departure of Tony Stevens. Is Andreas being totally honest with himself or does he have an eye to what his son Niko believes and his own posterity?
There’s a rhythm to how men hide themselves in Greece. It starts young, before you even know why you’re hiding. You learn it when uncle Panagiotis speaks of a bachelor cousin with too many silk shirts. In the narrowed eyes of your priest when you make confession about masturbation. In the long pauses between the things your mother says when you’re young and the things she really means.
They say embarrassment is best described as the gap between what is said to exist and what actually exists and most men live in that state of embarrassment or rather the fear of public embarrassment.
I grew up in Thessaloniki, not the modern sprawl of tourists and branded coffee, but the ancestral City. My mother was born into wealth, the type acquired not just through inheritance but through resolve. She ran shipping lines like chessboards, built alliances with men twice her size and half her mind. She taught me to speak clearly, dress impeccably, and never reveal my intentions. She had no patience for softness, but I loved her anyway.
My father was an aristocrat and if you go back far enough they were from the ancient Phanar district of Constantinople, a Cantacuzino by blood, from the Greek branch. Not that anyone speaks of it much anymore. The princely title is purely decorative now under the Hellenic Republic. We keep it neatly folded in resumes, and stitched into wedding announcements, not daily conversation. Growing up, I always felt the shadow of names, the expectation to behave like something historic. I was taught that our family survived revolutions, regimes, exile, and rumor. What was a personal little secret compared to that family story?
Secrets grow heavy over time.
Of course, I married. It didn’t last. I stayed friendly with the mother of my son, and I thank the gods for her grace, because I have a son. Nikandros who I worship.
Niko is the one part of me I didn’t ruin. He’s nineteen now, bright, curious, sensitive in ways I wasn’t allowed to be. He asks questions I don’t always answer, and sometimes he looks at me with those wide eyes like he’s trying to translate something I haven’t said aloud. I adore him. I protect him from my occasional sadness, even if that means lying, sometimes.
Which brings me to Tony Stevens.
I brought him to Antipaxos expecting change, or at least a rupture with an old life. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could step out of the marble halls of my legacy and slip into something human. Into the sheets with Tony. Into a sexual truth I never let anyone touch. I wanted Tony to take the lead and to top me. There I said it, or, I wrote it which is much the same.
He was perfect, maddeningly so. Short, strong, beautiful in ways that weren’t artificial. His smile cut through decades of performance. He was promiscuous, had no shame, no need to hide, and I envied that. I wanted him to undo me. That’s the word I keep coming back to: undo, but it didn’t work.
He was kind. He was gracious, but he wasn’t for me. Not in the way I needed. I watched his eyes drift toward deference when I wanted a challenge. I waited for him to make a move on me I never trained myself to make. We stood under the shower in the cabana that afternoon, the sea behind us, the drinks sweating quietly, and I realized, with astonishing clarity, that I hadn’t prepared for rejection.
When he hesitated and then played for time and eventually said he needed to leave, I nodded like a CEO signing off a report. I watched him walk naked across the marble, the same marble I chose in person from Apuan Alps of Carrara, Italy. His footsteps vanished instantly, as if they were never supposed to last. Yeah, despite all the fine words we shared I felt like I’d fucked up, big time.
I sent instructions that night to have Tony placed permanently in one of my mother’s original firms in Piraeus. It wasn’t guilt. It was grace. I reward truth. Even when it stings. What if that fool wouldn’t top me, he deserved something for his honesty.
What does Tony think of me now? He might joke about me, the closeted Greek tycoon with a great swimming pool and a crucifix up his ass. Maybe, he remembers me in silence, the same way I remember him.
I wanted to tell him the truth, not about being gay, that part feels tired now, and like a coming out story. About how exhausting it is to maintain a life sculpted in other people’s expectations. How even wealth, even legacy, can feel like a prison when you’ve painted the walls yourself. I couldn’t say it then, and I doubt I’ll ever say it in person.
I’m writing it here, because some truths deserve form. Even if they arrive too late, and someday, if Nikandros ever reads this, I hope he understands that loving someone isn’t weak. Hiding is weak.
Nikandros is nineteen now. Nineteen. The same age Tony Stevens was when he stepped barefoot onto Antipaxos and across my marble poolside and subsequently vanished from my life before dusk. Different men, different roles, different heartbreaks.
I saw Niko grow up in fragments. Summer visits. Winter dinners at the house in Kolonaki. The occasional weekend sailing trip when I could convince both his mother and my schedule to cooperate. I was there, but always at a distance, always carefully framed by time limits and diplomatic pleasantries.
We did the typical things absentee rich fathers do with their sons. Expensive gestures masquerading as bonding. I took him to ski in the Dolomites once. Bought him a watch he’d never wear but couldn’t refuse. Gave him lectures over fresh seafood and tried to make them sound like wisdom. I thought I was being different. More available. More open. The truth is, I repeated every quiet mistake my own father made.
My father was formal, princely in posture and opinion. A Cantacuzino through and through. Greek nobility wrapped in Hellenic pride. He believed in legacy more than laughter. My father took me to Athos once, just once, when I was thirteen. We stayed in Vatopedi. Monks in black robes gliding through silence like ghosts. Incense curling through dim corridors. Byzantine hymns echoing through stone chapels that felt older than sin itself.
I remember my father's hand on my shoulder while a monk whispered something about obedience. That trip was the closest we ever got. No hugs. No heart-to-hearts. Just a shared reverence for heritage. Maybe that’s why I wanted so badly to take Niko there myself. I wanted to rewrite the script. To build something holy between us, even if neither of us believed enough to make it last.
Life moved faster than plans, and he turned nineteen and there were rumors. One of my cousins, always eager to stir the pot, mentioned at a family event that a French countess Niko was close to had disappeared for six months and re-emerged with a son who looked “suspiciously Mediterranean.”
The countess, apparently, had spent a summer in Syros and Niko had posted a photo of her near Ermoupoli around the same time.
Could be nonsense. Could be true. I don’t push. That’s another habit I inherited. If it’s true, and Niko has a son, then the boy is mine too, in a way. My blood. My curse. My chance at redemption.
I thought, absurdly, of my grandmother. That stern-eyed woman who could recite Psalms and recite your sins with equal clarity. She believed in Orthodox baptism like the sun believes in rising. “A child outside the church,” she used to say, “is like a boat without a keel.” I scoffed at her then. Now? I find myself muttering the same thing under my breath. Tribal instincts, etched deeper than reason.
I haven’t spoken to Niko about the child. I doubt he’d tell me if I asked. He’s polite, well-mannered, but guarded. Like me. He speaks with diplomacy. Laughs in moderation. The same performance, just more contemporary.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of father I was to him. Not abusive, no. Not cruel. Distant? Like a constellation, bright, ever-present, impossible to touch. I told myself I was teaching him strength. I may have just been teaching him silence.
I loved him fiercely. I still do. More than any empire I’ve built, more than any man I’ve ever wanted, more than Tony Stevens. My son is the only person who’s ever made me feel complete without complication. I’ve barely told him so.
We’re supposed to be different from our fathers. Often we’re just echoes, same chords, played with newer instruments.
If I ever get the chance to take him to Athos, I will. Not for the religion. Not for the monks. For the walk along the coastline at sunrise, where the sea hums with forgiveness. For the moments between liturgy, when a father and son can speak with their eyes and pretend that’s enough, and if there’s a child? A grandson?
I’d like him to be raised Orthodox. I laugh even as I write this. I sound like my grandmother all over again. She’d be thrilled. She’d probably make a cross out of olive wood and place it above the crib.
It’s more than ritual. It’s about belonging. Continuity. The tribal machinery that keeps us rooted when the world shifts too fast. I don’t care for catechism. But I care for identity. I want the boy, if he exists, to know where he comes from. To know what the Cantacuzino name means, beyond marble and titles and polite press releases.
I failed with Niko in some ways. Maybe not fully but enough to feel it. If I have another chance with his son, maybe I’ll try differently. Maybe I’ll tell him the truth I never told his father. Love doesn’t weaken you.
Sometimes the bravest thing a man can do is stop performing for the audience, for the mob.
Then Niko appeared, without calling, without warning, as if time had sent him directly. Nikandros stepped onto the terrace with the confidence of someone who knew this land was his by birthright. He moved like the wind belonged to him, tall and tanned from summer tennis and yacht races against seasoned crews who always underestimated the young man until they saw him work a sail like muscle memory.
I froze for a moment before rising to embrace him, my arms instinctively reaching for my son, no longer a boy. I held my son tightly, longer than usual, surprised by the strength returned in the hug. There was warmth, yes, but also the unmistakable ease of a son who didn’t flinch from tenderness. That mattered more than words.
It had been months. Years, really, if one counted emotional time instead of calendars. I had always tried to be a better father than my own, offering exotic trips and fine education, making space for my son in boardrooms and properties.
In truth, those were distances wrapped in velvet. Tennis matches in Monte Carlo, ski weekends in Austria, brief lunches on discreet hotel terraces, they were moments that looked like connection from the outside but rarely touched the core.
I looked at Nikandros and saw everything, beauty, promise, vulnerability too well hidden. The boy had inherited my best traits and my worst instincts. Sharp eyes. Controlled expression.
He was magnetic without trying, born into history, molded by discretion. The Cantacuzino name suited him. Soon, that name, along with the full weight of the family fortune, would be his. More wealth than the Romanovs ever possessed. More influence than I had ever dared admit publicly.
I wanted so much for Niko. Not just success or visibility, those were already inevitable but dignity, good partnership, someone whose lineage would match and fortify the legacy. An aristocrat, perhaps. Someone who understood the odd loneliness of inherited grandeur.
I told myself it was practical, not snobbish. Bloodline was identity. Stability. Continuity,and yet, a part of him laughed at this, the echo of my grandmother whispering about Orthodox rituals and noble marriages. I was becoming her, despite earlier attempts to rebel.
The storms had cleared in the Ionian Sea but the coastline still looked unsettled. The sea down below the villa shimmered strangely, as if it hadn’t made peace with whatever had torn through the atmosphere out east. Clouds gathered in the far distance, thin like silk, but ominous in their formation.
The weather wasn’t right. It hadn’t been for months. There were whispers of climatic shifts, global unpredictabilities, but I didn’t understand the science. All I knew was the sky felt off.
On the beach, my son sat beside me, and nothing felt wrong.
Nikandros moved with that slow confidence of someone whose body had grown into its full command, hours on tennis courts and yacht decks had left him sculpted, powerful, serene. He was barefoot now, toes digging absentmindedly into warm sand, a towel slung loosely across his shoulders. He spoke easily, told me not to worry about the storms. He said they were above us, not within us and I believed him.
Watching him like this, sunlit and quiet, I felt my love for him pulse through me like something holy. I adored that boy, more than anything I’d ever built. There was always an ache beneath that devotion. A yearning for something I could never ask of him. Not just connection, but closeness, bondedness beyond blood. I wanted to be known completely. Held as I truly was, not as the father, not as the tycoon, not as the Cantacuzino, but as Andreas.
That kind of intimacy can’t be found in family. It lives elsewhere and I knew I was so damned horny after Tony walked away.
Later that evening, as we returned to the villa from a walk, Niko had someone waiting. A friend from university. Greek, raised in North London. Quiet. Striking in his own way, but modest about it. His name was Thanos Galatis, I knew him well as a boy, though not personally and here he was as old as Niko.
His father, Manolis, was our old pool keeper in mother’s house back in Glyfada. Good man. Honest. The kind that never asked for more than his wage but gave more than we deserved.
Thanos had studied hard, won scholarships, and ended up somewhere near Niko at school. Their bond was genuine, brotherly, uncomplicated. When I saw him stepping out from the shade of the bougainvillea, duffel in hand, I felt something settle in me. Something I hadn’t expected. I wanted him. I didn’t ask why he arrived so soon after Niko arrived. It never occurred to me to ask.
Thanos was given a room on the far side of the villa away from Niko, away from the main bedrooms, quiet and tucked into the older wing. Nikandros barely noticed. My son was proud to bring someone from his past into his present. I noticed. I noticed everything and nothing and smiled at Thanos.
I was led on by my cock that night and made my way to Thanos’ room after Niko went to bed and gently opened the door. I was going to shoot him a cheesy line about this or that but there was no need.
"You're up late, Andreas," Thanos murmured, his voice a soft rumble in the quiet of the villa. His eyes were heavy-lidded, the light from a device spilling over his bare chest and highlighting the muscles that tapered into his crotch.
"Couldn't sleep," I replied, my voice a low, horny gravelly echo of his. "Thought maybe you couldn't either."
The tension between us grew thicker with every second that passed, a silent dance of want and need. Thanos stood from his bed, his movements fluid and predatory. He was a vision in the moonlit room, all muscles and pubic hair. He approached me, the warmth of his body radiating out, wrapping me in a blanket of desire.
"Do you want this seeing to?" he asked, his hand reaching out to my cock sending a shiver down my spine. "Because if you do, you need to tell me."
My heart hammered in my chest as I met his gaze, the weight of my secrets and the world outside the villa's walls suddenly feeling like a distant memory. "Yes," I whispered, the word barely escaping my lips. “I do want this seeing to.”
With a nod, Thanos closed the gap between us, his body pressing against mine with a gentle force that made me feel like I was melting. His kiss was tender, a soft brush of his lips that grew more demanding with each passing moment. I could taste the sweetness of the wine from dinner on his breath, a faint hint of mint from his toothpaste, and something else, something uniquely him that sent a jolt of lust through me.
His hand traveled down my chest, his fingertips dancing over my skin before he found the hem of my shirt. He tugged it up, breaking our kiss just long enough to pull it over my head. His eyes took in the sight of me, his pupils dilating as he drank in the sight of my bare torso.
Our bodies aligned, his hardness pressing into me, and I couldn't help but let out a soft groan. This was it, the moment I had been craving, the moment that would either set me free or destroy everything I had built. As Thanos's hands began to explore my body, all rational thought evaporated.
He kissed down my neck, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin just enough to make me gasp. His touch was a brand, a promise, a silent declaration that we were in this together. His hands slid down to the waistband of my linen shorts, deftly unbuckling and unbuttoning before pushing them to the floor.
The cool air of the room kissed my bare skin, making me shiver. Thanos stepped closer, his body heat a stark contrast. He took my hand and led me to his bed.
Without a word, we climbed onto the mattress, naked. Thanos pulled the covers over us, creating a warm cocoon of softness. Our kisses grew deeper, our touches more urgent, as we sought to fill the voids we hadn't even known existed until that moment.
As the hours passed, I penetrated Thanos. I wanted him. I needed to fuck him, not as a man, not as a friend of Niko but as meat. We were silent except for the grunts and the occasional moan that slipped out, a symphony of desire that played just for us. I realised that despite all my fine fucking words, I was horny and liked to fuck men.
In the aftermath, we lay tangled, our hearts pounding in unison. Sweat glistened on our skin, the scent of sex and musk filling the room. Thanos had been fucked twice and looked at me, his eyes filled with something that made me feel vulnerable, yet oddly safe. I had fulfilled his wish to be wanted. I had fucked him and made him whole.
"Thank you," I murmured, my voice thick with emotion.
He leaned in, his forehead touching mine. "For what?"
"For making me feel human again."
He kissed me once more, a soft press of his lips that held more meaning than any grand declaration. "You always were," he whispered.
I kissed him and crept away saying something about Niko not finding out and Thanos accepted the statement but in reality I had what I wanted and that was that. I wouldn’t see Thanos again if I could avoid it. It was a sort of “Cash and dash” experience.
I didn’t tell Niko. Of course I didn’t. Not because I was ashamed, but because there are lines I won’t cross. I couldn’t tell my son I just fucked his buddy. I love Niko more than I love myself. To burden him with my private hunger felt cruel. This is a part of me I will carry alone.
Thanos left the next day. He gave some bogus reason for the fleeting visit. We shook hands on the steps of the villa as he went to take the motor launch back to Paxos, he smiled, nodded like old friends might. He knew, I think, that it wasn’t just a moment, it was a mercy to me. I know I’ll forget him and I hope he forgets me.
The villa was quiet again after Thanos left. Mellow with late-summer heat and the scent of salt and suncream still lingering in the stone although for some reason Nikandros left that same morning, a little after Thanos went back. I didn’t ask why, he was making the same sort of fleeting visits to me that I once made to him.
He was going back to Bavaria, back to his mother’s estate tucked between pine forests and steel-gray lakes. He’d kissed my cheek like he always did, no hesitation, no embarrassment, then set out for the motor launch.
The vessel itself was ridiculous. Not in taste, but in opulence. One of those Italian Pershing 9X builds, slender, shark-like, aggressive but smooth. Carbon-fiber hull, satin oak interiors, twin MTUs roaring beneath deck like restrained beasts. Fast. Obscene. Exactly what someone with the Cantacuzino name would be expected to board. He stood at the stern, arms folded, sunglasses glinting, and waved without drama. I watched him, flooded with pride and a familiar ache.
The short visit of a few hours only had passed with warmth and too quickly, it was a real flying visit for Niko and Thanos. Niko wondered why his friend, Thanos, left after only a night. Family obligation, I offered. Maybe something in their village near Corinth. Niko nodded, making a sound of understanding. That was the extent of it.
I thought he didn’t know I’d gone to Thanos’ room that night. Never saw me step quietly through the corridor, past sun-faded family portraits, toward something I hadn’t allowed myself in years. A touch. A moment. A truth, offered and accepted without negotiation. I won’t dress it up. I fucked Thanos. There was consent. There was gentleness, there was relief. A release from my own lust.
Thanos would return to Athens without comment, but I’d already decided: I would make sure his father received something, quietly. Perhaps a sliver of land behind the old orchard. Something modest. Maybe I’d arrange a position for Thanos himself, something in Thessaloniki with the regional accounts. Stable. Anonymous. A pension attached. I’d do just enough. I always did.
It was that morning, I told Nikandros I was looking for something more. Someone more. It just flooded out stripped of artifice. Just those words, raw and absurdly exposed. I think I expected nothing back. He was halfway leaving, when he paused and looked at me.
“I know,” he said. Then, more quietly, “I heard you walking. To Thanos’ room. You were led on by your cock!” Niko smiled, “You’re a man, father, nothing more and nothing less!”
There was no edge in his tone. No scandal. Just knowledge. A son witnessing something without judgment.
“I’m not upset,” he said. “It’s ok, Dad. Really.” Niko winked at me.
He smiled then. Not forced. Not awkward. Just with the gentle conviction of someone who had decided to love all the parts of me I never intended to reveal. The flawed ones. The tender ones. Even the ones wrapped in shadows.
My son knew I had sex with with his buddy Not everything, but enough. Love isn’t always given where we expect it, but when it is, it arrives like grace, silent, unassuming, and unmistakably whole.
I stood below the villa, bare feet pressing into the cool, polished sand of Antipaxos. The tide whispered close, soft enough not to startle, firm enough to remind him it was present. The storms had passed, or rather, had chosen to leave. Out toward the east, the horizon still held a shimmer I didn’t trust: an unnatural gleam like the sky had been stretched too tightly and was just beginning to fray. Something in the wind carried memory, or maybe something more.
When Niko had gone, I stripped naked like I often was on the beach when alone. Not in defiance, not in some performative gesture of vulnerability, but in honesty. There were no guests, no staff, no family. The villa slept behind me, ancient marble still warm from the sun, its shadows stretching like arms he couldn’t reach back to. Here, on this quiet slice of the Ionian, I was alone and unafraid.
I breathed slowly, letting the salt air fill him with something like courage. The air felt wrong. Not bad, not dangerous, just wrong in the way a stranger’s perfume lingers too long in a familiar room. Eastern winds had pulled through recently, hard and fast, bending olive trees until their branches snapped like prayer beads. Now, the weather had gone quiet. Too quiet, and the quiet itself seemed to listen.
Over the water, beyond the seas, the old mountains crouched. I had grown up hearing the legends of what lived among them, not monsters, not gods, but something older. Things that watched. Things that waited. I didn’t believe in folklore, not really, but belief was different from recognition and I recognized this wind. It hummed with presence.
I thought of Tony Stevens then, that bold, unfiltered Greek intern from America who had once looked at me with such clarity it ached. When Tony vanished across the marble path, barefoot and unbothered back to the fishing boat to take him back, I felt something die quietly in my chest.
Thanos, later, offered something different. No declarations. No judgment. Just a body that wanted to be fucked. We'd shared a night tucked away in the older wing of the villa, nothing theatrical. In the morning, Thanos left with polite ease, carrying little. I respected that, but it wasn’t love.
Niko offered his father friendship and how many men can say they are friends with their sons?
What I needed now, what was gnawing beneath my skin, was something more complete. Something sacred. A bond that didn’t rely on performance or roles. I wanted to be interpinned, a word I’d read once in an old theological text, describing how spiritual beings shared space, essence, identity without dissolving themselves. I wanted that with someone. Not symbolically. I wanted ‘interpinning’ physically, emotionally, soulfully. No escape. No half-truths. Just union with someone else or with someone.
I felt something collapse inside me, a wall, a defense, a generation of shame. My son knew I had gone to Thanos, and didn’t flinch. Didn’t scold. Didn’t even ask why. I wanted to say a thousand things in that moment, but didn’t. Some blessings are better left untouched.
Now, on the beach, beneath a sky that pulsed with quiet secrets, I walked slowly. I wondered, not for the first time, if there were things in the world that didn’t need form to exist. Things that lingered. Ancient watchers tucked into limestone hollows and pine needles and deep ocean trenches.
I didn’t feel afraid. I just wondered if they heard me.
I had called out earlier, silently, hopelessly. I had asked, not like a priest, but like a man tired of masks, for the kind of interpinned closeness he didn’t know how to build, and then I laughed at myself. Foolish. Absurd. If prayer worked like currency, I'd have cashed in years ago. Instead, I stood naked in the wind, whispering to a sky that wouldn’t answer and maybe that was fine.
Not every desire is meant to be fulfilled. Some are just meant to remind us. To keep the chest warm enough to try again. To love again. To reach again. I kept walking, slow and naked and undecorated, along the beach that remembered everything and demanded nothing. If something was listening, I’d let it listen and if not I’d still walk.
