CLARA
Angela doesn’t say more than two words on the way back through the old cobblestone streets to the house. She walks like she’s late, almost a run, and occasionally she passes her hands up and down her bare arms as if she’s cold, even though it’s a balmy night. I try to stay out of her head, give her some privacy, but it’s hard. They argued the last time they saw each other—that much I can’t help but pick up. They argued and she was angry when she left him and she wondered if maybe she’d never see him again. And now she’s a hot jumble of panic and wounded pride and yearning, such a deep yearning it takes my breath away.
She’s got it bad for this guy.
“Are you okay?” I ask breathlessly when we reach the little house where her grandmother lives. Angela stops on the stoop and glances down the street.
“I’m fine,” she says, too lightly. “It just got crowded in there.”
Uh-huh.
“Wow, I am so tired,” she says, and pushes her way past me.
Inside, her grandmother is standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot, a sauce of some sort. The kitchen is filled with a wonderful stewed-tomato smell. I swear, the woman is always cooking, day or night.
“Hi, Nonna. We had a nice time. Going to bed now,” Angela says, and darts up the stairs. I start to follow, but Rosa lifts a hand to stop me.
“You meet handsome Italian boys?” she asks in her loud, pieced-together English, wiggling her eyebrows.
“Uh—one,” I answer. “We saw one cute boy.”
“You must beware the handsome ones,” she says, and makes a tsking noise with her tongue. “Pretty face, rotten soul. Watch out for those. Those boys no good for you. Those boys will get you in plenty of trouble.”
Turns out, she’s not wrong.
ANGELA
Seeing him again is like being lit on fire. I literally feel his gaze on me, a heat that starts at my feet and washes up my body, and I look up, and there he is, sitting across the crowded car on the metro.
My heart goes all boom-boom-boom, and it’s like the rest of the people in the train dim, leaving only him in bright colors. I have to look away. I have to remind myself that he broke my heart last time. He called me a child. I said some things I shouldn’t have. I stormed out. And when I came back he was gone.
No calls. No emails. No letters written in his haphazardly scrawled print. Gone. I haven’t heard from him in over a year.
I remind myself that I’m mad at him.
But he’s smiling at me.
Clara is looking back and forth between him and me, bright-eyed with curiosity. The heat has reached my face now. The air in here feels hot and heavy, pressing in.
I have to get off this train, I think. I try to keep my head on straight, try to act like I don’t care, but he’s pinning me with that smile, an invitation written all over his face. I get up as the train slows down, and I say, “Let’s get off. It stinks in here.”
All of a sudden I get the image in my head of the green sofa in his flat—sun pouring through the windows, the smell of linseed oil, the roughness of wool on my skin. I feel dizzy with how much I want to go back to that moment. I look over at him again. There’s that flash of uncertainty in his eyes that makes him look like a little boy, even though he’s anything but. He missed me. He wants to see me.
He wants to more than see me.
He smiles.
I don’t smile back. The train stops, and Clara and I get off. I feel like there’s no breathable air in the world, and I take off walking, Clara trailing me with the questions she doesn’t ask, and I don’t want to explain.
But I know I’ll go to him later. It isn’t even like there’s a choice. In a flash I find myself out on the street again, closing the door softly behind me so I won’t alert Nonna to me sneaking out in the middle of the night.
Clara knows. That can’t be helped; she was awake when I slipped out. She’s going to want answers, and I’m going to have to provide some eventually.
But not tonight.
The metro’s closed. I’ll to have to walk across half of Rome, but I don’t care. I know the path by heart, by heart—a funny expression, so true. My heart knows right where to go.
I walk and walk. I stumble down the Spanish Steps, aglow and beautiful in the dark, big pots of roses and azaleas lined up along the sides, the fountain at the bottom whispering. I love this place more than any other sight in Rome, and I’ve been avoiding it all summer, because it makes me think of him.
Some man calls out to me drunkenly in Italian, Come here, sweet beauty, and staggers toward me. He’s harmless. I could knock him out in two seconds flat, but that’s when I start to run.
I don’t stop until I reach his flat.
For a minute I stand outside the door and worry. That I misunderstood. That it wasn’t an invitation I read in his eyes. That he was simply being polite, the old, “hello, ex-girlfriend, you’re looking well” expression on his face, and nothing more.
Is this what I am, his ex? It seems like the wrong word, because he was never really my boyfriend. He was my whole world, but not my boyfriend. Quickly, before I can reason myself out of this, I knock.
He opens the door immediately, like he was waiting, his hand on the doorknob.
We stare at each other. He’s wearing the same thing he was on the train, a white dress shirt and khaki trousers, but the shirt is unbuttoned, open, revealing an expanse of smooth brown chest. He is Michelangelo’s David, come to life. He’s everything I remember: the dark, lightly oiled curls, his fine, almost delicate face, the chocolate eyes that make me feel like I’m drowning, never able to get enough air in my lungs when he’s looking at me like that. Like he’s glad to see me. Like he wants me. I gulp in a breath, try to say something witty, because he loves it when I’m witty, but I don’t have enough air. So I give up with the words, and then I literally throw myself at him.
He catches my waist in his hands as our bodies crush into each other. Our lips come together. I want to touch him everywhere at once, to confirm that this time he’s real, not a figment of my overactive imagination, not a memory. He’s here. He’s mine again. My anger is gone.
“You jerk,” I whisper when he lets me come up for air. You broke my stupid heart.
He traces a finger down my cheek, from my temple to the corner of my mouth, smoothing over my bottom lip, which already feels bruised and swollen. I nip at his finger and he smiles, but his dark eyes are solemn.