by Aitana Moore
Never, never, never had she thought that. She rubbed at her mouth, looking at her hand, afraid that something would show on her face.
After a moment, she followed him as he strolled through the gallery.
The afternoon was warm, and Lee was glad when they stepped out into the sun. It had been cold in the gallery with all that marble. Perhaps that was why she was still shivering. They bought ice cream from a shop that had a dizzying array of flavors and slowly walked back to the little palace.
At Trajan's Column, Lee stopped to admire the thousands of finely carved figures. "There are so many columns and obelisks in Rome.”
"Now there's the one in my trousers," Bryce observed dryly.
Lee covered his mouth with a gasp, but his eyes were full of mischief.
They had a nap at the palace, which was cool even under the hot sun. Once again, she slept well with him next to her. In the evening he asked if she minded staying in; his knee hurt. She wanted to tell him to avoid walking over uneven old cobblestones, but she frowned the thought away. It would make her sound like his girlfriend, and she was only his experiment.
The cook, who was so discreet that Lee hadn't even known he was there, served them dinner in the living room. Afterwards, she leafed through art books and Bryce watched a replay of the soccer match between Roma and Milano, though he already knew the outcome. When it was over, he turned off the TV and opened a silver box, taking out a thin cigarette and a heavy jade lighter.
"Is that—?" Lee asked.
"Weed," he said, the joint between his lips as he lit it.
He took a deep drag, held it in and offered it to her. She had never done drugs and looked at the joint with suspicion.
"It's natural stuff," he said. "Now legal in a great number of American states. And no authority in Italy ever bothers about a joint.”
“Is it for medicinal purposes?” she asked tartly. “Good for my condition?”
“Come on, the worst that can happen is you eating all the sweets in the house."
Hesitating for another second, she took a timid drag, only to cough raucously. Bryce laughed and took another pull, then she took two small drags, holding the smoke in.
"You're a funny one," she said after a few minutes. Why shouldn’t she say it?
"Am I? Why?"
"I don't know, you went to learn about Buddhism, but you have mansions and you do drugs."
The smoke came out of his mouth in bursts as he laughed. "I think you're mistaking Buddhism for the Catholic priesthood. For one, I wasn't a monk, I was only learning meditation from them."
“Why did you go learn?”
“To see if I could control some things.”
“You said you like your temper.”
“I don’t exactly like it. I just think it cuts to the truth sometimes.”
She wondered just how much it cut …
"Since you didn’t learn to control your temper, what did you learn?”
“I was better at the stamina type of exercise. You know, staying in the same position and putting up with heat and cold. Putting up with pain without Tramadol, sometimes. Mostly managed to control my sex drive, too. At least the mindless lust part.”
Lee looked around at the room. “What about not being attached to wealth?”
"I'm not very attached to anything. I have three houses, true, but that’s four houses less than the previous generation. And I have land, a boat and some cars. Some art. But the truth is that I’m keeping all that for my sister. I'll start traveling again one day with very little on me. It was nice to do that.”
A small pang of regret struck Lee. Why? Because a stranger spoke of leaving on his own?
The joint was more than halfway gone, and Bryce put it in an ashtray and lay down on the wide sofa. Lee didn’t feel any different, except that the light around the ancient forum seemed to change color, and every detail looked sharp. Thoughts began racing through her head, and she didn't realize that she was sitting with her lips open as she stared at nothing.
When she turned toward Bryce, she found him watching her. The scant light hit his bones, creating sharp shadows on his face. If archaeologists in the future found his skull, they would be able to tell he had been beautiful.
There was heat coming from him. It came from his skin.
Without much thinking, Lee crawled on top of his body. He didn't move. Instead, it was she who opened his shirt to touch his hot flesh.
How alive he is, Lee thought, looking at the pulse beating in Bryce's throat. And what a strange thing skin was, something so thin and vulnerable that covered him from head to foot. She ran her hands over his chest, feeling his heart dance under her fingers. Opening his belt and zipper, she looked at the place where he ceased being brown from the sun and became white. She looked at that line for a while, then at the discreet path of hair that descended from his belly button to his underwear. It was a lovely part of him.
No man had ever lain so still for her, and Lee enjoyed it. He had made no movement to touch her. He only lay passively under her hands and lips.
Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…
She undressed him slowly, nuzzling the path of hair, then took his face between her hands. Lee kissed Bryce as he had kissed her at the gallery, slowly, moving her lips back and forth, then hard. She stuck out her tongue to meet his.
It felt good, for the first time in her life. He let her kiss him until their lips hurt.
He had borne his own excitement for a long while and she felt sorry for him — but when she started to slide down his body, he kept her where she was.
"No," he said. "When you take me in your mouth it will be because you want to. Otherwise, don't worry about me."
They went to bed, and Lee couldn't help laughing when she heard the shower running, and Bryce's loud yelp as he got under the jet of cold water.
TWELVE
"Since I am into cold showers now, we should go somewhere warmer," Bryce said.
Lee had been living at the Roman palace with him for a week, and every day they explored the city — and every evening she explored his body.
The previous night they had lain in bed naked, and she had let him nuzzle her neck with his stubble as he caressed her belly and hips. The fact that he hadn’t touched her in any of the obvious places, that he hadn’t touched her like that man, had provoked an ache in her that was both terrible and irresistible.
She had found herself moving back until her skin touched his and the softness of her buttocks met his hardness. It excited her. As she turned her head to be kissed, she also twisted her body so that his hand could cup her breast. He didn’t. He only stroked the side with the back of his fingers, and his other hand stroked the inside of her thighs until the pain inside her was sharp. That pain was desire, and she knew it.
But as soon as she started feeling like that, he moved his body away from hers and his hands were gone. In the dark, she saw his eyes flash for a moment with a feral light, but he fell asleep soon after they closed. She lay awake for a long time, watching him sleep, wanting to touch him — wishing he would touch her. Her breasts hurt, her insides, her mound of Venus.
Touch me. I won’t beg you. You do it.
The next day, as they visited the city, she looked at his hands as he poured a glass of wine, peeled a fruit or broke the shell of a lobster for her. They sat in a café reading and, without looking away from his book, Bryce flipped the hem of her skirt and stroked her knee. She was disconcerted when her body reacted almost violently. She wanted to open her legs to him right there, and the thought — after an initial, dizzy moment — shocked her.
He was so comfortable in his hot skin, Lee thought as she walked behind him through the Capitoline Museums, where they looked at marble busts of emperors, orators and philosophers. That wasn't English of him at all.
Usually she was the more beautiful half of a couple, but it wasn't the case now. Many women were beautiful, but it was rare for a man to be as handsome as Bry
ce. Even in the street, females offered themselves to him, throwing glances of admiration as he passed, standing brazenly in his way or staring across a restaurant. If you added the money and the charisma, she supposed he could have any woman he wanted in the world.
"What do you think about us going?" he insisted when they returned to the little palace. "I can't surprise you, you get upset."
She liked the little palace … "Do you mean somewhere hotter than Rome?"
"A hot, hot place. We’ll sail to Sicily.”
"Is that where your Italian house is?"
He lifted his eyebrows in assent. "What say you, madam?"
Lee ought to find a way to get him to London. They had done their bonding, he trusted her, and now it was time to progress toward her goal. Yet if she said she had to go to London, he might say goodbye and go to Sicily — and it would be difficult for her to change her mind without looking suspicious. Bryce was good at sensing things. It would take longer for her to get to his safe, but the payoff would be huge.
The voice in her head sounded reasonable, and it shut up the more businesslike voice that told her to press on with the job. It shut up the voice whispering that she wanted to stay in Italy with him because she wanted more of him.
"Let's go,” she said.
A sentence of his set a network of people, invisible to her, in motion. What a different life, she thought as they boarded a helicopter two hours later, than hers had been.
"You're poor, you'd better get used to it. You can't lie down all day," her mother would tell her when she had migraines and lay in the dark to endure them.
They had had no money for doctors or painkillers other than aspirin, and Lee — or Lynn, as she had been called then — had to go about her chores in the ramshackle house they inhabited. She had to take care of Cora, whose shrieking had pierced through Lynn's aching head like a spear. The poor baby was hungry, because their mother hadn't bought any food except what Cora couldn't eat: hard pop tarts and bags of salty chips which Lynn made soft by soaking in water.
Lee shook her head to get rid of the memories as they landed by the sea side. The helipad was in a marina, and a short distance away on the boardwalk there was a yacht, the Esiankiki.
"What does it mean?”
“A Maasai name,” he explained. “Means ‘young maiden.’ ”
He ushered her into the boat and leapt up on his left leg, although his right knee was getting stronger every day. After introducing her briefly to the crew, he took Lee to the back of the boat for the departure. The yacht flowed over calm waters; they couldn't have wished for a more beautiful day. Once they were clear of the bay, Lee started at the loud crack of canvas as white sails unfurled.
"They're wonderful!" she couldn't help exclaiming.
His eyes were soft. "You're a girl after my own heart, you know."
"Why?"
"Just taking pleasure in something simple like that."
He pulled her to him, and they watched the sails fill with balmy but steady wind. Much later they anchored in the crystalline waters around the Aeolian Islands and jumped into the sea for an hour. They dried under the sun as the yacht navigated the Strait of Messina.
"It's dangerous here when the wind is up,” Bryce said. “There's a natural whirlpool on this side and that big rock on the other side. They say this crossing was the inspiration for Scylla and Charybdis."
Lee had looked that up because of a Sting song. Scylla and Charybdis were two mythical monsters and Ulysses was forced to choose between them when passing through a strait. He opted to avoid the whirlpool, thus sacrificing less of his men.
The devil or the deep blue sea, she thought, looking at Bryce. The devil with his deep blue eyes.
The trip became more prosaic as they negotiated fishing boats, ferries and sailed by industrial installations, until the houses and churches on the coastline appeared again. It was evening when they reached the serene bay of Taormina.
A driver was waiting to whisk them away to an old red mansion perched above the sea, aptly named Villa Rossa. The front doors were open and the light inside was soft and inviting.
The staff greeted them as they walked in, "Buona sera!”
The two men and two women there smiled and chatted about the state of the house, the weather and what there was for dinner.
The villa had vaulted ceilings, niches with antique statues of saints and frescoes in almost every room. The frescoes were faded, and Bryce told her that he would not attempt to restore them; their state of decay preserved the old gentility of the house.
They walked across the entrance hall and onto a terrace surrounded by lemon and orange trees. Before them, in the distance, was Mount Etna.
"Wow!" Lee couldn’t help exclaiming at the sight of the white-peaked volcano. "You're full of surprises, aren't you?"
"It's not me, it's the place. This is why I love Italy."
Bryce plucked a large orange from a low-hanging branch and opened it with his fingers. It was blood-red inside. He offered it to her, and she sucked on it. He took it and put his lips where hers had been.
"Does that thing ever erupt?" Lee asked, nodding at the volcano.
"A while ago there was a lava flow of about one kilometer, and ash got all over the furniture. Kind of exciting."
"Aren't you—?" she was going to say afraid, but he never seemed afraid of anything. Perhaps he didn’t care if he lived or died.
She had felt like that at different times, but Bryce was a perfect animal: healthy, strong and fierce. Lee had the sudden wish that he should be happy — and that he shouldn’t hate her too much when she ran away with the ring. Not too much.
"I actually think that it might be a good death," he said. "Like in Pompeii. They'd find our bodies holding each other, and we'd stay like that always."
Lee scoffed. "I suppose that's the only way for love to last forever.”
He gasped. "You said the L-word!"
"Stronzo," she told him, using an Italian curse word because it seemed less harsh to her than an English one.
"Bella," he said in a low voice.
They kissed in the shadow of the volcano, and for once Lee stopped thinking of what was to come.
THIRTEEN
After a day in the sea below Villa Rossa, Bryce invited Lee to explore the surrounding towns. He waited for her on the terrace, and when she walked out in a green silk dress with a lower neckline than she had worn so far and a skirt slightly above her knees, he widened his eyes.
“Something wrong?”
“Something’s too right. You'll be like sex walking down the piazza, Frigidaire."
As they left, Lee saw their reflection on the glass. They looked tanned, relaxed and elegant, as rich people in love ought to look.
But she wasn’t rich yet, and they weren’t in love.
A silver Aston Martin was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps.
“Shouldn’t you have a Ferrari or a Lamborghini?” she asked with a laugh.
“Scusa, but the coolest cars are English,” he said. “Not as good plumbing as the Italian and German ones, but I got this one from James Bond. Shoots poisoned smoke, goes underwater and all.”
He opened the passenger door for her.
“Then you have your driver’s license back?”
“No.” He closed the door and went around to his side.
“Ah, all right. You're James, I'm the Bond girl and you have Her Majesty's permission to drive.”
"You'd be the definitive Bond girl. But where would you keep your treacherous knife?"
He ran his eyes over her with a quizzical look before turning on the ignition and letting the motor purr for a few moments. Boys and their toys. It was true that moving to the gate felt almost like floating.
“Watch, I’m looking left and right before I go out.” After a few yards he stopped again. “And look, I’m stopping at a stop sign.”
“Are you going to keep doing that all evening?”
“Incredible,
I’m going within the speed limit!”
Lee rolled her eyes. “Just don’t take me to jail with you.”
“Can you imagine you and me in a cell together, all dirty? Too bad you wouldn’t be in mine, there would be a big Sicilian brute going for my cute ass instead."
He pronounced "cute ass" like an American.
“If you are trying to turn me on, you’re managing,” Lee said.
“And what would be happening next door, at the women’s facility?" he wondered. "Vivien in a dress that makes her eyes look greener, wrestling a busty black-haired girl?”
“You’re turning yourself on now.”
“It started at 'Sicilian brute'.”
As they drove through winding roads lined with olive trees, he remarked, “You don’t swear, you want to stick by rehab and traffic rules — yet I'm sure you’re a transgressor. I just haven’t figured out exactly how.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing very interesting here.”
“I beg to differ.”
On the radio, Frank Sinatra crooned to the tune of Witchcraft and Bryce sang along.
The music sent Lee back to the time when she thought she would become famous. She had been fifteen, singing old songs like that one into a wooden spoon. Cora had been five and had danced to her sister’s voice. Those had been the good moments.
Then there had been the auditions to sing in clubs. There had been the hands all over her when she was hired, or before. Too bad she hadn’t had the guts to try for TV programs where one could arrive looking like a disaster, only to sing like a dream and record at least an album or two.
Instead, another passion had taken hold of her. She had fallen in love with shiny rocks and discovered that it was easier to take them than earn them.
Bryce hadn’t said anything in a while, and she realized that he always did that when she escaped into her own head — he stayed quiet and let her have her thoughts. She did the same for him, and perhaps that was why they had gotten along so far.
