“Um, hello,” she said, waving her phone at him. “Boyfriend. Remember?”
He laughed. “Have a shot with me.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, relax,” he said. “You’re in Italy. Have a limoncello. It’s what all the sexy American girls drink when they come to Rome.” He signaled to the bartender, and a minute later, he handed her the shot. She sipped at the edge of the glass. It tasted like lemonade concentrate. And she’d seen him buy it. He hadn’t put any drugs in it.
“To you,” he said, holding up his own shot glass.
“Okay,” Maggie said, somewhat embarrassed by the attention. He was so…
She didn’t know the word. Maybe he was just so Italian. She had nothing to compare it to.
He wiped the sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand and downed the shot. Maggie sipped hers again.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know how to take a shot,” he said. “All at once. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”
Maggie squirmed under his scrutiny, but he kept hounding her until she threw back the shot. “Happy now?” she said, sliding the shot glass across the bar.
“I like to see that look of abandon on your face,” he said. “Now come and dance with me.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m not really in the mood.”
“Did your American boyfriend tell you not to dance with Italian men?”
“No, my intuition told me not to dance with Italian men.”
Hearing him call himself a man instead of a guy made her remember how little she knew him. She checked to make sure her friends were still occupied on the dance floor, but she couldn’t see Kristina.
“If your intuition is getting in the way, you need another shot,” he said. “Let me get you one and then we’ll go dance.”
“I don’t want one.”
“Don’t be shy,” he said. “I’ll buy you as many as you like, if I get to watch you take them.”
“Seriously,” she said. “I’ll pass out if I drink more.”
She winced the moment the words left her mouth. Why had she told him that? Now he might try to kidnap her. The way he was eyeing her, she didn’t think he’d be pimping her out, though. If anything, he’d lock her in his basement so she couldn’t see anyone but him for the rest of her life. In fact, he was looking at her like he might be a freaky cannibal who was now imagining what kind of seasoning he would put on her before he ate her. Even more disturbing, she didn’t want him to stop looking at her like that.
Sure, on occasion, guys had looked at her before or come on too strong at a club or refused to take no for an answer, usually weirdos with Asian fetishes. But Enzo just kept staring openly at her, hungrily, like his mouth was watering at the sight of her. She rolled her lips against each other, wishing she’d worn more than lip gloss. Wishing she looked like Kristina so he had a reason to look at her that way. It unnerved her that he could look at her modestly dressed body like that, like she was the nakedest girl in the place.
She could have turned around toward Nick at any moment during the exchange. She could turn around now and tell him to chase off this obnoxious, sweaty guy. But she didn’t. And though she closed her fingers around the second shot by reflex alone, she didn’t put it back on the bar, either. As she took the shot, she could feel Enzo’s eyes sliding over her.
He took her hand and pulled her onto the dance floor. Without warning, he grasped her hips and fastened them to his own, pulsing against her to the beat of the music. This was as far from her first encounter with Weston at the eighth grade dance as she could get.
They loved telling that story to their friends, families, even to strangers. About how he’d been so nervous he had to send a friend over to ask her to dance with him. And when they danced, he kept saying sorry every time their knees or toes bumped. After the dance, it had taken him half a year to ask her out. And another year before he kissed her the first time, the most fumbling and shy kiss anyone had ever had, his breath pre-freshened with gum, his heartbeat like a hummingbird’s wings under her palm when she rested her hand on his chest.
Suddenly, Enzo’s mouth crashed into hers, his tongue sliding into her mouth before she’d recovered from the crushing blow of his lips on hers. His tongue was alive, an angry, hungry thing, devouring her.
“Get off me,” she said, shoving him back so hard he knocked into a crowd of girls. They gave him dirty looks and moved away as he reeled to keep his balance and then came towards her. “Ugh, you’re such a pig,” she shouted over the music. “I have a boyfriend.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t look in the least bit sorry. He was grinning at her. “I got carried away.”
“Well, I’m going to carry myself right to the bar,” she said. “And don’t even think about following.”
He lifted both hands and took a step back, and she turned and stormed back to the bar. She gulped down some of her water, which Nick had been guarding. She could still taste Enzo’s tongue, could feel the tightness of his hands on her hips and his excitement pressing against her. The smell of his cologne clung to her like sweat. She gulped down more water and turned back to the crowd. Nick must have seen the shame radiating from her. She couldn’t bear to talk to him right then, or anyone who knew Weston.
Enzo was dancing with a tall, thin girl with long, silky blonde hair. Maggie crossed her arms and frowned at them. She hadn’t wanted him to follow her to the bar. She’d wanted to be as far from him as humanly possible. But now that he’d switched her out for a cuter model, she wished she hadn’t pushed him quite so hard.
No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t regret pushing him. She just would have liked to think she wasn’t so easily replaceable. Turning away from the crowd, she reached for her phone to text Weston again. Though it was five o’clock in the evening in Arkansas, and Weston should have been off work, he did not answer.
“You okay?” Nick asked.
“What? No,” Maggie said, looking up from the phone she’d been staring right through while her mind turned. “I mean, yes, I’m fine.”
This time, she wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Five
As Maggie had unwittingly predicted earlier in the week, Alex texted Kristina. This called for an emergency lunch with the girls to discuss, in usual Kristina fashion, the pros and cons of getting the text, of each action she could perform as a consequence, and of Alex in general. Kristina was not a decision maker. She wallowed and waffled and took way too long to decide anything, from what to wear on any given occasion to where they should go for lunch.
Maggie chose the lunch spot, an adorable little bistro where she could safely watch the passersby from behind her sunglasses while she pretended to be interested in Kristina’s decision making process. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She’d been there through all Kristina and Alex’s breakups. But she knew this was part of Kristina’s process during which she mistakenly believed she needed input. What she really needed was to throw out a thousand possibilities and then narrow her focus, eventually coming to Maggie for actual advice. So while Kristina rambled on, saying all the things most people kept in their heads, Maggie watched the trickle of foot traffic.
No one in Italy seemed to have anywhere to be. They ambled along streets, gazing in windows and reading menus outside restaurants. A woman—or possibly a man—who would have stood over six feet tall in bare feet, wearing a form-fitting red satin dress and four inch heels in broad daylight, strutted by, holding a leash attached to a white ball of fluff that resembled nothing more than a bag of cotton balls. It barked at a nearby cat. There were cats everywhere in Rome.
Their food came, and Maggie took a picture with her phone. As she took a bite of pizza and pulled it away, trailing a string of cheese between her mouth and the slice, from the corner of her eye she caught the silhouette of someone standing outside. Setting the pizza on her plate and quickly breaking the cheese string, she turned to see Rory standing outside, pointing a camera straight at her. When Cynth
ia smiled and waved her over, Maggie smiled, too, though she could only hope the girl hadn’t caught her cheese mishap.
A guy Maggie didn’t know followed Rory across the street to the bistro. Maggie was about to call out to warn her, but he held the door for Rory, so she relaxed. Rory shuffled over, her fair skin pinkening. “Hi,” she said to the pizza in the middle of the table.
“Hey, pull up a chair,” Cynthia said. “In all of Rome, what are the odds we’d run into you outside class?”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother you.”
“You’re not,” Maggie said. “Come, sit. Who’s your friend?”
“Ned,” the guy said, reaching over to shake hands with Maggie and then, one by one, the others. “That pizza looks fantastic.” He was short and dreadlocked, but the polite handshake made up for it.
“Pull up a chair, we’ll share,” Maggie said.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Rory said.
“Let’s,” Ned said, nudging her towards the table. “We’ll order, too. That pizza’s making me hungry.”
They joined the table, and Ned told them he’d been in Rome for a while already, and pretty soon, they’d all made plans to go to Milan the next day.
“That’s a nice camera,” Maggie said to Rory when the conversation died down.
“Thanks,” Rory said. “I’m kind of a photo nut.”
“She really is,” Ned said. “I’ve known her all of three days, and I already know she loves photography the way that I love pizza. Like a true connoisseur.”
“I’m not that good,” Rory said, the color in her cheeks amping up a notch. “It’s just something I like to do.”
Ned’s pizza and beer arrived, and he seemed to forget all else in the universe. Rory took out her camera and started taking shots of him.
“Do you always take pictures of people eating?” Maggie asked.
“What?” Rory said, lowering her camera like she hadn’t realized what she was doing.
“I don’t mind,” Ned said through a mouthful of pizza. “I take it as a compliment that I’m fascinating even when I’m stuffing my face.”
Rory’s whole face flamed this time, but she ducked her head and began adjusting her camera settings. “I like capturing people’s expressions,” she muttered, “when they’re really absorbed in something.”
“Did you take a picture of me with cheese hanging from my mouth?” Maggie asked. She’d wanted to ask since Rory arrived in the bistro.
“That was a great shot,” Ned said, balling up a napkin to wipe his mouth. “I watched her frame it. That’s pizza art right there.”
“I take pictures of a lot of things,” Maggie said. “But I don’t go around taking pictures of strangers eating.”
“Oh—I’m sorry,” Rory said. “I can delete it.”
“No, it’s fine,” Maggie said. “If it’s that great of a shot, keep it. I tried to make my pictures artsy, but they just never work out. I don’t have that kind of eye.”
“I’m really not that good,” Rory insisted.
“Maybe you could give me some pointers,” Maggie said. “You’ve got to be better than me. I love art, I’ve just never been creative. My high school art teacher said I only had half a brain—the left side.”
“That’s mean,” Rory said. She finally put the lens cap on her camera and accepted some pizza. The others wanted to go shopping, so Maggie trailed along, though she didn’t care about designers or fancy Italian labels. She needed to talk to Weston. They’d texted every day, but it wasn’t the same. She needed to hear his voice. It had been four days.
After Kristina tried on about a hundred outfits, she bought exactly one top, and they took the tram back to the stop closest to Mary’s house. As they walked back, Kristina obsessed more about Alex’s text and if she should go out with Armani again. She never questioned if he’d want to go out with her again, if he’d call again. Kristina didn’t think that way. If he didn’t call, she’d be so completely hurt and bewildered as to why. She never thought anyone would reject her, until he did, and then she never understood why. She lived in some kind of naïve denial where she bore no responsibility for anything in life.
When they got back to Mary’s, Maggie went straight to their room and called Weston, though it was eleven o’clock in the morning in Arkansas, and he was at work.
“Hey, Maggie,” he said after one ring. “How’s Rome? Is your host family cool?”
“Yeah, I have two host moms,” Maggie said. “They’re both great. And Rome is…a little dirty, honestly. But we’re going to Milan tomorrow, to a museum. And I met this girl from our group who’s really cool, and she’s going to teach me some stuff about photography.”
Across the room, Kristina rolled her eyes.
“Photography?” Weston asked.
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “You know how I’m always taking pictures.”
“Oh, yeah,” Weston said. “That’s cool. I’m glad you’re having fun.”
“I am,” Maggie said. “We went out to a club last night. Gosh, it seems like a long time ago already. It’s like time moves slower here.”
“Wouldn’t it move faster if yesterday feels like a long time ago?”
“Good point,” she said. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. You know, because we went out to a bar.”
He laughed. “You don’t have to ask permission. I know you’re with Kristina. Which means I know you’ll be out partying all the time.”
“So you know Alex dumped her?”
He hesitated before answering. “I haven’t seen him,” he said at last. “But come on, Mags. You can’t be surprised.”
“I’m not.”
“She’s lucky she has you there to look out for her. And have some fun, too, okay?”
“I will,” she said, suddenly defensive, as if he thought she’d be sitting in her room wearing sweatpants every night while her friends went out to clubs. Which she’d rather do, honestly. “Actually, I had a ton of fun. Kristina met a guy, and he brought all his friends to the club to dance with us.”
“Cool,” Weston said. “I know how much you like dancing.”
They talked a bit more before saying goodbye. Again, she felt the physical distance from him like a weight pulling down the thread that tied them. When she hung up, she lay on her bed, looking at the picture in the locket he’d given her. He said she’d never be alone, but she’d never felt more alone than now, knowing they were literally an ocean apart.
Kristina’s phone dinged with a text message, and she snatched it up like she was saving it from a water spill. She read the text, biting her lip, and then her face broke open. Her reckless, consuming smile bounced around her face, and she jumped up and took it into the hall. Maggie heard the old staircase creak as she descended, and then the bump of the front door closing behind her.
Once upon a time, Maggie had taken calls from Weston that way. Giddy with excitement that he’d called, hiding her smile from her parents and retreating to her room to talk. She’d been fourteen then. Fourteen. Kristina was just as giddy now as Maggie had been back then, barely more than a kid, ecstatic to have a boy call. She sighed. Maybe falling in love felt the same whether you were fourteen or forty. She’d never know for sure. She’d done all the falling in love she was ever going to do.
A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away and sat up. She couldn’t sit around wallowing in missing Weston. Even in Rome, she had homework for her class, and homework didn’t care how much she missed her boyfriend, or if her best friend had to call a guy in the street outside so no one could hear her meaningless conversation.
To Kristina, every word from him was sacred, something to be guarded and kept private, so she could be the sole owner of it and the resulting joy. Maggie could remember those moments so long ago, when she would mark each phone conversation with Weston on her calendar, noting the length of each phone call, memorizing entire conversations to replay in her head later. She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped treas
uring his calls.
Chapter Six
The next day, they all met up and took a bus to Milan. Kristina was so excited about shopping that even Maggie caught a bit of it and admitted that she could get a well-made item or two. After all, Italian clothes were expensive for a reason. Italian craftsmanship was a real thing. And Maggie wasn’t above investing in some nice pieces that would last a long time.
They walked around the city, shopped, ate, and went to a museum. Maggie could hardly contain her enthusiasm as they approached the Milan Cathedral. It was enormous, and though she’d known that ahead of time, reading the dimensions and seeing the massive building in person were two different things. The spires towered high above them, the lacelike lattice between spires delicate as the gothic points were severe. Recessed sculptures in the marble façade stood well above the entrances.
“Look, it says here that the building is actually brick behind the marble,” Cynthia said, reading from a guidebook.
“I know,” Maggie said, stepping back to get a picture.
“And you can see a real mummified saint’s corpse inside,” Cynthia said, still reading from her guidebook.
“Can we skip that?” Rory asked nervously.
“Can’t be grosser than this monstrosity,” Kristina said, gesturing at the building. “Have you ever seen something so tacky?”
“I think it’s gorgeous,” Cynthia said.
Maggie wasn’t sure. It was true each part was gorgeous. But all together, with the spires and sculptures and marble and lattice, and so incredibly much of it, it could be overkill. While Rory took pictures, zooming in on one section and another, Maggie sighed. Her phone’s camera sucked, and her real camera wasn’t much better. She wanted Weston to be able to see it the way she was, but the truth was, a picture would never do justice to the beauty or the elaborateness or the size.
When in Rome...Break His Heart Page 3
