by C. L. Donley
“I wouldn’t hesitate to correct your English if it needed correcting, signore. You sound as though you’ve been taught by Italian teachers is all. Your vocabulary is superior to most Americans.”
“I do not always understand Americans. They are worse than Sicilians.”
“Indeed,” Lark chuckled. “We… have many dialects.”
“Don’t you mean ‘ya’ll’?”
“I’m never going to hear the end of that,” she sighed. He laughed a bit, sitting back in his place on the bench.
“Do you come from a family of dialects?” he delved.
“I don’t come from a family at all,” she confessed.
“No? You are an orphan?” he asked in a curious tone.
“Essentially. I was in foster homes until I was 18.”
She didn’t think she would ever bring this up at work, and here they were speaking of it on her first day, practically. Thankfully, he didn’t give her the pity stare.
“Ah. You met many people, and learned many languages,” he filled in the gaps.
“Si.”
“Italian was your first new language,” he guessed.
She shook her head. “Korean.”
“Hm. Your foster family?”
“The grocery store owner, in the building where my mother lived. Before I was taken.”
“Did they not take you in?”
“…They tried,” Lark didn’t elaborate.
“Do you keep in contact with your mother?” he wondered.
Lark thought about the last time she saw her. Re-married and with a young daughter of four, her half sister. Still a drunk, still picking losers to shack up with. She’d recently called to say she thought it best that they keep their relationship distant for the sake of her “family.” Lark expected any day to get the same call her relatives must’ve gotten, asking to take in her half sister as well.
“Very little. I hardly know her.”
“What about your father?”
“Forgive me, Mis… Dario,” she said, remaining professional, “this isn’t a pleasant topic for me.”
“Ma dai, Haiti, your former lover, your childhood. Everything about you is unfit for conversation.”
“Now you’re getting it,” she smiled.
“This is the past you referred to? The one you plan to outrun?”
It took a moment for Lark to recall their conversation on the street, where she admitted to trying to outrun the past, and he the future.
“Very good memory, signore,” she said without confirming or denying.
“Dario,” he corrected her again. “Va bene, tell me how you learned Italian.”
“I always wanted to. So I did. Italian was my fourth language.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Mama mia,” he said in perfect stereotypical fashion. She laughed.
“What draws you to Italia?”
She smiled as though he’d outed her.
“Is it so obvious?”
He simply nodded.
She thought about it, feeling naked as she spoke. “I don’t know. Everything about it is beauty, and love of it. It’s in everything. Even in the dullest parts of society.”
“Beauty,” he sat back, studying her. “Are you sure this is the word you are looking for?”
She gave him a shy turn of her head.
“I sense you believe that you already know the answer to this question you’ve asked.”
“Si,” he said, nursing his food. “The word you are looking for is ‘passion.’”
“Ah,” she nodded her head, smiling, as if having an epiphany.
“Would you care to be enlightened?” he asked as he sat back arrogantly. She laughed.
“Please.”
“We have many Africans in Italy,” he said.
Uh oh.
Lark braced herself for a bizarre exchange.
“They too are a passionate people. Creative,” he said, looking intently at her as he pointed. “You were born in a country created by Brits descended from Germans. The sticks in the mud of Europe. You are starving.”
She laughed.
“Ma dai,” she mimicked him, “then why wouldn’t I just go to Africa?”
“Because you were born in a country created by Brits descended from Germans. Europe is your father. Look at you.”
“What about me?”
“You are dressed like a boy from Dickens,” he said. She laughed as he continued. “You must drown your beautiful brown skin in color. How do you not know this?”
“I can’t very well wear a gold wrap dress to work.”
“Why the hell not? We are an Italian textile company.”
“I’m not auditioning to be a model, I’m here to be your voice.”
“Italian men like to gaze on beauty. Your boring blouse is making my dick sad.”
“Good,” she said after rolling her eyes. Workplace harassment still had many years to go in Italy, it seemed. But then, it was part of the reason she came.
“What about France?” she argued.
“What about Francia?”
“They’re not sticks in the mud. And they had a hand in our little national experiment.”
“A hand? They just use treaties as an excuse to fuck everyone… como si dice… indiscriminante.”
Lark cackled. “Indiscriminately, yes. And taught us how to make roux.”
“Oui.”
“And thus, I was born,” Lark said with a pinky in the air.
“You are part French?”
“Distantly. So I’ve been told,” she answered, chewing.
“Madonna, no wonder you fuck the way you do,” he daringly replied.
His words pumped throbbing arousal through her that rendered her speechless. They had fucked, hadn’t they? For a nanosecond she’d nearly forgotten. Her cheeks warmed and she wiped her mouth with a napkin to stall. He was testing her, perhaps. She was determined to pass.
“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean by that,” she offered an amused yet reprimanding glance. He huffed a laugh.
“So this is your plan? Never to talk about it?”
“That is precisely my plan, Mr. Di Rossi.”
“Dario.”
“That is precisely my plan, Dario.”
“You cannot avoid your mistakes forever, Allodola.”
Lark stiffened.
Mistakes?
She kept a calm visage as his choice of words stabbed at her ruthlessly. Outwardly she smiled.
“Have we met?” Lark finally said with a raised eyebrow. He laughed again in response.
Seven
Chapter 7
After another long day of meetings, Dario was again sharing his suite with Lark, enjoying another evening of room service.
“Do you know what you will do after your time here?”
“The agency has found me an assignment at the Embassy in Qatar.”
“That sounds exciting.”
“It is. It’ll be nice to brush up on my Arabic.”
“And after that?”
Lark looked at him as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her.
“Don’t know. I was supposed to be going on vacation when I took this job. Perhaps I will. Or maybe I’ll go back to the U.N. and beg them for my old job back.”
“Is that what you want?”
Lark took a deep breath as she pondered the question.
“Eventually I’d like something a little more… stable. Permanent.”
“That surprises me.”
“I don’t strike you as the stable type?”
“Honestly, no.”
“No?”
“You certainly have the dress code down, but you do not like to be confined.”
Lark smiled as she shrugged.
“I suppose I suffer from boring too easily. So much traveling and I become bored with that too.”
It was the only time they had a chance to get acquainted. Normally Dario despised
small talk, and it seemed so did Lark, who often retreated to her headphones in between meetings, leaving his insufferable father as his only chatting companion.
He was beginning to wonder if she even had anything playing at all, as if she merely had no other way to politely tell her bosses to fuck off while she wasn’t working. He imagined the mental energy it took to interpret between two non-native languages required one to recharge when off the clock.
As much as he understood, part of him wanted to make Lark swoon the way Vanessa had on the night they met, which she couldn’t do when they weren’t talking. At least, not without sacrificing their burgeoning professional rapport.
They had two days left in Korea before heading to New York, and he hadn’t anticipated the amount of down time he would have. They were at meetings and shows eight hours a day, four hours less than his average work day. He didn’t know what to do with himself and was about to do something drastic. Like indulge his appetites.
The instantaneous chemistry they’d experienced only a week before was still having its way with his warring libido. The salted carmel of her skin. If he tried hard enough— and he had— he could still feel the way her thighs had gripped him, the way they had filled her cozy bedroom with the damp heat of lovemaking.
He lay in bed mulling over his blunder the other night, the moment he’d referred to their affair as a “mistake.”
He regretted the existence of his mouth as soon as he heard himself. Her energy had completely changed and an awkward silence enveloped them both.
Obviously he hadn’t regretted anything, but he assumed from her complete unwillingness to talk about it that she had deemed it a mistake.
But he assumed wrong.
He wasn’t sure what it meant, but whatever it was, his stupid mouth had rendered it irrelevant.
Now he was sequestered in his room, pretending to be asleep.
He wanted to clear the air, but professionally speaking he couldn’t deny that the misunderstanding might be what he needed to make it through this trip.
If he let her think that he regarded her rendezvous with him a mistake, then she wouldn’t think anything of it if he were to get up and knock on her door right now.
She would think he was jet-lagged, perhaps a little self-absorbed and growing a newfound interest in talking to her about random things not related to business. And all of those things were true.
He emerged from his room, traversing the great crevasse between her side and his, to Lark’s door. Dario hesitated a moment, took a deep breath and then knocked.
* * *
The sudden knock on the door made Lark nearly jump out of her skin.
She was completely naked under her robe, and even though her door was locked and there was no danger of him seeing her, her heart was beating a mile a minute. She dressed herself in a panic, grabbing a t-shirt and a pair of sweats.
Her Russian audio droned on in the background as she opened the door. There she was confronted with Dario, wearing head to toe cashmere and barefoot. His brown tufts of hair were a bit wet and curly at the ends as though from a shower.
“Am I interrupting?”
She shook her head and opened the door further for him to enter.
He looked around, her room kept and neat as though room service also slept there.
“Can’t sleep?” she offered.
“No,” he shook his head.
She resumed her cross legged position on the turned down bed, a spiral notebook and a box of unidentifiable Korean treats in front of her.
“Jet lag, I suppose,” she babbled, mesmerized by the look of him, his cream colored shirt that draped his broad back.
He sat at one of the two leather chairs and table in the corner with his long legs stretched in front of him, a faint musky scent filling her room.
He was so damn elegant. The way Landon, her former boss at the U.N. had been to her. She swooned like the naive young recruit that she was, and here she was back in that same position, like deja vu. Only Dario was wickedly more handsome, to the point that it filled all her senses. He had the alpha-male gait, commanded every room he walked in like other men of a certain age and stature. No one could blame her for repeating history.
“Is this what you listen to? In your headphones?” he asked.
“Yes,” she grinned, pleased that he noticed.
“How do you keep them all straight? In your head?”
She knew he meant the languages.
“I can keep them straight,” she said, “the difficult part is keeping them all fresh when I’m not using them.”
“Hence the Russian audio.”
“Da.”
“So you are always working.”
“Not unlike yourself.”
“Si, but don’t you ever want to take a break?”
“I didn’t always do this,” she informed him. “I had to learn. When I had a new assignment I would cram and cram for hours the night before my first day and I’d be exhausted. It’s much easier to keep up an hour a night regimen.”
“You are very self-disciplined.”
“I’m in a penthouse suite overlooking the South Korean skyline. The least I could do is be self-disciplined.”
“I want to hear them all.”
“All the languages?” she smiled.
“Si. How many do you know?”
“Well, technically I speak eleven languages, but I have only have certified mastery in seven. Soon to be eight.”
“Frankly, I don’t believe you,” he said. She laughed.
“Well, you’ve heard the English, the Italian, the Korean,” she counted on her fingers.
“A bit of the French,” he said.
“Oui…” she said. “So…there’s Arabic.”
She switched between the remaining languages as though switching through split personalities. He smiled.
“You’re a fascinating woman,” he said, as if trying to use his tongue on her the only way that was still allowed.
“As are you, signore.”
“I am a fascinating woman?” he made a corny joke. Politely she laughed.
They stayed up far too late, he maintaining his distance at the sitting area, she in bed. They ordered room service again, and she taught him many words.
“It’s better to use some kind of trick or shorthand and use that as a… hm… what’s the word,” she said. He looked at the indentation her breasts made through her shirt. He imagined seeing her topless again as she spoke.
“Stele di Rosetta,” she said.
“Si. Rosetta Stone,” he blinked, letting her know he understood.
“A picture or a feeling, the object itself, of course, if that applies.”
“What if the word or phrase exists in one language but not another?”
Lark was impressed by his curiosity.
“That’s… a very good question, signore.”
“Dario,” he corrected her again. “You musn’t address a man of my stature so formally when he is in your room in the middle of the night. It’s creepy,” he said. She laughed, both at the insight and the very Italian way he said the word “creepy.”
“Perhaps you will find this as fascinating as I do, since you asked that,” she began, as she hiked her knee up and rested her chin there. “Whatever phrase I can’t find in the English language, I can usually find it in ebonics.”
“Ebonics?”
“African American slang.”
“Ah. You have more than one slang.”
“More like… the slang from which all other American slangs originate.”
“The rosetta stone of slang,” he said. She laughed.
“Well, perhaps we can’t take credit for it all,” she smiled. “But for instance. In Italian, in French, in practically every other language there is a verb tense for immediate actions. Cosa stai fascendo, what are you doing, right now, this very moment? See how many English words I had to use?”
“It is very taxing,” he emphatically agreed. She l
aughed again.
“But in Ebonics, we have ‘fixing’ and it’s incredibly useful. And if the verb is passive, we drop it. It’s implied. Because without it, no one is confused and everyone knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about, so guess what? Redundant.”
“Like ‘cosa’ instead of ‘che cosa,’ or ‘qual’. English uses ‘what’ for everything,” he replied, to show he was following her.
“Exactly. So, the correct ebonics pronunciation of ‘Cosa stai fascendo’ is ‘What you fixin’ to do’ or, even more precisely, ‘What you finna do?’”
“Whaachufinnadoo,” he said.
Lark fell over into her pillows and practically died at his pronunciation of ebonics.
So he said it again. Lark laughed until she couldn’t breathe.
“Ma dai, he exclaimed with his hands out like an Italian mafia movie boss. “I am saying it perfect.”
Lark could only nod.
“That’s why it’s so funny,” she finally said when she’d fully recovered. He smiled.
Lark was suddenly glad to know that he’d considered their night together a mistake. In light of the fact that he was long widowed, she perceived herself a welcome distraction for him at the very least, just as she was now. Their professional relationship was something separate, and seemed to be progressing nicely, nice enough that they could sleep in the same suite together without a problem. Whatever loss of respect or mystery she may have suffered, it inadvertently caused her to become more unguarded and friendly than she thought she could manage. He eyed her playfully.
“Whachufinnadoo,” he said again for effect, the pronunciation already improving.
“Please stop!” she yelled into her pillow. He relinquished an unbearably sexy laugh, delighted at the sight of her.
* * *
The last day of fashion week, the trio returned to the hotel ready to crash.
“Roberto, I am beginning to wonder what this trip accomplishes,” the senior Mr. Di Rossi complained.
“Just know that it will make us money in the long run, papa.”
“I hope so. Every day I am parched from so much talking.”
“A usual day for you, no?”
“Bafangu. You do not appreciate me.”
