by Lily Zante
~~
It was no good. She needed to see him. Needed to explain why she had left the way she did last night.
She wasn’t used to this, never having had a one night stand before. It wasn’t what she did, but oddly, she had no regrets. She was a little shocked at herself, it was only natural given her limited romantic entanglements, but regret?
No.
Yet her behavior might lead Christian to think she did.
Christian hadn’t coerced her, and he didn’t deserve the way she had left him. He had been a tender and generous lover, thinking only of her pleasure. She had never experienced such heightened bliss had never had it last that long before. Each time she was on the edge of release, he pulled her back, from it, made it linger, tortured her with his feverish kisses, and heated touch.
Now that the initial shock and shame had worn off, all she could think of was wanting to be with him again. It would be a mistake for her to leave Rome with things cold and words unsaid between them.
She needed to set things straight. He’d made her days here—most of them—entertaining, and he’d helped her step out of her comfort zone. He’d helped her bury the ghost of Davide, and he’d shown her that she was worthy. More than that, he’d made her feel something, not just special, he’d made her feel something deep inside her core. It wasn’t just the intimacy, she’d felt a connection to him that she had never felt before, and she didn’t want to walk away from his life without saying goodbye, at the very least.
With lunch over, and her friends now ordering coffee, she excused herself from the small restaurant and rushed back to the training center offices. She rushed towards Christian’s training room and was about to knock on the slightly ajar door, when she heard voices.
He was talking to someone. “You mean Gina?” She heard him say, and pressed her ear closer to the door. The voices were just about audible, and she recognized the other man. It was Emilio, the trainer she had spoken to a few days ago.
“And what’s with that thing she’s got on her head?” She heard him say, and then Christian’s answer. “Maybe she thinks taking it off leads to foreplay.”
She heard loud laughter and her stomach emptied. But she couldn’t walk away. She wouldn’t have been able to even if her legs hadn’t turned to rubber.
“You know the score. Sometimes you have to try all flavors.” Shock sucked the air clean out of her lungs and she froze, as if paralyzed from the neck down. She continued to listen, her mouth turning drier by the second.
“Rachele doesn’t need to know.” It was Christian’s voice. Even with her face pressed up close to the door, she felt the floor give. Felt the light go dim around her.
Who the hell was Rachele?
Though she was still standing, it felt as if she'd hit the floor hard and was all smashed up and broken in a way that could never be put back together properly.
First Davide, now Christian.
There were limits to what she could withstand emotionally. She would soldier on, the way she always had, but for a few silent seconds as she rushed away, she allowed herself to fall apart.
Chapter 22
Was this what charmers were like? The ones who slid into your panties with ease, and made it seem as if they were doing you a favor? Her mother had been right. Her mother had warned her. Just because things had worked out well in the end for Mimi, didn’t mean they would work out well for her.
She slipped into the washroom, her heart heavy. Thankfully, it was empty. It would give her the space she needed to pull herself together again even as waves of despondency, black and heavy, circled around her.
They had mocked her; talked about her as if she were a bet. Try all flavors? A schoolteacher? She lifted her hand to her hair, then realized she’d rushed this morning and hadn’t worn her headband. She had a mind to never wear it again. Scowling, she stared in the mirror and changed her mind. She would wear it again despite what those douche bags said about her.
She took a deep breath, hoping to still her furious heart.
Christian already had a girlfriend. She had been away and he had used Gina. His friend had called him a stud. That one conversation had told her everything she needed to know about the man. She had been blind not to have seen it.
She pressed her finger along the ridge just below her eyebrow, pondering how she could suffer the rest of the afternoon with him. If it was any consolation, she only had to put up with him for a few more hours. Imagine if she’d only been halfway through the course? It would have been a lot worse then. It would have been unbearable being in the same room as the stud.
She tasted bile in the back of her throat, her stomach hollow even though she’d just had lunch.
It was over. She had nothing to say to Christian Russo. He didn’t need to know what she had overheard—she steeled herself to get through the afternoon as calmly as possible. Get the test over and done with and jump on the next train back to Verona. For once, she was eager to go home.
She walked out of the washroom and saw her fellow students file into the training room. She joined them quickly, grateful to be able to hide among them.
When everyone had settled down, Christian gave instructions about the test and it was hard to know where to look. A couple of times she met his gaze by accident and returned it with a stony expression.
She felt ashamed that she had let him use her.
The test lasted about an hour and passed by in a blur. She couldn’t focus. Her mind kept drifting from yesterday and being in Christian’s bed, to the conversation she had just overheard. It killed her that the man she had been intimate with had turned out to be two-faced.
Not possessing an evil bone in her body, she failed to understand how people could behave like this.
She rushed through the test questions, and was so pre-occupied with the drama that had recently become her life, that she messed up a whole bunch of questions by not reading carefully and, when she discovered her mistake and tried to go back and change them, the time was up. She hadn’t even finished everything.
It was no surprise when at the end, as she waited with bated breath for the results, a big fat FAIL in large, black letters appeared on the screen. The background chatter turned to an excited roar as everyone else got their results.
“I passed!” The man next to her was beaming. “What about—” He stared at her screen. “No!” he gasped. “What happened?”
She shrugged. “I messed up a whole heap of questions.” She didn’t want to talk about it, but more than that, she dreaded Christian coming to her and pretending to be concerned.
“I don’t understand.” Her colleague looked dumbfounded. “You helped me with questions when I was stuck. How can that be?”
“Who knows?” She began to gather her things together. Suddenly, she was desperate to be among the first to leave.
“Well done.” Christian addressed the class with one of his oh-so-endearing-smiles. He leaned back against his desk and folded his arms as he looked around the room, reminding her once more that she had seen him naked, had seen those biceps and corded muscles up close.
She looked down at her keyboard. It was safer to rest her gaze there and to listen to Christian drawl on even though she felt the heat of his gaze on her. He told the class that they had done well and, while they were waiting for their certificates which were being printed out, he would appreciate their feedback.
He handed out the student survey forms. She took hers without looking at him, and began to fill it out. It was the usual type of form; rating the course, and the content and the instructor on a scale of 1 to 5. There were boxes for additional comments but she left them all blank. She put a 5 on everything, even though she had a mind to give him a 1.
She didn’t want him calling her later and asking what Fordana could do better.
The scraping of chairs and enthusiastic goodbyes told her that people were getting ready to leave. Christian disappeared to get the certificates from the reception area, she
assumed, and she used this opportunity to make her exit.
Saying goodbye quickly to her friends and rushed to leave the room, but just as she reached the door, Christian appeared before her.
“You’re in a hurry.” He seemed tense.
“I am.”
“Could I speak to you before you leave?”
Staring into his face for the briefest of moments was painful. He looked so genuine, so sincere, as if he cared. If she hadn’t heard the conversation, she would have been sucked into believing his bullshit. “I’m running late,” she lied. “I don’t want to miss my train.” It was a plain lie, because the trains ran all day, and she could just as easily get the next one.
“Have a safe journey back.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see you soon?”
See you soon? She would rather gouge her eyes out. The man had no shame.
“Ciao.” She wasn’t coming back. The first thing she was going to do at work on Monday was cancel her next course at Fordana.
Chapter 23
He had vowed not to go out with them again but Emilio had promised to give him tips about the interview with Nesta. Against his better judgment, Christian was now sitting at the bar with a group of guys from work.
Besides, it had been a bear of a day and he could do with a drink. The situation with Gina had been preying on his mind. She was probably back in Verona now. He lifted his bottle of beer to his lips and contemplated the state of things.
How had she failed the test? She shouldn’t have.
He felt for her because he knew what the test had meant to her, but to fail it like that? By two lousy marks only? Often, students asked if they could come back and take a re-test. Many didn’t bother. He had a feeling she would want to. He’d wanted to tell her that it was only by a sliver that she had failed, but she hadn’t given him the chance. And, when the class had ended, she had done everything but run from the room as if she couldn’t leave fast enough.
He didn’t understand.
Was she that angry at him for what had happened between them? It wasn’t as if it had been a one-sided encounter. He wasn’t looking to start a relationship with her. It didn’t seem the direction in which they were headed, and he sensed that she had, like him, taken a chance.
There had been something between them, something intangible, but it had been there. He had felt it. He didn’t sleep with women he cared nothing for. They weren’t a piece of meat to him, despite what Emilio thought.
He was no goddamn stud.
He saw Emilio saunter towards them with a few of the sales guys. Christian acknowledged them all and shook his head when they asked him if he wanted another drink. He wasn’t planning to stay long.
“Another week over.” Emilio pumped his hand into the air and plonked himself down next to him.
“Another week.” For Christian it had been a week of ups and downs, of revelations and surprises. “Are you helping the sales guys out again?”
“They wanted me to prepare some presentations for them,” Emilio replied.
“More client visits lined up?” Emilio seemed to be doing a lot of work with the sales people lately.
“A whole heap of them.” Emilio wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Did you get her number?”
“Whose?”
“The schoolteacher’s.”
“Will you stop calling her that?”
“Chill,” said Emilio, slapping him on his back. “I’m messing around with you.” Then he angled his head as if he was figuring something out. “But you sound touchy about it. Is there something you want to tell me?”
“No,” said Christian, maintaining eye contact and not wavering. “Don’t be stupid. It was nothing like that.”
It was none of Emilio’s business. He saw the others returning to the table and turned away. The last thing he wanted was for Emilio to spout off his big mouth. Christian refused to say another word on the matter in the hopes of deflecting Emilio’s apparent interest. “Do you have any final tips for the interview? Anything I need to know about Nesta?”
Emilio shook his head. “Good luck.”
Good luck?
He’d been expecting more than good luck. It had been the main reason he’d come out with him tonight. “Is that all? Don’t you have anything else? You know these guys better than anyone. What are they looking for? Is the interview going to be technical? Will they expect me to show them certain features of the software?” Anything. He was disappointed in what Emilio had divulged so far.
“You worry too much, Christian.” Emilio told him “Be yourself.” He smiled as he looked straight ahead. “Someone better looking than you is making eyes at me. I think she needs another drink.”
He got up and grabbed his half-empty beer bottle then whispered into Christian’s ear. “Tonight could end well.”
Christian shook his head and swigged down the last dregs of his beer. He didn’t want to hang around in this pick-up joint. As he pushed off the bar stool, his cell phone rang and he answered it as he left the bar.
“Red or white?”
Rachele’s exuberance was hard to miss even as the music faded to nothing behind him. It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the bright sunlight outside.
“What?” he asked, irritated.
“Wine. Do you want red or white?”
Crap.
“Did you forget?” Her voice rose to an indignant shriek.
“Yeah.” He’d completely forgotten.
“I’m at the airport. I’ve just landed.”
At the airport? Dang it. He didn’t have the mental energy to deal with Rachele tonight, and he was in no mood for sex.
“I missed you, C, and I’m coming straight over.”
No way. He couldn’t face Rachele. Not after the kind of day he’d had. Not while Gina and all of that emotional headache was circling around him. “Can we meet another time?”
“What?” She crowed. “Have you made other plans?”
He could read between the lines.
“No. I’m not feeling up to it.” She would automatically assume that he was seeing someone else. It would be close enough to the truth.
“C… I can get you in the mood so fast, you won’t know it.” Her voice dripped of honey and molasses and all things sweet. “It won’t take me long to—”
“No.” He cut her off before she went off on a dirty rampage. It was fun when he was feeling it. Lately, not so much.
“C! Are you seeing someone else?”
“No.” And he sure as hell didn’t owe her an explanation even if he was.
“I need a good seeing to. I can’t wait another day.”
A woman like Gina would have taken the hint. But then again, a woman like Gina would never have a friendship based purely on sex. “I’m not in the mood.” His voice was stony.
But she had already hung up.
Chapter 24
Gone were the busy streets of Rome, and the monuments and buildings. Verona slowly seeped into view as the train silently glided through the countryside.
An aura of misery enveloped Gina. It wasn’t her test results that weighed her down. It was the things she had overheard. Coming the day after she’s spent the night with Christian was like a slap in the face on prom night.
When she had marched out of his classroom, she was so filled with humiliation and anger that all she’d wanted to do was leave. It was no wonder she failed the test, she could barely keep her thoughts under control. What did it matter that Christian had tried to talk to her at the end? He had no idea why she was being so cold, and she was content to let him think it was because of how she felt about yesterday.
The sadness would pass. It had with Davide. Shame colored her cheeks at the thought of her ex-boyfriend. It had barely been a couple of weeks since their split, and she’d already jumped into bed with another man.
What would he think if he knew? What would her mother think?
She found out soon enough.
<
br /> No sooner had she walked through the door, when her mother’s somber face greeted her. “You’re back.”
“Yes, Mama.” Gina set down her small suitcase in the hallway and slipped off her jacket. A week at staying away in a bright and airy hotel now made the dark interior of her mother’s house even more foreboding.
“You could have phoned,” said her mother.
“I did phone.”
“Not every day.”
“I told you. My handbag was stolen and my cell phone along with it.” She studied her mother’s face to see if something had happened to her while she had been away. “You look fine.”
“I had a migraine a few days ago. And my knees are getting worse.”
Gina stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “You’ll be getting new knees soon.”
“Only one at first.”
“I don’t know why they can’t replace both of them at the same time. How do they expect me to cope with one bad knee and one good one?” Her mother whined.
“You’ll cope.” She sighed. It was miserable here, as well. No better than the place she had left.
“Did you cook anything, Mama?”
“Of course I cooked. I wasn’t going to starve myself just because you weren’t here.”
“Is there any left over for me?”
“There was, but Mimi came by earlier, and I sent it back with her.”
She wanted to curl up and cry.
She was happy to be back at work the following Monday. Yet, walking into the Casa Adriana also saddened her because she knew the date of her leaving was coming closer. She had spent the weekend working furiously on her résumé and remembering, at the same time, how she had helped Christian with his.
A smile settled on her lips as she strode towards her office, cheerily greeting her fellow colleagues along the way. If only she could pick up the Casa Adriana and take it someplace else. That would be the ideal scenario. As much as she loved Verona, she had to move away and start over.
