Italian Kisses(10)

“Didn’t you say it was a... What is it you call these? A one night stand?” Isabella’s dark eyes glinted with mischief. She and I had become fast friends after I arrived in Rome. She’d given me the tour of the university campus, and was herself a graduate student in classical studies.

While not an art history major like myself, she knew more than enough to hold her own in various conversations we had about Greco-Roman art. Behind those beautiful eyes lay a sharp mind. One more than a match to deal with any man who thought she was just another pretty face. It was a quality I’d come to appreciate in my friend.

“Yeah,” I said, “It was.”

“What something is supposed to be and what something actually is are often not the same,” Isabella replied before picking up her own tiny espresso mug, blowing the steam off the top, and taking a sip of the scalding black liquid.

“Sure,” I shrugged. It really was supposed to have been just a one night thing. Something to finally let loose, something to shake me out of this rut I couldn’t seem to escape.

And it had, I needed to admit. Being with him had awakened my mind and senses in ways I hadn’t felt for a long time. I took another bite of the hard biscotti, savoring the texture of it this time. When was the last time I’d thought about the texture of my food?

I sat back against the bistro chair, letting the warm light of the Roman sun hit my cheeks.

We were at an old café a five minute walk from the campus that we visited usually at least twice a week. However, it might as well have been my first time there. I studied the row of buildings crammed together across the street, the way little alleys cut in between them, branching off from the main road like vessels from an artery.

Somewhere down the street a young boy laughed as he ran through a flock of pigeons, the birds winging away in all directions with annoyed squawks.

I noticed our waiter as he shuffled between the tables on the patio. He was an older man with a horseshoe of wispy white hair clinging to his scalp. He was the same waiter we dealt with on every visit.

But this time, I noticed how, despite his age, he walked quickly and confidently, his polished shoes clicking off the pavement. He knelt to deposit a mug of espresso in front of a woman wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses, smiling as he did. I remembered that he always smiled, and that when his mouth smiled, his eyes did, too.

Liam’s smiles went to his eyes, too. I remembered that. A person’s eyes don’t lie, my dad used to say to me. Well, I definitely saw a certain truth in Liam’s eyes that night. And it was a truth that left the front of my stomach tingly and tight.

“Be careful. If Giancarlo sees you looking at him like that, he is likely to flirt with you,” Isabella said.

Heat rose to my cheeks while my eyes dropped to my latte. How strange I must look, I realized. Staring about like a tourist who’d just gotten off the plane.

“It’s nothing,” I said, “It’s just that everything reminds me of him.”

“Him? This Liam?” I liked the way his name sounded in her accent. Exotic, yet somehow familiar. “I think this was not just a one night stand, no?”

I shrugged, a sudden burst of frustration twisting my lips. “No, that’s all it can be. I’m just not in the right place for something like that... something like him in my life right now.”

“There is no place in your life for joy and happiness right now? Is that what you are saying? Because that is what I am hearing,” Isabella said, tracing the rim of her espresso cup with one long and lacquered fingertip.

I balked at that, hitching my shoulders higher, “Hey, come on, I’m happy.” I could taste the lie as it rolled across my tongue and then out through my lips. It was bitter. Not at all like Liam’s kisses.

“You aren’t a very good liar, Emma. Why do you resist the idea so much?”

I shrugged while shaking my head, getting the sudden urge to throw my hands up as well. Maybe Italy was rubbing off on me, after all. “I just can’t deal with it. Not on top of school.”

That made Isabella’s dark eyebrows climb her forehead, as though to say, “You don’t believe that. Why should I?”

And she was right, I knew. If it was just supposed to be a one night stand, why could I think of nothing but those lovely lips of his, of the way his eyes smiled with those lips?

Another tingle ran down my body, terminating in a place that had me shifting in my seat and swallowing heavily.

“Tell me,” Isabella said.

I blew my cheeks out. “I guess things just didn’t go like I thought they would. With him. Liam, I mean.”

“How so?”