Wish You Weren't Here

Chapter 25

James

Market day in Urbino has always been my favorite day of the week. It’s the time to catch up with the neighbors, make our all-important dinner plans for the week to come, and spend time with Zia while she sells her handmade casciotta. When I was a boy, I’d travel with her for market day from town to town, learning about each village’s local culture, soaking in the art and architecture like a vacuum hose let loose in a dust cloud, sketching and shooting everything in sight. Markets in Italy are a work of art in their own right. The colors. The smells. The energy. All strokes of the brush that create living, breathing beauty.

But today, the patrons, our friends, some students, and a few tourists on day trips, are interrupting my view of the blonde in the short floral dress as she strolls through the tents touching the goods, smiling and talking to the locals. It’s next to impossible to sit behind a table full of casciotta and engage in small talk when she’s there, bare tan legs just asking to be touched. Especially now that I know how soft they are—how she looks when I touch them. Getting her home last night without kissing her against every priceless tapestry was a herculean task. All of the reasons I pushed her away seem to have set sail across the Adriatic, leaving me with the memory of how she felt pressed up against me—her fingers wrapped in my hair and her soft lips pressed against—

“Mio Dio, Gi. You just gave Gaetano the wrong change!” Nina says, jabbing me with a bony elbow between my ribs. She gestures out to where Ava is studying a table of antiques. “You are useless. Like having Verga here with his bone across the room. Just go. Vai.”

I let out a sigh. She’s right. Always right. She lifts my camera from the table beside her.

“Gaetano owes me from poker anyway.”

She nods at my justification and I hesitate, unwilling to break our tradition. “Sei sicura?” I ask.

“Vai!” she yells, making change for another patron with one hand.

I take my camera from her and kiss her temple.

“Grazie, Zia.”

She shoos me away like a mosquito. I make my way around the table, loop the camera strap over my neck, and lift the viewfinder to my eye. She’s at the center of the crosshairs, as if the lens has been preprogrammed to capture her. Her head is back and she’s talking to someone above her—Signora Antonelli, who is hanging out her kitchen window. It’s dizzying how easily Ava has become a local even with all that armor and obstinacy in place. She’d deny it wholeheartedly—say something self-deprecating about how out of place she is here—but Urbino has accepted her with open arms.

Ava laughs, and I can imagine the breathy, joyous sound even through the murmur of conversation and movement all around me. The smell of fresh olive oil mixes with the scent of fine leather from the tents on my left as I make my way behind them to avoid the crowd. I click away as the older woman above Ava points down Viale Bruno Buozzi, and her golden head turns with a wave goodbye.

And once again, I’m following her, though this time through a much thicker crowd—a much safer situation than the museum.

She stops beneath a white canopy, points to a basket of pepperoncini, and then opens her oversized bag while Signore Zannotti drops them inside. Who needs that many chili peppers? She probably got her Italian numbers wrong again. She fiddles with her euros, smiling and blushing at something the old man has said, and I wonder if he’s flirting with her. No doubt he is. Why wouldn’t he?

A light breeze finds its way down the street from the hills, and Ava’s hair flies across her face. She turns her back to the breeze, her hands occupied with money and her overstuffed purse, and her eyes settle on me. She shakes her head and lifts a brow.

I snap one more for prosperity and lower the camera with a shrug and a smile.

“You’d have a police report filed by now if we were in America,” she says as she heads back toward me.

“We aren’t in America. And if I recall, you gave me permission,” I remind her.

“I believe I was under the influence.” She tilts her head, exposing the soft skin beneath her ear. I consider stepping forward to brush my lips there, but after how we left it last night, I still don’t know what the hell she wants. And at least four locals are staring at me and the beautiful American woman. Small towns love to talk. Small Italian towns love to get involved. I put my arm out for her to take.

“Can I show you the best the market has to offer?”

“Are you insinuating that that’s you?” she says, looping her arm in mine.

I dip my head down just close enough for her to hear without a thousand rumors popping into circulation, and whisper, “I was not, but if you have figured out what you want, dolcezza, I do know a place nearby.”

She swallows and lets out a long breath, color rising from beneath the scalloped neckline of her dress up her neck. The color of her blush—softer than the bushels of tomatoes behind her, but deeper than the rosé being poured at Franco’s booth—is enough to make me need to look away.

“What happened to this being a bad idea?” she murmurs beside me.

A group of students pass and we politely greet them. Ava looks up at me, nibbling on the lip that I nibbled on last night.

“Did I say that?” I know I did. And I know I need to say it again—to myself. My alarm bells have been going off since that kiss, but I can barely hear them when Ava is here in front of me. I want her. She wants me. And as complicated as that might be, it feels unavoidably simple when she’s here with me.

“No. You said ‘this is a bad fucking idea, Ava,’” she says, the last part in a deep voice that is supposed to be me. I can see the wall go up behind her eyes at the memory.

“We should talk,” she adds, worrying at her lips.

Here we go. She’s probably been up all night making PowerPoints about how to navigate this situation. This isn’t going to be good.

“Do we?” I ask, pointing to a pair of gloves at Marco’s leather stand. He nods and I lift them, taking Ava’s hand in mine and slipping one finger at a time into the glove.

“What happened last night—oh my goodness these are soft!” She lifts her hand to her face and sniffs at the leather. Her eyes close and she smiles. “My mom had a pair like this. They were maroon and I’d put them on and pretend to be a princess or a mime.”

“That’s quite the range,” I tell her, handing Marco the money.

“James! You can’t buy me these,” she says, rushing to pinch the top of her fingers and slip them off.

I put my hand on her back and guide her away from the tent before she inadvertently insults the vendor.

“I can and I did. Now put them somewhere that you won’t get chili peppers all over them,” I tell her, waving to a group of older women watching us from behind a table of handmade soaps.

“Seriously, you can’t be giving me gifts. It feels too much like—”

“You’re my mistress.”

“I was going to say like you’re my sugar daddy, but yeah. That works too.” She is still trying to get the glove off of her hand. I stop her, shield her from view with my body against a tent flap, and lift the glove to my mouth, carefully biting the leather fingertip and slipping it off.

She grabs it from my mouth, looking up at me with round eyes.

“What’s wrong with you being my mistress?” I ask, smiling at the amazing blush I’ve caused. I’m playing with fire. I’m almost certainly going to end up with third-degree burns.

She looks between my mouth and eyes, swallows hard.

“So many things,” she says. “Number one, this wasn’t part of the pl—”

“Don’t you dare say it, Ava. That word is no longer allowed here.”

“Number two, I have two weeks left here—”

I ignore the feeling in my gut and say, “We did this math last night. But I believe it was me with the reservations and you doing the begging.”

“Begging? Please!”

“Yes, exactly like that, but the please was breathier—”

“Your memory is broken. Number three, won’t you get in trouble for this?” she asks.

“Walking with you through the market?” I lift my hands.

She rolls her eyes so deep it hurts my head. “Sleeping with your assistant.”

“Did we sleep together? I think I would remember that—”

She elbows me in the exact place Nina caught me minutes ago.

“I’m serious. I don’t want to mess anything up for you here. At home, stuff like that can ruin reputations for life,” she says, her eyes on the side of my face while I lead us toward the smell of fried meat. Uvaldi’s food truck.

“Once again, we are not in America, Ava. Let it go. This is Italy. People here aren’t as stuffy and uptight about sex and lo—and affairs of the heart,” I finish lamely. Nothing like the L-word to send her into full retreat while she’s ticking off reasons not to be near me. And all of her reasons are just good sound sense—exact replicas of the good sound sense I let fly out the window after tasting her last night. That kiss opened the floodgates, and now there’s nothing to do but try not to drown until the water calms down. I lift the camera and take a few shots of a group of kids playing soccer in an alley to my right.

“You use your camera to hide,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Shit gets real and you find something to photograph.”

I chuckle—lower it to my chest and take her in without the barrier. She’s looking straight up at me, chest puffed out with that know-it-all grin.

“And you are the essence of open and forthright? It took me a week to be able to have a conversation with you that didn’t raise your hackles and shut you down. Shit gets real and you start spouting off about plans.”

She purses her lips.

“You’re raising my hackles right now,” she says.

I grin. “Come on. Let me show you the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

She shakes her head at the innuendo but graces me with a slow smile. I breathe out my relief that she’s back with me—out of her head, where her worries seem to suck the joy right out of the air. And pull my own fears and worries right to the surface.

The moment Uvaldi sees her, he is out from the inside of the truck, lifting her in his huge arms against the apron that smells of sausage. She laughs when her sandal slips off during the greeting, but it’s obvious she loves every second of the embrace.

“Gi, you sent this to me?” Uvaldi yells, arm around Ava’s shoulders. She’s a quarter of his size.

“I did,” I tell him.

“Va bene. I owe you, no?” His smile is infectious.

I want to say I feel the same way about whoever sent her to me. But I just nod and watch while he tells her about tonight’s antipasti that he’s bringing to dinner, tugging her into the inside of the truck and ignoring the line that has formed outside.

“Signore, can I have my date back?” I yell toward the interior.

Her golden head pops up over the counter of meats.

“Date?”

I wave her question away and Uvaldi’s laughter shakes the truck.

“I’d just like her to try la crescia, per favore,” I tell him, doing my best to send him Nina’s malocchio.

He winks at me over Ava’s head and lifts his chin.

“Va bene, bella. Vai. Let’s not upset Gi. We will see each other at dinner, no?” He pushes Ava back out the side door and she just smiles up at me.

“Date?” she asks again. “Don’t you think you should have consulted me before taking me on a date?”

Uvaldi hands me the melted cheese and prosciutto on the flaky flatbread and I immediately hold it to her mouth to shut her up.

She takes a bite and her eyes roll into the back of her head with a moan.

She’s forgotten all about my verbal slip.

She takes the crescia from my hand, licks her lips. Takes another bite. Another soft moan.

And I’ve forgotten my own name.