Wish You Weren't Here

Chapter 29

Ava

James has laid out a blanket on a square of grass in Piazzale Roma just below a statue of Raphael that sits at the public garden’s center. The open sky is a backdrop that the bronzed artist would have approved of—a shade of blue that he would have mixed for his own masterpieces. A high-pitched squeal from the playground in the distance draws our gaze to a father chasing his daughter around a slide. James is holding his camera to his eye, adjusting his focus as he zooms in on the two laughing figures. I smile around the mouthful of prosciutto and cheese, remembering a game my own father used to play called Daddy Monster.

You should call him.

Oh, now you show up, Mom. Nice of you to stop in. You want me to call Dad? So I can argue with him about my choice of law firm since we barely speak about anything else? Maybe I can let him know that your mark is all over Urbino? Or ask him if he knows anything about your secret life here?

You should call him.

“Should I?”

“Should you what?” James asks, offering me a third sandwich. My heart expands and I accept the delicious gift as easily as I accepted all of his compliments on the notes I wrote for him.

“Nothing, I was just thinking out loud,” I say, hiding behind the semicircle of yumminess.

“You do that a lot—” He points to my cheek and I wipe off a bit of cheese. “Talk to yourself.”

I don’t know which is crazier, talking to myself or to my dead mom, so I let it go.

“Well, you take too many photos,” I say. Excellent comeback.

He laughs and lies back on the blanket, hands folded beneath his head.

“That’s almost definitely true. But when I take that many, there’s always that one out of a million that captures something so perfectly it takes your breath away.”

“Like the little girl at Franco’s?”

He murmurs an mmhmmm.

“Or the old men walking in the market? That’s my favorite. The hand gestures and facial expressions! There is so much communication between them in that shot. I can hear it.”

He’s turned his head to the side and is studying me with a small smile.

“You love art,” he says in the same way a middle schooler might accuse his friend of having a crush on someone.

I lower my sandwich shield.

“I never said I didn’t.”

“No. But you really, really love art. You light up when you talk about it. There’s only one other time I’ve seen you light up like that.”

I know better than to ask when that other time was.

“I was going to be an art teacher,” I say so softly I doubt he’s heard me.

He sits up, resting on his elbows. The way he looks at me—I’m suddenly the most interesting woman in the world.

“You what?”

I shrug.

“I was in my second year of an education/art history double major when my mom got sick,” I say, staring at the bronze Raphael above me. “The month I took off to be with her turned into two years, and then when she passed—well, art kind of lost its appeal. I couldn’t even look at a painting without falling apart.”

“So you switched paths,” he offers.

“My dad had always wanted me to study law. He said I had a natural talent for argument.” I give him a warning look so he knows not to comment. But he doesn’t look interested in the low-hanging fruit. He looks like he wants to wrap me up in the blanket and put me on his lap.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him, my voice thicker than I’d like.

“Like what?”

“You know what,” I say, gesturing to his face.

“Oh, you mean with actual emotion? Like you looked at me when I told you about my parents?” He sits up, wipes his hands on his pants. “How do you want me to look at you, Ava? With indifference?”

I shake my head. How do I want him to look at me? I don’t have time to decide, because the warmth of his hand finds my own as he lifts it to his mouth.

“I can’t help how I look at you any more than you can help how you found your way back to art,” he says as he watches me over our hands. He presses his lips to my palm, then against my wrist.

“I didn’t find my way back—this was all a mistake. None of this is part—”

“If you finish that sentence I’m not letting you have the pizza dolce I brought you.”

Bastardo. What in the good Madonna’s name is pizza dolce?

He leans in closer, my hand still against his lower lip so that I can feel his breath against my fingertips. “Life brought you back to art. And when life brings you something, dolcezza, you take it, say grazie, and don’t look back.”

A breeze blows softly up Via Raffaello, rustling the needles on the cypress trees that flank the garden. I lean toward him, pulled by some invisible force, and touch my lips softly to his, then muster up every Italian cell in my body to purr “Grazie” into his mouth.

The way his mouth relents to mine makes me dizzy, and I find purchase in his hair with my free hand. He kisses me so softly—with less urgency than the night in the garden, as if we have all the time in the world, and the careful delicacy of his lips steals the breath from my lungs in a way that terrifies me so much I pull back with a sharp inhale.

My hand goes to my mouth like my fingers might find an answer to why I can’t let him kiss me like that—why I can’t let myself kiss him like that. But when I meet his eyes, I can tell he already has the answer. He shakes his head slowly. All the warmth and emotion that I asked him not to look at me with has disappeared. And the breeze that I welcomed only moments before is suddenly cold enough to send goose bumps over my bare arms.

“I have to get over to the museum,” he tells me, reaching into the basket and peering inside. “You stay. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

He puts the wrapped-up dessert in front of me and stands, then brushes off his pants and busies himself with cleaning up around me. I want to stop him, to tell him to stay with me, but the words don’t come until he’s walking away, back down Via Raffaello, his hands sunk in his pockets with the basket hooked at his elbow.

And at that point he’s too far away to hear me when I ask him to stay.