Chapter Twenty-One
Luca comes with me to the farm on Friday and actually stays. We unload some hay in the barn, and then he feeds the ducks. “They’re so happy to see me,” he says.
“It’s clearly your Scottish charm and not the food you have.”
“We Scots have a way about us.”
“Really? You seem like a bunch of bampots to me.”
Luca laughs. “You must be thinking of Andy.”
“Sometimes I wonder if he’s your handler or your best friend.”
“Same.”
“Maybe the problem is that you need a handler?”
Luca looks at the ducks. “This is how she talks to me, mannies,” he says as they congregate at his feet to get their food. One of the large males stares at Luca, unconvinced he’s safe.
“Look at this one’s face,” Luca says. “He’s thinking what a dobber I am. This is worse than standing in front of the paparazzi.”
“Except animals only judge you on how safe you are, not on how you dress or where you land on a Forbes list.”
Luca nods with a slight laugh, and we get to work. We even stay past one o’clock to help Ferdy finish some repairs on a fence.
On the way back to Rome, Luca says he’ll drop me off at my place and then go get a shower and come back to pick meup.
I shake my head at him. “There’s nothing on the schedule tonight.”
His eyes are dark like the afternoon sky when he glances over. “I know, it’s glorious, isn’t it? I have a surprise for you. So just get ready, okay?”
I try to rein in my smile. “What am I supposed to wear?” I’ve gotten so used to planning my wardrobe to match where we’ll be that it’s become my first thought.
“How about that yellow dress you wore the day we met?”
“That’s definitely not paparazzi approved.”
“I like it.”
I watch him a moment, but he has no intention of elaborating.
When he picks me up later, we drive to a square near the Colosseum that I’ve only ever walked through, San Pietro in Vincoli.
“Have you been here?” Luca asks. “To the basilica?”
“No, only to the square.”
He looks at me as if he’s just beaten me at world-class checkers and grabs my hand to lead me inside a basilica that could totally pass for an office building on the outside. “This,” he whispers as we walk through an ugly brown door to the cool quiet of the stone interior, “is one of the oldest churches in Rome.”
Inside it’s a whole different place, in a simple, elegant way. Luca pulls me across the smooth marble floor and down some steps below the altar to find the chains of St.Peter displayed in a glass case.
“Do I get into the tour guide union?” he whispers as we stand before it.
“Definitely,” I admit. I’m kind of touched he’s even trying.
“Well, just wait.” He can barely contain himself, he’s so happy to have the upper hand in our nerdy adventure series. But what he shows me next really is surprising. It’s a sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo. An actual Michelangelo, sitting in the nave of a regular church on a backstreet in Rome.
“It never gets old to me how there’s art by the most famous artists in the world just scattered in random places throughout the city like this,” I say as we contemplate it.
“You have to admit I showed you something special.” He slips his hand back into mine, and I smile up at him and nod.
When we step outside again, the summer sun is too bright, and we both squint. “So, I have somewhere else to take you where you’ve probably been before, but I still think we’ll be able to find some new discoveries.”
“And where is this?”
We start to turn the corner back to the car but stop when we see a bunch of paparazzi surrounding the Portofino. Luca jerks me back before they can spot us.
He groans. “They ruin everything.”
“It’s okay,” I say, even though I’m disappointed.
Luca shakes his head. “I have an idea.” He types into his phone and waits for the genie’s answer to whatever he asked it. “Come on,” he says, just as a paparazzo rounds the corner and shouts at us, his camera clicking in the now-familiar-to-me way. They must have spotted us after all.
“Not today,” Luca says. He scoops up my hand and takes off running, and I bob along behind him with no idea how we are going to outrun some paparazzo. It feels like we’re flying through the busy sidewalks. We dodge between tourists and a flower shop stand, its brightly colored buckets of roses and lilies cascading their scent along the road. We round a corner, and Luca pulls me into a souvenir shop. We duck behind a center console of T-shirts and watch through the plate-glass window as the paparazzo runs into the square. He stops to look for us as others join him.
“If our luck holds, we’ll lose them,” Luca says, panting a bit. “You okay?”
I nod. “Just need to catch my breath.”
“Good thing you wore your Converses.”
“I know to come prepared for your adventures now. Maybe this dress is unlucky, though. You seem to get chased a lot by tabloids when I’m wearing it.”
“It would only be unlucky,” he says, “if I’d never met you.”
From behind us, a soft voice asks, “Do you want to go out the back?”
We turn. A young salesgirl is looking shyly at Luca.
“That would be brilliant,” he says.
She smiles and gestures to follow her.
“Does this happen to you all the time?” I ask him.
He laughs. “Not to me, just the girls I’m with.”
“Funny,” I say as Luca hands the girl some euros and thanksher.
We come out of the back of the shop and walk through an alley to a main street. A snake charmer sits on the sidewalk doing his thing, incense burning beside him. We edge around him and keep heading in the direction Luca’s phone tells us to go until we reach a Vespa rental place. Within minutes, Luca has rented us a blue scooter, and I’m trying to figure out how to artfully climb onto it in a dress while Luca waits to hand me a helmet like some knight from a modern-day fairy tale.
“Hold on,” he says when he’s settled in front, and I slip my arms around him. He’s wearing a soft, green linen T-shirt that flutters against my skin as we zip and weave through the streets of Rome, out of the historic district and across the river. The breeze against us is cool in the late-afternoon heat, and I can feel Luca’s heartbeat against the palm of my hand. He really should come with a full legal disclaimer. In writing, not just a few warnings from his trusty sidekick.
When we stop about twenty minutes later, we’re at the Villa Doria Pamphili, a large park at the western edge of the city.
Luca parks and turns his head to catch my gaze. He slides off his helmet and musses his dark hair back into place. “What do you think? You can’t possibly have explored this whole place.”
“Believe it or not, I’ve never been here.”
“What?”
I smile. “It was on my list, but then my plans for the summer got interrupted.”
“Well,” he says, jumping off the Vespa and pulling me with him, “your plans are now uninterrupted.” His smile is huge.
He takes my hand, and we find our way to the place Romans call the secret garden because it sits behind the beautiful old villa that’s used now as a government building. The garden is made up of perfectly symmetrical hedges in little patterns. We stop at a small bistro in the park and grab some Italian sodas. Then we stroll to the Garden of the Theatre, a pretty half-circle wall that was used as an amphitheater in the 1600s. Birds chatter around us, and stone pine trees stand like tall, skinny umbrellas.
As we walk, Luca pulls me closer. “I see why you love the animals at the farm so much,” he says.
“There’s something about being on the farm that makes everything clearer,” I say. “We spend so much time trying to figure out how to get other people to think well of us, when the only thing we really need is to think well of ourselves. But animals never worry about that at all.”
“I’ve spent my whole life worrying about what people think of me,” he says. “My first memory, I was maybe three years old. My dad took Adaira, my eldest sister, and me to town for a meeting he had. I started to cry about something, I don’t know what, probably I was bored or hungry, and my father took me out of the room, and we went and stood at a window, and he told me to look at the town below us. People were going about their business on the streets, as if we didn’t even exist. And then he told me that all those people down there not only knew who I was, but expected me to be a good little boy and not to cry, because I was a Kinnaird.”
“Wow, no pressure. So you stopped crying?”
“Well, no, not until Adaira called me a baby.” He looks at me, and we both laugh. “But I never again forgot that people were expecting me to be a Kinnaird, and what, exactly, being a Kinnaird means.”
“I think,” I say, not able to look at him, “that you should only ever worry about being what you know in your heart is right for Luca.”
“And is that what you were doing, before I came along and made you a public spectacle who has to wear designer clothes to help me out?”
“I suppose so.” I smile at him. “Maybe a little hiding, too.”
Luca is quiet for a few moments, but then he looks right through me. “You should never hide.”
My face starts to burn. “I will take that under advisement, my lord.”
Luca turns his gaze back to the path in front of us. “What’s your earliest memory?”
“It’s not any happier than yours. Worse, actually.”
“You don’t have to tell me, then.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s of my dad. The last day he lived with us. I was four. He’d already lost his job, so he picked me up at preschool. My mom had told him to go straight home with me, but he didn’t. He took me on a drug buy, first. I mean, I didn’t understand that until years later. Anyway, my mom was calling him to make sure we were home, and he wasn’t answering, but she didn’t know where to look for us because he kept that side of his life secret. She only knew he was using at that point, but not where he got it. I guess I was lucky, because he was still in control enough that he brought me home before he used. But I remember being frightened by the dirty bar we were in and crying for my mom. When we did get home, she was standing in the driveway, frantic. She grabbed me out of my car seat and hung on to me like she was scared she’d never see me again, tears streaming down her face. She told him to pack his things and not come back until he was sober.”
Luca slips his hand around my arm. “And he never cameback.”
I shake my head. “I saw him, every so often, on supervised visits. But it was always awkward, and I was always a little afraid of him. Not because he was mean or anything, he was very sweet with me, always so happy to see me, but because I’d seen how scared he’d made my mom that day. I didn’t understand then why she was afraid, but I understood how much. Maybe that’s why I’m so scared of the world.
“And then it was something I had to navigate. I got that I was supposed to be ashamed of him, but my mom told me we were the only ones who had the right to judge him. I just wanted to make him love me enough that he’d get sober and come home, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. It was so confusing, how you could love someone who was completely self-destructive and who pulled you under with him. So we bought a lemon tree, and we transplanted it to a new pot, and my mom said that was where all the sorrow and things we couldn’t share with other people could be at home and grow and become something better and happier than they started out as.”
“Wait, you have a lemon tree in your apartment.”
I nod. “She somehow managed to take all that shame and sorrow and repurpose it for me. We call it Bert. And every new place we go, she spends hours making sure Bert ships safely and gets through quarantine. And then we make lemonade to celebrate.”
Luca smiles. “Your mom is pretty cool.”
“She is.”
He pulls me into a hug. “Her daughter is pretty cool, too.”
I hold on for a moment, and then let go with a laugh. “I don’t know why I tell you these things. I never tell anyone else.”
“Well, you don’t let yourself have friends, so who would there be to tell?”
“That’s not true, what Patrick said. I have friends. I mean, only Anna Maria here, because I’ve only been here for a year. And it’s two friends, if you count Jack.”
“Aye, because it takes at least a year, so that means we can be friends next summer.”
“You are so funny. Well, as much as I enjoy talking about my selective friend group, I’m very hungry.”
“Aye, milady,” Luca says, and pulls out his phone to find a restaurant. We find our way back to the Vespa and go to a small trattoria nearby. We sit at a sidewalk table under a bright red umbrella as the sun sets. A candle glimmers on the table, and fairy lights sparkle in potted trees around the little patio. We eat pasta and share a plate of cannoli for dessert, and we talk about all the things we would do and the places we would visit if we didn’t have any constraints, like time or money or family. Or girlfriends. Luca doesn’t mention Jasmine, and I don’t remind him.
Afterward, we hop on the Vespa, and Luca drives us around the city aimlessly, across the river and through streets sparkling with the city’s streetlights and the light that spills from shops and restaurants and apartments. I hang on a little tighter than I should and rest my cheek on his shoulder blade as all the sights and sounds and smells of Rome blur by us, and I wish this didn’t have to end.
Sometimes he pulls over, and we stay on the scooter, my arms still wrapped around him as he tilts his head back toward mine as we gaze at the view or talk about a monument. And then he pulls out again and we zip and weave our way around the city like it’s a magical modern fairy capital.
It’s well past midnight when he drops me off at my flat.
“Thank you for today,” I say as I let go of him and hop off the Vespa.
Luca catches my hand in his. “The pleasure was all mine, sweet Story.”
I pull away and go unlock the door to the building. When it closes behind me, I hear the Vespa hover and then purr into the street, but I don’t turn around to watch it go. Andy’s right, he’s an easy guy to fall for, and I need to change course before I make a complete fool of myself. He’s just bored because the girl he’s actually chasing, the girl he thinks is a dream come true, isn’t here.
The next two weeks are filled with typical Luca Kinnaird activities, and we settle back into our usual routines except for when Luca comes to the sanctuary or has Sunday dinner with my mom and me. The paparazzi declare I’m “taming the rogue Scot.” My partnership with Dani Meadows Designs has given Dani and me tons of new followers. Other companies approach me about plugging their products, but I leave that to Andrew so long as the products are vegan, organic, and ethically produced. He calls that a “great angle.” Luca and I just look at each other and smile. But Andrew takes care of the business side of it as if he were a professional manager.
When I scroll through my photo gallery, it seems effortless. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” I tell Andrew one day as we’re waiting for Luca to get the car.
“Luca was very specific about how your brand should look.”
“He was?”
Andrew nods. “Crisp, cultured, and congenial.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I guess you’ve become my handler, too?”
Andrew laughs. “You don’t really need one, but I’m happy to oblige. I’ve had some inquiries from charities that want you to promote them for free.”
“That’s fine, so long as they fit the brand.”
“As you wish, Yankee hippie,” he says, but he smiles.
My mom has noticed the new wardrobe, so I have to explain that some people are following me because of Luca and I’m helping Dani out by wearing her clothes. She shakes her head as she packs her lunch one morning. “I don’t understand any of this influencer culture your generation has.”
“Me neither, honestly. Andrew just thought it would help his cousin, so I said yes.” I know I should leave it at that, but I’ve never been good at lying through omission. “And it helps me, too, because then people don’t criticize me for not being able to fit into Luca’s designer world.”
“Story, you know better than to get caught up in that kind of nonsense.”
“I know, but I don’t want Luca to have to deal with people making fun of my clothes.”
She stops peeling an orange and looks at me. “How many people follow this boy?”
I shake my head. “Not that many. This isn’t forever, Mom. I’ll be at Princeton next month, and Luca will be back at Oxford. It will all be over.”
“Are you sure this is just a summer fling? You two seem pretty connected.”
“We’ll always be friends,” I say, and there’s truth in that. We’ll end our business arrangement as friends. We just won’t stay in touch. She looks at me skeptically, but she doesn’t say anything. I try not to think about how much my life without Luca seems—less full. Less everything. But at least maybe this friendship angle will be the foundation for telling my mom about the scholarship when the time comes.
The tabs are off my back, and some of them even comment on what a proficient influencer I’m becoming, although I’m “still no Chiara Ferragni.” Elisa is happy with me because the sanctuary has gotten some free publicity, and donations are up. Luca is more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him. Even Andrew is pleased, as he tells me I’ll need to hire an accountant about what taxes to pay on the endorsement income he’s started to deposit into my checking account. It’s not nearly enough to pay for a year of school, but it’s more than I ever expected. We’re more than halfway through this insanity, and I’m finally pulling it off to everyone’s satisfaction. Except my own.
And Jasmine’s. She calls Luca one afternoon when we’re in his hotel suite having lunch with Andrew. I can hear her even though he doesn’t have her on speaker.
“What the hell is she doing, babe? She isn’t supposed to be transforming into an influencer. She’s just a plus-one to take the heat off our relationship. Can’t that stupid wannabe do anything right?”
I’m sitting cross-legged on the sofa with my plate on my lap. Andrew is on the other end of the sofa, and Luca is in a chair next to me. I glance at Andrew. He must be able to hear her because he pulls his face into a long, awkward arrow toward the balcony. I get up and walk past Luca. He grabs my wrist as I go, but I don’t stop and he lets me slip by. His face is flushed, though.
“Jasmine, you aren’t being fair,” he says. “This was your idea and she’s doing great. Yeah, I am saying everything’s under control.” He lowers his voice. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
Sunlight is beating down on the balcony as Andrew closes the door behind us. We chat stupidly about Via Condotti. “I don’t know how anyone manages this heat,” he says after a couple of minutes.
“They don’t. The street is practically empty.”
“Except for that diddy down there with the camera watching us.”
I don’t look, but Andrew and I aren’t standing too close or acting weird, except for being on a hot balcony in the middle of the day in July in Rome.
“Listen, for what it’s worth,” he says, “I’d pick you over her any day.”
I laugh. “Only because you know what she’s really like.”
“Aye, she’s right hackit in her soul.”
I let out a deep breath. I just need to focus on how close we are to the finish. Billboards for Rowdy and Jasmine’s album started going up around town two days ago.
“I thought a couple weeks ago that he might break up with her. But it’s complicated.”
“What do you mean?” If it’s possible for hearts to do cartwheels, mine just might have.
Andrew shrugs and gets vague. “He’ll usually walk away when a girl brings this much drama.”
If Luca is putting up with all her drama when he doesn’t like it, he must really like her. Luca and my mom are right, I need to get some real friends. Maybe when I get to Princeton. Maybe Jack can help with that.
Luca pushes the French doors open and steps out. He’s in bare feet, and he jumps at the hot marble.
“I’m sorry about that, you can come back in. Jings, it’s blazing out here.”
“We’re being watched,” Andrew says. “Two o’clock street level.”
Without missing a beat, Luca wraps his arms around me and puts his chin on my shoulder. He leans his face against mine, so close I’m in a haze of his aftershave. “We need to go in before I melt.”
Andrew and I laugh and start toward the door, but Luca pulls me back. I look up, and he slips a strand of my hair behind my ear, one arm around my waist.
“She didn’t mean any of that. She’s just stressed about the tour. They had some security issues, and there was a problem with the sound system at the Oslo venue, and two of her dancers got food poisoning.”
There’s a camera lens pointed at me. Along with Luca’s eyes, which are the color of a stormy ocean. “It’s no big deal.” I force a smile. “I wouldn’t want to have to see us together in photos all the time if I were her.”
I look down because the way he’s searching my eyes feels like he’s found the secrets of my heart that I don’t even know. He could have at least picked a diva who wasn’t hackit in her soul. Whatever exactly that means.
“I just wish—”
I don’t let him finish. Whatever he wants is probably best left unsaid. “Dai,” I say as I pull him back inside. “If you melt, she’ll blame me for that, too.”