Chapter 25
chapter twenty-five
LEO
“I know you think I’m a top-level chef, but I promise you, this arancini is about to blow you away,” I say as Marisol and I weave our way down the line of stalls that make up the biggest night market in the city.
“How did you even know this was here?” she says as she takes in everything around us, her eyes wandering the space.
“I did live here for quite some time, if you recall.”
“I know, but I…” She looks up at me. “I didn’t exactly expect you to be the stroll-through-the-market kind of guy.”
“I had to have a few tricks up my sleeve for all the dates I had,” I tease, and Marisol goes silent beside me.
I look down to see her looking anywhere but at me, and I can’t help the small smile that pulls at my lips.
I don’t know what this is between us anymore.
I don’t think she does either, but she’s jealous of hypothetical dates in my past, and I kind of love it.
“I’m joking, Marisol.” She looks up at me now. “I shopped around a little when I first moved, but once Romano Security was up and running…I didn’t have the capacity to give what someone would have wanted or needed from me in a relationship.”
Her brows dip as her gaze falls ahead of us once more. “You didn’t want the company? Someone to come home to?”
“It would have made many nights easier, I’m sure,” I say as we walk, neither of us paying attention to the stalls around us any longer.
“But at some point, someone would’ve wanted more from me than what I could give.
I didn’t want to add a rocky relationship onto the list of things that needed my attention. ”
I was already consumed by my work, thinking and thinking and thinking, constantly coming up with new strategies, planning out operations, and coordinating teams. I wasn’t present. My personal life consisted of feeding and watering myself while I worked. I was never off the clock.
No one deserves the kind of partner that I would have been, especially the kind of man I turned into when I’d been out in the field myself.
If things went well, I’d celebrate. But if things didn’t go as planned, I would disappear into the bottom of a bottle until I couldn’t remember what went wrong.
Until the last time. No amount of liquor could make me forget, nor time, for that matter.
She nods slowly. “But there have been people? Women, I mean.”
“Yeah, there’ve been women. A couple of men, too.” Her eyes are back on mine in an instant, her gaze lit with intrigue. I laugh and tip my head. “I’m not afraid of a little experimentation.”
Her mouth falls open in a surprised smile, and then she shakes her head. “I start to think I’m getting a hang of this whole knowing-you-again thing, and then you go and surprise me, over and over.”
“You know me,” I say. “You know me in ways that other people never could.” She slips her hand into the crook of my elbow, holding onto me as she leans her head against the side of my arm. She doesn’t need to respond, because I think she knows that it’s true, that it always has been.
We walk in a peaceful kind of quiet, letting the sounds of the evening fill the space between us.
Like the man walking through the crowds strumming against his chittara battente, the folk guitar reminding me of summers at my nonna and nonno’s house as a kid.
An old couple dances to the music, and he stops to play for them as we wander past, smiles on both of their faces.
Marisol lets out a small gasp before she drags me over to a small stall decorated with vintage cameras.
“Salve,” the older man standing in the stall greets us.
“Ciao,” I respond as Marisol picks up a small camera, looking it over with gentle hands. It looks like something from a seventies TV show, and she’s absolutely enamored with it.
She looks up at me when I rest a hand on her lower back, eyes shining as she grins. “I had one of these when I was a kid.”
“You did?” I ask.
She nods, looking back down at the camera. “My nonna’s boyfriend gave it to me for my fourteenth birthday. I lost it somewhere, but I never knew where.”
“Quant’è, signore?” I ask the man behind us.
“Costa seicento e novanta euro.”
Marisol’s eyes fly wide. “Nearly seven hundred euros?”
“We’ll take it,” I say, pulling out my wallet.
“What the hell are you doing?” Marisol whisper-shouts at me, but she doesn’t let go of the camera.
I take it from her, handing it to the older gentleman, allowing him to put it in its respective box. “I’m not letting you walk away, not after that smile.” She tips her head, like she might scold me and thank me at the same time. “Consider it an early Christmas present.”
“It’s April.” She folds her arms across her chest.
“Shhhh,” I say, exchanging my cash with the man for the small bag he placed the camera in. “Molte grazie.”
I slip the bag into Marisol’s hand. “Leo.”
“Covergirl,” I chirp back, and she fights a smile.
“You shouldn’t have done that. But thank you.”
I nod like the polite gentleman I pretend to be. “You’re welcome.” She smiles down at her feet as we start wandering once more.
Fairy lights twinkle ahead of us, strung up above the plastic tables that sit in clusters in the middle of the market.
I spy the arancini stall amongst all the other food vendors, decorated with a blow-up chef that sporadically waves his arm to welcome people over, and a long line snaking down the walkway.
“I didn’t know you were into the photography side of things,” I say to Marisol as we join the queue.
A small smile pulls at one side of her mouth, a dimple appearing in her cheek.
“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I never wanted to be a model. That wasn’t the dream.
It was obviously where I ended up, and it became the dream, but when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was take photos.
” She fiddles with the handles on the paper bag as she speaks, a small laugh escaping her.
“I used to insist on filming all of our home videos. Whenever Ma had the video recorder out, I’d run off with it.
I swear, all of those videos must be shaky or so out of focus, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at, but I remember photos of me behind that thing with the biggest grin on my face. ”
I smile as we step forward, imagining her as a little girl, snatching the camera. “Well, I hope your skills have improved, ’cause I want to see whatever you capture with that thing.” I nod toward the bag in her grasp.
She scoffs. “I don’t know that you can judge my skills when I only have one chance to take the perfect shot.”
“I believe in you, covergirl.” I smile like an idiot, but when Marisol doesn’t respond, I look over and see her staring up at me like I just said something revolutionary. “What?” I ask.
She shakes her head and lowers her gaze as we take another step closer to the front of the line, and I come to realize how much I dislike it when she does that.
“I think maybe that’s what I like about Polaroids. I think every piece of film is so perfectly imperfect. Someone might have a crooked smile, or you’re not in focus whatsoever, but it’s real. It’s exactly what was happening in that moment. I think that makes it precious.”
All I can do is stand here and force myself not to thank her, because I feel like she just let me inside her mind in more ways than one. I mentally forgive her for shutting me down a moment ago.
“Ciao.”
I look up to see we’re at the front of the line, and the man behind the counter awaits our order.
“Do you want to share one or have one each?” I ask Marisol, wanting to order an amount she’ll be comfortable with.
“I don’t trust you to share fair and square,” she teases, throwing a side-eyed glare my way. “We’ll have one each.”
A laugh tumbles from my lips as I hand over the correct amount of cash and we move to the side to wait, but I don’t say anything, don’t try to convince her I could share perfectly with her. I am more than happy for her to have one all to herself.
Marisol waits quietly, the ghost of a smile gracing her lips. I want to wrap my arms around her, to feel her hands slide over mine like they always do, but I just stand beside her with my hands behind my back. “So what’s the dream now?”
She looks up. “What?”
“The dream now. Is it still to model for as long as you can?”
“I—” She stumbles, and I watch her brows draw together as if the thought hasn’t entered her mind until now. “I’ve worked so hard to find my way back to this, and I’m nowhere near the level I was before Jack threw a grenade my way.”
“I know,” I say gently. But that wasn’t my question.
I’ve never doubted how hard she’s worked in her career, but I do wonder what it is she wants out of it.
Is it to be known, to have everyone know her name or her face?
Is it to endorse brands she loves and spread important messages?
I’ve never known. “So, in five years, where do you see yourself?” I ask.
“What’s future Marisol doing in your mind? ”
She’s quiet, and when a man rushes past us, I pull her into me, my eyes locked on him as he walks away. When I look back down, Marisol is looking up at me, but her eyes are narrowed. “What is future Leo doing in your mind?”
I chuff a laugh. “I have no idea.” Her gaze softens.
“Maybe by then, I’ll have found someone who wants to be around for more than just a little fun.
Maybe I have a really extensive watch collection.
I’ll be thirty-five by then. Real men wear watches, you know.
” Marisol rolls her eyes, and then our order is being served up, and she moves to grab the two small paper bags.
“I don’t know who I’ll be then. I don’t know what my dream is, I only know what it isn’t anymore.” She sits down on one of the plastic chairs, and I pull one out on the other side of the table. “It’s okay if you don’t know either.”
She finally meets my gaze again, but she doesn’t respond. She just opens one of the bags, sliding the other one over to my side of the table before taking a bite of her arancini. Her eyes widen. “Oh, fuck. This is good.”
I grin as she closes her eyes, and take a bite of my own. It is fucking delicious.
We eat in silence. Marisol watches everything around us, but I just watch her.
We haven’t talked about what’s going on between us, not that I know what that is, exactly.
But every day we spend getting closer leaves me more wary than I was the day before, because at any point, this could all be over, and entirely out of my control.
And out of control has never really been my forte.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Marisol says quietly, gently breaking our silence, “what life would’ve been like if I never left.”
If she’d never left Ruby Cove, she might never have become a model. She might have worked with Rafael in Olive&Vine or in Vanessa’s bakery. She never would have dated Jack, but maybe she would have settled for a local instead. But wondering never gets us anywhere good.
“We’ll never know what could have been if we had done things differently,” I say.
“Every single decision we’ve made along the way has led us to the people we are today, and if we always look back and try to ask ourselves if we made the right decisions, it’ll send us into an early grave.
” Marisol listens to me with her chin in her hand, her eyes watching every word from my mouth.
“The only question we can ask ourselves is: do I like the person I am now? Because that is the only real thing we can change.”