Chapter Eighteen Guinevere #2
“Trusting me should be enough,” he retorted, his tone matching mine. “If you care at all about us, you’ll come home right now. Enough is enough. We can talk about the consequences of your irresponsible actions when you get back.”
Behind me Raffa’s body shifted just slightly, a tensing in every muscle he tried to curb so I wouldn’t detect the way those words affected him.
He didn’t want me to go.
And neither did I.
Staring into my own face as if I were staring down my father, I declared, “I am not coming home. I have three weeks left here, and I’m going to enjoy them.”
“Guinevere, honey, please come home.” The sudden shift from fury to pleading derailed me. “After everything we’ve been through when you were young and now with ... with losing Gemma. Your mother and I can’t handle this.”
“Does she know?” I asked, thinking about how devastated my mom would be with me for lying, but especially for lying about this. Even though it was Dad’s hang-up about his homeland, Mom had always supported his aversion completely, and she hated to see him upset.
The sigh that unspooled over the phone was so weary, it made my heart ache.
“No. When a friend sent me a photo of you with some man on a red carpet outside Pitti Palace, I thought it might have been a very good resemblance. Even when I called ... I honestly never thought you would defy me. I-I was hoping I could convince you to come home, and she never needed to know. You must, Jinxy. It’s not safe in that godforsaken country. ”
I winced, realizing how stupid it had been to be photographed together, even though I never could have assumed a random society page article would get back to my dad. I didn’t even know he had friends in Florence to keep in touch with.
Raffa had turned into something carved from marble, a cage around me instead of a comfort. I looked at him in the reflection, but his gaze was pinned somewhere I couldn’t follow.
“Can you explain why you think that is?” I asked Dad softly, because I wanted to understand. I always had. I just needed more to go off than “because I said so.”
The silence was telling, filled with anger and fruitless frustration on both ends.
“I’ll see you in three weeks,” I said, silk over steel because I hated that he was hurting, that I had been the one to make him hurt, but I was not giving up on this dream because it would have been giving up on myself.
“I’m still coming home, Dad, and you’ll still see me every day at work in the fall.
I just ... I can’t give up on this. Not yet. Not now.”
Maybe not ever, a cruel voice at the back of my mind whispered. How will you ever get over this place and this man?
As if privy to my thoughts, Raffa softened, dipping his head to press a kiss to the mark he’d made sucking into one side of my neck.
“Guinevere, if you stay, there won’t be a job waiting for you when you come home because we will not have a relationship,” he threatened.
My heart, so full of new experiences and new people, withered in my chest.
“Fine,” I whispered as tears finally fell down my cheeks. “If that’s the way it has to be, I’ll live with the consequences of my actions. What I can’t live with is giving up on what I want just to keep you happy.”
Silence met me on the other end because he’d hung up.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the burn of hot tears springing from the backs of my eyes and let the waves of sorrow take me under, somewhere dark and deep and lonely.
Distantly, I was aware of Raffa gently pulling the phone out of my grip and lifting me into his arms as he took us from the bathroom into the bedroom and sat carefully on the bed, arranging me in his lap with his back against the headboard.
I was crying hard, but silently, soaking Raffa’s bare chest and the hem of the fresh pair of shorts he’d put on.
He didn’t seem to care.
He held me in his arms as I cried until there was no water or salt left for my body to produce and my head throbbed like an open wound. One of his hands was in my hair, stroking it back from my wet face, and the other was rubbing soothing circles into my thigh.
“I am sorry it came to this,” he said finally, when my sniffles had subsided and I lay there in recovery. “It is the worst kind of grief when we cut the final strings of filial responsibility to our parents in order to carve out our autonomy. Our own futures separate from their vision.”
There was silence, but I could almost hear the words unspoken in his mouth.
“I am very proud of you for standing up for yourself,” he admitted into the top of my hair.
“And I do not mean that to be condescending. You are one of the bravest people I have ever known.” He chuckled softly.
“You throw yourself into life and adventure with such a pure enthusiasm and confidence, it inspires me to seek the pleasure in life as well.”
I tipped my chin up to peer at his face, my fingers trailing the furred line of his jaw because they could. “And what brings a man like you pleasure?”
“You,” he said simply. “In all your iterations. A goddess on my arm at a party, charming everyone we meet; a genius perched in my lap at my desk, finding something my men, Martina, and I could not find for hours; a little fawn stranded on the side of the road, looking at me with much too trusting eyes. I like them all.”
“You make me sound so much better than I am.” I rubbed my salt-crusted cheek against his chest hair and listened to the steady thud of his heart.
He snorted. “Oh, I like the girl who curls up on my chest in her sleep and leaves a little puddle of drool and the girl who leaves her clothes on the floor and the one who teases me when I have never enjoyed being teased very much. You must remember my definition of perfect , Vera.”
I did remember. It wasn’t something I was likely to forget, because I wanted to make it my definition too.
“It means something so captivating that you can’t help but find it beautiful, flaws and all.”
“ Molto bene ,” he praised. “Exactly.”
“And you feel that way about me?” I asked just to clarify. “Even knowing I lied to my parents about where I was. That I can be that selfish and reckless and stubborn as a mule.”
“Especially knowing all that. How boring you would be without those wicked little habits and flaws.”
I had never considered it like that before, but he did have a point. “I did always find heroes a little dull.”
Raffa laughed from his belly, the sound vibrating through his skin into mine. “And who are your favorite villains?”
“I think I would call them antiheroes over villains. They occupy that murky zone between good and bad that most of us battle to stay out of at all costs. Achilles with his unforgiving pride and rage that ultimately led to his avoidable death. He is flawed and wrong more often than he’s right, but we still talk about him as a hero.
Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind is one of the most obviously manipulative women in literature, and I cry every time Rhett leaves her without a moment’s hesitation. ”
“‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’” Raffa surprised me by quoting those cruel parting words. When I laughed, he shrugged a shoulder. “My sisters love any movie, in any language, that will make them cry.”
“I think it’s easier to empathize with people who aren’t all good,” I realized. “It’s even easier to love them. We can’t relate to perfect heroes because none of us are as good as we want to be.”
“ Ben detto ,” he agreed, but there was a knot in his brow I had to reach up to erase with my thumb.
“I wish I was a better person,” I confessed with a sigh as I snuggled closer against his chest. “But I also want to be happy, and those two things always seem to be at odds.”
Raffa didn’t smile at my joke. Instead he seemed almost upset about it.
His voice, when he spoke, was dry with self-mockery.
“Ah, that is the difference between you and me, Guinevere. Sometimes I feel like I should wish the same, but at the end of the day, I know I am not capable of being better, and I am happy with where I am.”
It was my turn to frown. “Are you? Because even though you keep implying you’re a bad guy, you’ve played the hero very well for me.”
“I am a very good actor,” he said, deadpan, and I laughed as I was sure he meant me to.
Even after a brutal fight with my dad, this man could make me smile.