Chapter Nineteen Guinevere #2
I winced, both because the sentiment was horrible and because it underscored the fact that my dad, while controlling and specifically insensible about Italy, had only ever wanted me to be happy and healthy.
“What happened?” I asked, because there was more story there, buried in the bitter dregs of his tone.
Raffa sighed, eyes popping open to stare into the vast, cloudless sky above us. “I did much as you did with your father, only I did it a lot less politely.”
“You told him to fuck off,” I guessed.
His smile was broken at the ends. “Yes. I had a full ride to Oxford to study business. It was my dream to go there, and I could not give it up, even when I tried. I was cut off from the family, not allowed contact with my sisters or my mother, with no access to my inheritance.” He shrugged, but it was not something he could play off.
“I moved to wet, dreary England and pursued what made me happy at the cost of everything I had ever known.”
There were parallels there to my own situation that astonished me but also made me feel petty.
My parents had refused to pay for my trip, which had seemed unfair when they had paid for all of Gemma’s, but the privilege of growing up as I did with enough money and more than enough love was glaringly obvious.
I would take my dad’s hugs and pep talks before every surgery and medical appointment above any palazzo. My mother’s homemade pasties and summer cherry pies, eaten with forks straight from the plate on the back deck of our lake house, above any Ferrari or designer dress.
It made me ache for Raffa. I had the absurd thought that I wanted to fuse my heart with his so that he would know, even long after I left, that he would never be alone so long as my heart still beat.
“How long?” I asked instead.
“Until he died four years ago. I lived apart from my home for nine years.”
Nine years.
“Oh, Raffa,” I murmured, unable to stop myself from moving so I could lay my body flat against his, as if I could imprint myself on his skin. “I’m so sorry.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but one hand continued to play through my hair, tangling in the wind-blown strands.
“Carlotta married her high school sweetheart and had three children. Stacci married a stranger I had never met and had two of her own. Delfina took over the vines I had loved to help my mother’s brother tend as a boy, and my best friend, Leo, took over the business from my father.”
The words lay unsaid in the air after he spoke: They all moved on without me .
“Why did you come back?”
“Why does anyone do anything? For love. I had missed them every day, and when I could return, I did.” Something in his tone said he was holding back, a lingering bitterness I couldn’t make sense of.
But he had shared a massive piece of his painful history with me, and I was not going to linger over the details. Not when I only had three weeks left to bring this man enough joy to last him for the rest of his life.
Not when I could spend the last of our time together loving him enough to fill the abyss that nine years without love must have left in his chest.
And there was no doubt then, the two of us pressed chest to chest under the wide Italian sky on the Ligurian Sea, that I loved Raffa.
The kind of all-consuming, life-ruining love that had plagued Dante and Petrarch and Botticelli. An undying love that would never be returned.
It didn’t matter, I told myself as I cupped Raffa’s face and dragged myself farther up his torso so I could kiss his mouth, soft, feathering brushes like a healing touch on a wound. It didn’t matter if he never wanted this gift I’d made of my heart. It would always be his.
What I had told my father was true. I felt called to Italy, and I had since I was a girl lying awake and terrified in the hospital, pretending not to hear my parents weep.
And now I knew what had been calling my name.
Him.
“I hate that you’ve suffered to get to the man you are today, but the man you are?
He’s spectacular,” I said against his mouth.
“And I hope you know that you have left an indelible mark on my life. It feels like everything I wanted to be was just below the surface of my skin, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shed my old skin to find it.
You helped me do that. You make me feel like every version of myself is a gift, when before, I thought I would never be good enough.
And I might not be good in the traditional sense I always thought was so important, but maybe I am my own version of perfect. Your version. Flaws and all.”
“There is no maybe about it,” he told me, finally shifting his gaze to mine, eyes fierce with conviction and a yearning that made my teeth ache.
“I know you believe you are unlucky. Sei nata sotto una stella sfortunata. Born under the wrong star. But to me, sei la stella cadente che illumina la mia vita .”
But to me, you are the shooting star that lights up my life.
He cupped my face then, so we were a closed circuit, something I was too scared to call love ebbing and flowing between us. Then he kissed me, a warm, open-mouthed kiss that made my toes curl.
And I wondered clearly for the first time if this moment and this man were enough to make me give up everything I had ever known.
We spent the day anchored off the shore of a public beach with no land access, a tiny strip of U-shaped sand surrounded by craggy rocks on either side of the cove so that the water within was as clear and steady as lake water without wind.
I had a diving competition with Martina and, of all people, Renzo, who actually ended up being voted the winner by the others through their sheer incredulity that he could make his enormous body slip beneath the water with hardly a splash.
Carmine produced a packet of Italian playing cards that went to forty instead of fifty-two and taught me the rules of tresette, which was a surprisingly complicated game played in partners. Luckily Raffa was mine, and he was a shark, because I definitely needed more practice.
I got the start of a sunburn across my nose, and Raffa insisted on lathering me in sun cream even though I’d already reapplied.
We had lunch together at the back of the boat, and Raffa handed me a liter jug of filtered water instead of a glass of wine, which oddly made me want to cry.
Because he was taking care of me in a way that did not seem overbearing or make me feel like a child. Just giving me silent, observant care, like bringing my meds to me from my bag in the cabin after the meal.
Yes, I loved him.
It pulsed in my chest like a lighthouse beacon.
By the time the sun set over the cerulean waters, we were all pleasantly sun drunk and sleepy. Martina was napping with her head in Renzo’s lap while he read a German spy thriller, and Ludo and Carmine were bickering softly over another card game.
“Take a swim with me,” Raffa murmured into my ear.
I was lying between his legs at the bow, listening to his sweetly accented English as he read from Dante’s Inferno . We were almost at the end, and I hoped we would finish Purgatorio before I had to leave.
I was sleepy, muscles lax from hours in the salt waters, but I was not in a mood to resist anything Raffa wanted, so I stood up and took his hand when he offered it. We stood at the side of the boat, and he grinned.
“ Insieme? ”
Together?
I nodded, and in tandem, we arched over the lines and plunged into the cold sea. When I broke the surface, Raffa was already cutting through the water with clean, powerful strokes, aimed toward a smooth configuration of rocks on the outer ridge of the cove.
I swam in his wake, thinking I would follow him, like Eurydice, blindfolded and trusting through the underworld.
He was standing on the rocks, dripping water out of his hair, when I arrived, and he offered his hand to me. I laughed when he tugged me too hard, pulling me tight against his chest.
“From this angle, they can’t see us,” he whispered in my ear before nipping it.
I tilted my head and found he was right. Though I could see the boat slowly turning with the tide on its anchor chain, a huge outcropping of white-gold rock meant if we lowered ourselves to the sun-warmed rock below, we would not be seen.
“Why, Raffa, what are you thinking?” I teased, linking my arms around his neck.
“I am thinking I cannot wait until tonight.”
He kissed me as soon as the words were out of his mouth, lifting me into his arms with his hands on my ass, pressing me to his groin, where I could already feel the hardening line of his dick.
I groaned into his mouth and slid my hands into the wet strands of his hair, holding on as he kneeled on the rock and laid me gently against it.
“You taste like salt and sunshine,” he muttered against my mouth between succulent kisses. “ Divino. ”
I moaned when those talented lips trailed down my neck, pausing to kiss my cornicello before nipping each peak of my breasts through my wet bikini.
“You look like something from another time or another realm,” he said as he nosed the fabric aside and sucked my nipple into his hot mouth, shocking after the temperature of the sea.
“A woodland nymph, a Renaissance princess, one of Salacia’s Oceanids.
Sometimes, I cannot believe you are real until I touch you like this. ”
The scrape of his stubble against my delicate skin lit fires in each breast that merged and raced toward my groin.
I was wetter than the ocean had left me when he moved farther down my body and undid the tie of my bottoms with his teeth.
The fabric gaped, revealing my bare mound to his gaze and the orange-pink sky.
“ Una fragola così bella ,” he praised, placing an open-mouthed kiss on my clit and then licking me off his lips. “ E altrettanto dolce. ”
Such a beautiful pussy, and just as sweet as a strawberry.