7. Alex
Alex
Iwanted to be alone. Or at least as alone as I could get in the middle of an Italian town where the buildings were barely ten feet apart.
But it was almost like being alone, especially since everyone was speaking a language I didn’t understand.
They might as well have been aliens or spirits whispering all around.
But Leo had followed. I should’ve known he would. And though he didn’t speak much Italian, he spoke a lot more than I did. That would make getting a drink far easier. Or even finding a bar in the first place.
Italy had bars, right?
“Hey, wait up,” Leo called, jogging to catch up with me.
I didn’t slow down.
“Alex, look…” he began as I came up beside me. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t,” I snapped. “Don’t apologize for something you didn’t do again. I’m fucking tired of it.”
Leo was quiet, his hands in his pockets.
“You’ve been doing that since we were kids,” I continued.
“You apologize when it’s not your fault.
I’m sure you did that to Ben too. Just like you broke up with him to spare his feelings, so he wouldn’t have to be the one that called it off.
” I glanced his way, my brows knit in fury. “Fuck that. Stop being a pushover.”
Leo stopped walking.
I made it another three steps before I realized he wasn’t beside me anymore and turned around.
He was standing in the middle of the narrow street with his hands still in his pockets, the candlelight from a nearby restaurant window catching the side of his face.
He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t immediately categorize.
Not hurt exactly. Not angry. Something more complicated than either of those things.
“You’re not wrong,” he said quietly.
“I know I’m not.”
“But that doesn’t mean you get to be a prick about it.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. Fair enough. I turned back around and kept walking, a little slower this time. After a moment I heard his footsteps fall back into rhythm beside me.
We walked in silence for half a block. The street was narrow and uneven underfoot, the cobblestones worn smooth in the middle from what must’ve been centuries of foot traffic.
On either side, the buildings pressed close, their shuttered windows throwing slanted shadows across the pavement.
Somewhere above us, a television murmured through an open window.
The smell of garlic and wood smoke drifted down from somewhere higher up the hill.
“It wasn’t just Ben,” Leo said eventually, his voice level. “I’ve always done it.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“My therapist calls it conflict aversion born out of an anxious attachment style.” He said it with a lightness that didn’t quite reach his voice. “Which is basically just a fancy way of saying I’d rather set myself on fire than make someone uncomfortable.”
“Your therapist sounds expensive.”
“She is.” A beat. “She’s also probably right.”
I glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, his jaw set in a way that told me he was working through something internally rather than just making conversation.
His dark hair was still slightly disheveled from our long flight.
In the low light of the street he looked younger than he was, but the exhaustion in his eyes was old.
He was tired in a way that had nothing to do with jet lag.
“I don’t actually know where I’m going,” I admitted.
“I know.” He tilted his head slightly. “There’s a place about two streets over. I looked up some places before we got here. It looked like a bar to me.”
“Lead the way.”
He angled left at the next intersection without hesitating, ducking under a string of lights that had been strung between two buildings at eye level for absolutely no reason I could identify.
I followed him through a passage so narrow I had to turn slightly sideways, and then out into a small square I hadn’t seen from the main road.
The bar was exactly what I would’ve guessed from a town that looked like this one.
Low-lit, unpretentious, with a handful of mismatched stools along a zinc counter and a few small tables pushed against the wall.
A television mounted in the corner was showing soccer with the sound off.
Two old men sat at the far end of the bar with small glasses of something amber, not talking, just existing in each other’s company like they’d been doing it for the past forty years.
And honestly, from the looks of them, they probably had.
The bartender was a heavyset man in his fifties with a gray beard and an unhurried manner. I could tell immediately that he’d worked there for decades, if not longer. He seemed like he was part of the bar itself, not just its tender.
Leo leaned against the bar and said something in Italian that I only half followed. The word for whiskey, I thought, and then something else.
The bartender looked at me. “Neat or ice?”
“Neat,” I said, surprised he’d switched to English so readily.
He set two glasses on the bar and poured without measuring, the way bartenders did when they’d been doing it long enough that their hands just knew what to do. I picked mine up and drank half of it in one pull. The whiskey was smoky and warm and hit the back of my throat with a pleasant burn.
Leo sipped his more carefully, both hands wrapped around the glass, elbows on the bar. He was quiet, but not in an uncomfortable way. But something was slightly different than the silence before dinner. We were both less guarded, maybe now that so much truth had been spoken aloud.
“For what it’s worth,” he said after a while, still looking at his glass, “you’ve never apologized when you didn’t mean it.”
“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”
“No,” he agreed. “But it’s honest. You always say exactly what you mean, even when it makes everyone in the room want to strangle you.” He glanced sideways at me, one corner of his mouth pulling up slightly. “There’s something to be said for that.”
“My ex-wife would disagree.”
“Your ex-wife cheated on you with a college kid named Tyler.” He turned back to his drink. “I’m not sure her opinion carries a lot of weight right now.”
I laughed. It came out before I could stop it, rough and slightly startled, like it had been waiting for a gap to finally escape through. The sound surprised me. When was the last time I laughed at anything?
I finished my whiskey and set the glass down. The bartender appeared and refilled it without being asked, which I appreciated.
“The thing you said at dinner,” Leo said carefully. “About someone wanting you so badly that the thought of sharing you drives them mad.” He paused. “Did you mean that? Or were you just angry?”
“Both,” I said. “But I still meant it.”
He nodded slowly, turning his glass in a slow circle on the bar. “Nobody’s ever said anything like that to me before. About what I deserve.”
“That’s a problem,” I said flatly.
“Yeah.” His voice was quiet. “I’m starting to think so too.” He paused for a long moment, taking another sip of his drink. “You deserve that too, you know? Someone who’ll stick with you even when work gets tough or things are hard. Someone who won’t run off at the first sign of discomfort.”
The words landed differently than I expected.
Not because they weren’t true, or because I didn’t appreciate them.
But because I couldn’t remember the last time someone had said something like that to me without wanting something in return.
Leo was just sitting there with his whiskey, looking at the bar, saying it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“You’re the first person to say that to me too,” I said finally.
Leo looked over at me.
“Amanda never said anything like that,” I continued, turning my glass slowly on the zinc counter.
“My mother’s never said it. My boss certainly never said it.
” I paused. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever actually suggested that I deserved something good.
They just assumed I had everything I needed because I had money and a job and a nice house. ”
“Having things isn’t the same as being loved,” Leo said simply.
“No. It isn’t.” I drank. “I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.”
Leo was quiet for a moment, watching the side of my face. I could feel it without looking at him. That careful, attentive stillness of his that I’d noticed more than once today and that I kept filing away under things I wasn’t ready to examine too always caught me off guard.
“Do you think you could do it?” he asked. “Actually let someone love you? All the way, like you said. Not the convenient version.”
It was a genuinely good question, and it deserved a genuinely honest answer. I rolled it around in my head, testing its weight.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I was doing that with Amanda. I thought working that hard was a form of love. That giving her everything she wanted materially was the same as being present.” I set my glass down.
“Turns out those are completely different things and I only knew how to do one of them.”
“You could learn the other one.”
“Could I?” I glanced at him, genuinely uncertain. “I’m not sure people fundamentally change, Leo. I think we just get better at hiding the parts of ourselves that drive everyone away.”
“That’s a bleak way to look at it.”
“It’s a realistic way to look at it.”
Leo shook his head, but not in disagreement exactly.
“I think you’re smarter than that,” he said.
“And I think somewhere underneath all this…” He gestured vaguely in my direction.
Encompassing, I assumed, the general disaster zone of my current existence.
“Somewhere under all of this, you know that you’re capable of more than you gave Amanda. ”
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“Not maybe.” His voice was quiet but firm. “You came here, didn’t you? When you had every reason to stay on that floor and rot.”
I looked at him then. Really looked at him, the way I hadn’t let myself do all evening for fear that it would break me.
The candlelight from the small table behind us was catching the amber in his eyes, turning them almost gold.
He was watching me with that open, undefended expression that I’d always found slightly unnerving about Leo.
It was the way he looked at people when he had nothing to hide and expected the same in return.
Like honesty was just the baseline and everything else was a waste of time.
It was the most exhausting and the most disarming thing about him.
“You can be really annoying, you know that?” I said.
The corner of his mouth curved up. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“And yet here you are.” He raised his glass slightly, the gesture somewhere between a toast and a point being made. “Putting up with me.”
I picked mine up and touched it to his, the soft clink swallowed by the low murmur of the bar around us.
We drank.
Outside, through the open door of the bar, the sound of the town at night drifted in.
Footsteps on cobblestones, a distant burst of laughter, the faint thread of music from somewhere up the hill.
The two old men at the end of the bar had started talking now in low, unhurried Italian, their voices mixing with the muted commentary of the soccer match on the television.
Everything felt very different from home.
Which was, I was beginning to understand, exactly the point.
“I want to say something,” Leo said carefully, “and I need you to not immediately tell me to go fuck myself.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a promising start.”
“I mean it.” He turned to face me more fully, his elbow on the bar, his expression serious in a way that made me sit up slightly. “I know you came on this trip because you didn’t have anything better going on. I know it wasn’t exactly a choice so much as a lack of other options.”
“Leo—”
“I’m not finished.” He held up a hand. “I know that. And I don’t care.
I’m glad you’re here regardless of the reason.
” He paused, something moving behind his eyes that he seemed to be deciding whether or not to say out loud.
“I just want you to know that I didn’t bring you here because I felt sorry for you. ”
“Then why did you?”
He was quiet for a moment. The soccer match flickered silently above us. One of the old men at the end of the bar said something that made the other one wheeze with laughter.
“Because you’re the only person in my life right now who understands what I’m going through and tells me the truth anyway,” Leo said finally.
“Even when it’s not what I want to hear.
Even when you’re being a complete ass about it.
” He looked down at his glass. “And I think I needed that. Someone who wasn’t going to spend three weeks in a beautiful place telling me everything was fine when it wasn’t. ”
Something shifted in my chest. Not dramatically, not the way things shifted in movies with swelling music and perfect lighting. Just a small shift that made me appreciate him a little bit more, that made me actually happy that he was with me.
It had been a long time since I felt that way about anyone.
“I’m glad I’m here too,” I said at last. Then, I let out a long sigh, grinning despite myself. “Even if you’re an annoying little shit sometimes.”
Leo smiled back, holding up his glass once more. “To being single?”
I clinked my glass to his. “Fuck yes to being single.”