9. Alex #2
Not Amanda. I was past grieving Amanda, or at least past grieving the version of Amanda I’d invented and maintained for the better part of a decade.
What I was grieving was the idea. The possibility.
The version of myself that had once believed, apparently with some sincerity, that love was a thing that could be built the way you built a company.
With enough effort and the right materials and sufficient dedication to the project.
That version of me had been wrong. But he’d also been, in some fundamental way, hopeful. And I wasn’t sure I still was. Being a third wheel on an obvious date was convincing me otherwise, either.
“Alex.”
I looked up. Leo was watching me, his expression caught between amusement and something more careful.
“You went somewhere,” he said.
“I’m right here.”
“I can see that,” he said. “I mean you were spacing out.”
Matteo was watching me too, with polite curiosity rather than intrusion. He had that quality, I was noticing, of being very present without being invasive. He didn’t push. There didn’t seem to be an aggressive bone in his body. He was just here for the ride. It was very alien to me.
“Sorry,” I said, which surprised me slightly. I didn’t usually apologize for being in my own head. “I was thinking.”
“Dangerous,” Leo said lightly.
“Probably.”
Matteo refilled our glasses from the small carafe the old man had left on the table without any of us asking.
“In Italy,” he said, with the measured tone of someone offering something genuine rather than a platitude, “we say that a man who thinks too much at the water is either a poet or a fisherman.” He paused. “You do not look like a poet.”
Leo pressed his lips together, clearly trying not to smile.
“I’m neither,” I answered.
“It’s a compliment,” Matteo said simply.
“Fishermen are practical. They understand that the sea does not care what you want from it. You go out, you do the work, you come home. What you catch is what you catch.” He turned his glass on the table.
“There is a peace in that, I think. When you stop trying to control the thing and just... do the work.”
The harbor lapped against the wall below us.
I looked at Matteo for a moment, this man who fixed old pipes and grew up near the water and apparently dispensed accidental wisdom along with his limoncello.
I wasn’t sure if he knew what he’d said or whether it had just come out that way, assembled from a lifetime of living somewhere that moved at a different pace than the one I’d been running at for the past decade.
Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to just move on and let life show me what I needed. To see what swam my way so to speak. Or at least, I thought that was what he was saying.
Maybe I was thinking about it too much.
“I’m gonna head back to the house,” I said, pushing myself up from the table. “I’ve crashed your date long enough.”
Leo’s expression did something complicated. He opened his mouth, and I could see the argument assembling itself behind his eyes, but Matteo put a light hand on Leo’s arm before he could speak. The gesture was easy and natural, but it made my stomach turn.
Something inside me snapped.
“Thank you for coming,” Matteo said, with a sincerity that I couldn’t find fault with no matter how hard I looked. He meant it. That was the annoying thing about him. He always seemed to be decent.
“Good limoncello,” I said, which was the only thing I could force myself to say.
I left some money on the table, more than my share, and turned before either of them could protest, my stomach still twisted in knots. The stairs cut back up from the harbor wall to the main street, and I climbed them slowly, my hands in my pockets, with the warm night air pressing close around me.
Behind me I could hear the low murmur of their voices resuming. Leo’s laugh, a real one, drifted up once before the sound of the water swallowed it.
My stomach clenched tighter.
I walked back through the narrow streets without anyone to guide me and managed not to get too badly lost, which I was counting as a personal victory.
The town was quieter now, the evening crowd thinning out, the restaurants wrapping up their last tables.
A cat appeared from under a parked car and regarded me with contempt before deciding I was not worth its time and disappeared back into the shadows.
The lane back up to the villa was dark except for the occasional amber glow of a light left on behind a shutter somewhere.
My footsteps sounded very loud on the stones.
I was aware, more than I had been all evening, of being alone.
I was walking up a hill in a country that wasn’t mine, toward a house I didn’t own, in a life that had shed almost every feature I’d spent a decade building.
But all I could think about was Matteo touching Leo’s arm and the heat rising in my chest because of it.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
The villa was dark when I got back except for the light I’d left on in the kitchen.
I went in through the front door and stood in the main room for a moment, listening to the silence of the old house.
I could hear the birds outside and the buzz of insects as the night came on.
And, if I listened closely enough, I thought I could hear the house itself, breathing slowly in the night.
Pouring myself a glass of water, I stood at the kitchen window, letting my thoughts wander. They all seemed to come back to Leo. He was the only person I had left and now, as much as I knew I should be supportive, I felt like I was losing him to Matteo.
It wasn’t fair to Leo. I knew that. But this vacation was supposed to be for us, for healing and figuring things out. Hell, he’d practically dragged me here in the first place so I didn’t rot in my shitty apartment back home.
And now he was seeing someone. Someone who looked at him like he was worth seeing. The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t like it. My thoughts darkened. It didn’t seem fair. Leo and I were supposed to be in this together and suddenly, I was the third wheel.
My gut clenched, and I dropped my glass into the sink with a dull thud.
Alone again.