13. Alex
Alex
I’d been watching the clouds on the horizon for some time.
At first I figured they were nothing, just a storm passing far away over the sea.
But as they drew closer and got darker, I realized Leo wasn’t back from the market yet.
The sun disappeared, the birds stopped singing, the wind picked up, and the thunder began to rumble.
The clouds that seemed so innocent a half hour ago were now dark and menacing as they came in over the sea.
And that was when I started to worry.
I closed the notebook I hadn’t been writing anything useful in and went to the window.
The sky had gone the color of a bruise. Not gradually, the way storms were supposed to build, but all at once, like someone had pulled a curtain across the afternoon.
The sea had disappeared entirely behind a wall of dark gray that was moving inland at a pace that made my breath catch.
We didn’t have weather like this back home.
The lemon trees along the garden wall were bending sideways.
The rosemary was flattening itself against the stone path.
A terracotta pot near the back door had already tipped over and was rolling in slow, uncertain arcs across the flagstone.
I pulled out my phone and checked the time. He’d left over an hour ago. The market was a twenty-minute walk down the hill and back. Even if he’d stopped for coffee, even if he’d taken his time browsing every stall in the piazza, he should’ve been back by now.
I began to type a message.
Where are you?
I stared at it for a second, then added: Storm coming in.
Then I deleted it. Leo wasn’t an idiot. He’d be on his way back already. Besides, it wasn’t my job to worry about him, right?
The first crack of lightning split the sky somewhere over the valley. The thunder that followed it was close. Close enough that I felt it in the floor.
I went downstairs.
The kitchen felt different with the light gone.
All the warm terracotta and the honeyed stone had turned gray and flat, and the windows were doing that thing where the glass looked alive, trembling faintly in their old frames with every gust of wind.
I stood at the back door and looked out at the garden, which was being dismantled by the wind in real time.
A rose cane had torn loose from the pergola and was whipping against the iron frame with a sound like a cracking whip.
The first fat drops of rain were beginning to hit the flagstone, dark circles appearing on the pale stone, and then more of them, faster, until the pattern of them overlapped and the whole terrace was wet.
That’s when I heard the front door open.
“Leo?” I called, wanting to make sure that it wasn’t the wind tearing the door open or anything.
“Yeah,” came the reply, strained and breathless from the direction of the entryway. “It’s me.”
I crossed the main room in a few quick strides and found him in the doorway, soaking wet, both arms wrapped around a bulging canvas bag that was soaked through.
His dark hair was plastered flat against his forehead.
His shirt was stuck to him in a way that made it look like he’d walked through a river rather than a rainstorm.
Water was dripping off the end of his nose and running in rivulets down the side of his jaw, and he was breathing hard from the climb up the hill.
He looked like a drowned rat.
He also looked completely, infuriatingly wonderful. My heart skipped a beat the moment I laid eyes on him and I cursed internally. Three days of trying to get rid of those feelings and they just came flying back the moment he walked in the door.
“Come inside,” I said, which was unnecessary since he was already stepping over the threshold, but I said it anyway.
“It just snuck up on me,” he said, nudging the door shut behind him with his shoulder.
The wind fought him for it and won briefly before he got it closed.
The latch caught with a sound like a gunshot.
Outside, the rain had gone from fat drops to something that sounded like gravel being thrown at the windows.
“I was in the café at the bottom of the piazza and it was sunny one moment, then dark the next. The lightning started on the way back, but I wasn’t fast enough.
” He shifted the bag in his arms. It made a wet, unhappy sound.
“Everyone was shutting up their houses fast.”
“They know better than us,” I said. “Never seen anything like this back home.”
Leo looked down at himself, then up at me. A drop of water fell from his chin to the floor. “The bread is probably ruined,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing about the bread?”
“It looked like really good bread.”
“Leo.” I took the bag from his arms before he could argue.
It was heavier than I expected and damp all the way through.
I set it on the kitchen table and turned around.
He was standing in the middle of the entryway still, arms hanging at his sides, dripping onto the old stone floor.
The lightning came again, closer this time, and the whole room went white for a second before the thunder arrived on top of it with a crack that shook the windows in their frames.
Leo didn’t flinch, but his jaw tightened.
“Go change,” I said. “I’ll sort the groceries.”
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t immediately read, something between grateful and surprised, like he’d been bracing for me to attack him the moment he arrived. Then he nodded and headed for the stairs, trailing water behind him on the tiles.
I turned to the bag.
Most of it looked better than I’d expected. I put it away without taking much stock. The bread, as Leo feared, was very wet.
The storm outside was getting more intense. Lighting was flashing across the sky every few seconds and the thunder had been one long continuous rumble since Leo had gotten back. Then, with one sudden bright flash and a loud crack, the entire villa went dark.
The power was out.
The darkness was total and immediate. Not the gradual dimming of a sunset or the soft dark of a room with the curtains drawn, but a sudden shift from day to night in an instant.
The only light came from outside, and that was mostly the lightning, which flashed every few seconds through the windows in sharp white bursts that printed the room in stark relief before swallowing it again.
A half hour ago it had been a bright sunny afternoon.
But now I couldn’t tell if it was evening, midnight, or sometime before dawn.
I stood at the kitchen table with my hand still resting on the bag of groceries and waited for my eyes to adjust. They didn’t, not really. The villa was old, and the walls were thick and the shutters were heavy, and between the flashes there was hardly enough to make out the edges of the room.
“Alex?”
Leo’s voice from the top of the stairs. He’d made it up before the lights went out.
“I’m in the kitchen,” I called back. “Don’t move around up there. I’ll find candles.”
“There are some in the sideboard,” he said. “Left side. Bottom drawer. I saw them when I was looking for napkins.”
I navigated the kitchen by memory and by feel, trailing my fingertips along the counter edge until I found the doorway into the main room.
The sideboard was against the wall to the left of the fireplace.
I found it by nearly walking into it, catching the corner with my hip in a way that would probably leave a bruise.
I crouched down and felt for the drawer, pulled it open, ran my hand through what turned out to be a very well-stocked emergency drawer. Candles. Matches. But no flashlight.
I found four candles and lit one of them, tucking the rest into my pocket. With the little bit of light I was able to find the stairs. Glancing up, I saw Leo standing at the edge of the top step, his fingers wrapped around the banister.
“Goddamn it’s dark,” he said, raising his voice so it could be heard over the rain, wind, and thunder. “It sounds like a fucking hurricane out there.”
“Does Italy get hurricanes?”
He paused. “I… I don’t know.”
“Well,” I replied, heading up the steps. “We should probably make sure all the windows and shutters are latched.” I fished out a candle at the top of the steps, lighting it with my own before handing it to Leo. “Don’t want you to lose your deposit on this place or something.”
Leo took the candle gratefully, his face hidden in shadow. “Yeah. Right. Good idea.”
We split up wordlessly, moving through the villa with our candles.
I took the rooms on the east side, Leo the west. The storm outside had reached some kind of peak that seemed impossible to surpass and then surpassed it anyway.
The lightning was nearly constant now, and the thunder arrived so quickly behind it that there was barely a breath between the flash and the crack.
The windows rattled in their frames with every gust. One of the shutters on the far bedroom had come unlatched and was slamming rhythmically against the outside wall.
I had to lean half out into the rain to grab it and haul it back in, the wind fighting me the entire time.
I got it latched. Barely.
I stood there for a moment with my back against the wall and my shirt soaked through from the ten seconds I’d spent leaning out the window, listening to the storm tear at the villa from the outside.
The candle on the windowsill had blown out.
I relit it with the matches from my pocket and stood watching the flame bend and shiver in the drafts that leaked through the old stone walls.
This house was at least a hundred years old, probably more.
It had survived every storm that had come at it in all that time.
I knew that, intellectually. But there was something about being inside it in the dark while the sky seemed to tear itself apart outside that made the rational part of my brain very small and very quiet.
“Alex.”