Chapter 21 Cosimo
Cosimo
Cosimo felt the bone break – again – as he blasted through the surface of the water.
From the height they had dived from, it was like hitting concrete.
Unable to hold the protective pose, his arms parted, exposing his head to some of the impact, and he felt stunned as he arrowed ever downwards, into the blue.
Pain suffused his body, rippling through bone and muscle, and he had to fight the instinct to open his mouth and cry out.
This had been a mistake. Pride before the proverbial fall.
He shouldn’t have goaded Fon in the first place; he should have known he wouldn’t back down – not in front of his brother …
Rafaella … all of them. He’d thought he had the measure of his rival, the boy who had always hung back and watched from the shadows – he well remembered how Fon had trailed them as kids, peering over the garden wall while they splashed in the round pool, wanting to be included but always overlooked.
Now that he was finally having his moment in the sun, there was no way he would step aside, not for anything.
What was it, this unarticulated rivalry driving them both to risk life and limb?
Cosimo knew why he hated Fon – he had two very good reasons to despise him, as far as he could see – but why did Fon hate him so much?
Was Fon’s contempt for him the reason he’d fucked Romola, even though it risked everything with Rafaella? Had it been some kind of power play?
His body curved naturally as his descent slowed through the water, easing him upwards again, and he surfaced a few moments later with a gasp, his hand limp and throbbing as he kicked and took some breaths.
He groaned loudly as the air hit his face and the pain in his thumb redoubled itself.
He opened his eyes to see a row of concerned faces staring down.
‘Oh my God, Cosi!’ Romola cried, scolding him. ‘We thought you’d knocked yourself unconscious!’
How long had he been under? ‘Well, thanks for rushing to my aid, then! Don’t all jump at once!’
From down here, they were almost indistinct, and yet he could make out Romola and Gina and Rafaella and Dante and Fede and …
Fon.
Fon was staring back down at him, too.
Cosimo blinked in confusion as realization slowly dawned … He hadn’t done it. Fon had chickened out.
In disbelief and shock, he threw himself backwards in the water like a breaching whale.
‘Woohoo!’ he yelled, a mighty war cry that seemed to gather energy from the deepest part of his soul, ricocheting off the cliffs, sounding into the caves.
He felt euphoria building inside him, blocking out the pain in his hand and the ringing in his head.
He had won! Faced him down, in front of them all!
Her!
But as quickly as it had come, his joy dissipated. Oh God, what had he done? Rafaella had been protective of Fon on the beach yesterday, insisting Cosimo forgive him as she had done. Instead, Cosimo – always rash – had humiliated him at the first opportunity.
He was an idiot! Impetuous, vainglorious … Those were always his father’s complaints about him anyway, and perhaps he was right.
Cosimo submerged himself again as he swam back to the base of the cliffs and slowly, flinchingly, began to climb the rocks. His thumb was throbbing but he used his other fingers to hook onto the handholds and pull himself up.
The others were waiting with apprehensive expressions as he finally reached the ledge. There were no cheers or congratulations. They all knew what he’d done. Dante looked mutinous, his hand proprietorial upon Gina’s bare calf, his fingertips leaving white impressions in her skin when he moved.
‘Did you hurt your hand again?’ Romola asked, immediately noticing the strange way he was holding it and rushing over.
‘It’s fine,’ he said quickly. ‘Agh,’ he gasped as his sister turned it over; the swelling was already doubling.
‘Clearly not,’ she said, making him wince as she gently tried to move it. ‘You idiot! Mamma will kill you!’
‘It’s fine,’ he muttered. ‘Just a thumb.’
‘I hope it wasn’t my jaw that broke it?’ Dante asked, lightly mocking and trying to regain a footing against his brother’s humiliation.
Cosimo held his tongue – he’d done enough damage for one hour – as Romola returned to her place on the towel beside Rafaella. He noticed she wasn’t looking at him, and neither was Fon.
He’d really messed up. Too late, he realized he should have held back. Always too late. He acted before he could think.
‘Well, let’s eat,’ Fede said, throwing Cosimo an irritated look as he began opening up the picnic hamper Signora Cinzia had prepared. He brought out small containers of fried fishes, olives, bombette and cartellate. ‘I, for one, am starving.’
As they ate, Romola began recounting a story about a disastrous shooting trip in Tuscany where the host had accidentally shot his own dog, mistaking it for a boar.
Cosimo watched how Rafaella and Gina hung on her every word, eyes shining as they waited for the inevitable punchline.
She’d always been the natural leader of their trio but she no longer eclipsed them in the way she once had.
Nonetheless, he saw his sister returning to herself, recognizing that she had been forgiven and things were settling back into their old order.
Summers in the port had always been about life lived more deeply – music, laughter, pink drinks and pasta – but the girls’ estrangement had felt like an echo of the problems in their family, in which everything was slowly fading to white and silence.
Their father – oblivious to his family’s domestic dramas – was back in the city, of course, their mother drifting through empty flower-scented rooms, beautiful and bored.
Even Fede, ever the diligent scholar, had taken to escaping the silence for long tours on his scooter, and the little ones preferred the red dust and chaos of their pastoral adventures on the agricola to the lush greenery of the villa garden.
But sitting here, eating and listening as the others talked, he felt their life colouring up again, the blood pumping once more through their veins.
They were all together like the old days – just with two more faces in the crowd.
For Rafaella’s sake, he knew he had to accept it.
And for Gina’s, too; anyone could see by the way she looked at Dante that she was smitten.
Keeping the peace meant accepting the Giannellis were part of their landscape now.
Fon was sitting on Rafaella’s other side, a gap of less than a centimetre between their legs as they listened to Romola’s story, and Cosimo found himself watching it with the intensity of a hawk to a mouse – as if his own entire existence inhabited that tiny space; as if he could somehow lever a distance between them and keep them apart, off the path of what Gina had suggested was increasingly an inevitable destiny.
Would Rafaella really marry him?
He watched them together, trying to get a reading of what they were to one another. Despite their proximity, Fon was sullen and distant and cold – although that was no surprise, not right now. Cosimo’s glory had come at great cost to Fon’s pride.
For Rafaella’s sake, Cosimo knew he should have been more generous and never tried to bait her boyfriend, much less go head to head with him …
But that was like asking a lion to clip its own claws, because he couldn’t tame how he felt.
Desire was like water, impossible to turn around.
At best, it could be held back or redirected – but he had tried both of those tactics, and it was still there.
He’d never known this torment. Girls everywhere flocked to him but Rafaella felt unreachable.
On the scooter on the way down here, he had driven slowly, pointing out the house that had burned down the other week, pretending to care about the view; anything to draw out the moments while she was holding onto him.
The feel of her body pressed against him, soft and taut all at once, made his stomach drop and loins stir, and when she’d pressed her cheek to his back he’d been assailed with a violent tenderness that made him almost skid the bike.
She aroused every emotion in him across the spectrum but was wholly oblivious to it.
He watched as her leg gradually leaned against Fon’s, closing the tiny gap in which he’d tried to lever some hope. It was only a casual intimacy – not a kiss, nor even the touch of a hand – but Cosimo felt himself snuffed out.