Chapter 20 Ravenna, Italy
RAVENNA, ITALY
ALEXANDER
For years, it was my preference to send women off with a friendly pat on the bum after sex—ta-ra, thanks for the memories—and that was obviously not nice.
Then came a night when I was twenty-four and a woman named Rose screamed at me in my foyer, “It’s still muggy even if you pay for the cab, you feckin’ tosser!
” before slamming out my door, and the angry tears in her eyes made me feel like a world-class arsehole.
Since then, having women sleep over if it’s their preference has been, to my mind, part of the deal. But this is the first time I’ve been delighted with it.
When I wake just after 5:00, Sage is lightly snoring. I prop on an elbow and watch her in the faint light. She sleeps on her stomach, arms and legs sprawled, face unglamorously mashed against the pillow, and I’ve never seen anything more lovely.
After we’d slept for a few hours last night, I was pleasantly roused by Sage’s mouth on me.
I assumed the sex would be one of those drowsy, quick things people do with minimal words, but we ended up making love for an hour or better (contrary to her previously stated preference for speed and repetition).
She still won’t kiss me when my cock is in her, and I’m not sure how to feel about that, but I acknowledge that she makes the rules.
After about ten minutes of meditating on her adorable snore, wondering what she might be dreaming when the fingers of her left hand twitch in a sequence that appears deliberate, I quietly rise, put on a dressing gown, and go to the kitchen.
I take the kettle from the hob and fill it, then set it on a burner, remembering the moment last night when I realized I was not merely enamored, but—for the first time in my life—in love.
Sage mentioned her parents’ “weird relationship that’s sorta ‘open’ but actually my mom just turns a blind eye to a shitload of cheating.” With a cynical flip of one hand, she concluded, “Anyway, who cares? At least it was enough to discourage me from ever being a romantic.”
As multiple realizations assailed me, my heart stumbled back and forth like someone walking the deck of a ship in a gale.
I want to be the one to make her believe in love came first. Then a heartbeat later I was crushed by the acknowledgment that I am the wrong person, hopelessly unqualified.
Another beat and I thought, What “qualification” does one need other than a genuinely selfless, actionable desire for the other’s happiness, whatever the cost?
I want the world for Sage. I would do anything to ensure her happiness, comfort, safety.
After a lifetime of feeling like any personal detail about a woman—even as insignificant as knowing her birthday or preferred coffee drink—is an imposition, a nasty little hook that might be set into me… I’m greedy to know everything about my sweet Salvia officinalis.
As I wait for the water to boil, I pick up my mobile from the counter to peruse my messages, and my stomach drops to see two from “Alfred, Accountant”—the contact name I made up for CJ Ardley. I swipe the thread open.
Alfred, Accountant: I’m finding it a little suspect, hun, that you still don’t have gossip to pass along, especially considering you and shortcake are apparently having a slumber party in Italy.
Alfred, Accountant: If you’re jerking my chain, be warned that I bite.
Fuckin’ hell.
Fake contact name or not, the meaning of that message would be clear if Sage were to see it. I stare out the back window into the garden for a long minute, my heart pounding, and finally dash off a reply.
Me: Playing a long game takes patience and subtlety. I believe you said you’d allow me to “be on top”? Don’t question my methods or the deal is off.
Me: Or do you think I couldn’t find another recipient for the riches I mine?
Once sent, I delete the exchange, sick at heart over my deception.
Oddly enough, I feel bad not only for hiding things from Sage but also for lying to CJ and using a blustering, imperious tone that reminds me unpleasantly of my father.
I should’ve had the courage to tell Ms. Ardley, that night at the gala, Sage is my friend and I won’t help you to make a fool of her.
Clear and simple, no games.
My God, Badrick is right—I’m such a fucking child sometimes.
I finish making the tea, then go to the bedroom and climb under the covers, sipping and thinking as the sky outside stains along the edge with hints of dawn.
What happens now? She doesn’t “do” attachments. Is this the template, going forward: I fight for each moment with her, perpetually carrying the anxiety that it’s our last? How long until she finds someone else, or simply tires of me?
She emits a small groan, then her left hand slides across the bed as if she’s trying to place where she is. With a deep intake of breath, she rolls onto her back and drags the tousled blue hair out of her face. Looking over at me, she smiles, and my relief is almost palpable.
“Morning, sweetness.” I set my tea aside and lean toward her. “Kiss?”
“At your own risk, pal,” she says in an amused, sleepy mutter. “I just woke up.”
In deference to her reticence, I brush her closed lips lightly, then deliver a longer kiss to her warm forehead. Retrieving the mostly full tea mug, I offer it to her. “You can have this. Or I’ll make fresh if you like.”
“Yeah, I’d take a sip or two.”
She struggles upright and the sheets fall away, exposing her torso.
It comes to me again that yes, I must be feeling something very new, because rather than ogling her pert breasts, I find myself looking at the impressions the tangled sheets have made on her skin.
I have that sense of wonder at the small living details of her.
Those dented lines might as well be the intricacies of origami, the way they captivate me.
I hand her the tea and she drinks a few gulps, then takes one more just before handing it back, swishing it in her mouth in her uninhibited way before swallowing.
When she leans to kiss me again, there’s a warmth and familiarity to it that makes me hopeful.
I go in for another, then she deepens it, and when I pull her on top of me, she makes a tiny despairing moan against my lips and asks, “What time is it?”
“Just gone half five.”
“Fuuuuuuuuck…” Her forehead drops to my shoulder and she whooshes a sigh against my skin. “It’s a forty-minute drive to the paddock. I gotta shower and get on the road.”
My hands drift down her spine. “Come back tonight?”
“Can’t. The rest of the week is fuckin’ nuts.” She sits up, straddling me, and I noticeably respond. Feeling it through my dressing gown, she wriggles her hips. “Don’t suppose you wanna go to Barcelona in a month? We could hook up there…”
I don’t let it show how the term “hook up” affects me with its sudden revert to distance.
She pivots and hops off the bed, shimmy-dancing toward the en suite, singing Gorillaz “Clint Eastwood” in a slow, sooty drawl.
When she turns on the water the same way she did last night—step in, twist the tap, scream, laugh—I’m flooded with the gratifying sense that this is now a thing I know about Sage, a routine detail of her. It’s like being given a prize.
After a few minutes, I follow her into the en suite, where I go to the washbasin and began to shave. Her singing drops to humming, and I hear the squelch of shampoo suds as she washes her hair.
I examine myself in the mirror, stripes of clean skin showing through the foam. “You know,” I find myself saying before thinking it through, “I’ve never told a woman ‘I love you.’”
Fuck… what have I done?
Sage falls silent. I hope it’s because she’s not heard me, but she peers around the frosted glass panel with a nervous amusement. “Well, don’t start now. I’m not that good in bed.”
She disappears again, and I return to scraping the line of my jaw, fretting over what I’ve said.
A minute later, she speaks up. “You mean not in a romantic sense, right? But you tell your mom and stuff? Because guys who are dicks to their moms are total walking red flags.”
I’m struck by two things: first, a dart of hope that she’s talking about “red flags,” since that denotes the possibility of examining my suitability for partnership; and second, whether I should lie, or try to explain why I haven’t said those words to my mother either.
I run my razor through a stream of water. “I’m British, darling.”
Her skeptical snort turns into a cough as if she’s got water up her nose. She leans to look at me again. “Oh, like, ‘Keep calm, and don’t bother telling Mum you love her’?”
“She knows, Salvi. Fuck’s sake.”
When I turn to make eye contact directly rather than through the mirror, Sage is scowling.
“So that’s a no?” she presses. “Because, I mean, I haven’t ever told someone I’ve had sex with ‘I love you’ either, but… I definitely say it to my family.”
“Nefeli Laskaris is not sentimental. Just last week she joked about selling my baby teeth.”
“Okay, so she’s a smartass like you,” Sage says a bit coldly.
I narrow my eyes. “She’d find it mawkish and embarrassing if I told her directly that I love her. Again, in my defense, she bloody knows.”
Sage’s only reply is an irritated growl, and she steps under the shower spray again.
A horrible sense that this conversation is about to go off the rails makes me feel like the ground is shaking under my feet.
I’m about to redirect things and ask Sage if she’d like for me to make her some toast before she leaves, when instead I utterly shoot myself in the foot by saying, “Do you tell Julian you love him? Because he told me in Melbourne that you hate him.”
I see her freeze for a moment behind the glass divider, then turn the water off with a smack. Stepping into the shower doorway, she fixes me with a baleful look and swipes a towel off its peg.
In a mocking imitation of me, she repeats my words. “In my defense, he bloody knows.” She strides into the bedroom.
I towel my face off, imperfectly shaved, and follow. “Salvi.”
She ignores me, pawing through the chaos of her clothes until she finds a pair of jeans and steps into them. “Don’t talk to me. I’m annoyed at you.”
“I see that.” Rubbing my face, I add, “Can we not?” I open my arms in invitation for a hug, and after a pause she receives it woodenly.
“It’s hitting below the belt to bring Jules into it,” she mutters against my chest.
“I don’t know what I was thinking.” I kiss the damp top of her head, and she softens in my arms. “How is he? Have you got word of his progress?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
I’m stung; it feels like the intimacy I thought we’d achieved might be one-sided. But I don’t dare push her, or I’ve no hope of seeing her in Barcelona next month.
“We needn’t, then.” I give Sage another kiss on the head, and as she draws away and dips to grab a T-shirt and pull it on, she looks distant.
She’s already somewhere else, a hundred elsewheres.
She’s at the paddock in a meeting, she’s in her car, she’s talking with the press, she’s worrying about Julian.
It’s humbling to know I’m the least relevant of her concerns.
Gathering her things over the next few minutes, Sage reinstalls her carefree mask, cracking wise as if we didn’t very nearly quarrel. But I can tell there’s something fragile beneath it. I wish I could pull her back into bed and reset this all in the way we both know best.
When she grabs her mobile, the screen is crowded with messages. She focuses on them in a pointed way, as if needing me to understand that my usefulness has expired.
She declines an espresso, then toast. I offer to box up some of the baked pasta Cinzia made so Sage can have it later, and when she consents, I can’t be certain it isn’t out of pity.
As I pack up the lunch—my God, when have I ever packed a lunch for anyone?
—I discreetly check my expression in the reflection of the microwave door to ensure I look appropriately detached and neither lovesick nor panicky.
Soon, the moment arrives when I walk her to the foyer. On the living room floor, just within my peripheral vision, I catch a smudge of pink—the absurd doughnut trousers. Last night seems a hundred years ago.
She opens the door and when I pull her close, she grips the back of my dressing gown with both hands.
I cradle the side of her neck with the burning peacock feather tattoo and touch her chin, tipping her up for a kiss that turns into a half dozen.
Finally she steps back, shouldering her duffel bag and taking the container of pasta off the credenza.
“It’s been real,” she says with a crooked smile that’s a little sad.
“Very much so.” I lean in the doorway, trying to appear unbothered. “See you in Spain.”
“Maybe,” she says. Just as the ambivalence of the word is killing me, she winks. “Probably. But don’t go counting on it.”
I put a hand on my chest, comically. “Dagger to the heart, that.”
And then she’s gone with a backward wave, and I’m left to overthink the past twelve hours, wondering how I’ll live without her if she’s forgotten me next month.