11. Baleigh
BALEIGH
The bus hums, a low-vibration lullaby as we serpent through the Chianti hills. Outside the window, Tuscany peels back like a dream I haven’t earned yet—sloping vineyards etched in perfect, silver-green lines and cypress trees standing like lonely sentries against the morning mist.
Max sits beside me, his long legs folded into the cramped space with a grace that shouldn't be possible for a man of his height. Usually, he’s surrounded by a fortress of leather-bound planners and digital tablets, but today he only carries a small, worn notebook.
He smells like cedarwood and the sharp, clean scent of espresso.
"You're staring at the trees like you expect them to speak," he says. His voice is a rich baritone that cuts through the white noise of the engine.
"Back home, everything is so... pine," I say, leaning my temple against the cool glass. "It’s beautiful, sure, but it’s loud. Here, the hills look almost reverent."
He turns toward me, shifting his weight. "It’s the limestone. It gives the land that pale, eternal quality. It’s been carved and recarved for three thousand years, Baleigh. It has every right to be still."
We talk for two hours, but it feels like twenty minutes.
We don't talk about schedules or the students' housing complaints.
We talk about how the light changes in the afternoon and the specific irony of Italian bureaucracy.
The usual flutter of nerves I feel around him—the fear that I'll say something provincial or unrefined—dissolves.
He isn't lecturing; he’s just there, his presence as steady as the horizon line.
When we spill out onto the sun-baked stones of Siena, the heat hits us in a golden wave.
The air tastes of dry earth and roasting meat.
Max steps into the center of the Piazza del Campo, and the transformation is instant.
He doesn’t pull out a megaphone or a map.
He just starts to walk, and we follow like iron filings to a magnet.
"Look at the bricks," he says, gesturing toward the fan-shaped pavement. "They didn't just lay these for aesthetics. Each section represents the Nine who ruled the city. It’s a map of power and ego, baked into the clay."
He points to a high, narrow window with a jagged stone crest. He doesn’t tell us the date it was built.
Instead, he tells us about the family who lived there—two brothers who hated each other so fiercely they built a wall through their own dining room, dying centuries ago while still refusing to share the salt.
"History isn't a list of dead people," Max says, his eyes sparking with a sudden, fierce light as he looks at me. "It’s a collection of people who wanted things too much. Love, land, revenge. We’re just walking through the leftovers of their passion."
I watch the way his hands move when he speaks, certain and strong. The reserved, disciplined academic I met in the lecture hall is gone. In his place is a man who sees the ghosts of human ambition in every shadow, and I don’t just respect him. I’m captivated by him.
The students fragment into the side streets, lured by the promise of gelato and leather stalls.
Max and I drift in the opposite direction, ducking into a narrow alley where the air drops ten degrees and smells of laundry soap.
Purple bougainvillea spills over a low stone wall, brushing against my shoulder as we walk.
"You have a perspective the photographers miss," Max says suddenly. He isn't looking at me; he’s watching the way a shadow falls across a medieval archway. "You aren't looking for the landmark. You’re looking for the life happening inside it."
"I just like people-watching," I say, pulling a loose thread on my sundress. "It’s a hobby. Not exactly a career path for a girl from a town with one stoplight."
Max stops. He doesn't tower over me in a way that feels imposing, but his focus is a heavy weight. "Why do you diminish yourself?"
"I'm being realistic."
"No," he says firmly. "You’re being safe. There is a profound difference. You speak about the world with a clarity that most people spend a lifetime trying to manufacture. Why is that 'just a hobby' and not a roadmap?"
We reach a small, secluded piazza near the city wall. A single stone bench sits under the sprawling arms of an olive tree. Below us, the valley stretches out, a patchwork quilt of gold and green under the Tuscan sun.
"Back home," I start, my voice catching on the dry air, "choices are permanent. If you pick the wrong path, you don't just fail yourself. You fail everyone who’s watching. It’s always been easier to stay in the road. If I don't try for something huge, I can't be devastated when I don't get it."
Max leans back, his elbows resting on the stone ledge behind him.
He removes his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"I spent twenty years building a reputation, Baleigh. I did everything by the book because I was terrified of being seen as a fluke. I won the awards. I got the tenure. And I woke up at forty realizing I’d built a very impressive cage. "
He looks at me, his eyes dark and unblinking.
"Failure is a bruise," he says. "It fades. But the things you never do? Those are the ghosts that haunt you. Risking disappointment is the only way to prove you’re actually alive."
The heat from the stone bench seeps through my dress, but it’s his gaze that makes my skin prickle. Max doesn’t look away. He doesn't offer the easy, polite smiles I’m used to from the men back home—the kind that mean don't worry your pretty head about it.
"I’ve watched you these last few weeks," he says, voice losing its academic polish and smoothing into something intimate.
"You think you’re just an observer, Baleigh.
But I see the way you handle the students when they're spiraling.
You don't just solve their problems; you anticipate them. You’ve mastered a city that usually swallows people whole within forty-eight hours. "
"I'm just trying to keep my head above water," I mutter, though my heart begins a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
"No. You're swimming," he counters. "You’re intelligent in a way that isn't found in textbooks. You have this instinctive, fierce ability to connect. It’s a rare type of leadership—the kind that doesn't need to shout to be followed."
He stops, his eyes searching mine as if he’s reading a script written in my iris. "I see a woman who is far more capable than she gives herself permission to be. It’s been the highlight of my time with the program, watching you realize that."
A lump forms in my throat, thick and stubborn.
Nobody has ever looked at me and seen a leader.
They see the dependable daughter, the "slightly chaotic" friend, the safe bet. To have Max—a man who has spent his life studying the greats—look at me and see something worth documenting makes me feel stripped bare. It’s terrifying. It’s the most hopeful I’ve felt in a decade.
We stand to leave, the silence between us no longer just comfortable. It’s heavy. Charged.
Intimate.
As we navigate a particularly steep, narrow alleyway, a Vespa engine roars behind us.
Max’s hand instinctively finds the small of my back to pull me toward the wall.
Even after the scooter rattles past, his hand stays for a second too long.
The heat of his palm through the fabric of my dress feels like a brand.
"Sorry," he says, but he doesn't sound sorry.
We reach a shop window filled with intricate carnival masks.
I make a joke about one with an absurdly long nose, and we both laugh.
The sound echoes off the high stone walls, but when the laughter dies, our eyes lock.
We’re standing too close. I can see the salt-and-pepper grain of his stubble and the way his pupils dilate behind his glasses.
The air in the alleyway vanishes. My hand brushes his as we turn to keep walking, and instead of pulling away, our fingers linger, grazing skin to skin.
It’s a tiny, electric friction that renders the rest of Siena invisible.
The attraction is no longer a quiet hum in the background; it’s a roar I can’t shut out.
The late afternoon hour catches Siena in a stranglehold, turning the terracotta into molten copper. We reach the city walls where the valley opens up like a vast, darkening sea.
"Look at that horizon," Max says, his deep voice a low vibration near my ear. "Most people see a boundary. I see the fact that the world keeps going whether you’re ready for it or not."
I lean against the weathered stone, the heat of the day still pulsing from the masonry. "It’s easy to be brave when you’re standing in a postcard. Back in North Carolina, the horizon feels... smaller. It’s like a list of chores and people I just can’t disappoint."
Max shifts, his shoulder brushing mine. He doesn't pull away. "You keep talking about disappointment like it’s a terminal illness. What happens if you disappoint them and the world doesn't end? What if you choose wrong, and the only consequence is that you have to choose again?"
"I've spent twenty-eight years trying to be the girl who doesn't make mistakes," I admit, watching a hawk circle a distant farmhouse. "If I fail, I lose the only thing I've built. My reputation for being the 'good one'."
"Then trash the reputation," Max says. His intensity is startling.
He turns fully toward me, blocking out the view of the valley.
"Stop defining your future by the catastrophe that hasn't happened yet.
Start considering what might go right. Imagine a life where you aren't waiting for permission, but taking it. What does that Baleigh look like?"
I swallow hard. I see her. She’s louder. She’s messy. She lives in a city where she doesn't know everyone's name, and she isn't afraid of the silence in her own apartment.
She isn't afraid of anything anymore.
On the bus ride back, the students descend into a chaotic, snoring heap of exhausted tourists, but I am wide awake. The hills are silhouettes now, black teeth biting into a navy sky. Max rests his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, his breathing slow and rhythmic.
I watch the reflection of my own face in the darkened window, overlaid against the passing Italian countryside. The thought of my bedroom back home—the familiar floral quilt, the predictable Sunday dinners—suddenly makes my chest tighten with a new kind of panic.
Failure isn't the monster under the bed anymore. The monster is the version of me that gets back on that plane in three weeks and picks up exactly where she left off, unchanged, as if this light had never touched her.
I can't let that happen.