Chapter Seventeen
I fix my stare into Sutton’s dark eyes. I knew her reasons for being here were not as selfless as “Benito’s been good to me.” She wants him. She wants to use me to get him back. And the worst part is, she thinks she’s doing me a favor. “I do not want to be mayor,” I say.
The sun descends below the rooftops of the piazza that surrounds us and Sutton tops off her glass.
“Don’t let the way Benito goes about it fool you, it doesn’t have to be so horribly stressful.
” She offers the bottle to me and sets it down when I don’t take it.
“Benito resigns, he and Raffaello endorse you to run in his place, you approve the development deal, you sit back, relax, enjoy your life knowing your Wikipedia page doesn’t end with your last election. ”
My mind buzzes with questions. Primarily how dare you. “Is it even legal for me to be mayor? I’m not an Italian citizen.”
Sutton waves it off. “We’d work it all out, don’t worry about that.”
I sit up straighter. It’s not going to be easy to convince her I don’t want this. “I’d be a puppet for Raffaello’s business. And don’t even get me started on that offensive ad campaign pitch. You’re using me.”
She leans back, exasperated. “Good god, Izzy. Must everything be so sinister?” She laughs, pushing the bottle back toward me again.
I relent and refill my glass. “Support Raffaello or don’t.
The point is, it’d be your battle to fight.
Not Benito’s. He belongs back in London.
He chased the wrong family legacy. He needs to return and fulfill his destiny. ”
My breath catches in my throat. She’s preaching to the wrong choir.
I know destiny is a mirage, a trick into letting life pass you by while you chase a shiny object through a sparse desert to no avail.
A way to convince yourself you have a purpose instead of accepting that you are a sack of organs and bones meant only to breathe in and breathe out until you no longer can.
“Sutton. I don’t want to be mayor. And if you really cared about Benito, you’d know that he doesn’t want to go back to London. ”
Completely unaffected by my words, she laughs. “Benito does not know what he wants.” My stomach does a flip. She’s right about that. He more or less said the exact same thing to me weeks ago.
I take another sip of prosecco. “Will you make a PowerPoint to convince him to go back?”
Sutton’s lips stretch into a sly smile. “If it’ll help.”
I finish my drink and don’t bother to fight Sutton when she offers to pick up the check.
I walk through town on my way home and my brain is buzzing, both from drinking two glasses of prosecco in quick succession and from what Sutton confessed.
Benito is surrounded by so many people who don’t have his best interests at heart.
No wonder he was skeptical of my intentions.
I can’t help but feel like I’ve meandered too far from my original mission. I was supposed to come to Italy, sleep, drink wine, eat pasta, and that was it. I wasn’t supposed to care about anything else. I wasn’t supposed to care about anyone else.
Once again, I’ve failed.
I’m so deep in thought, it barely registers when someone shouts my name. It’s a grating voice. Deep, low, with a sharpness that causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up straight. “Isabella Rhodes!” I hear again, and my instinct is to keep walking, but my legs freeze. I turn around.
I’m not surprised when the man approaches me. He’s red faced, bearded, massive with bulging shoulders and a beer belly. “You!” he shouts again as he gets closer. I freeze.
“Isabella fucking Rhodes,” he says, spitting all over me.
“You have some nerve moving to another country. It wasn’t enough to ruin ours?
” A woman catches up to him; she’s petite and wearing a backpack around her shoulders.
She stands a few feet behind him with an equally disgusted look skewed in my direction.
I try not to cower or worse, verbally spar. What was Richard always saying? Stay calm. Try not to escalate the situation. I make my voice as still and even as possible. “I am living my life out of the public eye. I am not trying to ruin anything.”
The man’s eyes go black. He takes a few steps closer so there’s barely any distance between us, a foot tops. “You existing at all ruins everything.” An ominous chill trickles down my spine.
The man moves closer to me, a mere inch between his face and mine. “You’re a waste of a human being. You don’t deserve to enjoy the rest of your life. You tried to ruin all of ours. You tried to ruin America. All while you were trying to screw everyone in Washington.”
I put my hands up in surrender. None of that is true, but he has a good foot of height on me, and without Richard or any of my other former bodyguards, I’m defenseless.
This isn’t the first time I’ve feared for my life during an altercation, but the lack of strong people who know how to disarm on my side makes the threat feel more real. “I don’t want any trouble.”
He moves closer and squats down so we’re nearly nose-to-nose. I swallow hard. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll disappear. You got it?”
An arm darts between us, a measly protective shield against this truly massive dude, but enough to keep him from getting closer. I quickly turn my head to my right and see Benito. “I need you to walk away before I call the police,” Benito says.
The man laughs loudly, and my eardrum shakes from the booming noise. “What are the Italian police going to do? Huh? Arrest me with spaghetti handcuffs?”
I laugh because it’s a funny image, but I’m terrified. Still, Benito doesn’t budge. He holds his arm steady, walking closer until he wedges himself between us. The man’s female companion lays a gentle hand on his arm. “Come on, Matt. Let’s go. She’s not worth it.”
Matt stares me down for another minute as if he’s deciding to finish me off right there.
I have no doubt he could squash me with his bare hands and treat himself to gelato afterward with no remorse, but he backs off.
He spits just to the right of me as if to show his dominance one last time, and leaves.
We watch them walk away, the opposite direction from my house.
Benito grabs my hand, and we book it the last quarter of a mile to the house. The run does me good and helps to shake off the nerves. When we walk through the front door, I exhale, relieved. Benito follows me up to my room, locking the door behind us. “Are you ok?” he asks.
I fall onto the bed and fold my knees into my chest, getting into fetal position. “Yeah, yeah. I’m good. That hasn’t happened in a while, but I knew it was a possibility after the news came out.”
Benito sits next to me. “This has happened before?”
I nod. “I used to get accosted a lot in the early days of my term. I hired security and stopped going out in public without them and it got better, and after. . .” I lift my head and look at him, still woozy from the alcohol and the adrenaline. “After I lost, it got a lot better.”
Benito’s face contorts, and even from my lying-down position it’s easy to recognize it as the same as my parents’ when I first told them about such encounters: pity, sadness, fear.
I don’t want him to look at me like that.
Not because it’s humiliating to look like that in front of another person, although I don’t love that either, but because it was never supposed to come to this.
If I had just stuck to the plan—no attachments, no ties to my old life—none of this would have ever happened.
I’d be watching the sunset, drinking a glass of wine, wondering how I ever cared about anything other than life’s simplest pleasures.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to go through that again.” I sit up so I’m level with him. He reaches his hand like he’s about to rest it on my knee but places it in his pocket. “Do you think you need security here?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess it depends if it happens again or not.”
Benito inhales sharply. “It’s unsettling to think you’re unsafe here.”
I shrug. “It’s the reality of my situation no matter where I go. I came to the most off-the-grid town I could think of, and I still ended up outing myself. Unless I want to live on my aunt’s ranch in remote Northern Ontario, I don’t think it really matters.”
“I’m going to find out who outed your location and give them a formal condemnation.” Benito runs his fingers through his hair. “A formal condemnation, Izzy.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I say.
“I should’ve done it a long time ago.” He starts pacing. “Let me get in touch with the police.” He takes out his phone and scrolls. “Or maybe we send this man’s photo to every business, and they can refuse him service. We’ll leak his name to the press. Matt.” He scoffs. “I hate that name. Matt.”
I stand up and put my hand over his phone. “Benito,” I say. I shake my head. “You don’t need to do anything.”
His eyebrows furrow. “Of course I do.”
I shake my head. “This is the reality of who I am. Or who I was.” I clasp my hands together. “We could freak out, that’s one option. Or”—I tilt my head at him—“we could forget it all.”
Benito’s face scrunches up even more and I miss its softness. I don’t like that I added to his ever-mounting stress. I resist the urge to run my fingers over the lines on his forehead. “Forget what?” he asks.
I sigh. “Your father trying to ruin the town, the fact that you didn’t like me at first, the fact that I didn’t like you at first, my sordid past, my dead dream, Levi, my PG-13 sex scandal, your ex-girlfriend trying to make me mayor so she can have you all to herself back in London.
Really, it runs the gamut. Anything else you want to throw in there, we can forget.
We can Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind any and all unnecessary complications. We can do that.”
His face drops. “Wait, what? Sutton is trying to what?”
“That’s what drinks was about. She floated the asinine idea by me. You resign, I become mayor, you return to London to fulfill your destiny or whatever.” I wave it off. “Which probably includes getting back together with her.”
Benito rubs his hands together, digesting.
I wonder what I can do to speed up the process and cut to the part where he agrees to a more laissez-faire perspective.
It’s not too late for me to slip into a state of dormancy.
Food, wine, sex with Benito—that could be my new purpose.
Izzy Rhodes’s next big move. “I can’t believe she said that to you,” he finally says.
“She thought she was doing me a favor. She thinks what everyone at home thinks too, that I need a big life with accolades and glory, but I don’t. I really don’t.” I place my hand in his. This is taking too long.
“And you’re sure of that?” he asks.
I tilt my head back, frustrated that he keeps asking questions instead of unbuttoning his shirt. “I can’t have this argument with you again.”
He turns his body so he’s facing me, my hand falling off his knee in the process.
“No, I know you want to be here. I understand why you left, I understand why you can’t go back to the life you knew, but are you sure this will be enough?
” He runs his fingers through his hair. I remember the feeling of when I copied that exact gesture and my breath catches.
“Eating pasta, drinking wine, Mamma’s lunches every Sunday, the closest city two hours by train.
Can you honestly tell me you won’t get bored once the novelty runs out? ”
My eyebrows furrow. Why are we discussing the intricacies of the future when I’ve just sworn to focus on the present?
“You’re overthinking it,” I say, knowing the irony of how often I’ve done the same about everything else in my life.
“I came here with a resounding intention to be nothing but a woman in Italy. It’s an added bonus that I’ve met you, I’ve met your family, Vincenzo, Valeria, Giac.
Everything got so messy, everything’s been a mess since I lost the election, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s not too late to flit through the rest of my life. ”
Benito’s eyes widen. He looks at me like he’s doing a scan, parsing through every part of my body looking for signs that I’m bullshitting him.
If one hair’s askew or one muscle of my face not fully relaxed, it’d be enough for him to retreat.
“I don’t want what happened today to ever happen again,” he says.
His last line of defense. If he’s looking for reasons to push me away, it’s not a bad one.
Valiant, even, to sacrifice his own wants over the need for my safety.
“If it does, we’ll handle it,” I say. “The last remnant of the life I left behind. A scar on an otherwise completely clean slate.”
He smirks. “You’re sexy when you speak in metaphors.”
I grin. I’m in. I move my hands to either side of his head and pull him to me. His lips meet mine and my stomach settles knowing the last time wasn’t the last time, and this won’t be the last time either. I’m getting what I wanted. I’m getting everything I came here for.
Benito lowers me onto the bed and crawls on top of me, delicately pushing the hair out of my face. He smiles at me before kissing me again. This is what I wanted.