14. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Then - The Year He Came Back
Anthony drives me home even though I should have taken a cab.
I should have swallowed the words the second they left my mouth, should have walked back into the gala and found someone else to cry on, should have done anything except demand a ride from the boy who broke my heart a decade ago.
But I’m already here, watching the city lights blur past the window, and it’s too late to change my mind.
“You can drop me anywhere,” I tell him. My voice sounds thick from crying, embarrassing and raw. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“I’m not dropping you on a street corner at midnight.”
“I’ve walked home at midnight before.”
“Not while I’m driving.”
There’s something in his tone - protective, almost possessive - that makes my stomach flip. I should hate it. This man owes me nothing. He disappeared from my life without a word and stayed gone for years, and he doesn’t get to act like he has any claim on my safety.
But some stupid, traitorous part of me likes it anyway.
“Why were you on that balcony?” I ask, because the silence is too heavy and I need to fill it with something. “You said you were looking for air, but that’s not an answer.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes on the road. The streetlights slide across his face in regular intervals, illuminating and then hiding his expression.
“I saw you inside,” he says finally. “You were standing by the ice sculpture, talking to someone, and I couldn’t-” He stops. Swallows. “I couldn’t walk up to you. I didn’t know if you’d want to see me.”
“So you waited outside hoping I’d come to you?”
“I wasn’t hoping anything. I was just - there.”
I don’t know whether to believe him. I don’t know how to read him anymore - this grown-up version of the boy I knew, with his sharp jaw and his careful voice and his hands steady on the steering wheel.
He’s familiar and foreign at the same time, and looking at him makes my chest ache in ways I don’t want to examine.
“Why did you leave?” The question has been sitting in my chest for ten years, and it comes out before I can stop it. “You didn’t even say goodbye. One day you were there, and then you weren’t, and nobody would tell me anything.”
He’s quiet long enough that I think he won’t answer.
“My uncle needed me back home,” he says finally. “It happened fast. I didn’t have time to do it right, and by the time I did, I didn’t know how to face you.” His jaw works. “That’s not a real answer. I know that. It’s the only one I have tonight.”
It isn’t enough. But it’s more than the nothing I got at sixteen, and I’m too tired and too full of champagne to make him bleed for the rest of it tonight.
“I thought about you,” I hear myself say. “After you left. I thought about you all the time.”
His hands tighten on the wheel. “Alessia-”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel guilty. I’m just-” I shake my head. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’ve had too much champagne and I’m tired and I’ve been crying on a strange man’s shirt.”
“I’m not a strange man.”
“You’re not the boy I knew either.”
He doesn’t have a response to that. We drive in silence for another few blocks, and I watch his profile in the passing lights, counting up the differences.
The boy I knew was all sharp angles and uncertainty, still growing into his body.
This man is solid, settled, comfortable in his skin in a way sixteen-year-old Anthony never was.
He’s beautiful, I think, and then I want to slap myself for thinking it.
“This is me,” I say when we reach my building. I don’t wait for him to pull over properly - I just pop the door open and swing my legs out, desperate to escape the enclosed space that smells like him.
“Alessia, wait.”
His hand catches my wrist. Gentle, not restraining, just enough contact to stop me from bolting. I look down at his fingers wrapped around my arm, and something electric sparks up my spine.
“Can I see you again?” he asks.
I should say no. Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to say no, to walk away, to protect myself from whatever this is. He left once. He’ll leave again. People don’t change, not really, and I’m too old to keep believing in fairy tales.
But his eyes are the same green they’ve always been, and his hand is warm on my wrist, and when he looks at me like that - like I’m the only thing in the world worth seeing - I forget every reason I have to refuse.
“Yes,” I say, and I watch his whole face light up.
It’s not until three weeks later, on the drive back from Sofia’s rehearsal dinner, that he tells me the rest of it - my father, the threat, the ultimatum that sent him running the summer we were sixteen. By then I’ve already decided that whatever he says, I’m not letting him disappear on me again.