4. Leo
Leo
We touched down in Florence just after eight in the morning.
Jet lag didn’t even begin to describe how I felt.
After a long layover in Iceland and then another in London, but not long enough to actually get any sleep, I was about to pass out.
Alex looked like he was about to do the same thing. We were both exhausted.
We shuffled through customs like a pair of zombies, dragging our bags through the terminal on autopilot.
Alex had barely said ten words on the transatlantic flight, which I’d taken as a good sign at first. Quiet Alex was better than grumpy Alex.
But somewhere over the Atlantic I’d caught him staring out the window with that hollow look I’d seen on his face that first day in his apartment.
The same one that made me want to pull him into my arms and tell him everything would be okay.
Somehow, I had a feeling he wouldn’t like that. Alex was never the touchy-feely type.
“What time does the cab come?” he asked, his voice gravelly from the dry air on the plane.
“I told them eight-thirty.” I checked my phone. “So now-ish.”
He grunted.
Florence’s airport was small and manageable by international standards, which I was grateful for.
Neither of us was in any condition to navigate something sprawling and chaotic.
The arrivals hall smelled like espresso and diesel, and even through my fog of exhaustion, something warm stirred in my chest at that.
This was real. We were actually in Italy.
And all my problems were thousands of miles behind me.
Alex dropped his duffel bag at his feet and stood squinting against the morning light flooding through the glass doors, looking like more of a hobo than a man.
His blonde hair was flattened on one side from where he’d finally managed to sleep for maybe forty minutes somewhere over Scotland, and there was a crease pressed deep into his cheek from the airplane seat.
He hadn’t shaved in days. Somehow there was a dark smudge on one of his cheeks, though I had no idea where it might’ve come from. He looked, objectively, like shit.
And somehow, through some strange magic I didn’t understand, he still managed to look handsome despite it all.
Annoying.
“Our driver should have a sign,” I said, scanning the small cluster of people waiting near the exit. I spotted it quickly. A handwritten card that read ROSSI in slightly uneven block letters.
“Ah,” I said, recognizing my surname. “Unless there’s a hundred other people called Rossi around here, that’s us.”
The driver was a short, round man in his sixties with an impressive mustache and the cheerful energy of someone who had gotten a full night’s sleep and eaten a proper breakfast. He greeted us in rapid Italian, took both our bags before either of us could protest, and led us out to a dusty white van idling at the curb.
“Livorno?” he asked, glancing between us.
“Si,” I said, exhausting approximately twelve percent of my Italian vocabulary in one syllable.
He beamed and gestured for us to climb in.
Alex folded himself into the back seat with the careful movements of someone whose joints had lodged a formal protest, and I slid in beside him.
The driver loaded our bags into the back, climbed behind the wheel, and pulled out into the morning traffic with an alarming amount of confidence.
The road to Livorno ran southwest from Florence, cutting through rolling Tuscan countryside that looked almost offensively beautiful.
Even half dead from sleep deprivation, I couldn’t help pressing my face against the window to watch it pass.
Vineyards and cypress trees and old stone farmhouses perched on hillsides like they’d been there since the beginning of time.
The sky was that impossible blue you only saw in postcards, the kind of blue that made you feel like your whole regular life had been slightly gray by comparison.
“It’s pretty,” Alex said finally, somewhere around the forty-minute mark.
I glanced over at him. He was watching the landscape with those bloodshot blue eyes, his elbow propped against the door, chin resting on his fist. There was something different in his expression.
Not happy exactly, but not that grinding emptiness either.
More like... cautious acknowledgement. Like he was considering the possibility that something outside his apartment might still be worth looking at.
“Wait until you see the villa,” I said.
He made a noncommittal sound, but he didn’t look away from the window.
The road climbed as we got closer to Livorno, winding up into low mountains that rose behind the port city.
The driver took us through the outskirts of town, past a bustling market that looked like it had been open since before dawn, past narrow streets lined with terracotta rooftops and laundry hanging between buildings like flags, and then up a winding lane that became increasingly unpaved the further we climbed.
The villa appeared around a bend in the road without any warning.
It was old. That was the first thing anyone noticed.
And not just old, but like it had grown out of the hillside rather than been built on it.
Like it belonged to the land more than the land itself.
The stone was warm gold in the morning light, softened by decades of weathering and draped in places with thick ropes of ivy.
A low iron gate stood open at the end of a short gravel drive, and beyond it, a terrace looked out over a sweeping view of the valley below and, in the far distance, a thin blue line of sea.
I heard Alex exhale slowly beside me.
“Yeah,” I said quietly.
The driver pulled to a stop at the gate and climbed out to retrieve our bags.
I stepped out onto the gravel and just stood there for a moment, breathing in the air, which smelled like rosemary and warm stone and something faintly floral I couldn’t identify.
Every anxious, tangled thought I’d been carrying for the past two months seemed to loosen very slightly, like a knot going slack.
This place just felt… right.
Alex came to stand beside me, bags at his feet, staring up at the villa with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“This is what you planned with Ben?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He was quiet for a moment. “His loss.”
It was such a simple thing to say, and he said it in that flat, matter-of-fact tone he used for everything.
But something about it made my throat tighten unexpectedly.
I turned away before he could notice and focused on tipping the driver, who refused twice before accepting the folded bill with a small tilt of his head.
“The key should be in the mailbox,” I said, turning back to Alex after I’d gathered myself.
“The owners trusted leaving the key to this place in the mailbox?”
I nodded. “People are trustworthy here, I guess.”
Alex wandered toward the mailbox mounted to the stone pillar at the edge of the gate while I paid the driver the rest of what I owed him. I heard the metal lid creak open, then a pause.
“There’s a big ass envelope in here,” Alex called back.
“That’s it,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it. I crossed the gravel toward him and took it before he could examine it too closely, tucking it under my arm in what I hoped was a casual gesture. Thankfully he couldn’t read Italian.
“Rental agreement and all that,” I said. “I just have to sign a couple of things. I’ll deal with it later.”
He looked at me for half a second with those flat blue eyes, and I had the unsettling feeling he was deciding whether to push back on that. But he was too tired. We both were. He just picked up his duffel and started up the gravel path toward the front door.
The key was inside the envelope, a heavy old brass thing on a simple ring with no decoration.
I worked it into the lock while Alex stood behind me on the front step, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him in the cool morning air.
The lock was stiff and took a few tries before it finally gave with a satisfying clunk, and the door swung inward.
The interior smelled like old wood and dried lavender and that same faintly sweet scent that I couldn’t place.
The entryway opened directly into a main room with low, dark-beamed ceilings and whitewashed walls.
There was a worn leather sofa, a long dining table made from what looked like reclaimed timber, and a fireplace big enough to stand inside.
The floors were terracotta tile, faded and uneven in the way that only came from decades of use.
Every surface had that particular quality of old Italian houses, things that were rough and imperfect and somehow the more beautiful for it.
Alex dropped his bag just inside the door and turned a slow circle, taking it in.
I watched him do it. I’d gotten good at watching him lately, cataloguing his expressions the way you watched the sky when you weren’t sure yet if the weather was going to turn.
I was waiting for the storm to break, for the flood to come.
But so far, he’d kept it together much better than I expected.
“It’s not bad,” he said.
Coming from Alex in his current state, that was practically a standing ovation.
“There are three bedrooms upstairs,” I said. “Take whichever one you want.”
He nodded and picked up his bag again, heading for the staircase without another word. I listened to his footsteps move overhead, slow and deliberate, heard a door open and then close. Then silence.
I let out a long breath and leaned back against the doorframe, still holding the envelope.
Through the open door behind me, the valley stretched out in the morning light, terraced hills rolling down toward the distant suggestion of sea.
A bird was calling somewhere in the cypress trees along the edge of the property, a low, repeating note like a question asked over and over.
I looked down at the envelope in my hands.
The paperwork inside was real enough. I’d spent weeks coordinating with the notary in Livorno.
She was a meticulous woman named Signora Ferretti who communicated exclusively through formal emails and seemed personally offended by the concept of urgency.
The deed transfer had taken longer than expected.
There had been complications with the title, a disputed boundary line dating back to the nineteen-forties, and at one point I’d genuinely believed the whole thing was going to fall through.
But it hadn’t. And three months ago, the villa had become mine.
I hadn’t told Alex that. Or anyone else, obviously.
Because telling people that I’d bought a villa in Tuscany would immediately prompt them to ask why, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to tell them it was a gift to go along with the gold ring I’d had in my pocket for the past six months.
The ring that was supposed to be for my now ex-boyfriend.
That would immediately inspire pity, and that was the last fucking thing I wanted.
I folded the envelope and tucked it into my carry-on.
I’d deal with the contents later, once I’d slept and figured out how to explain it all.
But that could wait for a while yet. I told Alex this trip was three weeks and there was nothing at home for either of us that would stop us from extending it.
So, really, I had as much time as I needed to sort it all out in my head first.
I found the kitchen through a low archway off the main room.
It was small but functional just like in the photos.
It had open shelving and a gas stove that looked like it had been installed sometime in the seventies and had absolutely no intention of retiring.
Someone had stocked the pantry with basics before our arrival, the way I’d arranged with the property manager.
Olive oil, dried pasta, a tin of tomatoes, coffee, a rough country loaf wrapped in paper.
There was a bowl of lemons on the counter that hadn’t been requested, just left there like a gift.
It wasn’t until I saw them that I realized what that faintly sweet smell wasn’t I couldn’t place.
It was lemons.
I stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the back garden, overgrown and sun-bleached and perfect in its wildness, and felt something ease open in my chest that had been closed for a very long time.
For some reason, I made coffee. I did it just the way I’d been shown by my father’s mother once, long ago, in a memory that smelled exactly like this kitchen even though hers was in New York.
The coffee was strong, black, and poured into small ceramic cups that I found in the second cabinet I opened.
I carried one upstairs to Alex’s door and knocked softly.
No answer.
I knocked again, a little louder.
Still nothing.
I eased the door open an inch. Alex was face-down on the bed, still fully dressed, one arm hanging off the edge and his face buried in the pillow. His duffel bag hadn’t even been unzipped. He’d made it as far as horizontal and that was apparently as far as he got. Soft snores filled the room.
If Alex was sleeping soundly, the house was already doing its job.
Leaning against the door frame, I couldn’t help but smile. Seeing him like this made my heart happy. He deserved it after all the shit he’d been through.
I went back downstairs, slipped out onto the terrace, and drank my coffee in a wrought-iron chair. The sun was warm, the air smelled delicious, and all the tension slowly began to leave my body.
This was exactly what I needed. What we both needed. And now, all that was left to do was figure out what the fuck came next.
The only problem was that my heart still hurt.