5. Alex
Alex
When I woke up, sun was streaming through the open window and across my body.
The warmth would’ve been pleasant if I hadn’t sweated through my entire goddamn shirt during my nap.
My gaze fell on the rough stonework and the stucco walls, causing momentary confusion.
It took sitting up in bed and rubbing my eyes to realize I wasn’t having some weird dream, but that Leo had somehow convinced me to fly halfway around the world so he didn’t have to go on vacation alone.
At least that’s what he said. But I knew better. I knew this was some sort of intervention. That he was worried about me because of the divorce and the fact that my entire family, except for him, had pretty much abandoned me.
But I wasn’t worried. The reason was plain and simple.
I liked being alone. It took loosing Amanda to realize that I enjoyed my solitude.
I didn’t need people, outings, jobs, cars, big houses, and especially not some wife at home making me feel bad about buying her the life she’d always wanted. Being alone was wonderful.
Now the only person I had to worry about was myself.
If I wanted to leave on a whim, I could.
If I wanted to go skydiving or something equally dangerous, I could.
And if I felt like going out and making a fucking fool of myself at a bar or some shitty nightclub, then so be it.
I had nothing to lose anymore. In fact, I intended to start a brand new life on this vacation. And that new life only had one rule.
No women.
Everything else was on the table.
I sat with that thought for a long moment, letting it settle into my bones the way the sunlight was settling across the bed. No women. It was such a simple rule, and yet it felt like the first genuinely sane decision I’d made in years. Maybe ever.
I peeled my shirt off over my head and tossed it onto the floor, standing up to stretch out the kinks that a transatlantic flight and an impromptu nap on a foreign mattress had introduced to my spine.
The room was small but not cramped, the kind of small that felt intentional rather than cheap.
The ceiling was low with those same dark wooden beams I’d seen downstairs, and the walls were thick stone plastered smooth and painted a color that was somewhere between white and cream.
The bed frame was iron, old and solid, and the mattress beneath its faded linen cover was somehow the most comfortable thing I’d slept on in two months of floor camping and lumpy rental furniture.
I went to the window and leaned my forearms against the sill.
The view knocked me sideways a little. I just plain wasn’t prepared for it.
From up here the whole valley fell away below the property in long terraced sweeps of silver-green olive trees and sun-bleached grass.
Further down, the rooftops of Livorno clustered together in that warm terracotta palette that looked like something off a postcard, and beyond that, barely visible through the afternoon haze, was the sea.
It sat there at the edge of everything like a suggestion.
Like a promise that the world was bigger than the one I’d been living in for the past couple of months.
I stared at it for a while. The sea. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually looked at the sea. Hell, when was the last time I was even at the sea?
The air coming through the window was warm and carried something I couldn’t immediately name.
Herbs, maybe. It was planty and earthy and spicy all at the same time with a floral note underneath it all.
I pulled in a slow breath through my nose and felt the tension in my shoulders drop by about half a degree. Which was something, I supposed.
Downstairs I could hear Leo moving around.
There was the soft clink of ceramic, the scrape of a chair, and the low hum of what might’ve been music.
Or it might’ve been him singing to himself, which was a thing he’d done since we were teenagers and which had driven me absolutely insane back then.
Now, standing at a window in Italy with the sun warm on my bare chest, it just sounded like white noise.
Comfortable white noise. It was almost goddamn peaceful.
I found a reasonably clean t-shirt in my duffel, changed into it, and went downstairs.
The main room was bathed in the long golden light of late afternoon, which meant I’d slept longer than I’d intended.
The leather sofa had a throw blanket across the back that hadn’t been there when we arrived.
That meant Leo had been busy while I was unconscious.
He’d always had a hard time sleeping when things were too exciting and being in Italy definitely qualified as exciting for him.
The whole room looked slightly more lived-in than it had this morning.
More settled. Leo had a way of doing that to spaces, filling them up with warmth without making any obvious effort.
That’s probably why he’d become an interior designer in the first place. Comfort and style was his gift.
I expected to find him in the kitchen, but it was empty, a half-drunk cup of coffee sitting on the counter going cold. Through the low archway and past the dining room, the back door stood open.
I crossed toward it and stepped out into the garden.
And stopped.
It was a fucking mess. A beautiful, completely overgrown, utterly chaotic mess that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.
Stone pathways wound through what might have once been formal planted beds but had long since been reclaimed by whatever wanted to grow there.
Rosemary had gone woody and enormous, sprawling across the edges of the paths in thick silver-green curtains.
There were rose bushes that had climbed entirely free of whatever structure had once supported them and were now making their own architectural decisions, threading themselves through an old iron pergola that was slowly rusting back into the earth.
Lavender grew in great faded purple drifts between cracked terracotta pots.
Lemon trees stood at intervals along the far stone wall, untrimmed and heavy, their branches dipping under the weight of fruit that was either ripening or had already fallen to the grass below.
The whole thing smelled extraordinary. Like some strange concoction that had been slowly steeping in sunlight for a decade.
Leo was sitting on a low stone bench at the far end of the garden, half-hidden by an overgrown fig tree that leaned out over him and cast him in shadow.
He had his elbows on his knees and his face tipped down.
And he was very still in a way that I never remembered Leo really being capable of.
His dark hair caught the late sun and turned it almost bronze.
He hadn’t heard me come out.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him. I couldn’t see his expression from here, but something in the set of his shoulders told me he wasn’t sitting out here because the view was nice. He was sitting out here because the house had felt too small for whatever he was carrying.
I knew that feeling.
I stepped off the threshold and onto the cracked stone path, and a pebble skittered under my shoe.
Leo looked up immediately, reflexes snapping back into place.
By the time I’d crossed half the garden his face had already rearranged itself into something easier.
Something that looked like his default setting.
That bright, effortless warmth that he wore like a second skin.
“Hey,” he said. “Good nap?”
“I drooled on the pillow,” I said. “For probably like three hours at least.”
“Try four and a half.” He shifted over on the bench without being asked, making room. “You snore, by the way.”
“So sue me,” I said, plopping down beside him. “I hardly slept for that entire flight.”
“Me either,” he sighed. “I’m exhausted. But… I’m just…”
“Too excited to sleep?” I offered. He glanced my way, seemingly surprised that I remembered. “I figured you would be.”
Leo let out a short laugh, surprised and a little self-conscious.
“Yeah. Something like that.” He looked back out over the ruined garden, turning a dried sprig of lavender between his fingers that he must’ve plucked from somewhere nearby.
“I’ve been dreaming about this place for a long time.
Now that I’m actually here it feels a little... ” He searched for the word.
“Overwhelming?” I offered.
“I was going to say surreal.” He glanced sideways at me. “But overwhelming works too.”
I leaned back on my hands and looked out at the garden.
A fat bumblebee was working its way methodically through the rosemary, unhurried and entirely indifferent to our presence.
One of the lemon trees along the wall had dropped its fruit in a loose scatter across the grass below, and a few of the fallen lemons had split open in the heat and were giving off that same sharp sweetness I’d smelled all morning.
The sun was sitting lower now, cutting long amber shadows through the tangle of rose canes and the rusted pergola, and everything it touched looked slightly unreal.
Like a painting someone had abandoned halfway through.
“It’s a disaster,” I said.
“The garden?” Leo followed my gaze. “Yeah. Apparently nobody’s done anything with it in years.”
“How long has the place been empty?”
He hesitated. Just a fraction of a second, but I caught it. “A while,” he said carefully. “The owners were elderly. It got away from them. Now it’s rented out.”
I let that sit. There was something about the way he said it that felt rehearsed, but I was too jet-lagged and too comfortable in the warm evening air to pull on that thread right now.
“It’s got good bones,” I said instead.
Leo turned to look at me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read. Something between surprised and pleased and something else that he tucked away before I could identify it. “That’s exactly what I thought,” he said quietly.
We sat there for another minute in the kind of silence that felt natural and warranted.
A breeze moved through the garden and lifted the scent of the lavender and the lemons and that deep, green rosemary smell.
Somewhere beyond the stone wall a church bell started tolling the hour in long, patient strokes. I counted them. Six.
“Are you hungry?” Leo asked.
I considered the question honestly. For the first time in a long time, the answer was actually yes.
It wasn’t that hollow, obligatory hunger of someone who knows they should eat.
Instead, I was actually, genuinely hungry.
The smell of the place had done something to my appetite that two months of takeout pizza hadn’t managed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good.” Leo stood up from the bench, brushing dried grass from the back of his jeans.
“Because I am absolutely not cooking tonight. I’m way too tired and I’d probably burn the place down.
” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the valley below.
“I saw a little restaurant when we drove through town. One of those places with tables outside and a chalkboard menu. It looked… real.”
“Real?” I repeated.
“You know what I mean. Not touristy. The kind of place where locals actually eat.” He tucked the lavender sprig behind his ear without thinking about it and then immediately seemed to register what he’d done, pulling it back out with a slightly sheepish expression. “So. You in?”
I stood up and stretched my arms over my head, my spine popping in three separate places. “I didn’t fly fourteen hours to cook my own food.”
Leo grinned, and it was the real one. Not the one he put on for waitresses and strangers, but the one that crinkled the corners of his amber eyes and made him look seventeen again. It was the one I was beginning to remember. “Perfect. Now go put on something that’s not a ratty t-shirt.”
“This t-shirt cost over a hundred dollars.”
“Boy did you get ripped off.”
I flipped him off over my shoulder as I headed back through the garden toward the door, and I heard him laugh behind me, a bright sound that once again reminded me of our childhood.
After I’d changed, I met Leo at the front door and we headed out.
The walk down into town took about twenty minutes along a narrow lane that wound between old stone walls and terraced properties.
The light was golden and soft, and the shadows were shades of blue and purple.
Usually I didn’t notice things like that but everything here was just so vibrant, like I’d been living in black and white until this moment.
Leo walked beside me with his hands in his pockets, pointing things out as we went.
A tabby cat sleeping on top of a wall. A pomegranate tree heavy with dark fruit hanging over a rusted gate.
And an old man in a doorway reading a newspaper who lifted two fingers in greeting as we passed without even looking up.
“Does he think we’re locals,” I asked after we’d passed.
“There’s no way,” Leo answered, shaking his head. “We stand out like a sore thumb here.”
“Is it the clothes?” I asked, looking down at my chino shorts and t-shirt.
“That,” he nodded. “And probably the dark cloud of stress and heartache surrounding us both. From what I’ve read, people here are just more relaxed than Americans. They try to live life enjoyably.”
Maybe Italians were onto something.
Livorno was massive, but this little area of town seemed small and intimate.
It was the kind of place built on a human scale, where the streets were narrow enough that you could touch both sides and the buildings leaned slightly toward each other overhead as though they were sharing secrets.
The locals were drifting along the main street in an unhurried way, stopping to talk, or emerging from shops with bread or wine.
It felt like the whole town was outside, but quietly.
Like everyone had agreed to take in the evening slowly and with purpose.
Leo stopped in front of a narrow restaurant tucked between a doorway labelled “Tabacchi” and a small grocery whose produce spilled out onto the street in wooden crates.
There were maybe eight tables on the cobblestones outside, most of them already occupied, and lit by candles stuck in old wine bottles.
A chalkboard propped against the wall listed the evening’s menu in looping Italian handwriting that I couldn’t read a word of.
“This is it,” Leo said.
“You sure?”
“Come on,” he grinned. “You’re about to have the best food of your fucking life.”