6. Leo
Leo
The restaurant was small, unassuming, and rustic in all the right ways.
I was fairly certain the patio furniture had been there for years, the wrought iron chipping away its many layers of paint.
Everything from the menus to the tablescapes were unintentionally beautiful.
After years of being a designer, I never could’ve recreated the simple elegance and charm of that place.
It was just one of those things that only time could create.
“I fully plan on gaining ten pounds while we’re here,” I said to Alex as we took our seats. “I want to eat pasta and cheese every single day.”
Alex took one glance at the menu before looking up at me. “I’m not sure you have another choice.”
The menu was entirely in Italian, which I’d expected, but the categories were at least recognizable enough that I could piece together what was what.
Antipasti, primi, secondi. A short list of dolci at the bottom that I was already planning to work my way through systematically over the course of this vacation.
A young woman appeared at our table without a notepad.
She must’ve been one of those confident waitstaff that had memorized everything and considered writing it down an insult to their intelligence.
She rattled off what I assumed was a greeting and possibly a description of the evening specials, all of it delivered with the particular musical cadence of someone who spoke Italian as a native language.
It was mesmerizing, but I still had no idea what she’d said.
“Parla inglese?” I tried, with what I hoped was an apologetic smile.
She tilted her head. “A little.”
“Perfect. That’s about as much Italian as we have between us.”
Something shifted in her expression that wasn’t quite a smile but was adjacent to one. She pointed at the chalkboard. “Tonight we have the ribollita. And the pici al ragù.” She said both with the careful emphasis of someone who’d learned which words tourists always mangled.
“What’s ribollita?” Alex asked, which surprised me. He was actually engaging with the menu instead of just pointing at something and waiting to be fed.
“Is soup,” she said. “Bread soup. Tuscan.”
Alex considered this for a moment with his usual flat expression. “Sounds like peasant food.”
“It is peasant food,” I said. “That’s the point. It’s traditional.”
He looked at me, then back at the menu. “I’ll have that.”
The waitress seemed pleased, or at least less neutral than she had been a moment before.
I ordered the pici and asked about the wine, which resulted in a brief consultation that ended with her bringing a carafe of the house red without further discussion, as though the question had only ever had one correct answer and I’d been silly to treat it as a genuine inquiry.
Alex watched her walk away. “She didn’t write anything down.”
“She’s going to bring us exactly what we need.”
“I sure hope so,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
“We’re in Italy now and this is the last place in the world you would ever starve.
” I poured us both a glass of wine and pushed his across the table.
It was dark and a little rough around the edges, the kind of wine that tasted like it had been made fifty meters from where we were sitting. I loved it immediately.
Alex picked it up, turned it slightly in the candlelight, and took a sip. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he took another sip.
“Okay,” he said.
“High praise.”
“Don’t push it.”
I smiled and settled back in my chair. Around us the evening had fully arrived, the last of the light gone from the sky and the street now lit by the warm glow of windows and the candles on the tables.
The couple next to us was sharing a plate of something that smelled extraordinary, a deep savory smell that drifted over and made my stomach contract with anticipation.
Down the street someone was playing a concertina badly, but with tremendous enthusiasm.
For a moment I just let it all wash over me. The sounds, the smells, the warm air on my skin. The particular feeling of being somewhere completely new, somewhere that had no associations attached to it, no memories layered over it yet. Just raw, present experience.
I’d needed this. More than I’d even admitted to myself when I’d planned this crazy adventure.
“So,” Alex said eventually.
I glanced over at him. He was looking out at the street with his elbows on the table, wine glass held loosely between both hands.
His jaw was still unshaved and his hair was still a disaster, but he’d changed into a clean navy shirt that fit him properly across the shoulders, and in the candlelight he looked considerably less like a man who’d been living under a pile of takeout boxes.
“So,” I echoed.
“Tell me about Ben.”
I hadn’t been expecting that. Of all the directions the conversation might have gone, that particular one hadn’t made my list. I turned my wine glass slowly on the tabletop. “What about him?”
“You said you broke up. Tell me why.” Alex shrugged, the gesture studied in its casualness. “I told you about Amanda. Seems fair.”
I supposed it did. I watched the candle flame bend sideways in a brief gust of warm air, then straighten itself again. “We just grew apart,” I said finally.
Alex looked at me. Really looked at me, with those flat blue eyes that were actually quite a bit sharper than he usually let on. “That’s not an answer. That’s the thing you say to people when you don’t want to give an answer.”
I let out a slow breath. “Yeah. I know.”
He didn’t say anything, just waited. That was the thing about Alex that most people didn’t understand.
They assumed the silences were hostility, that his bluntness was cruelty, or that he was just plain not interested.
But he was actually, in his way, a very good listener.
He didn’t fill silences with noise just because they were uncomfortable.
He just waited, and eventually the silence did the work for him.
“I was gone a lot,” I admitted. “For work. You know how it is when you’re building a client base.
You go where the projects are. And Ben was at home teaching his classes at the college, and I was somewhere else most of the time.
” I paused. “We had an open arrangement because of it. Because it seemed practical at the time.”
Alex’s expression didn’t change, but something in it shifted slightly. “Open how?”
“Open as in, when I was away we could both...” I gestured vaguely with my wine glass. “You know. As long as we were honest about it. As long as it didn’t become anything serious.”
He considered this. “Did it become something serious? For him?”
“No.” I turned the wine glass around again. “No. That wasn’t the problem.”
Alex waited.
“The problem was that I came home one time and Ben had rearranged the entire apartment,” I said.
“New furniture, new art on the walls, different dishes in the cabinets. Everything I’d chosen, everything I’d designed to build our life together was just...
gone. Replaced. And when I asked him about it, he said he’d been living alone in that place for so long that it had stopped feeling like mine was there at all.
” I paused. “So he’d made it entirely his instead. ”
Alex was quiet for a moment. “And you let him.”
“I wasn’t there to stop him.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I looked up at him. He was watching me with that steady, unreadable expression.
I picked up my wine and took a long sip before answering.
“No. I suppose I let him. I suppose somewhere along the way I stopped fighting for things. It was easier to just agree and keep the peace and get back on a plane to wherever the next project was.”
The waitress reappeared with our food, setting the bowls down with quiet efficiency.
The ribollita in front of Alex was thick and dark and steaming, smelling of black kale and beans and something deeply savory.
My pici came in a wide shallow bowl, the pasta hand-rolled and rough-edged the way it was supposed to be, the ragù clinging to it in a way that suggested whoever made it had been making sauce for their entire lives.
I watched Alex look down at his bowl. Something crossed his face that I couldn’t name exactly. Not hunger, or not just hunger. Something more like recognition. Like the food itself was something honest and uncomplicated in a way that appealed to him right now.
He picked up his spoon and ate.
I did the same.
For a few minutes neither of us said anything, which felt right.
The food was extraordinary in that way that simple food sometimes was.
It wasn’t the kind of cooking announced itself or tried to impress you, like at all those fancy restaurants out east. It just quietly delivered on every single thing it promised.
I ate half my bowl before I trusted myself to speak again.
“He started seeing someone,” I said finally.
“While I was away. Which was technically within the rules we’d agreed on.
But then I came home and he didn’t stop.
And I realized he didn’t want to stop, and that maybe he’d been hoping I’d come home and end it for him so he didn’t have to be the one to say it. ”
Alex tore a piece of bread from the basket the waitress had left without either of us asking. “So you ended it.”
“I ended it,” I said. “So he didn’t have to.”
He nodded once, slowly, in a way that meant he was processing rather than responding. He dragged the bread through the broth at the bottom of his bowl. “Do you miss him?”
I thought about that honestly, the way I hadn’t really let myself yet. “I miss not being alone,” I said. “I miss having someone to call when something good happened. I miss the version of us that existed in the beginning, before it all got so...” I searched for the word.
“Convenient?” Alex offered.
I looked at him, surprised. “Yeah. Exactly. It stopped being a relationship and started being an arrangement. Something we’d both agreed to maintain out of habit.”
“Sounds familiar,” he said, his voice flat.
“Who knew we had so much in common…”
He looked out at the street again, the bread still in his hand.
A group of young locals had settled at the table across from us, loud and comfortable with each other, like people who had known each other their whole lives.
One of the women was laughing at something, her head thrown back, entirely unselfconscious.
Alex watched them for a moment. Then he said, without looking at me, “The open arrangement thing. You think that’s why it fell apart?”
“Partly,” I said carefully. “Or maybe it was a symptom of something that was already falling apart. I’m not entirely sure which came first.”
“I think it’s wrong,” Alex said flatly. Just like that. Direct and unambiguous, the way he always was.
I raised an eyebrow. “The open arrangement?”
“Yeah.” He finally looked back at me, and there was something firm and clear in his expression that I hadn’t seen there in a long time.
Something that wasn’t anger or numbness.
Something that actually resembled conviction.
“If you’re with someone, you’re with them.
All the way. Not when it’s convenient, not when you’re in the same city. All the way.”
“That’s a pretty traditional view,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.
“Call it whatever you want.” He picked up his wine. “I just think if you’re going to love someone, you should actually do it. Not a partial, negotiated, logistically convenient version of it. And definitely not only when they’re around.” He took a drink. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
I watched him set the glass back down. His jaw was set in that particular way it got when he’d said something he actually meant and wasn’t interested in walking back.
“The divorce hasn’t made you cynical about love?” I asked carefully.
He considered the question for longer than I expected.
“It’s made me cynical about my own judgment,” he said finally.
“But not about what it’s supposed to be.
” He turned the wine glass slowly on the tabletop, an echo of what I’d been doing earlier.
“I think you deserved better than what Ben gave you.”
The words landed somewhere soft and unguarded in my chest. I hadn’t expected that. I’d expected a shrug, or a grunt, or another one of his flat observations that held you at arm’s length. But not that.
“Alex—”
“Someone who wants to share you with the rest of the world isn’t actually that interested in keeping you,” he said, still looking at his glass.
“You should be with someone who...” He paused, something flickering briefly in his expression before he smoothed it back over.
“Someone who wants you so fucking bad that the thought of letting another person touch you drives them mad. They should have your back, not looking for another cock to ride on.”
I paused, the fork halfway to my mouth. “Is this about Ben? Or is this about Amanda?”
He tossed the uneaten bread into his bowl and crossed his arms over his chest, turning his gaze out over the city.
“It’s about them both,” he grunted. “I’m just…
god, I’m so fucking tired of people getting used.
I thought love was supposed to be easy and wonderful and whatever the fuck all those movies say. ”
I just watched him, this small outburst of his showing more honest emotion than I’d seen from him in years.
“But it turns out I was the asshole the entire time,” he snapped. “Shame on me for thinking love was a real thing.”
I nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. “Sounds like we both needed this vacation, huh?”
Alex pushed himself up from the table suddenly. “What I need is a fucking drink.”
And then he was off, walking down the street at a fast pace.
For a moment I considered letting him go and cool off for a while.
He seemed like he needed the alone time.
But we were in Italy, he spoke zero Italian, he didn’t know how to get back to the villa, and he had no money.
If I didn’t want him getting arrested, I figured I should probably go after him.
So, dropping some money on the table, I sprinted off toward him.
Maybe he was right. A drink was in order.