8. Leo #2
I was halfway down the staircase when I nearly walked directly into Alex.
He was coming up from the direction of my bathroom with damp hair and a clean shirt and looking considerably more human than he had at any point since the divorce.
He’d even shaved, I noticed. Or at least done something to bring the stubble under control.
He looked, objectively, very handsome. Which, as I was reminded earlier, was something I was attempting to ignore.
“Plumber’s here?” he asked, nodding up toward the sound of Matteo moving around overhead.
“Yeah. Says it’ll be about forty minutes.”
Alex leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “You look weird.”
“I’m fine,” I said, perhaps slightly too quickly.
He looked at me for a long moment with those flat blue eyes. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where your face goes very still and you talk like you’re reading from a script.” He tilted his head, assessing. “You used to do it when you were lying to Mom about where you’d been.”
“I’m not lying about anything,” I said, which was technically true. I descended the remaining stairs and headed for the kitchen with the purposeful energy of a man who was absolutely going to make coffee and think about nothing in particular. “I’m making coffee for the plumber.”
“The plumber,” Alex repeated flatly, from somewhere behind me.
“Yes.”
“What does the plumber look like?”
I filled the coffee pot with water and measured out the coffee with great attention to detail. “Like a plumber.”
There was a pause.
“Leo. You’re doing it again.”
“He’s very good, apparently,” I said. “Very fast. Signora Ferretti recommended him personally.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“That bad, huh,” Alex said. It wasn’t a question.
I set the pot back into the maker, turned it on to brew, and stared at it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Behind me, I heard Alex pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, the legs scraping against the terracotta floor.
He didn’t say anything else. He just sat there, and I could feel him watching the back of my head with that infuriating patience of his, the one that he deployed specifically in situations where he’d already figured out what was happening and was content to wait while the other person caught up.
I gripped the edge of the counter.
The coffee maker began to gurgle.
“He’s attractive,” I said finally, because apparently I was incapable of withstanding a prolonged silence when I was already flustered. “Objectively. In a very general, impersonal way. It’s not a big deal.”
Alex was quiet for a moment. Then I heard the scrape of his chair shifting.
“Uh huh,” he said.
“It’s Italy,” I continued, with the defensive energy of someone who had already lost the argument and knew it. “Everyone is attractive here. It’s practically in the water. It’s a cultural phenomenon.”
“Sure.”
“I’m just making the man a coffee.”
“You’re making the man a coffee,” Alex repeated, not quite mocking me, but it had the same effect, nonetheless.
I turned around. He was leaning back in the chair with his arms crossed and his legs stretched out under the table, watching me with an expression that was, infuriatingly, almost amused.
It was the closest thing to a smirk I’d seen from him since before the divorce.
Under different circumstances I would’ve been delighted by it.
Right now I found it deeply inconvenient.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re saying plenty.”
He raised both hands in a gesture of innocence that convinced neither of us. “I’m just sitting here.”
“You’re judging me.”
“I’m not judging you. I’m observing you.” He dropped his hands back to his arms. “There’s a difference.”
The coffee maker let out its final gurgle and clicked off. I pulled down a cup, poured it, and added a small spoon of sugar because maybe Matteo liked his coffee sweet. I set the cup on a small saucer, which was probably overkill, and then stood looking at it for a moment.
“You put it on a saucer,” Alex observed, a tone of surprise in his voice.
“It’s a cup. It goes on a saucer.”
“You never put mine on a saucer.”
“You get yours in a mug,” I said. “Because you drink it like a construction worker.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Was he trying not to smile or trying not to grimace? I figured it had to be a smile. “Go take the man his fancy coffee, Leo.”
I picked up the saucer and headed for the stairs with what I hoped was a dignified amount of composure. Behind me I heard Alex shift in his chair again as if to remind me he knew exactly what I was doing.
The sound of Matteo working drifted down the corridor as I climbed. The soft clank of tools and the occasional murmured Italian that I assumed was directed at the pipes rather than anything else. I paused in the bathroom doorway and knocked lightly on the open door.
“Coffee,” I said.
Matteo looked up from where he was crouched at the access panel, something clamped between his teeth and both hands deep in the wall.
He held up one finger, finished whatever he was doing, and then sat back on his heels and reached for the cup with a grateful expression that nearly made my knees buckle.
“Grazie,” he said, wrapping both hands around the saucer and taking a slow sip. His eyes closed briefly. “Perfecto.”
“I’m glad,” I said, leaning against the door frame, and then immediately decided that leaning against the door frame was too cliche and pushed off it and stood normally instead, which probably looked worse.
Matteo looked up at me over the rim of the cup.
His brown eyes were warm and unhurried and he had, I noticed, a very slight gap between his two front teeth that somehow made the whole picture even more devastatingly charming.
He gave me a slow and interested look that started at my face and worked down my body before returning to my eyes.
Bingo.
“You are on holiday?” he asked.
“Three weeks,” I said. “Maybe longer.”
“You are alone?”
“My stepbrother is here,” I said, which answered the question he had asked and the implied one about my relationship status. I watched to see what he did with that information.
He smiled again, slow and warm, and handed me back the empty cup. “Livorno is very beautiful in the summer,” he said. “There are things worth seeing. If you need a guide.”
“I might take you up on that,” I said, before I could stop myself.
His smile widened. He turned back to the pipes, but the energy in the room had shifted in a direction that I found both thrilling and slightly terrifying, like standing at the edge of a cliff.
I went back downstairs.
Alex was still in the kitchen, now with his own mug of coffee, which he had apparently helped himself to without ceremony or saucers. He looked up when I came back in and read something in my face that made him set the mug down.
“Well?” he said.
“He offered to show me around town,” I said, dropping into the chair across from him. “Be a guide. That kind of thing.”
Alex said nothing.
“It’s probably nothing,” I added.
“It’s not nothing.”
“He was just being friendly. Italians are friendly. It’s a whole thing.”
“Leo.” Alex leaned forward slightly, both forearms on the table. “He asked if you were here alone.”
I looked up at him. “How did you—”
“I came to the bottom of the stairs to check on something and I could hear you.” He picked up his mug again, unbothered. “The walls are a hundred years old and about as thick as cardboard.”
I pressed my hand over my eyes. “Perfect.”
“You should go,” Alex said simply. “Get it out of your system.” He paused, looking at me over the rim of his mug. “Just don’t go falling in love. I don’t feel like putting up with that right now.”