12. Leo
Leo
Alex had barely said two words to me for the past three days. I was starting to think he hated me, or at least that he was avoiding me. That much seemed obvious. Every time I walked into a room, he went somewhere else.
But I tried to be gracious about it and give him space. He was going through a tough time. We both were. Maybe a little alone time wasn’t such a bad thing. In fact, that was exactly what I’d learned from going out with Matteo, that I needed some time alone still to process.
Still, I caught myself wondering what Alex had been going on about. Obviously I understood why he felt left behind. But the rest of it… his intense jealousy… that was the part that still confused me. On multiple levels.
There was a part of me, a part I didn’t want to admit, that felt sort of happy that he wanted to keep me to himself.
I, of course, wrote it off the same way I did my wandering eyes when I’d caught him in just a towel.
It was loneliness. It had to be. Years of loneliness catching up with me and making me feel inappropriate things.
And yet, no matter how many times I repeated it to myself, my heart still skipped a beat when I thought of him in that towel.
I didn’t have time to think about that right now though.
We were dangerously low on pretty much every supply in the house.
The property manager had stocked it enough to get us through the first couple of days, but we were down to a couple of eggs, a rogue slice of bread, and a single bottle of olive oil.
We wouldn’t make it through lunch at this rate.
Italy, after all, was the country of food.
It was time to visit the piazza. I put on my shoes, grabbed my wallet, and made a quick detour to the spare bedroom where Alex was spending most of his time. Sure enough, there he was, seated at the desk with an open notebook in front of him, his pen tapping on the scuffed wooden desktop.
I knocked lightly on the door. “I’m heading down to the market,” I said.
“Okay.” Flat tone again. He was still sulking.
“Need anything?”
“No.”
“Any requests for dinner?”
“Nope.”
I couldn’t help the sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t like to see Alex like this. “Want to come with me?” I offered, hoping some sunlight might rouse him from his funk.
“No.”
I held the doorframe for a moment longer than I needed to, watching him. The notebook in front of him was open to a page that appeared to be completely blank. The pen had stopped tapping.
“Alex.”
“I said no, Leo.”
“I know what you said.” I leaned against the frame. “I’m not asking again. I just want you to know that the silent treatment is getting a little old.”
He didn’t answer. He picked up the pen and wrote something in the notebook that I was fairly certain was just gibberish, even though it looked deliberate.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
I left before he could ignore me again.
The walk down into town was different without him.
Quieter in a way that felt like absence rather than peace.
I noticed it immediately, which annoyed me, because I’d spent years being perfectly comfortable walking places alone.
I’d traveled alone, worked alone, built an entire professional life out of extended solitude in cities where I barely knew anyone. I was good at alone.
Apparently three days with my stepbrother ignoring me had recalibrated something.
The market was in the small piazza about halfway down the hill, the same one we’d driven past on our first morning when everything was still new and slightly unreal.
It was bigger than it had looked from the window of the cab.
Several vendors had set up under canvas awnings along the edge of the square, their tables loaded in that particular abundant, slightly chaotic way of European markets where everything was piled on top of everything else and somehow still looked like a scene out of a movie.
I started at the produce stall because it was closest and because the tomatoes were an extraordinary shade of red that I’d never seen on a tomato outside of a photograph.
The woman behind the table was somewhere between sixty and eighty, with the kind of face that had been sculpted by time.
She had deep lines around her eyes and a mouth that looked like it had smiled a lot over the decades.
She watched me examining the tomatoes patience.
She’s probably watched a lot of tourists examine her tomatoes over the years.
“Buongiorno,” I tried.
“Buongiorno.” She tilted her head slightly, assessing. “Inglese?”
“Americano,” I said, with the small apologetic smile I’d been deploying all week.
She made a sound that was not quite dismissive and not quite forgiving, somewhere in between. Then she said something in Italian and pointed at the tomatoes and then at a cluster of dark basil beside them, and the meaning was clear enough. They went together. Obviously.
“Si, si,” I said, nodding, and she began filling a paper bag.
I worked my way along the market slowly, taking my time the way I hadn’t allowed myself to in months.
There was a kind of deliberate pleasure in it that I was beginning to understand was the point of being here.
Not the grand architecture or the sculptures.
Not the view from the terrace or the limoncello at the harbor.
Just this. The weight of a good tomato in your hand.
The smell of the bread stall two tables over.
And something with rosemary baked into it that made the air around it feel like it belonged in a different century.
I bought eggs from a man who clearly found my Italian catastrophic but appreciated my enthusiasm.
I bought a wedge of hard cheese wrapped in paper and a rope of garlic and a small jar of something dark and preserved that the vendor described in a rapid Italian I couldn’t follow.
But it smelled extraordinary when she opened it for me to sniff, so I bought it anyway.
I bought the rosemary bread. I bought a bottle of local wine and then, after a moment’s consideration, bought a second one just in case the first turned out to be too good to resist.
By the time I reached the far end of the market my bag was heavy and I was feeling better than I had in days.
There was something stubbornly curative about this place that I couldn’t entirely resist, no matter how much emotional debris I was wading through.
The sun and the sea cured all ailments I guess.
Or, at least, it didn’t allow the dark clouds in my mind to linger.
I found a small café at the edge of the piazza and sat down at one of the outside tables with an espresso, just to sit for a moment before the walk back up the hill.
The square was busy, but in that unhurried way.
People moved through it like they had somewhere to be but were in absolutely no rush to get there.
A pair of old men were playing cards at a table outside the tabacchi.
A group of children were doing something with a ball that had no apparent rules but enormous stakes judging by their cries of enthusiasm.
I wrapped both hands around my espresso and thought about Alex.
Three days of silence. Three days of him finding reasons to be in whatever room I wasn’t in.
Three days of him claiming he was fine. But he wasn’t fine.
He hadn’t been fine since my night out with Matteo.
Since the truth had slipped out from between his lips.
Since his hand on my shoulder and the way he’d pulled it back like he’d touched something hot.
I’d thought about what he’d said. And I’d been turning it over in my head ever since.
In bed, in the quiet of the mornings before he came downstairs, or while I sat on the terrace and pretended to read.
I’d been taking it apart and reassembling it, looking at it from different angles, trying to find the interpretation that made the most sense.
The trouble was that the most sense and the most comfortable were not the same interpretation.
The loneliness explanation had held up for exactly one day before it started showing structural problems. I knew what Alex looked like when he was lonely.
I’d seen it in the apartment after the divorce, in the hollow quality of his voice on the phone, in the way he’d stopped bothering to notice anything around him.
That was loneliness. What I’d seen in the kitchen that night was anger, jealousy, and possessiveness.
But it was directed at me. And those were not things I expected to see from my stepbrother or from a man who, as far as I knew, was straight.
Unless, of course, he wasn’t.
I turned that thought over very carefully, like it was something fragile or venomous that you weren’t sure you should be touching in the first place.
Alex had been married to a woman. He’d dated women his entire life, as far as I knew.
He was the kind of man who had never, in any conversation we’d ever had, given me any reason to think otherwise.
He was my stepbrother. He was straight. He was grieving his marriage, the loss of his big corporate job, his entire collapsed life, and he was lonely and miserable and looking for something to hold on to.
That was the comfortable interpretation.
But he’d said what he’d said. And he’d touched me the way he’d touched me. And then he’d fled up the stairs like a man who’d just realized something that scared the shit out of him.
I finished my espresso and set the cup down.
The thing about knowing someone the way I knew Alex was that you learned to read the space between what they said and what they meant.
Alex communicated in that space more than most people communicated out loud.
The flat tone that meant he was protecting something.
The jaw muscle that jumped when he was working to contain something he didn’t want to release.
The way he went very still when something actually surprised him.