12. Leo #2
I’d watched all of those things happen in that kitchen. And I’d watched them happen again over the past three days, every time I walked into a room and he found a reason to walk out of it.
He wasn’t avoiding me because he was embarrassed about losing his temper.
He was avoiding me because he didn’t know what to do with what he felt.
I sat with that for a long moment as the warm morning sun was darkened by clouds, the bag of market goods heavy against my leg, and the sound of the children’s game rising and falling across the piazza.
A cat appeared from under the table next to mine, regarded me with indifference, and disappeared again.
The trouble, the real trouble, was that I understood exactly what he was feeling. Because I was feeling a version of it myself.
That was the part I’d been the most carefully not examining.
The part I’d buried under loneliness and grief and the entirely rational argument that these things were simply not possible and therefore not worth thinking about.
But sitting here in the cafe, three days removed from a kitchen conversation that had rearranged something in my chest, I found I was running out of places to put it.
I’d gone out with Matteo. Matteo, who was objectively beautiful and kind and had smelled like Italy itself and had looked at me with warm brown eyes that said he was genuinely interested in knowing me better.
And I’d sat across from him on that terrace with the harbor below us and the limoncello in my hand and had thought about Alex the entire time.
Not about Ben. Not about the villa, or the deed in the envelope, or the unused ring I’d had in my pocket for six months.
About Alex. About the look on his face when he thought no one was watching.
About the way the morning light had caught his blonde hair through the window on the first day, when I’d come upstairs with coffee and found him face-down and finally, finally sleeping.
I’d told Matteo I wasn’t ready. And that had been true. But it hadn’t been the whole truth.
I picked up my bag and stood up from the table, leaving a few coins next to the empty cup. In the distance, I could see the dark cloud line moving in over the sea.
The walk back up the hill was steep enough to require my full attention, which I was grateful for.
The lane wound between old stone walls that radiated the morning’s warmth, the rosemary spilling over the edges in great fragrant curtains.
In the distance, I heard the rumble of thunder as the breeze picked up.
I shifted the bag to my other arm and kept climbing, listening to my own footsteps on the stones and trying to organize my thoughts into something that resembled a plan.
But I didn’t have a plan.
What I had was a bag of food and a stepbrother who was writing gibberish in a blank notebook while pretending not to feel things that were clearly eating him alive.
And I had three weeks in this villa, possibly more, and the stubborn conviction that leaving important things unspoken was the fastest way to ruin any relationship, brotherly or otherwise.
I’d done that with Ben. I’d swallowed things and smoothed things over and taken myself off to the next project instead of staying and having the conversation that needed to be had.
I’d done it my entire life, actually. Made myself small and accommodating and easy to be around, and then wondered why no one ever seemed to actually see me.
But Alex saw me.
That was the thing I kept coming back to.
He was blunt about it in his infuriating way, and he pushed back.
He told me things I didn’t always want to hear, and he had absolutely no patience for my tendency to apologize for things that weren’t my fault.
But he saw me. He’d been seeing me since that first night at the restaurant, really, maybe even before that.
He’d looked at me in the kitchen at two in the morning with those raw blue eyes and said things that no one had ever said to me.
And the way he touched me… that had said more than anything else.
I reached the iron gate at the top of the lane and pushed it open.
The villa sat in the dim light, its old stone warm and golden despite the lack of sun, the ivy began to shift as the breeze turned to wind, carrying with it the smell of the sea.
The back garden was visible around the side of the house, a tangle of rosemary and roses and the heavy-limbed lemon trees along the stone wall.
A pair of swallows were cutting wide arcs above the terrace, seeking shelter as thunder rolled louder behind me.
I stood at the gate for a moment, looking at it.
This house. This house that I’d bought because I’d thought I was going to propose to a man who’d quietly replaced me.
This house that I’d dragged my grieving stepbrother to on the theory that we both needed somewhere new to fall apart.
This house that was thousands of miles from anyone I’d ever known.
We were alone here. And with no one around to interfere, maybe it was time we had a difficult conversation.
I pushed through the gate just as the first drops of rain began to fall.