Chapter 4 A Fling to Remember #3
Harold hadn’t left his apartment in a week.
The Deliveroo delivery guy knew him by name.
He’d been carbo-loading pizza and pasta like he was prepping for the apocalypse.
His trash cans were full. A stack of pizza boxes on the dining room table reminiscent of the Leaning Tower of Pisa threatened to tip over at any moment.
These details mattered little to Harold as he moved from bed to kitchen to couch, the repetitive life of a young man who’d been stripped of love, a man who’d ignored the data and allowed the idea of fate and love and the cosmos to play a part in his plan.
It hadn’t helped that he’d watched Alice’s favorite movie, Say Anything, with John Cusack and Ione Skye, about ten times since she’d left.
Toward the end, when John holds up the boom box and plays Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” outside of Ione’s house, Harold would cry till he was out of tears, wishing he could find his way back to Alice.
Harold’s stomach twisted when he imagined someone else touching his girl.
He tried so hard to avoid thinking about what this guy must look like, but in his mind, he saw a wealthy heir to Lamborghini or Ferrari, a man several inches taller than Harold, who wore his starched white shirts halfway unbuttoned, revealing a perfectly shaved chest and perhaps a Saint Christopher medal dangling on a gold chain, an exquisite Bulgari watch on the man’s wrist. He probably wore designer glasses, thick frames to further enhance his style, because he was certainly a fashion model, or used to be before taking over the family business.
Naturally, he was a skier, as everyone with money in Bologna was, so he probably planned on taking Alice up to his chalet in Cortina on the weekends, where he would teach her how to navigate the slopes before he took her home to explore the slopes of her body.
Harold had finally broken through, though. After a long seven days—and they were excruciatingly long beyond description, pain ticked off by the second hand on the clock, black holes of emptiness, soul torn by loneliness—he’d found the answer he’d been looking for.
His whole life, he’d proved to be his father’s son, running away at the first sign of adversity. No more would he let that happen. He’d come so close to booking a flight back to Denver, forgetting this whole thing happened, picking up where he’d left his life. It hadn’t been that bad, right?
Yeah, it actually had. He couldn’t go back to that old life. At least, not without a fight.
Alice was having a fling, that was all. What gorgeous youngster who studied in Italy didn’t meet an Italian man or two? It seemed almost a requirement. She’d come back to him eventually, Harold knew it.
The idea caused his lips to curl into something that might be considered a smile.
Hope danced in his heart, helping it to properly beat for the first time that week.
He sat up and reached for the lone T-shirt she’d accidentally left when she and the demigod had come by to pick up her things.
Harold had promised to leave for a few hours, and he’d done just that.
What he should have done was lingered in the shadows to get a glimpse of this Renzo, but he’d been too afraid.
Not anymore, though. As he sniffed the scent of the woman he still believed to be his soulmate, he decided to go find her and inspect her new life, look for the weaknesses, look for any indication that their false love affair was ending.
Maybe Harold could find a way to give a final push to bring things to a close quicker.
After one last sniff, he popped up like a man possessed. He’d been lost but now he was found, and he marched into the bathroom, shucked the clothes he’d been wearing for two days, leaned against the counter, and stared at himself in the mirror.
He had work to do. He needed to shower and shave and clean up the place. At some point, he’d have to call his mom and explain that he wasn’t ready to come home, but it was better to put that conversation off for now.
An hour later, Harold hauled out two big bags of his trash.
He weaved through the construction that all but blocked the entrance before escaping onto the street.
He noticed the open sign on the English bookstore he lived above and wondered whether they had any books that might aid in his rebirth, perhaps the Kama Sutra or maybe a Sex for Dummies–type manual.
But the thought of approaching the counter with something like that in hand made him feel queasy.
After he dropped the trash in the dumpster (he’d have to make a separate recycling run with all the pizza boxes), Harold began to wander along the cobblestones.
Today was simply about getting out, his first adventure in a week.
Alice would have been terribly disappointed with him if she saw his step count since she’d dumped him.
It was time to change. He needed sunshine and fresh air, something to bring him back to life.
Because never had he hurt like this before.
Not even when Brandon Paine and two other guys beat the shit out of him at the mall when they were twelve, writing sissy on his forehead and leaving him with a cracked rib and a black eye.
Not even when his dad disappeared.