Chapter 2 #3
The call ends with her blowing me a kiss I pretend not to receive.
The screen goes dark. I sit there for a moment with the phone in my hand and the quiet room around me.
The crumb is still on my dress. The coffee is finished.
My notebook is open to the line Lucia gave me, and outside, Rome is burning brighter by the minute.
I brush the crumb away. Then I turn back to the page and write one more note before the feeling can disappear:
Some cities do not heal you. They keep you occupied while you remember how to do it yourself.
I look at the sentence until it stops feeling like something I wrote and starts feeling like something I should probably believe.
That is usually when I close the notebook.
I have learned not to overwork the useful lines.
They arrive clean or they do not arrive at all, and if I keep touching them, they start to bruise.
I cap my pen, set it beside my laptop, and stand from the desk because sitting too long after a call with Sophie is a terrible idea.
She has a way of entering the room from another continent and rearranging the furniture inside my head.
The balcony doors resist when I open them, then give with a soft wooden complaint.
Heat pushes into the room, carrying the smell of warm stone, cigarettes, and the café downstairs beginning its lunch rhythm.
Plates clink. A scooter shudders over the uneven street.
Somewhere above me, a woman shakes out a sheet and the white fabric snaps once in the sun before disappearing back through the window.
Rome is loud enough to be useful.
I take my phone from the desk and check the time.
11:03 AM.
No new message from Ethan.
I should feel nothing about that. The absence of a text is not an event. It is not generosity, restraint, growth, punishment, strategy, or proof. It’s a blank space on a screen. Still, my thumb pauses over his name before I lock the phone. That irritates me enough to make me productive.
By 11:17, I have rewritten the opening paragraph of the Rome dispatch.
By 11:42, I send Diana the Santa Livia notes in a clean document, labeled properly, because Diana believes bad file names are early evidence of moral decay.
By 12:05, I am walking toward lunch with my sunglasses on, my notebook in my bag, and Sophie’s warning tucked somewhere I can reach without letting it drive.
He’ll try when you’re tired.
I am not tired.
I am hungry.
There is a difference.
The lunch restaurant sits behind a butcher shop near Testaccio, hidden through a narrow passage that smells faintly of rosemary, meat, and old tile.
It is the kind of room that looks accidental unless you understand how much work it takes to make something feel undesigned.
Paper placemats. Heavy glasses. No music.
Walls lined with framed photographs of men in aprons, men holding knives, men standing proudly beside animals no one in a modern dining room wants to imagine becoming lunch.
I order trippa alla romana because avoiding tripe in Rome feels cowardly, and cowardice has never improved a meal. The server looks at me for one approving second before writing it down.
The dish arrives red with tomato, bright with mint, and finished with pecorino that softens into the heat. It is rich, earthy, unapologetic. The texture demands attention. The sauce tastes like someone’s grandmother won an argument with poverty and never stopped refining the victory.
I write:
Tripe: not rustic as branding, rustic as memory. Mint keeps it alive. Pecorino gives it spine.
The sentence works. I keep it.
By the time I return to the hotel, the sun has sharpened.
The streets are white-gold and punishing.
A group of tourists has gathered in the small piazza near the fountain, all of them pink-faced and wilted, listening to a guide explain something into a microphone while no one looks capable of retaining information.
I pass them, climb the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, and reach my room with sweat at the back of my neck and a clean line about tripe repeating itself in my head.
The phone buzzes when I am unlocking the door. I know before I look. That annoys me too. Inside the room, I set my bag on the chair, place the notebook on the desk, and take out the phone with more care than the object deserves.
Ethan: I’m not trying to pressure you. I just hate that this is where we are.
I read it once. Then I put the phone on the desk and walk to the sink.
The hotel bathroom is too bright at this hour. White tile, chrome fixtures, my reflection in the mirror with flushed cheeks and hair beginning to loosen from its pins. I turn on the cold tap and run water over my wrists until my pulse stops insisting on itself.
The wording is so him.
I’m not trying to pressure you.
That is the sentence men use while pressing their hand against the door.
I just hate that this is where we are.
Where we are.
As if we arrived here by accident.
As if the geography of a relationship changes itself while no one is responsible for the travel.
I dry my hands slowly. The towel is thick and white and faintly stiff from hotel laundry. I fold it back over the rack because the action gives my hands something to finish. Then I return to the desk. The message is still there. I pick up the phone and type nothing.
There are answers available. Too many of them.
A clean one. A cruel one. A patient one.
A final one. The kind where I remind him that we are not anywhere together.
The kind where I tell him that where he is and where I am no longer share a map.
The kind Sophie would read aloud in a dramatic voice over takeout in her apartment while declaring it “surgical.”
Instead, I lock the screen. I set the phone face-down. Then I open the laptop. The rest of the day becomes work because I make it become work.
I refine the Santa Livia piece until it stops wobbling.
I cut a sentence about the lamb because it repeats what the previous sentence already proved.
I move the line about restraint closer to the top because Diana is right more often than is convenient, and discomfort can be precise.
I send the revised draft at around 4:30PM and receive no immediate response, which means Diana is either in a meeting or making me wait because she knows waiting annoys me.
Both are possible.
I go downstairs thirty minutes later.
Lucia is at the front desk, speaking to a British couple who have arrived with six bags and the stunned expression of people who believed cobblestones were decorative. She looks composed, as always, but one hand rests on the desk with the slightest pressure at the fingertips.
The husband says, “We were told the room had a view.”
Lucia says, “It does.”
“Of the courtyard,” the wife says.
“Yes,” Lucia says. “That is the view.”
“We expected something more Roman,” the husband says.
Lucia blinks once. “The courtyard is in Rome.”
I stop near the small table of tourist brochures and pretend to read one about Vatican tours while the couple processes the fact that Lucia has not technically insulted them.
The wife says, “We meant something with landmarks.”
Lucia’s smile appears, gentle enough to be fatal.
“Of course. The landmarks are outside. The room is inside. This is usually the arrangement.”
I have to look down at the brochure.
By the time the couple leaves, Lucia turns to me.
“You heard nothing,” she says.
“I heard architecture explained beautifully.”
“They wanted the Colosseum outside the window.”
“Greedy.”
“Very,” Lucia says.
I step closer to the desk. “I leave tomorrow morning.”
“For San Sebastián,” she says.
“You remember everything.”
“It is my job.”
“It is more than your job.”
“It is still useful to pretend otherwise,” Lucia says.
I smile. “My train is at 9:30 AM.”
“Then you need a taxi by 8:40 AM.”
“I was thinking 8:45 AM.”
Lucia gives me a look.
I lift both hands. “8:40 AM.”
“Good.”
“I’ll settle the bill tonight.”
“It is already prepared.”
“Of course it is.”
She slides a small envelope across the desk.
“Also, the restaurant for tonight confirmed. Outdoor table. Not the one by the kitchen door. I told them you would leave if they tried that.”
“You did not.”
“I did,” Lucia says.
“It is good to give people a chance to behave before they disappoint you.”
I stare at her.
She looks back, calm and severe.
“That is also going in my notebook,” I say.
“It should,” she says.
My last dinner in Rome is quieter than the others.
Not because the restaurant lacks noise. The terrace is full, the street is busy, and the table beside mine hosts a birthday dinner for a woman turning sixty with the glorious impatience of someone who has no interest in pretending she is thirty-nine.
Her friends keep raising glasses. She keeps correcting their toasts.
The quiet is internal.
It settles somewhere between the second course and the wine, once the day’s work is done and tomorrow’s departure begins to make itself visible in small ways.
My suitcase waits half-packed at the foot of the hotel bed.
The train ticket is saved in my phone. The next city has begun to replace this one in the practical part of my mind.
Rome has done what I asked.
It gave me work.
It gave me tables.
It gave me enough beauty to stand inside without having to explain what I was doing there alone.
The waiter brings grilled peaches with mascarpone and a drizzle of honey.
The peaches are smoky at the edges, the mascarpone cool and faintly tangy, the honey floral enough to make the dish feel like it belongs to evening rather than dessert.
I eat slowly, not because I am sentimental, but because the dish asks for it.
My phone buzzes before the last bite.
I let it sit on the table beside the plate.
The birthday woman’s friend lifts another glass.