Chapter 25 Rafaella
Rafaella
Rafaella sat at the top table, looking out at the sea of faces staring up at them.
She wondered if this was what it was like to be a schoolteacher watching over the assembled children, waiting for the bell to ring.
Villa Maria’s main reception room had been dressed with coloured streamers that looped across the ceiling and long tables draped in cloths.
The wedding cake was displayed on a stand in the corner, and there was a dance floor and a small stage for a band with a drum kit already set up.
At the far end of the room, large arched windows gave onto the beach below, but no one was lying out on the promenade – none of the anziani were standing on the steps or in the shallows today. Everyone was in here.
Luchino was giving his speech. He had been talking for at least forty minutes now and it seemed to her that the more he talked, the more the villagers drank.
She could see Gina, Luigi and Gino all sitting together with Donatella, Antonia and Clara.
Cosimo, Romola and Fede were at a table with their mother – Filippo’s chair still empty, although he was expected back from Rome ‘any second’.
Fon and Dante were with their parents and El Greco …
Dante kept looking over at Gina’s table, his finger tapping on the back of his chair as he watched her flirting with Luigi.
Rafaella knew perfectly well what her friend was doing: she was getting revenge for Dante’s on?off treatment of her.
He would come in hot one day, wooing her and saying all the right things, only to disappear again for days afterwards.
Gina might be mad about him but she was nobody’s fool.
Two could play at his game, and from the jealous look on Dante’s face, it was working.
Fon, beside him, just kept drinking, his head hanging down.
Everyone was drunk, but he looked wrecked.
He’d been avoiding her for the past few days again – ever since the picnic at El Ciolo, when Cosimo had humiliated him – but then, she hadn’t exactly sought him out either.
It wasn’t her job to salve wounded pride and male egos.
Especially when she had asked both him and Cosimo to accept each other in her life, to no avail.
The tension between the two of them was still at breaking point and she didn’t know how else to ease it.
But she frowned now as she watched Fon running his hands over his face, looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but here.
He wasn’t talking to anyone, and he looked so wretched that she suddenly regretted not having made a point of speaking to him.
Things had been so crazy all day, tending to her sister, calming her mother, enduring photographs and small talk with Father Tommaso …
To her shame, she realized she hadn’t even looked for him in church, but how could she when every time she’d raised her head, Cosimo had been staring straight at her?
He had kept trying to make her laugh, almost succeeding several times, and on the walk over here he had bounded around her like a puppy wanting to play.
In truth, he was the real reason she’d let the days slip past without searching out her boyfriend. She had been enjoying having fun again, and for the past few evenings, after they’d finished their shifts at the beach caffè, she and Gina had gone over to the villa and hung out with him and Romola.
She was determined to show them they could all go back to how things had been before, and on the surface, their return to friendship had been seamless – it really had been just like the old days, the four of them telling wild stories and silly jokes, raiding the kitchen for food.
Romola had got her old spark back and even decided that if she couldn’t beat them, she’d join them, coming down to help out at the caffè several mornings so they could all have more time together.
But below the surface of bright smiles, it wasn’t so simple with Cosimo.
For all their well-intended declarations at the caffè, their truce felt as fragile as a fairy’s wing – as if a lingering look could tear through it, an enquiring touch could set it alight.
Their renewed friendship existed more as a concept than a concrete reality.
At first she had thought it was all in her head, that she was imagining the way the air seemed to crackle between them.
But then she would catch him staring at her; she felt his eyes on her back whenever she left a room, the pressure in his fingertips when they messed around in the pool.
And when they came inside and lounged on the sofas, his arm was always slung across the cushions behind her shoulders, tantalizingly close.
Slowly, she was beginning to wonder if, far from being something they had left in the past, the kiss had become a ghost, haunting them both.
She looked over to find him already watching her.
His black eye had faded now, his atrocious sunburn turned into a deep tan, and he was distractingly handsome in his suit.
Sometimes she wished she could hate him.
It would be so much easier to foster contempt than to keep on suppressing the emotions he really aroused in her.
It took so much energy not to look at him, to force from her mind memories that had danced for so long they had worn grooves into her very being.
He’d hurt her in his efforts to show they were nothing but friends, but as she met his eyes now and she felt that familiar charge in her body, she didn’t think that even Valentina Fabiani could stop what was happening between them.
In a flash, she understood it at last. Their kiss hadn’t been an ending to last summer but a beginning to this one, revealing a story neither of them had been ready for.
But as he smiled from across the room, it was like watching flames race towards her over an oil slick. There was only one direction of travel, and it was unstoppable. This fire was going to consume them both.