Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Amanda
The audio guide tells me Michelangelo didn't even want this job.
I stand in the middle of the Sistine Chapel with my neck tipped back at an angle my chiropractor would bill extra for, and a polite British voice in my ears explains that the greatest ceiling in human history was painted by a man who spent four years complaining about it.
He wrote a poem about how much he hated it. His neck seized. Paint dripped in his eyes. He called himself no painter, signed the letter, and climbed back up the scaffold to make God anyway.
Honestly? That's the most relatable thing I've ever heard about a genius.
We've been walking since eight this morning. The Forum, the Pantheon, a gelato place Valentino swore was the only acceptable gelato place in a city of four thousand gelato places, and my feet have filed a formal complaint with management.
None of it feels like enough.
We could walk until my sneakers dissolve and Rome would still have another church, another fountain, another alley that smells like espresso and old stone, and I want all of it. I'm greedy for this city the way I used to be greedy for likes, except this actually fills something.
The chapel is packed. Hundreds of tourists shuffle shoulder to shoulder in the dim light, everyone whispering, everyone's head tipped back like a field of sunflowers that found God instead of the sun.
The air holds the warmth of too many bodies, with something cooler underneath.
Stone. Plaster. Five hundred years of people breathing in the same room.
Every few minutes, a guard's voice cuts through the murmur.
"Silenzio. No photo."
Nobody listens.
Forty phones go up the second he turns around, and the murmur swells again. I keep mine in my pocket. Six months ago, I would've spent this entire visit hunting the angle, the caption, the proof.
Now I just look.
The British voice tells me about the moment of creation, and I find it on the ceiling. God reaching. Adam barely bothering. Their fingers are not quite touching. All of creation hanging in a gap the width of my thumb.
For a second, the painting stops feeling famous and starts feeling alive.
Every pope crowned under these frescoes. Every conclave. Every secret. Five centuries of men deciding the fate of the world while Adam lounges above them like he's waiting for someone to bring him a drink.
My eyes sting.
In a museum.
Over paint.
I blink it back and turn to find Valentino.
He's standing maybe ten feet away, and he isn't looking at the ceiling.
He's looking at me.
Tourists crowd around him in bucket hats and sensible sandals. Selfie sticks. Fanny packs. A tour group from Ohio in matching lime-green lanyards. He should look ridiculous among them.
He doesn't.
He looks like he belongs to the stone more than the rest of us do.
Dark shirt. That stillness he carries, the kind that makes people move around him without realizing they've made room. The painted prophets above us are all muscle and gravity and terrible knowledge, and he matches them so well I have one brief, unhinged thought.
If Michelangelo had painted Valentino onto that ceiling, tourists would've been falling in love with him for five hundred years. They'd put him on postcards. Sad art students would cry in front of him.
Instead, he's mine.
And he's watching me look at the ceiling like I'm more important than this place.
I pull out one earbud and drift over to him, hip-checking past a man filming the entire ceiling in vertical video, which should be a crime tried at The Hague.
"You're missing it," I whisper. "The most famous ceiling on earth is up there, and you're staring at some blonde."
"I've seen the ceiling," he says, low, his mouth barely moving.
"It's the Sistine Chapel. You don't get to be over it."
"I didn't say I was over it."
His eyes lift for two seconds, then come back to me, and something in my chest tips sideways.
"I said I've seen it."
"Silenzio," a guard barks somewhere to our left.
We both go quiet.
His hand finds the small of my back, light and steady, and the warmth of his palm bleeds through my shirt. I lean into it without deciding to. The audio guide chatters on in my dangling earbud, tiny and far away, telling no one in particular about the Last Judgment.
I look at that wall instead. The massive chaos of it. The saved rising. The damned dragged down. Christ in the center with his arm raised mid-decision.
The British voice told me earlier that Michelangelo painted his own face onto a flayed skin held by a saint. He put himself into heaven as an empty sack of himself. Four years on his back making God, and that's how he signed it.
"He painted himself as dead skin," I whisper. "Did you know that? The saint with the droopy skin. That's Michelangelo's face."
"I know."
"That's the most Catholic thing I've ever heard."
A sound leaves him through his nose, one dry huff that, in Valentino currency, counts as a full belly laugh. The lime-green lanyard group surges past us, and he draws me closer before they can bump me. We stand there with his arm around me under five centuries of judgment.
"Hey." I tip my head back to find his face. "Nine more days."
"I know."
"You promised me ten."
His thumb brushes my side.
"One is gone already."
His mouth curves. Actually curves. Both corners. Rare enough that I want to take a picture, except I've stopped doing that.
"I'll give you nineteen days," he says. "The whole city. You'll beg me for a taxi by Thursday."
"I will never beg you for a taxi."
"You begged me for other things."
Heat climbs my neck so fast I'm grateful for the low light. A nun stands eleven feet away.
"You can't say that in here," I hiss. "We're in the Pope's house."
"The Pope isn't home."
I press my face against his shoulder to smother the laugh, and he holds the back of my head with one scarred hand.
Above us, God keeps reaching for Adam, forever an inch short. The chapel hums with a hundred whispered languages. The guard calls for silence again, and no one listens.
None of it touches us.
This is what I want.
Not the photo of the moment.
The moment.
Us.
Valentino
The tiramisu is from a pasticceria the size of a confessional booth two streets behind the Pantheon, and Amanda is eating it with a tiny plastic spoon like she's defusing a bomb made of mascarpone.
"Okay," she says, mouth half full, "this is illegal. This has to be illegal. Nothing legal tastes like this."
I take a bite of mine. Espresso, cream, the cocoa bitter on the back of the tongue. My grandmother would've called it acceptable, which from her was a standing ovation. "If it were illegal, half the Roman judiciary would be in prison. They're all customers."
"You know the judges' dessert habits."
"I know everything about this city that's worth knowing."
She laughs, and the sound carries down the street ahead of us, bouncing off ochre walls and shuttered windows.
Evening is coming down slowly over the rooftops, that golden hour where the whole city looks like it's been dipped in honey, and the air smells like exhaust and jasmine and somebody's dinner frying in olive oil three floors up.
Tourists drift past us toward the Spanish Steps in loud little clusters. I track them out of habit. Hands, bags, sightlines. But it's background noise now, low volume. My right hand is free. My left is occupied with dessert.
"You know what's insane?" Amanda says. She licks the spoon, and I make myself watch the street instead, because we're in public and I'm a grown man, allegedly. "Walking with you. Eating tiramisu. This feels out of space. Like we left the planet and nobody told anyone."
"Eating tiramisu isn't out of space, bella. It's the most natural act a human body can perform." I scrape the bottom of my cup. "I could eat one in my sleep. I've probably done it."
"In your sleep."
"There are weeks of my life I can't account for. Tiramisu is the most likely explanation."
She laughs again, harder this time, head tipping back, and the gray-haired couple passing us smiles at her the way everyone smiles at her, like she's a window someone finally opened.
Something pulls tight under my ribs. It's been doing that for weeks.
I've stopped checking whether it's a medical problem.
The Steps rise up ahead, that wedding cake of travertine spilling down from Trinità dei Monti, crawling with people sitting where the city has decided people may no longer sit. The fountain at the bottom burbles its eternal complaint. I slow down without deciding to.
"I wanted to ask you something," I say.
Amanda stops dead in the middle of the street. The spoon freezes halfway to her mouth and her whole face goes courtroom-serious, eyes narrowed, shoulders square.
"What now?” she says. "What happened? Who do we know that's dead, arrested, or missing? Rank them by urgency."
"Nobody's dead."
"That you know of."
"Amanda." I throw my empty cup in a bin and face her, and Cristo, this was easier in my head. In my head it was one sentence. In my head I didn't have an audience of four hundred tourists and a Bernini fountain. "Do you want a house here? In Rome. Something that's only ours."
She blinks. Twice. A vespa whines past behind her and she doesn't flinch, which six weeks ago she would have, and the fact that I notice that tells me everything I need to know about what I'm doing.
"Are you for real right now," she says. It isn't a question. It's an accusation with hope inside it.
"I'm—" The words stall. I push through it anyway, because she taught me that, whether she knows it or not.
"I'm not good at this part. Asking. I take, I handle, I arrange.
Asking is new." Her eyes have gone soft and enormous and it's making it worse, so I look at her mouth instead, which is also a mistake.
"What I want to say is that I want you with me.
Here, Chicago, a tent in the goddamn Alps, I don't care about the geography.
If you want Chicago, I'll live in Chicago and complain about the pizza until I die. But I want you where I am."
The fountain keeps burbling. Somewhere up the Steps a street musician butchers "Volare," and Amanda stands there in the gold light with cocoa powder on her lip, looking at me like I've handed her something breakable.
"You better find an apartment in the next seven days," she says, "because I'm not leaving this town. I'm warning you. This is your notice."
Something detonates in my chest, quiet, no shrapnel. I don't have a name for it. It might be happiness. I've had so little practice with it that I genuinely can't be certain. It could be happiness or it could be cardiac arrest, and standing on this street with her grinning at me, I'd accept either.
"Seven days," I say. "I'll have keys in two."
"Show-off."
"You fell in love with a show-off. That's a you problem."
Her phone rings.
She digs it out, glances at the screen, and her eyebrows jump. Then she turns her back to me to answer it. Turns her whole body away, shoulders curling around the phone, voice dropping, and something old and ugly rises in me before I can kill it.
What the fuck.
I turn.
For one second, I hear nothing.
Not the traffic. Not the tourists. Not Amanda behind me.
A woman walks toward us through the gold light and the tourists, dark hair threaded with silver, a navy coat, a face I have seen every night for twenty-two years in the part of my mind I never enter willingly.
Older now. Lines at her eyes. The same way of holding her chin slightly down, like she's walking into wind.
My hand drops to my side.
For a second, I can't breathe.
Chiara.
She stops three meters away, close enough that I can see her hands shaking around the strap of her bag, and behind me Amanda says, soft, where my heartbeat used to be:
"Valentino. Breathe."