by Kristin Rae
Maybe I should go.
I pull out the chair opposite him and plop down, setting my camera on the table. “Hey.”
The wind whirls around us, causing our hair to fly up in the air and tangle around our faces.
“Hi.” He smiles, placing a hand on top of his head to control the madness.
“Windy today.” I use the band on my wrist to pull my hair back in a floppy loop.
“It’s supposed to rain.” Darren points across the water to an ominous black cloud. “It’s already storming out there.”
I frown at the sky. Hiding from rain back at the apartment is the last thing I want to have to do today.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Afraid to get wet?”
I motion to my camera. “I’m afraid to get that wet.”
Now he frowns at the sky. “Do you want to go back?”
The distant storm flashes with fingers of lightning, probably a sign I should call it a day, but I can’t make myself do it.
“I’ll take my chances,” I say, turning one corner of my mouth up in an attempt to look saucy.
What am I doing? He has a girlfriend.
I scan the area around us to try and spot her. “So where are Tate and Nina? I thought they’d be with you.” And I thought you were pushing Tate on me. I prepared myself for all three of you and it’s just you. Again.
“Nina had a headache.”
“Okay.…”
“She acts tough sometimes but she’s a big baby when she doesn’t feel good.” He gives up holding back his hair and just lets it fly where it wants. “Tate stayed with her,” he adds with a roll of his eyes.
“Tate …?”
“Yeah …?”
“But I thought—” No. Way. “Wait a minute. Are they … together?” I manage to spit out, mouth suddenly filled with cotton.
“Tate and Nina? Yeah.”
“Ohhhh.” My mind is a whirlwind.
His eyes widen and the words race out. “You thought—wow, no no no no no. She’s like three years older than me.”
“So there’s nothing between you and her?” I stare at his face but I’m unable to focus on his features.
“No. They were already dating when I met her. That sort of thing’s off limits, you know?” He opens his mouth to continue, but instead bites at his bottom lip and turns his face back to study the sky.
Do I know? I want to tell him that’s why I never asked for an e-mail address, phone number, any way to contact him. He was off limits, and I couldn’t be that girl.
I fight to keep laughter from escaping my lips, my mind flipping through memories of every interaction Darren and I have had. How did I go this long thinking he was the one dating Nina? Neither of them ever came right out and said it. They just seemed so comfortable around each other. Like … family.
I am one big, fat idiot—sono un grande idiota.
Darren crosses his arms on the table and leans toward me. My heart kicks the inside of my chest, forcing me to mirror him.
“You really thought I was with her? This whole time?”
I nod. “I guess I shouldn’t assume so much.”
He shrugs and studies my face intently. “Sometimes it’s hard not to.” He bites his lip again, obviously keeping himself from saying more.
The wind rushes around us and my face gets pelted with loose grains of sand from the edges of the nearby trail. I close my eyes tight but it’s too late.
“Agh!” I shout, pressing my fingers into my eyelid reflexively—probably the absolute worst thing to do.
“Stop! You’re gonna scratch your cornea or something.”
I stop. A chair screeches and I sense him super close to me. My right eye is on fire, tears welling up. I bring my hand back up, but Darren snatches my wrist before I can do any more damage.
“Do you want me to see if I can get it out?” he asks.
The scent of warm spearmint reaches my nose. I try to look at him but I’m practically underwater. All I see is a flesh-colored mass with a dark halo.
I swallow. “Are your hands dirty?”
He laughs deep and my body rocks as he rotates my chair to face him better. “What do you think is in your eye, Pippa?”
“Dirt.”
I catch a whiff of spearmint again. Too close.
“So am I doing this or do I have to carry you to a mirror?” he asks.
I squint and slam my fist toward where his shoulder should be. “Smart aleck.” I try to relax as he pries my eyelid open.
“I see it. Look up and to the right.”
My teeth clench together as a fingertip gently touches the white of my eye and pulls away. Every part of my body is tense, completely disgusted.
“Got it.”
I blink a few times and try to refocus on my surroundings through the blur. “Thanks.”
He observes the dark dot resting in the middle of his pointer finger. “Make a wish.”
A wish. I wished on a coin at the Trevi in Rome, and I saw Darren’s face in my mind just as the coin fell in. Now I’m actually looking at his face, the real one. A shiver tickles my spine and I take a shaky breath.
“You want me to wish on a grain of sand?”
“Well, yeah. It was in your eye, wasn’t it?”
“It’s not an eyelash.”
“Oh, is that the rule? Hmmm.” Darren frowns at the granule. “That’s too bad. I was sure it had a wish to grant.” He’s just about to wipe his hands on his khaki shorts, but I stop him.
“Wait! I’ll do it.” If the first one worked … another couldn’t hurt. “I’ve got a wish.”
He raises his finger between us, a corner of his mouth turned up. I try to come up with a really compelling wish, something specific, but there is a pair of lips less than two feet away from me.
“Any day now,” he teases.
I close my eyes and blow out a puff of air.
“Ow!” Darren’s hands fly to his face.
“No! It did not just go in your eye!” I lean forward to try and help. “I’m so sorry!”
He shakes his head and flashes me his twisty-tooth smile, dropping his hands to the armrests of my chair.
“You are such a nerd.” I laugh.
I gently rub my eye again, the fire lessening but still a bit painful. Extra tears drip down my cheeks and Darren swipes at them with the back of a couple of fingers. Our faces are level. He’s on a knee in front of me, chest pressed against my legs, a pressure I hadn’t noticed until now. And now I can’t concentrate on anything else.
And he’s not moving.
My tears dry, and I can really see him, study him. A freckle on his left cheek, one near his temple. A tiny scar makes a gap in his left eyebrow. The brown of his irises are flecked with amber that brightens the center near the pupil, the color deepening as it reaches the outer edge.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us smiles. His eyes dart to my lips for the tiniest fraction of a second.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A fine mist slaps our faces as the wind kicks up again, forcing us to blink the moment away. The unused anticipation turns my stomach. Darren shifts backward, preparing to stand, but a nearby voice startles both of us.
“May I at least be introduced before you set the wedding date?”
Darren, still on one knee, scrambles to his feet, color spreading up his neck toward his ears.
“Chiara!” I stand and smooth back my hair. “What—”
She flashes a wicked smile. “I did not mean to interrupt. Per favore, carry on what you were doing.”
Two girls with sandwiches quickly snatch the table we abandon, so we move closer to the building, away from the cliff side. Thunder rumbles in the darkened sky overhead.
I say, “He was just—” at the same time Darren says, “I was just—” and we’re both tongue-tied.
“I had something in my eye.”
Chiara moves closer to us, making room for the other trail walkers taking shelter from the imminent downpour. A low h
um purrs in her throat, hands resting purposefully on her hips.
“Darren, this is Chiara, the friend I was telling you about. Chiara, this is my—this is Darren.” I don’t know what I was going to stick in there after my. Friend? Can you be friends with someone if you don’t even know their last name?
Darren finally unfreezes, extending his hand, which Chiara takes in both of hers and squeezes. “Darren Ledger.”
Ledger. Darren Ledger. Pippa Ledger. Darren and Pippa Ledger.
STOP!
“You helped Pippa when she was hurt,” she says, and Darren nods. “You are one of those heroes we read about?” She rests her hand back on her hip, which she sticks out a little too far toward him for my taste.
Darren laughs and shifts his weight closer to me. “I don’t know about that. Right place, right time. That’s all.”
Chiara raises an eyebrow. “But that was a week ago. You are still here?”
He shuffles his feet. “No. Well, yes, obviously I’m here now, but I left the next day. And then I came back.” His eyes dart over to me a few times, but he won’t completely look in my direction.
“He came back,” she says to me, though not exactly softly, then looks back at him. “How lucky we are for that.” She brings a section of her raven hair in front of her shoulders and combs through it with her fingers.
My pulse pounds in my ears. She cannot be flirting with him.
Rain slips through the holes in the overhang and I pull my camera closer to my body. Why didn’t I think to check the weather forecast before I set out today? I would have at least brought my camera bag with me.
“I’ll be right back,” Darren says before approaching the order window of Bar dell’Amore.
“He is beautiful—lui è bello,” Chiara says. “And so much hair to hold on to.” She clucks her tongue as she sizes him up.
I stifle a gasp. “So you were flirting with him?”
“Does it bother you?” she asks, not taking her eyes off of his backside.
“Yes,” I say before I can think of anything more clever.
She offers me a friendly smile without showing teeth. “Then you are welcome.”
“What, I should be happy you’re flirting in front of me?”
“Now you are certain that you are interested.” She waves a hand, palm up, from her to me. “You are welcome.”
“Uh—”
Darren returns, pulling something small from a plastic sack and holding it up. A rectangular magnet depicting a cluster of colorful buildings along the sea, with scripted font that reads Riomaggiore.
“For your fridge back home,” he says, offering it to me.
He bought me a present! I reach out to take it, our fingers sweeping across each other. I swallow and try to keep from grinning like a clown.
Holding up the empty sack with his other hand, Darren says, “And for your camera.”
I attempt to raise only one eyebrow but they both fly up. He takes my camera from me and wraps it up. I gape at him. Such a simple but brilliant gesture.
I stow it away safely in my tote bag, putting one more barrier between the rain and my baby. “Thanks.”
Chiara’s attention flits to someone at the other end of the overhang. She frowns and says, “Solo un momento”
Too preoccupied with replaying the finger graze over and over in my head, I let her go without asking any questions and watch her feet disappear through the growing crowd.
“And thanks for the magnet,” I add to Darren. I examine it, sliding my fingers across the smooth surface.
He pushes his hands down deep into his pockets. “Well, I didn’t want your camera to get wet. And I figured the sales guy would be nicer about me asking for a big sack if I actually bought something.”
Oh. Of course. Very logical. So he didn’t really mean to give me a present present. “I can pay you for it,” I say, a little too upbeat. “Or maybe you want to put it on your fridge.”
Hurt flashes across his face, but he quickly relaxes into a smile. “No. I picked it out for you. It’s the village you’re staying in.”
I picture this deep-blue and bright-pink souvenir stuck to the pristine stainless steel refrigerator back home. Mom freaks if there’s even one fingerprint on it; there’s no way this would fly.
“I’ll have to find a creative use for it. My mom doesn’t exactly allow magnets on our fridge.”
Darren laughs as if I just told an epic joke. I smile but it’s hard to find humor in my restricted reality.
“Wait.” He stops laughing. “You’re serious? You don’t have anything on your fridge?”
“Totally serious.” This can’t be a new concept. “She thinks it’s junky and cluttered.”
“It is junky and cluttered! That’s what’s so great about it. Our fridge back home is like a montage of all the places we’ve been. We’ve even got a set or two of all those tiny words you combine to make sentences or movie quotes or whatever.”
I’ve never seen someone’s face light up talking about refrigerator magnets before. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about refrigerator magnets before, period. I can’t help but smile at him.
“Those are the really fun ones,” he continues. “We like to be sneaky and make up stupid phrases for one another to find.”
My chest tightens. “And your mom is actually, like, okay with you guys doing that?”
“Are you kidding? She’s the queen of that game.”
“Sounds like a fun mom.” I sigh. “I wouldn’t know what it’s like to have one of those.”
Darren’s cheery expression fades. “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot you and your mom aren’t really seeing eye to eye right now.”
“Right now?” I huff. “Try ever.”
“That sucks.” He hooks his thumbs on the straps of his backpack and shifts toward me so a family of six sporting bright-yellow rain ponchos can squeeze behind him. They look like waddling ducks.
When they pass, I catch eyes with Darren and both of us stifle a laugh. “Did your mom ever dress up your whole family in canary-colored ponchos?” I ask.
“No way. My parents are a little, I guess you’d call them free spirited. They don’t see anything wrong with getting wet,” he says, eyes cast out over the churning sea, lost in a memory. “It’s just another side to nature.”
“I don’t know why, but that doesn’t really surprise me.”
We’re laughing together when another family passes behind him. The portly father bumps into Darren’s backpack, which sends Darren crashing into me. He grabs my elbows and steadies both of us. I can tell the fabric of my shirt near my hip is touching the fabric of his shirt.
And why isn’t he letting go?
A woman’s angry Italian shouts make us jump apart and we turn our heads in that direction. Chiara. Of course. Always ruining my perfect moments.
But she’s not shouting at us, she’s shouting at a man maybe in his early twenties. And he’s shouting back. I know Italians sound like they’re yelling eighty percent of the time even in regular conversations, but this is different. There’s something off about this guy, the way he’s glaring at her between strands of greasy, wet hair.
Chiara’s face is flushed, which I’ve never seen on her, and both of them are throwing hand gesture after hand gesture, each one more animated than the last. The people nearby—tourists, mostly—scoot away to give them room, mouths hanging open, and I get a clear view of the two of them.
The thug steps closer to Chiara and towers a full head above her. His hand curls into a fist, then relaxes. He pops his fingers.
I suck in a breath. “Is he going to hit her?”
Darren’s face scrunches in concern. He pulls away from me and begins to move in Chiara’s direction.
“What are you going to do?” I ask in a quiet rush.
“No idea, but something’s better than nothing.” He tucks me behind him. “Stay behind me. Far enough so you don’t catch any stray punches.”
When we approach, Chiara and Greasy Guy fall silent, eyes still locked in a staring contest. Theories are flying through my head. Ex-boyfriend? Jilted lover? Another cousin gone bad? He’s not particularly attractive, so I rule out all formerly romantic possibilities quickly. Maybe they’re just friends who had a falling-out. A really loud, dramatic, public falling-out.
“Chiara,” Darren finally says. “Everything okay?”
Greasy Guy looks Darren up and down with narrowed eyes and spits out what I’m guessing is a question. Darren responds, calmly, in Italian. It’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in Italian, and I can’t even tell if his accent’s right, but it’s seriously hot.
They go back and forth a few times, Chiara chiming in once in a while. I pick out a word here and there, but I mostly make up what I think they could be talking about. My version sounds like this:
Greasy Guy: “Who the bleep are you?”
Darren: “A friend of Chiara’s.”
Greasy Guy: “What kind of friend?” This is when he puffs up his chest to make himself look stronger.
Chiara: “Not that kind of friend, so chill out. Besides, Pippa’s got dibs on him.”
Darren: “Is there a problem?”
Greasy Guy: “Yeah. You. How about you get out of my way?”
Darren: “Chiara comes with us.” This is when Darren nods in my direction and I back up a hair.
Greasy Guy: “You can’t have her. We’re not through here.”
Chiara: “I should have cut ties with you years ago! You selfish piece of bleeping ble—”
Greasy Guy: “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a dent in that pretty face of yours!”
Chiara backs away and links her arm with mine, pulling me over to where Darren and I had stood. I turn my head to check on him. He’s right behind us. Greasy Guy takes off toward Manarola.