It was rather like that lecture I’d had with him after Liam’s secretary had told me the truth. I’d studied well, and I knew everything Dr. Aretino touched on. I made sure to add what I could, to answer his questions when he posed them.
By the end, even I felt impressed with my performance. This is in the bag! I thought.
We reached that restless point about ten minutes before class ended. That point where even the professor notices the clock and becomes eager for the ordeal to reach its conclusion.
Other students began packing away their texts and notebooks. I rifled through my clipboard until I reached my neatly-typed list. And then I had to fight to keep my hands off it. I knew it shouldn’t be crumpled or creased when I handed it to him.
“Dr. Aretino,” I said, approaching the lectern while he flicked the locks on his briefcase open.
“Emma, yes?” he said.
Something was different. Something that set my heart racing and tickled the nerves at the base of my spine.
“Do you have a few minutes? I have something I’d like you to look at.”
“Yes, yes. I will see it.”
He didn’t tell me to call him Giuseppe, I realized. But that wasn’t it. He seemed eager to leave. Usually every other class he demanded I stay and talk to him.
Feeling considerably less confident than before, I handed him the piece of paper. “This is the list I was talking about. I wrote down 10 ideas for extra credit assignments. I was hoping maybe you could approve one or two. I can have them all to you by…”
He waved a dismissive hand at me after glancing at the list. “These are no good.”
If I’d had lead in my wings before this, his words sheared through them and left me plummeting towards the ground, vainly flapping my arms.
“Oh. Well, I can think of a few more possibilities. Or maybe there are other assignments you have in mind?”
“No.”
“But if you just give me a chance. You saw how well I did during the lecture…”
Dr. Aretino slammed his briefcase shut. “All of your grades are slipping, Emma. I know; I have spoken with the rest of the faculty. You cannot save your grades now. Not without my help.”
My gorge started rising. That paper should have been an easy A. “You talked to them? Or you told them to lower my marks?”
Dr. Aretino shrugged, the corners of his mouth drooping. “I don’t know what you mean.”
His eyes lied, though. The look in them, the way they glinted and flashed, told me that it was a lie.
A cold sensation crept through me, starting in the pit of my stomach and slowly working its way up my innards.
He saw the realization spread across my face. “You know I will always help you.”
“If I pay your price.”
Another shrug. “It is not so much, is it, really?”
I couldn’t take any more of this. Crumpling the list into a ball, I tossed it into the bin beside the lectern. Then I went for the doors.
Dr. Aretino’s voice stopped me. “The exchange program board will review your progress in two weeks. If there is no improvement, you will be asked to leave the program. They will also revoke your student visa. You will have to leave Italy.”
Then I ran from the lecture hall. Straight to the women’s restroom where I splashed cold water on my face until my cheeks went numb and the pressure behind my eyes faded to a dull ache.
Two weeks, I kept thinking. What can I possibly do with only two weeks?
It took me fifteen minutes to get home after that. There, I sat on my creaky bed and let my messenger bag slide off my arm.
Two weeks.
Dr. Aretino knew he had me. I had two choices. I could give in, give him what he wanted. Which in this case was me. Or I could accept the review board’s judgment, tuck my tail up between my legs, and run back to Missouri and the tatters of my life that I’d left behind there.
A mirthless smile spread across my lips when I realized a cruel irony. Wasn’t it only a little more than two weeks ago that I wanted nothing less than to leave this ancient city behind?
And now that I wanted to stay, they wanted me to leave.
I’d finally begun to reconcile with my grief over my father, with my guilt over the money he’d given me to come here, to not make it so that it was given in vain. And now he may as well have burned that cash for warmth for all the good it did me.
Except for Liam, I thought, I wouldn’t have met Liam if not for coming here. Except that multiplied the guilt. I’d have to tell him I’d be leaving the country soon, and why.
It was one of those times when your brain just doesn’t want to deal with anything. Just shut down for a few blissful hours to remove your consciousness from reality, at least for a little while.
My lead-weighted eyelids started drooping shut. The thin, worn out pillows on the bed beckoned.
Normally I liked to pull my hair into a quick ponytail before sleeping. But this wasn’t normal. My head hit the pillow and I waited for sleep to pull me away.
But then Liam knocked once on the door and came in. My heart lurched; I’d forgotten he’d be coming by.
“Hey, I hope you’ve been in suspense all day, because…” he started, smiling. The smile fell from his face when he saw me. “What is it? Tell me.”
The bed groaned again when he sat beside me.
I started telling him, but then I cut myself off. An embarrassed heat rushed up my neck. I wanted to Liam to think I was smart, a good student. A success in my field just like he was a success in his. What would he think of me if he knew that I’d just been put on defacto academic probation, and that my days in Rome were numbered?
He took my hand in both of his and squeezed it gently, surrounding me with the warmth of his palms.
“Don’t clam up on me again.”
Finally I nodded. I told him the whole story. He’d gleaned parts of it himself. He’d known about Dr. Aretino’s interest in me since the night of the fundraiser. He hadn’t, however, suspected that interest had blossomed as it had.
His expression tightened as I told him, his fingers squeezing my hand tighter. I finished with getting back to my flat. “And that’s when you knocked on the door.”
“That has to be illegal. Against school regulations. Something…”
I braced myself, waiting for him to offer to do something for me. Lately everyone wanted to intervene on my behalf, it seemed.
Liam’s eyes searched for the answer in my tiny flat, as though my laptop or the text on paintings of the Italian Renaissance beside it could solve my problem.
“The dean,” he said, “Go to the dean. Aretino will be out on his ass before he can say, ‘Leonardo.’”
“That might have worked before, when it was only him. But now that he’s got my other professors in on it, the dean would probably just think I’m crying sexual harassment to fix my grades.”
In this battle of he-said, she-said the He side would definitely be the victor.
Then I saw it in his face, that desire to help me, to fix all my problems for me. Money could solve any problem, provided you threw enough at it.
However, he swallowed the words back down. He knew I wouldn’t accept the help.
“What will you do?” he asked.
I shrugged, tried to look like it wasn’t a big deal. “I guess I’ll be on my way back to St. Louis in two weeks.”
I tried smiling, but my lips started trembling. A combination of anger, frustration, and despair pushed hard against the back of my eyes.
Liam pulled me close just as the first hot tear streaked down the curve of my cheek. “Your jacket!” I said, trying to pull away. I didn’t want to ruin his expensive suit.
“I don’t care about the suit,” he replied, pulling me close again. The silk absorbed that tear, the next, and the ones after that. “You know I’ll help. All you have to do is ask.”
“I know.”
“You also know that I’ll be on the first plane to St. Louis
after you.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. There was something funny in that. That image of the ultra-rich, ultra-successful man chasing after the girl who couldn’t even get passing marks in an art history program, a bird course.
Except that Dr. Aretino had clipped my wings. Clipped them right from my wing bones with no chance to grow back.
“It’s not funny. I mean it,” Liam said. Then he drew my face away from his chest, plunged his hands into my hair so that he could tilt my head back, and kissed me.
I tasted the saltiness of my tears, knowing he could too.
When we parted, he run the pads of his thumbs gently over my cheeks, brushing away the moisture.
“So I imagine that you’ve completely forgotten about that surprise I hinted at earlier?”
Mostly I couldn’t stop thinking about how puffed up my eyes had to be, how red my cheeks were. Or the dark, irregularly shaped smudge my tears had left on his jacket.
“Is it a time machine so that I can go back to the beginning of the semester and drop Dr. Aretino’s course?”
That got me a crooked smile. “Unfortunately, no. But I think it will take your mind off things for the rest of the evening. You can start thinking up a solution tomorrow.”
A distraction? I could use one of those. “What is it?”
That crooked smile grew, and mischief flashed in his eyes. “If you want to know, you’ll have to come with me.”
“Then I suppose I have no choice but to stay here.”
That earned me a couple confused blinks. Then the other side of his mouth quirked up, completing the smile. “Funny.”
“I thought so. So, what is it?”
Chapter 11
“This is incredible! I didn’t even know you could do this!” I said.
My worries had receded to the back of my mind. They were still there, pressing against the envelope of conscious thought, but not quite able to sneak through.
Every now and then I’d feel their impression, and my guts started twisting up with the anxiety. But I found that if I concentrated on being in the present moment, being with Liam, managed to fight those sensations back again.
And how could anyone be anything but in the present with what surrounded me?
We’d driven over the Tiber river, the shifting water glittering below us. We’d rolled the windows down again, letting the city air flow through the cab of the grey BMW.
I’d closed my eyes, feeling the way the wind washed through my hair, making it stream back in golden waves over the headrest.
We arrived at our destination, which was a large square not far from the Vatican hill. I could see the pale domes of those palaces rising over the low buildings surrounding the square.
Water burbled from the upended basins held by twin cherubs that were the centerpiece of the modest fountain in the center of the square. The never-ending tinkle of water underscored all the other activity going on around it.
Specifically, the four hot air balloons and their accompanying trucks and trailers. Swarthy Italians swarmed the balloons, inflating them slowly with helium. All four were patterned after the Italian flag, green at the top, then white in the middle, and finally a ring of red around the bottom.
The buckets were larger than I thought. Like giant, uncovered wicker picnic baskets. I guess it shouldn’t have been so surprising, since I’d never been so close to one before. I’d only ever seen hot air balloons drifting around through the sky.
“What do you think?” Liam asked. Even though we’d arrived late, they still weren’t set up. Apparently even billionaires had to wait sometimes. We leaned against the side of the BMW.
“They’re beautiful,” I said, watching the balloon closest to us slowly lift off the ground and begin assuming its final shape. It reminded me of a light bulb, the bulge at the top tapering down to a narrow neck that the operator could use to heat the balloon using the large burners mounted beneath.
There was something majestic about the balloons, something graceful and gentle.
The slowly fading sunlight helped with that, too. The dusky light made everything ethereal and timeless. As though everything around us had its own internal glow.
“I know you can just bring up a satellite image of the city,” Liam said, “But it’s not the same as when you’re literally floating above it, looking down.”
As the balloons filled, the men crewing them kept them anchored to the ground using bags of sand tied to ropes.
The balloons jerked against this resistance now and again, like animals becoming testy with their bonds, impatient for the freedom afforded by the open sky.
And that made me notice the sky. It had darkened from its afternoon blue to a purplish shade, a few thin streamers of cloud so high they hardly seemed to move topping it off.
“I like to remind myself to look up,” Liam said, following my gaze, “It’s so easy to let life and responsibility and worry anchor you down and make you forget that there’s more out there than you and your troubles.”
“And looking up helps you to forget all that?” I said, taking in Liam’s wonderment and the way it softened his eyes and gave him a youthful cast.
“No, it’s just as bad to forget. It doesn’t make me forget. It gives me perspective, tempers me.”
“And you swear you had all this planned before I told you about school?” I said, feeling like that message was directed squarely at me.
Then I nudged him in the ribs, bringing those lovely baby blue eyes of his down from the skies and onto me. He smiled at what he saw, a touch of mischief making one corner of his mouth quirk up higher than the other.
“I swear that I didn’t. Though it is apt… They’re ready.”
Other people had arrived while we waited. Other passengers, waiting for their chance to board and grumbling at the whole show starting late. Mostly tourists, I thought.
A large man in a Hawaiian shirt, a black Nikon strapped to his neck, was the first on. The basket, floating a few inches off the ground, tilted alarmingly beneath his weight. The driver tugged the chain to blow more hot air into the balloon to compensate.
Liam had reserved a balloon all to us. And I mean only the two of us.
He held my hand as I stepped up into the basket. It shifted slightly beneath my feet, and a sudden, sickening vertigo curdled in my stomach.
It got worse when the thin Italian who I thought would be our driver for the evening stepped off, nodding to Liam as he closed the door to the basket.
The tourists in the other baskets noticed, and I could hear them talking confusedly and see them pointing.
“What’s happening? What’s going on?” I said, the hot blood my suddenly racing heart started pumping clashing with the cold, queasy feeling rising up through my stomach.
“Didn’t I say I’d be your tour guide for the evening?” Liam said.
“You most certainly did not!”
“Oh, well then, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Liam, and I’ll be operating this hot air balloon. When we’ve landed, if you wouldn’t mind completing a brief customer satisfaction survey, that would be great. Before we lift off, does anyone have any questions?”
“How do I get out of this thing?”
He shrugged. Then he tugged on the chain and the little furnace snarled as hot, blue flames leaped up. I hadn’t noticed that the man who’d gotten off had shipped the sandbags, and that we’d begun to drift.
The infusion of hot air gave the balloon lift, and then I could see the marble curls of hair on the heads of the fountain cherubs as we drifted over it.
“You’ll have to wait until we set down again. Just enjoy the ride,” Liam said.
It was a strange disconnect to not be on the ground. To watch it get slowly smaller and smaller beneath you so that it was as though you looked down on a living map of the city.
Anxiety tingled inside of me, but excitement was there, too, at the nape of my neck where the fine hairs began standing, in the way my blinking sl
owed so that I wouldn’t miss a second of this experience.
Soon the entirety of the Vatican came into view. The city within the city. The only place in the world where Latin was still a living, spoken language. The many-columned buildings of the Piazza San Pietro came into view. Their windows seemed to burn with the dying of the light.
And we kept going higher and higher, Liam tugging on that chain that breathed hot air into the balloon.
The other three balloons had also launched by now, all at different heights. Cameras flashed, and on the breeze I caught the excited voices of the other tourists.
If I leaned over just slightly, I could pretend that I floated on the air itself.
“I didn’t know you knew how to fly one of these things,” I said.
“Who said I knew how to fly it? I just keep tugging this cord here,” Liam said.
“Not funny. Not funny at all,” I said, wheeling to face him. His joke had the effect of making me realize there were only a few inches of material between me and the open air beneath us.
And by that point that gulf of open air had become more than just a gap.
“I thought it was. But yes, I can fly this thing, among others.” Then he nodded for me to look out.
It was the sunset. The sun had begun its slow descent into the Mediterranean. The sky had turned pink around it, sending out tendrils of color that painted the few clouds I’d noticed earlier into deep shades of imperial purple.
It took my breath away, and for those few moments I really did forget all my troubles.
And that sensation only grew stronger when I found the strength to peer down at Rome again. The glow I’d noticed before had only intensified, really making it seem like the eternal city many called it. Ageless, ethereal, and sublime.
The headlights of cars flowed along its streets, along the highways ringing the city. And there were so many people there. All tiny from up there.
I squeezed my eye mostly shut and held my thumb and forefinger out over the edge, holding the entirety of the Pantheon’s rotunda between them. If I closed my fingers together, would it be crushed to marble debris?
Italian Kisses: A Billionaire Love Story Page 12