That actually sounded like an incredible plan and I was impressed that Leo was starting to think like an artist. Maybe he and his super-great-grandfather-to-the-nth-degree had more in common than just their looks.
Taking the cloth into my hands, I twisted it in a knot at the back of my head and awaited further instruction.
“Well, now that you’re blind folded you’re not gonna be any help to me,” Ian complained, and I could hear the shuffling photographs between his fingers.
“They are all hot.” I waved a hand in the direction where I assumed the photos were still situated.
“That doesn’t help.”
Leo laughed as he poured a glass of wine, the liquid audibly sloshing into the crystal. “Julie’s not really good at stuff like that anyway. I took her shopping and she pretty much convinced me to buy the entire store.”
“Yes, she is quite easy to please,” Ian agreed. I take back what I said earlier. Their camaraderie was annoying. “There was this one time when I needed an opinion on a portfolio I was putting together and she picked out every single image where the male model wasn’t wearing a shirt. Didn’t matter what his face looked like, so long as he was practically naked and—”
“Still here!” I interjected, thrusting my fist out into the air in an attempt to slug Ian. I missed by a mile and suddenly felt five years old again trying to whack a piñata at a backyard birthday party. “And I’m still blindfolded, Leo. Where’s that wine?”
“Sorry. Here.” Coming around behind me, Leo deposited the glass onto the counter, his chest just inches from my back. Though I couldn’t see him, I could feel his heat radiating from the arm that bracketed my right side, and I could smell his scent as it wafted over me, an intoxicating mix of mild cologne and some type of spice. I hadn’t even taken an actual sip yet and I felt like my blood alcohol level was way over the legal limit. “Try this one first.”
Slipping his fingers into mine, he guided my hand forward along the marble until it came in contact with the glass. We curled each of our fingers onto the stem, one after the other, and he lifted the cup toward me, only dropping his hand when the cool crystal came in contact with my quivering lips.
Well that was sexy.
“Don’t drink it just yet, but focus on the aroma of it first.” His hand was on mine again as he swished the contents of the glass in slow, circular motions.
I replayed Ian’s voice, ‘I’m still here,’ over and over in my head to remind myself that he was, in fact, still here.
“Do you notice anything?”
I noticed a lot. Like every nerve ending in my body.
“Anything specific you can detect?”
I gathered in a long, slow breath through my nostrils and paused to evaluate what it was I was smelling. “Hmmm. It’s kinda smoky? Like tobacco, maybe?”
Was that the wrong thing to say? To compare his family’s prized wine to a cigar? I tried to imagine that bust from back in my room lighting up a stogie, but just I couldn’t make that visualization work.
“Right. Good. Anything else?”
I pulled in another deep breath. “Some kind of berry maybe? I don’t know. Blackberry?” This was hard. Wine smelled like wine to me. I’m sure there was some way to define the exact tannins or notes or whatever they were called, but that wasn’t a skill I possessed. They were just a bunch of squished up grapes.
“Exactly. You’re really good at this, Julie.” He placed his hand on mine again and lifted the glass back to my lips. Heart in throat, I gulped. “Okay. Go ahead and try it now.”
Angling the cup to pour a small sip into my mouth, I held it there on my tongue, trying hard to think of more ways I could impress Leo with my newfound wine sommelier talents. It tasted good, kind of smoky and berry-ish, but I’d already used those two descriptors. I racked my brain, but for the life of me couldn’t come up with anything else.
“Any thoughts?”
I paused, then blurted, “It sort of makes me crave a liver and some fava beans.”
Great Caesar’s ghost, someone shut me up. I downed the rest of the entire glass in one enormous gulp like I’d been in a desert for forty days and someone just handed me a bottle of fresh spring water. Maybe all that liquid pouring down my throat would keep the words from making their way out. There couldn’t be room for both, right?
So now Leo probably thought I was a cannibal.
“Whoa there, tiger.” He pulled the now empty cup from my grasp and settled it onto the counter with a clink. “I think we should get something in your stomach before you go to town on the wine like that.”
“Oh no,” Ian piped up. Of course. He was still here. Thank you for the reminder. “This could be really fun. Alcohol convinces Julie she’s an incredible dancer. I say you guys do another tasting.”
Annoyed that suddenly Leo and Ian’s friendship turned into a Let’s-get-Julie-so-drunk-to-the-point-of-dancing type of partnership, I ripped off the blindfold with angry fingers and tossed it to the counter. I don’t know how it could have hit me so fast, but the room sort of spun around when I did that, and I was pretty certain Leo’s Villa wasn’t placed on a fault line. I gripped onto the counter until everything wobbled back into place and the earthquake in my brain ceased rattling. Then I teetered slightly. Whoopsie. Must’ve been a little aftershock.
Leo filled the remaining two empty glasses and slid one toward Ian, the other one kept within his own grip. The way he propped one hand on the counter, his hip leaning slightly into it, and the other hand holding a glass of wine that he had actually made was all kinds of irresistible. And he still wasn’t wearing a shirt. Ian needed to race to his room to retrieve his camera and start snapping away because this image would be enough to fill that entire portfolio of his and then some.
“You want another glass, Julie?”
“Fill ‘er up!” I slammed my cup onto the marble with gusto, and the round base of it snapped completely off and went skittering across the counter like a Frisbee about to land. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” With my luck, these glasses were probably some ancient family heirloom and I’d just broken the wedding gift of Antonio Carducci the Second and his bride Princess Fiona of Macedonia.
“No worries.” And it probably didn’t worry him because Leo reached into a cupboard and I could easily see that they had at least forty more glasses exactly like the one I’d just destroyed. That made me feel a little better.
Until he pulled out a pink plastic Sippy cup. That didn’t make me feel good at all.
“We should be safe with this one,” he chuckled, his head still facing into the cabinets as he placed it onto the counter next to him.
It took a lot to embarrass me. When you did something so often, it became second nature, to the point where you couldn’t feel the sting of it anymore. Kind of like ramming your head into a wall until you lost consciousness—that sort of thing. Lately, I wasn’t even conscious of the stupid things I said or did.
But this cup sitting in front of me screamed of my blatant lack of grace, neon lights flashing on a billboard. Evidently I had just as much coordination as a toddler. Quite sad.
As I struggled to reconcile the fact that Leo was not the 100% perfect gentleman I’d thought he was—more like 98%, which was still pretty darn close to an A+—he pulled out about five more children’s cups before turning around to scoot a clear, plastic wine glass my direction. After that, he returned all of the other cups to their original home within the cupboard and regained that 2% of perfection like he’d just earned extra credit.
“I think that will work, don’t you?”
Relieved, and even thankful that he’d take the time to find a cup I could actually drink out of without the worry of breaking, I took the glass and the bottle and poured myself another generous tasting of the Chianti. It really was good as far as wine was concerned, and I figured having a little of it pumping through my veins might even help in the artistic process. Not too much because I wasn’t one for the abstract. But if anything,
it would make me all the more credible when I finally submitted my masterpiece, having tasted the actual product.
Lifting my glass into the air, I practically cheered with all the enthusiasm I could muster, “To Renaldo Carducci!”
“To Renaldo,” Leo and Ian rang out in a baritone chorus, our glasses clinking (mine more thumping) together as we stretched our arms over the island in a toast of raised hands and voices.
“To Modern Matters and the article and photographs that will make Leo even more famous!” Ian added, and we clinked/thumped once more.
“To affirming the fact that I’m not a lesbian!” I shouted raucously, wobbling a bit on my stool. Okay, the wine had definitely taken over both my balance and my words. “To Chianti and liver and fava beans!” And here’s to shutting the hell up, Julie! That little inner pep-talk didn’t work, because I proceeded to add, “To jetlag and sweatpants with elastic and God only knows how many calories are in this amazingly tasty wine!”
Ian curled his hand around my shoulder and lifted his glass to join in another toast. The tangy bite of alcohol fell from his breath. “To Julie and the hopes that she doesn’t have a massive hangover tomorrow.”
“To strong coffee and aspirin.” I hoped Leo actually had those two things that he’d just toasted to on hand because I would definitely need both come sunrise.
“Here’s to running for purpose and not for sport!” Where I was pulling all of this from, I wasn’t sure, but we all drank after every toast like maybe cheering for these things wasn’t completely moronic. That or Ian and Leo were just really nice guys.
I didn’t think Leo was drunk at all, but he appeared to be having a great time with this and I could even see the collection of tears developing at the corner of his eyes as his body shook with laughter. Oh my word, I was literally making him weep with joy! That was so special.
He cleared his throat, saying, “To life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!”
“Hey there, Italian,” I demanded as I crashed my glass to the counter, thankful for the durable plastic this time. “You can’t steal that from us. Get your own Declaration of Independence, foreigner.”
“Oooh, someone’s getting feisty!” Ian shouted, draining his glass with a swift flick of his head angled skyward. He shook off the burn like he’d just downed a shot of bitter tequila. “Here’s to the Italians and their fantastic forms of alcohol!”
Oh yes. That was a good one. I nodded with vigor, and said, “Here’s to toasting!” My eyes nearly popped from my head when I realized how I could get even more creative with this. “And to actual toast!”
“The French kind slathered with maple syrup,” Ian tacked on, licking his lips in appreciation. We didn’t even bother setting down our glasses and my arm was actually starting to ache a little from keeping it held in the air for such a long duration of time.
“To all things French!” This was getting good. I was pretty much on a roll right now and couldn’t be stopped even if I tried. “Especially kissing!”
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt it, but I think Leo slammed his glass even harder into mine in agreement with that one, much more than all of the previous toasts combined.
Ian’s spine straightened to full length as he poured another glass into his own cup and drained the remaining portion into Leo’s as well. He lifted it back up and continued, “Here’s to being single, seeing double, and sleeping triple.”
“Umm...” I shook my head at him and it took a second for my eyes to catch up. They’d grown incredibly sluggish, as did my speech. Did I always have a lisp? “Correction. Here’s to not being single.”
“Fine,” Ian shrugged, surrendering to that truth. “Then here’s to my favorite toast of all. Since we’ve covered the Italians and French, let’s move on to the Americans. Or maybe this isn’t an American saying, but whatever. It’s universally a good one.” Thrusting his cup into the air with so much force the contents sloshed up and over the sides, trickling down his arm in a red rivulet of liquid, Ian crooned, “To the roses and the lilies in bloom, you in my arms and I in your room. A door that is locked, a key that is lost. A bird, and a bottle, and a bed badly tossed. And a night that is fifty years long.”
Leo raised his arm up higher, his eyes locked with mine. With the hand that didn’t hold his glass, his reached into the space between us, his fingers grazing my cheek, curling around my ear and tucking a lock of fallen hair back into place. He didn’t pull his hand back, but kept it right there against my jaw and his index finger slowly dragged down the slope of it. And with a connected gaze burrowing deep into me, he repeated in a whispered voice that almost had the quality of a song, “To a night that is fifty years long.”
I stared directly at him, searching out the meaning and intent behind his words. But my heart and brain filled with more emotion than I would even be able to handle had I been sober. The fuzz of alcohol just smeared all of that together, my thoughts and feelings blurring into this watercolor where everything in me bled into everything else. I was mush.
Leo had admitted so much with his disguised declaration, and I didn’t know what to do other than lift my glass as high as it could go.
Because whatever it was he was trying to tell me, it was something I could whole-heartedly drink to.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Well, after all of that toasting, I was definitely toasted. Which, one would think, might actually help with the whole jet lag issue because I should feel that drowsiness which typically accompanied being drunk. Just the opposite.
I was buzzed. Like everything from my brain to my heart to my fingertips twitched with energy pumping through me. In fact, I was pretty sure I could conduct my own electricity right now based on that charged sensation alone.
Back in my room, I decided to test out that drunken theory, so I scraped my socks along the dense reeds of carpet, shuffling toward Renaldo just to see if he and I had that same literal spark I shared with his grandson. Stretching out a crooked E.T.-like finger, I was just about make contact with the statue’s carved shoulder when my last little static shuffle ended in me completely bailing and slamming my cheek into the side of his solid, cold face.
Though Renaldo was securely fastened to a three-foot marble column, the impact was enough that even the base wobbled from the force. I was desperate not to break the Carducci family heirloom to smithereens, so I wrapped my arms tightly around the column, hugging the statue to my chest, our cheeks still squished together.
That was a close one. And now that we were actually this close, I realized that Renaldo was not creepy at all. In fact, he was quite lovely. My face was still pressed to his, and I closed my eyes and loosened my death grip on him just a touch. Relaxed my shoulders. Slowed my breath.
Aw, this was nice.
You’re not a scary, sparkly man, Renaldo. You’re very solid. In fact, your shoulders feel a lot like Leo’s, all broad and squared. And your jaw is remarkably chiseled like his. Wow. It even feels like his, minus the five-o’clock stubble. Would you look at that?
It’s a shame you only have shoulders and a head. That’s gotta be sad, to think that only your upper half deserved to be immortalized. I’m sure you had a nice lower half, too, Renaldo. Leo has a nice lower half. Leo has a nice ass. I bet you had a nice ass.
Why didn’t they ever make statues just of people’s backsides? I mean, some people had hideous faces, but the junk in their trunk made up for it. That deserved to be documented. There should be more asses in art. Leo’s ass should be in art. Like life size, so you could truly appreciate its perfection.
Sorry, yours should be made into art too, Renaldo.
I flipped to face him, squatting down slightly to his level. Still pressing my cheek to his, I reached around and grabbed onto the base of the statue where, had he owned an ass, it would have resided.
Right there. See, would it have been so hard to give you a booty? Why was it that David got not just an entire body, but a seventeen-foot one at that? And poor
Renaldo, you can’t be taller than what? Two feet, tops? And now I was going to shrink you down to a one-inch sketch on wine label. I’m sorry, Renaldo, but that’s just not fair.
“Oh my God! Are you feeling up my grandpa?”
“What! NO!” I threw my hands into the air like someone just pulled a gun on me. How did Leo get in here? And how long had he been standing there? And why was I still groping the statue? “No!”
“What are you doing, Julie?” Leo was horrified. Rightfully so, I supposed. “How drunk are you?”
“Drunk enough to feel the need to conduct science experiments at 4:30 in the morning.” My mouth felt really gross, like cotton coated the walls within it. I didn’t like cotton balls. The texture of them always gave me the shivers. Leo gave me the shivers. Renaldo kinda did too. I liked those shivers.
“What sort of experiment involves you fondling a Carduccian statue?”
Ha! Carduccian. That was a fun word. It made me want to -ian my own last name. Thorntonian. No, that was just lame. Julian. Oh, so much better. Like the fries, right? Weren’t there fries called Julian fries? Damn. No, that was Julienne.
Wait! What about that little furry creature from Madagascar? You know, the ferret thingy that always danced around, singing, “I like to move it, move it!” King Julien. Hmm, that was still a different spelling. Oh! He wasn’t a ferret, he was a meerkat!
Meerkats were funny. Were they merely cats? Or were they something else altogether? And why did they jump off cliffs?
“What’s with all of the suicidal merely cats?” I yelled, my hands still in the air, but not as high as they used to be. In fact, every appendage on my body felt as though weights had been tied around them. How many calories did that wine have?
Did calories actually weigh anything? If I drank like a thousand calories, did that equate to a thousand pounds? Goodness no! That couldn’t be right. I’d be a hippo. I didn’t want to be a hippo. But maybe then I could actually hang out with the merely cats in person (or in animal, since I wouldn’t be a human anymore) and we could all jump off those cliffs together.
Draw Me In Page 14