Alessandro’s voice saying those words taps into that well of despair I’ve hidden away for so long. His just being here after all this time brings it closer to the surface.
“I’m fine,” I snip.
He tilts his head and looks at me for a long, uncomfortable second. “Of course.” It’s clear from his tone that he knows I’m lying, but he doesn’t press me on it. He pushes his plate away and nods at the last three slices of pizza. “Have you had enough?”
“I’m stuffed.”
He waves down he waiter for the check. Once he’s paid, he stands and slides my coat off the back of my chair, holding it open for me.
I grab it out of his hands. “I’m not three. I can put on my own jacket,” I say, shoving my arms through the sleeves.
He tips his head at me and shrugs on his black wool jacket, then escorts me out of the restaurant with a hand on the small of my back. I hate that the feel of his hand there makes me ache inside.
It’s a crisp, clear late October day, right on the edge of winter but not cold enough for snow yet. Dry leaves cling to the trees in the park across the street and the light breeze prods them loose a few at a time. I bundle my jacket around me and watch them flutter to the ground as we walk in silence toward the subway. Alessandro doesn’t break stride when I don’t turn for the stairs, and he never asks what we’re doing as we walk home slowly past the park. It’s a fifteen-minute subway ride . . . or a half hour walk back to my apartment. Picking my way through the street artists, hot-dog vendors, and tourists clogging the sidewalks keeps me from having to look at Alessandro, but for some reason, I’m not quite ready to be rid of him yet.
“I’ve been wanting to go to the Met again,” he finally says as we pass the Museum of Natural History. There’s scaffolding over the massive stone front of the building, but the ugliness of it doesn’t stop the tourists from snapping shots like paparazzi gone rabid.
“The museum?” I glance up and see him looking toward the park. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a straight shot across the park from here—a twenty-minute walk from my apartment—and I’ve never been there.
He nods, turning his gaze back to the sidewalk unfolding in front of us. “Have you been?”
“No.” I’ve lived in the city all my life and I’ve never been most places.
His gaze flicks to me. “Are you free later this week? Or maybe next?”
“Um . . . maybe. I’m usually off Thursdays.”
“Would you be interested in going?”
“To the Met?”
He nods and a smile twitches his lips. “To the Met.”
“Is it expensive?”
He looks up from the sidewalk again. “My treat. And lunch too, if you can handle my company for that long.”
I scrunch my face at him. “How long will it take?”
“The museums are vast. We could spend as much or as little time there as you like.”
My face scrunches more. “Vast . . . I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
He laughs and the sound takes me off guard as the memory of the last time I heard him laugh slams into me. We weren’t too far from here, in the middle of Central Park, near Bethesda Fountain, surrounded by butterflies.
“I promise not to bore you. We’ll hit the highlights,” he says, pulling me back to the here and now.
“How long will the highlights take?” I ask warily.
He looks at me and I’d swear he’s smirking a little. “Leave your afternoon open.”
We turn away from the park up Eighty-second Street toward my apartment.
“This is a nice neighborhood,” Alessandro says. Considering he’s hardly once looked up from the sidewalk, I’m not sure how he’d know.
I shrug even though he’s not looking. “My boyfriend can afford it. His family has money. It’s really his place.”
His pace stalls for a beat. “Boyfriend. You’re with someone.” It’s not a question, and there’s something in his tone that I can’t read.
“Brett. He’s an actor.”
He looks at me, his gaze suddenly intense, as if he’s about to recite the cure for cancer or something. “Does he make you happy?”
Again, he takes me off guard. Am I happy? I’m not unhappy. I kick a pebble in my path and it skitters onto the road, scaring a well-fed pigeon that’s pecking at something in the gutter. “Happy is all relative.”
“You deserve to be happy.” His voice is lower now, as if he said it more to himself than me. He looks up at Trinity Church, across the street, and something mournful passes over his face. He was going to be a priest and he gave it up for the love of a girl who doesn’t love him back. I wonder if that look is for her, or for what he gave up because of her.
We reach my door and I turn to him. “So, did we decide about the Met?”
He nods. “Thursday. Meet me there, at the main entrance? Noon?”
I should say no.
I should.
“Okay.” I unlock the door and slip through to find the elevator waiting. I push four and wave through the glass as the doors close.
And wonder what the hell I’m doing.
Chapter Seven
“SO, WHAT KIND of art do you like the best?” Alessandro asks over our salads.
Instead of going to the museum cafeteria, he insisted on this swanky café, complete with a smug maître d’ and hoity-toity waiters. I feel like I’m being judged.
“Is that a trick question?” I ask, stabbing a cherry tomato, which burps a slimy pile of tiny seeds onto the white tablecloth.
His fork stops halfway to his mouth. “You don’t like art at all, do you?”
I shrug. “Not really.”
“I shouldn’t have twisted your arm into coming here.” He keeps his voice neutral, but he can’t hide the disappointment in his eyes, and it makes me wonder about the other girl. The one he loved. Was she into art? Did they curl up in bed on rainy afternoons and have long conversations about things that I don’t even have names for? All I know about art is what I learned watching The Da Vinci Code.
The truth is, if anyone else had asked me to come here, I would have said no. But something deep inside me wanted a reason to see Alessandro again. Curiosity maybe? Part of me wants to hate him, but the truth is, even after everything, I’ve never been able to find hate anywhere in me for either Alessandro or his brother. Anger? Yes. I’ve been seriously pissed off for eight years and my anger has fueled me, made me stronger. But I never hated them. “What kind of art do you like?”
“Impressionism has never been my favorite, but I can appreciate almost anything.” His sharp edges have softened a little since we walked through the doors of the museum, like being here has somehow lifted the weight of the world off his shoulders.
“I remember you always doodling,” I say, tossing my salad with my fork to mix in the ranch dressing. I hate it when it’s all in a glob. “Do you still draw?” I glance up at him when he doesn’t answer right away.
“No. Not for a long time.” His gaze locks with mine and it’s like he’s trying to see into my thoughts. He never missed much, even as a kid, but I didn’t have nearly as much to hide then. I lower my eyes, afraid he’ll see too much.
I have a flash of an image . . . Alessandro in his usual corner of the rec room with his sketch pad, so quiet, watching as Lorenzo and Eric wrestled on the floor. His eyes kept flicking to me, where I sat on the saggy couch, painting my toenails.
That was the day after Lorenzo and I slept together. I didn’t want anyone looking at me, especially Alessandro, who always seemed to see everything, so I turned sideways on the couch with my back to him.
Lorenzo usually ignored me, but Alessandro always sat next to me at dinner. After the first time, when he told me I had a good voice, he never said anything and neither did I, but it wasn’t weird. He put the sketch pad on the table between us that night and I looked at it. The sketch was of a girl in a baggy T-shirt and rolled up jeans, with her frizzy black hair falling in he
r face. She was perched on the edge of a sagging couch painting her toenails. You could just make out the lines of her face in the shadows of her hair, and there was a tear coursing a crooked path down her cheek.
I hated that he paid enough attention to see that.
The waiter shows up with our food and clears our salads. When Alessandro assures him we don’t need anything else, he leaves.
“There are some things I missed last time I was here,” he says, lowering his eyes to his plate and cutting a wedge off his quiche with the side of his fork. “We could start in the nineteenth-century European section?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say as he chews, ’cause it’s all Greek to me. “You’re going to tell me what’s what, right? Because I’m pretty clueless about this stuff.”
He holds up a finger, and after he swallows, he says, “I’ll tell you as much as I know, but everything’s pretty well labeled.”
“If you say so.” I’m nervous. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to seem like a total idiot in front of him.
“So, tell me about your sister,” he says and my stomach lurches.
“What about her?”
There’s an edge to my voice, and hearing it, his gaze lifts from his plate and questions me.
“She’s great,” I say, preempting his next question, which would be some version of “What’s wrong?” “She’s married to a great guy and they have two great kids and they’re great.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Boys.”
“And you’re their favorite aunt, I’m sure,” he says with half an amused smile.
Despite the knot in my stomach, I can’t help smiling back. “Something like that.”
“Do you enjoy children?”
“What do you mean?”
He lowers his fork to his plate. “I mean, are you a kid person? Do you want children of your own?”
“Hell, no!” I say, but then amend, “I mean, Henri and Max are fun, and I like hanging out with them, but I don’t want any of my own.”
He tips his head at me. “Why not?”
I shrug. “Some people just aren’t cut out to be parents, you know?”
He nods. “I struggle with that. I’m not convinced I’d make a good father, but I can’t deny the part of me that desperately wants a family—children of my own. Lots of them.”
I look down at my plate and twirl my pasta. “You need to find someone who feels the same way for that.”
“This is true.” He picks up his fork and his eyes study my face as he takes another bite. “Were you were happy living with your sister and her family?”
I relax a little. “Yeah. I was really happy there.”
“How long did you live with them?”
“I moved out about three years ago, when I was nineteen.”
“Did you go to college?”
What is this, twenty questions? “No,” I say a little defensively.
His gaze finds mine again. “Why not?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want to go right out of high school. I took a couple of community-college classes to keep Mallory off my back, but I really just wanted to act. And then American Idol happened and I started getting auditions and moved into the city and . . . I just never wanted to go.”
He holds my gaze. “No judgment, Hilary. I’m just curious.”
I look down as I twirl my pasta on my fork.
When we’re done and Alessandro pays, he leads me up to the second floor. There’s a long gallery with paintings on the walls and statues on pedestals. At each one, we stop and read the plaque that tells us what it is. Occasionally, he tells me things that aren’t on the plaque—like how the artist died, or who he trained with. He seems even more relaxed here than he did over lunch, and I realize, what walking in the rain does for me, art does for him.
About halfway down, we come to a painting that looks different from the others. It’s of a woman in a gold-yellow dress with black curly hair, sitting there staring off the canvas at us. She’s pretty in a sort of unique way and she looks like she wouldn’t take crap from anyone.
“Henri Regnault’s Salomé,” Alessandro says. “It’s one of the signature pieces of the Romantic movement.”
“I like it. She looks like she has her shit together.” My eyes flick to the plaque next to the painting and I run a finger under the artist’s name. “Henri . . . It’s spelled the same as my nephew. They named him after Jeff’s dad.”
“It’s the traditional French spelling, pronounced ehn-reh.”
“That sounded very French.”
“Oui, mademoiselle,” he says with a smile.
“That sounded very French too.”
“I lived in France after I left here,” he says, and that’s when I realize I don’t even know where Corsica is.
“So you speak French?”
“I do.”
“But I remember you had an accent before.” And, wow. I only just remembered that as I said it. But he did, just a little. It was the way certain words rolled off his tongue.
“I may have,” he says with a little bit of a cringe, like it embarrasses him. “Italian was my first language. My father was in the military and we lived in Italy until I was six. He spoke Italian to us in the home even after we came back to New York.”
“So you speak French and Italian. What else?”
He smiles. “English.”
I roll my eyes at him. “I mean what else?”
His smile turns to more of a smirk and he lifts his eyebrows at me. “That’s not enough?”
I shrug. “I guess. Say something in Italian.”
“Come sei bella,” he says, his smile softening.
“What did you say?”
“You are beautiful.”
I just stare at him for way too long before turning back to Salomé. “Why did you stop drawing?”
I hear him blow out a sigh, but I don’t turn away from the painting. “Things changed. I just didn’t feel . . . inspired. I lost my love of it, I suppose.”
“That’s too bad. You were good.” He saw things that others missed. He saw everything. And then he managed to put it on paper in a way that made it more real than it had been in the moment. Or, at least it felt that way.
The memory that flashes in my head makes me smile.
“What?” Alessandro asks, giving me a curious look.
“Do you remember that day in the park? It was right before you . . .” left, but I can’t make myself say it. “You were drawing me and I grabbed your sketch pad and ran away, and I ran into that totally lame mime guy near the fountain, who kept doing—”
“—trapped in a box,” he finishes for me with a smile and a small shake of his head.
“Yeah. And he got pissed and started cussing me out and then all those little orange-and-black butterflies came, and like, swarmed us.”
“We never did figure out what kind of butterflies those were,” he muses with distant eyes, still smiling.
“It was pretty cool, though. I’d never seen more than one or two butterflies in the park before that.” I remember Alessandro pulling me against him and laughing as they fluttered all around us. And I remember feeling free in a way I never had before, like I was one of them, fluttering above the ground, light as air. I could go anywhere. Be anything. The feeling made me dizzy. Alessandro made me dizzy. I think that’s the second I knew I loved him, because in anybody else’s arms, I felt trapped, but in his, I felt free.
We spend the next two hours in the European painting galleries, looking at super old paintings that seem to be mostly Italian and French, and Alessandro answers all my questions. He gets pretty excited when I ask something, his hands working as he answers, so without even meaning to, I find myself asking a lot. I love watching those hands. But it’s more than that. It’s like his enthusiasm is contagious, because I’m surprisingly non-bored.
We find ourselves in the main stairwell at the end of the rambling galleries and he looks at me a long mom
ent. “You’ve had enough, haven’t you?”
I glance back over my shoulder. “That was actually pretty cool.”
He smiles softly and guides me to the staircase with a hand on my back. “I can see this really isn’t your thing. What do you like to do?”
I shrug as we start slowly down the stairs. “I don’t know. Nothing, really.”
He flashes me a glance. “You must have a favorite place in the city . . . somewhere that’s special to you.”
I shrug again. “I kind of like Central Park . . . and I went to Coney Island once when I was a kid.” Mallory’s dad took pity on me once and brought me with them.
“Coney Island,” he repeats. “What about the Statue of Liberty, or the Empire State Building?”
“Never been,” I answer.
“The Museum of Natural History?” he says with a wave toward the park as we reach the ground floor.
“Nope?”
He stops walking and just stares at me. “We need to fix this.”
“I’m not broken.”
His mouth presses into a line. “I didn’t say you, I said this. You’re off on Thursdays?”
“Usually.”
“So, Thursday will be our day to discover the city.”
“I’m pretty sure the city’s already been discovered by the, you know, eight million people who live here.”
“So, here’s the challenge. Every Thursday we’ll find someplace that most of them don’t know about.”
I lift my eyebrows at him. “The undiscovered New York City?”
He nods. “The gems that no one else sees.” He turns and starts walking toward the main doors. “And it’s your turn.”
“I don’t think this counts as undiscovered,” I say, gesturing at the hundreds of people milling around the exhibits.
We shrug on our jackets and I pull my gloves from my pocket as he holds open the door for me. Cold air slaps me in the face as I brush past him on my way out. And mmm . . . he smells like that tangy, spicy cologne that I remember from Club 69.
“Maybe not, but it’s still your turn,” he says in my ear as I pass. His accent is so faint, but it’s there, making his voice purr.
He catches up and we start across the park.
A Little Too Much Page 7