Prosecco Heart

by Julie Strauss

He leaned against a small white Renault. He watched her with a curious expression.

  She dropped the handle of her suitcase and walked into his arms, pressing her body against his and letting the car hold him up. His lips, at once so foreign and so familiar, pressed against hers with a hunger that matched her own, and he wrapped his arms around her, twisting his fingers into her hair and holding her close.

  “Why are you here?” she said into his ear, not willing to let go of him, burying her face into his neck and inhaling the warm scent of his hair.

  “I would not leave you alone. Any Italian man might steal you away. I knew I would have to find you before anyone else got to you.”

  She laughed and pulled back to look at him. “But how did you know to come here?”

  He stared down into her eyes as if he were learning the planes of her face all over again. “Do you not remember? You texted the plane ticket and then nothing more. You did not reply to my other questions, so I decided to come and bring you home. Is there someone else you would prefer to see?”

  Tabitha laughed and kissed him again, a long, slow kiss that she hadn’t even realized she’d dreamt about for so long. “You are who I prefer to see.”

  24

  Tabitha woke in the predawn light and looked around the room. She was in a twin bed in a bare room with stucco walls the color of butter. She stretched her hands over her head and pulled the sheets around herself. She wondered what time it was. There was no clock in the spare room. Her suitcase was on the floor at the foot of the bed, and she could see her cell phone on top of it, but she didn’t reach for it. Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor, next to a white towel. Giovanni had brought her here last night, and the haze of her international travels and the lingering hangover from her sleeping pill and the gallons of beer had hit her with a wallop. She’d showered and collapsed into this bed, falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Her senses were on high alert, her skin against the linen sheets, everything around her sharp and in high relief, as if she’d come out of a deep fog. The window near her bed was cracked open, and she could feel the dewy air coming from outside, perfuming her room with the rich scent of rosemary and an undercurrent of vanilla and black soil. A unique, sweet, and savory memory that told her immediately that she was in the Italian mountains.

  She wondered where Giovanni was now, where he slept, if his daughters were here, where they slept. She hadn’t seen much of the house when they arrived; she’d stumbled to the shower and into the bed. Giovanni, to his credit, hadn’t pushed her for details on the drive here. It was a hazy blur to her.

  She rolled over and pulled the bedsheets around her. He’d been in here at some point during the night, she remembered. He tiptoed in and stood over her, turned off the light next to her bed, and kissed her forehead. She looked over at the night table and saw a large glass of water. She sat up now and gulped it down gratefully. Surely this was her imagination, but it tasted like the best water she’d ever had in her life. Oranges and basil and clear mountain air. She guzzled it, rivulets of the cool water dripping down her chin and onto her bare chest.

  She finished the glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, opening her eyes wide when she saw a person standing at her door. It was Giovanni, wearing boxer shorts and an untied robe. He pushed the door shut behind him and looked at her.

  Tabitha glanced down. She was naked, cross-legged, the dawn light surrounding her on the bed. She pulled the sheet up over her body and put her hand to her head to smooth down her hair. Giovanni moved to the bed and pulled her hand down.

  “Do not touch it.”

  “I’m a mess.”

  He only stared at her. She let the sheet drop and met his stare.

  “Tabitha,” he breathed, and his lips went to her neck, where his tongue chased the droplets of water down over her breasts. He lifted his head to meet her lips in a deep kiss, and put his hands on her waist, pulling her down on her pillow. He moved down her body, his soft lips heating every inch of skin they touched. His hands moved slowly around her, cupping her backside and pulling her from behind so her center would meet his mouth. She gasped in pleasure, and he glanced up and put one finger over her mouth. This house wasn’t big; she would have to be quieter. She put her hand over his and took his fingers in her mouth, matching the rhythm of her tongue to the soft, slow strokes of his. She gripped his hair as she climaxed, arching her back in pleasure. He pressed his hand harder to her lips to quiet her gasps, until, spent, she collapsed on the bed, giggling into a pillow. He grinned up at her and dragged his tongue up her body, between her breasts, to whisper in her ear.

  “Buongiorno, bella mia.”

  His girls spoke nearly perfect English, which hardly surprised Tabitha. She walked them to school with Giovanni, and they peppered her with questions.

  “Have you met Chris Pratt?” Alessia asked.

  “No. Is that a YouTube star?”

  The girls turned to each other and laughed, and Tabitha winked at Giovanni.

  “No. He is an actor.”

  “Oh. No, I have not met him. Do you eat pasta every day?”

  “No. Have you been to Las Vegas?”

  “Yes. It’s foul. Have you been to Milan?”

  “Our mother works there. We don’t like it. Do you own a convertible?”

  “No. But I once crashed my car into Kevin Bacon’s. Sort of the same thing.”

  “Is he in the Avengers?”

  “No. But he’s a movie star.”

  The girls looked at each other in what Tabitha hoped was amusement and not derision.

  “Do you live near Hollywood?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you live near a beach?”

  “I live near the ocean. It’s rocky and not too beachy. But it’s an easy drive to the beach.”

  “Can you surf?”

  “No. One time I tried and a pod of dolphins swam by me, and I got distracted and fell off the surfboard.”

  Their eyes widened.

  “You were surfing? In the waves? And the dolphins surrounded you?” Nicoletta made a cresting motion over her head, simulating a giant wave.

  “No. I never stood up, and they were very tiny waves. Beginner waves. Had it been up to my—to the person I was with, we would have started on massive waves, the kind you see in movies. But I’m not good at those things. Balancing, I mean. So I convinced him to start on small waves. Anyway, I was paddling out to the waves, and I saw the dolphins, and I fell off the surfboard.”

  “And then you surfed?”

  “And then I tried to follow the dolphins, and the person I was with got angry at me. Because he only wanted to surf. But I never cared about surfing; I just wanted to see the dolphins. There were baby dolphins with them, and they kept jumping out of the water like they were playing. I didn’t know dolphins played like that. They were so excited that they couldn’t contain themselves. I swear, I saw the mother dolphins giving the babies the stink eye. You know?” She gave the girls a mock dirty look, and they laughed. “But the babies kept jumping out of the water anyway. And I kept thinking how cool it would be if one of them jumped right over my head. I didn’t want to bother it or anything, but I just wanted it to go over me. I could imagine the spray of water as it leaped over me. So I kept following along trying to catch up to them. But I never did.”

  The girls stared as she talked.

  “That sounds wonderful,” Giovanni finally commented.

  “You know what? It was. And the person I was with was so angry with me. I didn’t learn to surf, which he said was the whole point. But it was one of my best days ever, so I didn’t understand what made him so mad.”

  “We saw dolphins from the boat once when we went to Turkey,” Nicoletta said. “But I’ve never been close to one.”

  “Nicoletta is going to be a marine biologist,” Alessia announced, looking at her sister with pride. “The best one in the world. She will stop the countries from polluting the oceans.”

>   “That’s amazing,” Tabitha said. “What about you?”

  Alessia didn’t lower her gaze. “I don’t know.”

  Tabitha smiled at her and nodded. She had a feeling this child very much did know what she wanted.

  The girls walked ahead of them, lapsing into Italian. Tabitha and Giovanni stayed behind, watching them move in unison. They did not touch, careful to remain casual in the presence of the girls, to be, as he told them at breakfast, colleghi. Colleagues. But he smiled at her now, a mixture of affection and pride. When their hands brushed against each other, she let her pinky finger catch his thumb just briefly. But then she jerked it away. She did not mind being his colleghi with benefits. She was here on a break, nothing more. There was no point in getting attached.

  25

  “You own all of this?” They stood on the crest of a hill, holding their hands over their eyes to gaze across the rolling vineyards in the dappled sunlight in front of them.

  “My family does. That is my brother’s home.” He pointed to a small farmhouse about a half-mile away. “He runs our vineyard with his wife and four sons.”

  “And your uncle Francesco runs the family enoteca,” Tabitha said, and shook her head in embarrassment. “I believe I owe him an apology. I was not very nice last time we met.”

  Giovanni waved her concern away. “People come to Italy to forget their pain. Francesco understands this.”

  “Did you ever think of doing anything else?”

  “Why would I?”

  She laughed at his sturdy determination.

  They walked along the ridge to a stand of cypress trees. “Is there any room to expand?” she asked. “If your winery grows, can you buy more vineyards?”

  A stone banister ran through the land in front of them, and Giovanni leaned against it now, gazing out over the hills.

  “It is enough. What we have is enough.”

  “But do you ever want to do more?”

  Tabitha watched his face as he stared out over his land. The light wind had died down, and he breathed deeply, as if taking stock of the land through all of his senses. The sun glinted off his olive skin, and Tabitha could see just the beginnings of stubble forming along the ridge of his neck. He wore a blazer over his linen shirt today, and his muscles pulled against the fabric. “I want to do different things. Sometimes we plant vines from other vineyards so we can make something new.” Giovanni pulled her to him, standing behind her, his body against hers. She leaned her head back so that it rested on his broad chest, and when he started speaking again, she could feel his mouth move against her temple.

  “I do not want it bigger. That world, that need to take over everything, it is not for me.” He lifted his arm from her waist and pointed across the valley. “That is my cousin Elena’s vineyard. She also supplies us with grapes, and grows the best Pinot Bianco in all of Valdobbiadene.” He shifted his arm to the right, pointing to another field. “I grew up with their son; we attended the same school. The son now lives in Sicily but comes home every harvest season. His father helps me with all the bottling. Over there.” He pointed to the right, and Tabitha leaned her head so it rested against his bicep. “That farm is run by the first girl I kissed. Portia Santoro. She has two children, and they make taleggio cheese, which we serve at our winery.”

  He dropped his arm back around her waist, and Tabitha closed her eyes and enjoyed the warm sun on her body, the cool breeze moving the folds of her skirt gently around her legs.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she murmured.

  “When people ask me why I do not make more wine, make it bigger, sell in every store, I have to tell them that I already have what I want.”

  “You have everything.”

  He hesitated a moment, then bent down to gently kiss her neck. “Not everything,” he whispered.

  Tabitha closed her eyes and thought about the wine she would make to capture this moment. Scented with piney breezes and loamy earth and warm vanilla sunshine. Pulsing with possibility and an undercurrent of lust and electricity. A warm, soothing afterglow of something that felt suspiciously like love.

  She turned to meet his mouth, to wrap her arms around him, to bring him closer to her.

  “Don’t you want to frame these?”

  The SommFest medals hung from a hook behind his office door. Giovanni glanced up from his work and seemed surprised to see the gold in her hands. He shrugged and went back to his work. “Someday, maybe.”

  Tabitha had quickly fallen into a routine with Giovanni’s family. They took the girls to school and then she went to work with him, walking the fields, talking to farmers, tasting grapes. He introduced her to his staff, asked her opinion about new blends. She began to understand his method, as she watched him work, saw his focus on a pure expression of his corner of Italy. He moved slowly at work, thought through each decision, always put the taste of the wine first. Tabitha studied him, watched the way his eyebrows knitted as he thought out a decision, the way he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply every time he tasted a wine. It was a thoughtful, slow approach to work that she had never seen before.

  In the late afternoon, they returned to his house to make dinner with the girls. He claimed to have never brought a woman home before, for the sake of his daughters. When they were around, Tabitha and Giovanni were careful to maintain some physical distance, at least initially. She still slept in the spare bedroom, at least as far as his daughters could see. If her hand grazed his or he kissed her chastely on the cheek, she would occasionally see the girls glance at each other. But they didn’t seem disturbed by it. It was almost as if they were seeing their father differently, or as if they hadn’t realized he had this kind of affection in him and they were startled, but not wholly upset, by it.

  The evenings grew cool, and on most nights, Giovanni started a fire in the wood-burning stove in the center of the living room. The girls had spent dinner complaining about an exam they’d taken at school, and how much homework they had to complete. Now they all collapsed around the crackling fire, letting the quiet night overtake them. The sun set and no one seemed to have the energy to stand up and turn on any house light, so they let the room darken around them, let the auburn light bounce off their faces and dance around the room. Tabitha sat next to Giovanni on the couch, sipping a red wine he’d poured for them. Her head rested on the cushion behind her, and she had a sharp image of the night just over a week ago, when she thought her ribs might crack from the sadness in the back of Mark and Liz’s car. At the time, her loneliness overwhelmed her.

  Giovanni had stretched out his legs and intertwined his ankle with hers on the coffee table in front of the couch. Tabitha looked at the way their legs matched, the way her ankle had locked in with his, and she had not even noticed that he did it. Positive and negative ions, searching each other out.

  She took the last sip of her wine, and Giovanni took the empty glass from her and set it on the side table next to him. The heat of the fireplace enveloped her with a drowsy stillness, and she let her head drift to his shoulder. His arm went around her, and he pulled her in closer. They watched the girls, lying on their stomachs, flipping through magazines and peeling tiny tangerines, flinging the peels into the fire. A warm, smoky orange scent filled the room.

  Nicoletta glanced back, took in her father on the couch with Tabitha draped against him, his arm around her. Giovanni’s fingers stopped the languid twirling of her hair. For just an instant, he froze. His daughter turned back to the fire.

  “If you lived here, Tabitha, we could do this every night,” Alessia murmured.

  Now it was Tabitha’s turn to freeze. She kept her head on Giovanni’s chest, tried to infer his reaction by listening to his pulse through his shirt.

  “Wouldn’t you get tired of doing this every single night?” she asked.

  “No,” the girls said in unison, without looking back.

  “Neither would I,” Giovanni said, loud enough for the girls to hear.

  Tabitha curved her a
rm around Giovanni’s chest and nestled into him, no longer listening for his heartbeat, as it matched her own perfectly.

  26

  She wore an apron the next day, washing dishes with Alessia at her side. They caught each other’s eyes and suppressed smiles. Tabitha had promised them an American breakfast and had made a batch of pancakes. She couldn’t find maple syrup in the small bottega near Giovanni’s house, so she’d topped them with jam and Nutella. Now they scrubbed the dishes together, splashing suds on each other and taking great pains not to let Giovanni see them horsing around. He sat at the table with Nicoletta, helping her with math studies, and pretended to glare at Alessia every time she squealed. But when Tabitha caught his eye, he winked at her, with a tiny smile that told her volumes.

  Nicoletta was brash and mouthy, wore her heart on her sleeve and let her emotions carry her away if her father or sister didn’t step in to soothe her. Alessia stood back and studied every situation. She wanted people around her happy. She grew dismayed at any show of anger or ugliness, and Nicoletta would quickly rush to protect her, to shelter her. Tabitha felt an incredible affection for both of the girls. Nicoletta, with her impulsive ways and loud mouth, would get herself into trouble, fall in love with the wrong person over and over again, and wind up brokenhearted more times than she could count. Tabitha did not wish this on her, but she suspected it to be the truth. Alessia would remain steady, would absorb the pain of others and be able to open her heart to help them heal when they most needed it. Tabitha had an incredible urge to pull her into a hug and then call Gabrielle. We need these strong, quiet ones, she thought.

  There was a knock at the door, and Giovanni stood to answer it, calling instructions over his shoulder as he left the table. Tabitha and Alessia took the opportunity of his absence to flick suds in each other’s faces and dissolve into giggles.

  “Mama!” Nicoletta called, jumping from the table and rushing into the arms of the most stunning woman Tabitha had ever seen. Aurelia pulled her daughter into an embrace, then leaned back and smoothed Nicoletta’s hair out of her face. She spoke in crisp, precise English, without a trace of an accent. “Your father tells me you have forgotten all about our weekend. It’s so late in the morning—why aren’t you dressed?”