Kissing in Italian

by Lauren Henderson

  “Mamma, possono venire?” Leonardo asks, tilting his head to one side, flashing his most practiced, charming smile. “Dai, perchè no?”

  Catia looks tired too, her eyes sunken into hollows rimmed by dark liner, her red lipstick dried into faint lines around her mouth. Catia is a mystery to me. She comes across as totally Italian, and yet her daughter, Elisa, told me that Catia’s actually American, pretending to be Italian, married to an Italian man, never breathing a word about her real nationality. It’s totally weird.

  “Perchè no?” she echoes. “Why not?” She’s probably happy to be rid of us, to be able to drive home in peace and quiet and put her feet up instead of having to supervise dinner, ready to pounce on every error we make in table manners. “Non fare troppo tardi,” she adds. “Don’t be too late.”

  We all break into smiles; we know these are just words. Catia may be in loco parentis to us, but she’s a pretty slack chaperone. We had to lug Paige home a fortnight ago, drunk as a skunk, and Catia barely batted an eyelid. All she did was trot out a speech about learning to hold your drink, and then she let us go out with the boys again practically the next evening.

  “Fantastico!” Leo claps his hands. “Andiamo tutti!”

  He kisses his mother enthusiastically, turns, and dashes off toward the fortezza, gesturing that we should all follow him. I hesitate, wondering if we should follow his lead and kiss Catia goodbye, but she’s already heading toward La Lizza, where she parked the jeep, one ringed hand held up in farewell to us.

  No adults! We’re on our own, out for the evening, ready to party. And now that Evan’s here, we won’t have a repeat of Paige drinking too much. Nothing like a looming big brother to keep his wild younger sister in line.

  I’ve been feeling so confused, so messed up recently. Now that there’s the prospect of some release for my stress, I’m so happy I could scream. I dash along the pavement and trip on a cobblestone in my haste. Evan grabs my elbow, catching me. It feels as if he could lift me off the ground as easily as if I were a little girl. I look up and smile at him in thanks.

  “You’re in a hurry!” he says, and I laugh and agree.

  “I really love to dance,” I say, beaming at him. “I can’t wait.”

  “I really love pizza!” he says, letting me go. “I can’t wait!”

  We’re on a total high, all seven of us, as we pile into two cars and sweep out of Siena in convoy, driving around the walls of the old fortress and onto a narrow highway that Leo says is the road to the sea. The evening sun is a golden haze, and since we’re heading west, it’s blazing into our eyes, wrapping us in warmth, as if we’re driving into the heart of a fire. We have all the windows down, the wind whipping our hair.

  “It’s like being in a film,” Kelly sighs to me, her hazel eyes glowing.

  “It is,” I agree. But what kind? I find myself wondering. A romantic comedy or a gritty family drama?

  The car crosses a little bridge and then starts to slow down, and Kelly oohs at the sight of our destination, a sound I echo. It’s a big sprawling stone building set back from the road, behind a large gravel parking lot bordered by trees strung with brightly colored paper lanterns. As we pull in, I see that the bridge we just crossed spans a little river, which flows by the side of the dining area, below a wall lined with long terra-cotta planters of flame-red and fuchsia geraniums.

  My heart lifts. I jump out as soon as the car comes to a halt, taking in the sight. The air is rich with the perfume of wisteria and jasmine, which are trained over a big trellis behind the patio. Now that the noise of the car engine has died away, I can hear the running water of the river, and music drifting out from the restaurant.

  Everyone piles out, the other girls exclaiming in delight as we walk across the gravel to the entrance. We go through a high wooden arch wreathed in more wisteria, and after we’re led to a table and given menus we exclaim all over again at the sheer number of pizzas they have—fifty choices. We order, and moments later the pizzas arrive. They’re huge, the size of cartwheels, but so thin and light they’re not too filling, easy to eat, and we finish every last scrap, even Kendra, who’s always watching her weight. They’re the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Evan, halfway through his, calls the waitress over and orders another one; we all roar with laughter, but he’s quite unembarrassed, saying he has a big appetite, and the waitress, flirtatiously, agrees with him, squeezing his broad shoulders, commenting on his size, offering to bring him a third if he wants.

  Paige squeals with amusement. And when Evan’s pizza comes, the waitress leaning over him sexily as she takes his old plate and slides the new one in front of him, he turns to wink at me, saying:

  “Hey, I told you I really loved pizza! I wasn’t kidding!”

  After the pizzas, we have sorbet, served in the shells of the fruit: lemon and orange, tangy and sharp, and coconut, smooth and creamy. Then coffee, then little chilled glasses of limoncello and arancello, lemon and orange liqueurs, the glasses frosted from the freezer, the liqueur sweet and heady and sugary. The American girls still can’t believe that no one asks for proof of drinking age.

  Night has fallen. The candles are all lit and flickering above our heads, their wax melting gently into the iron setting. The lanterns are illuminated and glow red and yellow and green and blue. The music’s grown louder, no longer soft jazz; now it’s booming pop, the bass cranked up, echoing gently off the paving stones, summoning us inside to dance.

  And we do. We dance our feet off. We shed all embarrassment about the tackiness of the music. It’s all Top 40 and, yes, the Grease medley that drove me off the dance floor in Florence a few weeks ago. But now I have a group to be silly with, and we sing all the words, or, to be honest, howl them, our heads back, our mouths wide open, sharing the pure, silly, dizzy fun, making the Italian boys sing “Ooh ooh ooh, honey!” after every “You’re the one that I want.”

  Suddenly, it’s midnight. When Leo drags us off the dance floor, all of us sweaty and shiny, and announces what time it is, Paige actually wails like a banshee in disappointment, thinking that he’s announcing a curfew, that we’re Cinderellas who have to leave the ball.

  “No!” Leo gestures out of the open doorway at the side of the dance floor, which leads outside; we’ve been nipping out there to cool down. “Now we go swim! In the river!”

  “Everyone go!” Andrea chimes in eagerly. “Everyone swim after dance here.”

  This, in our overheated state, seems like the most brilliant idea in the world. I glance out the door, and now that I’m looking, I see a few dark shapes bobbing in the water. Someone dives in with a splash I can see but barely hear over the music, and people squeeze past us, making for the door. I see a girl start to pull off her dress; underneath it is a brightly striped bikini. They’ve all come prepared.

  Kendra gets it in a flash.

  “We don’t have bathing suits!” she points out.

  “Oh, no problem!” Leo responds, a gleam in his eyes. “We swim in our intimi—our underclothes.”

  “Underwear!” Paige yells, swatting him. “Underclothes? That’s hilarious!”

  But I turn to look at Kelly and see the same panic in her eyes I’m feeling myself.

  No way am I going outside to swim in my underwear in front of a bunch of boys!

  Things I Can Never Have

  Mad, screaming giggles and squeals come from Paige and Kendra as their elbows fly, clothes falling on the floor of the little bathroom as they squish up to the mirror to look at themselves in their underwear. Behind them are Kelly and me, our faces pink, caught between panic and excitement: our eyes shining, our lips parted. We’re freaking out, swaying, almost dancing on the spot, the music pouring through the thin wall that separates the loos from the rest of the club, the bass line pounding as insistently as our own heartbeats.

  “Paige, you cow!” I sigh in jealousy, looking at her matching underwear. Pink bra and knickers (of course, Paige lives for pink), dotted with white and trimmed with white
lace. And best of all, better even than matching, it’s not see-through at all but made of opaque cotton, the bra structured and lightly padded to contain Paige’s abundant upper half.

  I look down at my strapless lace bra and grimace so hard that my mouth practically stretches to my ears. No way can I go swimming in this. My pants are all right—not very pretty, just plain black, but they do cover my bum. Still, what am I supposed to do? Run outside with my hands over my boobs, jump in the river and spend the whole time underwater with just my head showing?

  I think longingly of my swimsuits back at the villa. I’m not usually comfortable wearing a bikini around boys, but even that would be infinitely preferable to my underwear. I glance at Kelly, wedged next to me, who’s pulling exactly the same face; she’s been caught out too, and even worse than me—she’s in thong underwear that shows pretty much her entire bum cheeks. No way can she be seen by boys looking like this.

  “What am I going to do?” she wails hopelessly.

  “Go in your dress?” Paige suggests, trying to be helpful. But when she glances down to the dress puddled at Kelly’s feet, she can’t help wincing; Kelly’s in a maxi, with a smocked bodice. Way too much fabric to have billowing around you swimming in a river.

  “Tie it around your …,” Kendra starts, but trails off when she realizes that Kelly can’t knot the dress up around her waist—it’s her bum that’s the problem.

  “Oh, why didn’t they let us know we were doing this! We could have tried to buy bathing suits in Siena!” Kelly’s on the verge of tears, the pink of excitement deepening perilously into a hot red of embarrassment and disappointment that clashes badly with her ginger hair. Her voice wavers, becoming a wail. “If I don’t go in, Andr”—she’s about to say Andrea, we all know. But she bites off his name, corrects it to—“they’ll think I’m a spoilsport.”

  Paige, Kendra, and I exchange glances in the mirror, biting our lips, unable to think of any reassurance to give. There’s no point lying: Kelly’s right, as she pretty much always is. Everyone else will be in the river, and if Kelly sits on the side, she’ll be a wallflower.

  I feel I should tell her that I’ll sit with her, keep her company, make sure she isn’t alone. But I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not nice enough for that. My blood’s racing around my veins, so hot it feels as if I’m boiling up. I’m desperate to get back out into the club, to dash through it and outside into the warm night air, to jump into the river, splashing and laughing, to burn off the energy that’s still rushing through me even after having danced like a maniac for a couple of hours. Kelly’s my ally here, my best friend in Italy, and I’m still not prepared to give up my midnight plunge for her.

  I suck, as Paige would say.

  Kelly’s eyes are welling up. She’s madly keen on Andrea, and Kendra, at my request, has released him into the wild, snubbed him hard enough that he’s got the message and stopped chasing her. But that still leaves a big gulf between Andrea’s cheerful, friendly attitude to Kelly, and the doglike worship he used to pay to Kendra.

  I don’t know if Kelly can bridge that gulf in the weeks we have left in Italy. But she’s quite right; she won’t get any further by sitting glumly on the riverbank while we all dive in and get wet.

  “Hey!” Someone’s banging on the door of the ladies’ loos: we all jump. Kelly blinks, and one big tear is released. It starts to trickle down her red cheek.

  “Hey!” the voice calls again. It’s a guy, and not an Italian; they don’t yell “Hey!” here, but “Oh!” instead, which is weird until you get used to it. I’m closest to the door. I grab my dress, hold it over me with one hand, and ease the door open a crack with the other.

  Behind me, the girls, overexcited, scream at a pitch that would deafen bats. We’re all ridiculously worked up at the thought of a man seeing us in our underwear, even though we’re planning to go into the river in exactly that.

  In front of me is a wide male chest. I look up, over the swell of the pectorals, the broad tanned neck, the square jaw, to the cheerful blue eyes and cropped blond hair of Evan, Paige’s brother. Like Paige, he’s built on a massive scale, especially by comparison with the slender, slim-hipped Italians. He completely blocks any view of the club behind him.

  “Violet!” he says. His eyes widen as he takes in my state of undress, but he’s manfully resisting looking anywhere but my face, which I thoroughly appreciate. “Look, I made the other guys give me their shirts, okay? I thought you’d need all of them.”

  He’s holding a bunched-up ball of fabric in one big fist, which he pushes toward me; it leaves me in a quandary, as I don’t have my hands free. I wedge the door with my shoulder, which means I can still hold my dress over me and take the shirts with the other.

  “Thanks!” I exclaim gratefully, realizing that this means Kelly can come swimming with the rest of us, that I can cover my bra up.

  But Evan isn’t done. He reaches down, takes the hem of his own T-shirt, and pulls it up in one swift movement, dragging it over his head, baring his tanned chest. I can’t help staring. Evan is at college on a football scholarship, apparently, and from his muscle definition, I can’t imagine he gets any time to study. He looks as if he spends every waking minute in the gym.

  And he’s really close to me. I feel a blush rising to my cheeks, and I try to step back a little, confused by my feelings about this sudden striptease, his physical proximity. His hand reaches out to me again, giving me the T-shirt still warm from his body, still smelling of him. I take it, realizing that my mouth has fallen open at the sight of him. I clamp my lips together as he says, grinning, his white American teeth perfect:

  “Give this to Paige, okay? Those skinny little Italian guys’ shirts won’t fit around her, and I don’t want my little sister showing her junk all over town.”

  “Hey!” Paige shouts back crossly. “I do not show my junk all over town! You better not go around telling people that!”

  Evan’s grin deepens as he looks down at me; he winks.

  “It’s just too easy to get her going,” he says to me confidentially, seeing my eyebrows raised: I’ve rarely heard Paige this wound up. Evan certainly knows how to press her buttons.

  I back inside the bathroom again and close the door. Kelly rips a shirt from my hands and drags it on, buttoning it as best she can, as Andrea is very slim and Kelly’s definitely curvy. Of course, it’s Andrea’s shirt she’s picked. She’s beaming now, tears forgotten. I hand Paige Evan’s T-shirt and then look hesitantly at Kendra. We’re one short.

  “You take it,” she says nonchalantly, slender as a wand in the white underwear that contrasts beautifully with her dark skin. “I’ll be okay without a cover-up.”

  Of course she will, I think, glancing at Kelly. Kendra is an athlete, with a perfect body; I’d be more than happy to show it off too.

  “Evan’s such an idiot,” Paige says, still cross, pulling on his T-shirt.

  “Oh, ignore him,” Kelly says quickly. “I never listen to a word my stupid brother says. Come on, I’m dying to go for a swim!”

  She’s pulled her dress on over the shirt—she’s very self-conscious about her legs—then winds her arm through Paige’s and pulls her toward the door. Paige follows obediently, and as soon as they emerge, I hear wolf whistles from boys waiting outside. They’re for Paige, of course, just as the sighs that issue as Kendra and I come out are for her, not me. Kendra has slipped her dress on again, but she doesn’t need to be half naked to drive Italian boys crazy; they adore blondes as well as black girls, loving the difference from the local brunettes, I assume. And Kendra has a grace and elegance to her carriage, a goddesslike way of walking with her head up and her shoulders back, that particularly draws the eye.

  Evan, Andrea, and Leonardo form a phalanx around us and whisk us along the side of the room, skirting the dance floor with its mirror balls twirling and sending cascades of silver sequins over everyone’s bodies. Thank goodness for Evan. I’ve pulled Leo’s shirt on, and when we get to th
e river I’ll tie its tails below my boobs, covering my lacy bra. For now, they’re hanging down to my upper thighs, perfectly decent enough to walk through a club where some of the Italian girls are wearing miniskirts barely longer than their tiny bums.

  We emerge into the warm night air and I smell the honeyed wisteria, hear an owl hooting across the fields on the far side of the river. I’m eager to dive in; I love to swim. I’m picking my way down the little slope when, behind me, I hear a commotion and look back to see Paige braced between Evan and Leo; she’s tripped on her wedge heels and is cackling like a banshee.

  Kendra looks at me and rolls her eyes.

  “Hopefully the cold water’ll sober her up a bit,” she says resignedly.

  I don’t answer, even though I completely agree. Because, leaning against the wall of the club on our left, long legs crossed at the ankles, shoulders propped square to the stone, black hair falling over his face, is a silhouette that looks eerily familiar, like a ghost that haunts my dreams. There’s a book called The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that I found in the villa’s library, and I’ve been reading it. I don’t quite understand it all; to be honest, I pulled it off the shelf because the title spoke to me, made me think of him. Luca. Definitely beautiful, and the damned part fits too, because he’s so dark, so brooding, so sad; it feels sometimes as if he doesn’t want to reach for happiness, as if he actually pushes it away—

  But he saved me when I was in danger, I remind myself. He saved my life. And then he told me he thought I might be his half sister. Which meant we couldn’t see each other anymore, in case that was true …

  A red dot flashes in the blue-black night as the figure raises a cigarette to his lips.

  It can’t be Luca, I tell myself. We’re beyond Siena, miles and miles from Chianti, where he lives. It can’t be him.

  Everyone’s already passed me, brushing by as I stopped to stare at the lean boy draped against the roadhouse wall.