Trying Not To Love You

by Amabile Giusti

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015, 2020 by Amabile Giusti

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Hillary Locke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Tentare di Non Amarti by Amazon Crossing in Italy in 2015. Translated from Italian by Hillary Locke. First published in English by Montlake in collaboration with Amazon Crossing in 2020.

  Published by Montlake, in collaboration with Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Montlake and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542018944

  ISBN-10: 1542018943

  Cover design by Plum5 Limited

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

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  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Unto a broken heart,

  No other one may go

  Without the high prerogative

  Itself hath suffered too.

  —Emily Dickinson

  1

  There was no way to avoid the puddles, so she waded bravely through – and as if that weren’t bad enough, the water sprayed up into her eyes every time a car went past. Beneath her pink wool beanie with its little pompom on top, her poor hair hung limp as a jellyfish.

  What a night! It was only two short blocks from the bar to her apartment but each trip felt like crossing a minefield, and the rain that particular evening was a cruel bonus, adding insult to injury.

  She paused at a distance from her building, praying he wouldn’t be there. His presence was insistent but erratic: one day yes, another day no, and then there he’d be again. It was a dangerous little game they were playing. He knew just how to make it impossible for her to report him and, in any case, a woman has few legal grounds on which to call the police over a psycho ex unless he actually kills her, even though she’s not exactly in a position to speak out if she’s dead. Either way, she’s screwed.

  Penelope – Penny to her friends – stopped just out of reach of the glare of a streetlamp; the light buzzed on and off, then came a sizzle, and finally darkness. At least he wasn’t waiting at the entrance. Now it was just a matter of figuring out whether he was inside.

  Penny sighed into the rain, bit her lip and told herself she couldn’t stay out there much longer. If he doesn’t stab me first, I’m gonna die of pneumonia.

  Shrugging her shoulders, she quickened her pace as she sploshed her way to the door, though not exactly quite so carefree as Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain.

  The building was truly hideous – one of those sad, crumbling apartment complexes, a chipped canvas for mediocre graffiti artists, with a sparse lobby further enlivened by drab, peeling wallpaper. The ideal place, in fact, for a sick psycho to take revenge on a girl who’d dared to stop dating him.

  Penny crossed the threshold, her heart in her throat.

  It was totally dark inside. The light switch was still faulty, the single bulb on its bare wire failing to relieve the gloom. Just as it always did, the concentrated darkness took her breath away.

  Penny had a serious problem with the dark. She would lose all sense of reality, grow paralysed and then panic until she eventually managed to force herself to breathe and think and count to ten. Then she would finally come to, the blood rushing back to her arms and legs, and she could move again, though it was always a momentary truce, only long enough to fool the brain until it was light again. Those times when she couldn’t find the light right away were when she’d start screaming.

  On this particular evening, she took her cell phone from her bag and turned on the flashlight, illuminating a grey and desolate space. Mildly heartened, she set off up the stairs.

  She lived on the second-to-last floor, and hoped Grant hadn’t bothered to climb that many steps to lurk in wait for her, crouched in some miserable corner.

  One month earlier, Penny had dated Grant for seven stupid days. They’d met at the bar where Penny worked. He’d walked in, gorgeous as the sun, elegantly unkempt and with the most charming smile. He’d exchanged a few words with her while she was mixing his mojito, and then ended up waiting outside for her, all done with a studied delicacy, clearly with the hots for her but making no assumptions. They had fallen into an easy conversation outside the entrance to Well Purple. Nothing on that starry night, not the faintest hint of anything wrong, had led her to suspect that so much beauty and elegance could hide something far more sinister, but Penny had been forced to snap out of her fantasy by only their third date. That boy with his perfect looks – every mother’s dream for her daughter – was no more than a spoiled and violent little bully who took pleasure in humiliating women, so Penny had dumped him without much thought and he had not forgiven her. Since then he had begun to follow her everywhere. For the time being he was still limiting himself to inspiring fear in her, observing her from afar with his feral smile and mocking her threateningly, though never in the presence of a witness. In public he acted like a true gentleman, straight out of Downton Abbey, but once he was sure no one could hear him, he’d let his mask drop and harass her, making clear his intentions and promising acts of unspeakable violence against her.

  Penny had made no mention of it to her grandma as she didn’t want to scare her. She’d researched it online and discovered that without physical acts of aggression, visible bruises, a visit to ER or reliable witnesses, no one would really believe her. Grant was the son of a lawyer – he had himself just graduated from law school – plus he was rich, dressed like an Abercrombie model and even had the looks of one. Who would ever imagine he could be a danger?

  Penny continued up the stairs. Suddenly her phone signalled it was about to run out of battery.

  ‘Not now, not now, not now!’ she pleaded, but the old contraption didn’t give a damn about her fears and chose to die right then and there.

  She was plunged into the darkest of darks, halfway up a flight of stairs.

  There was nothing for it but to continue to climb, hoping her feet wouldn’t find the edge of some broken step and that her panic wouldn’t come rushing back. Above all, she hoped not to encounter Grant emerging from the darkness.

  She held her breath and climbed the stairs as fast as she could.

  Three more floors, three more floors. Hold on. You can do it. The darkness is only dark; it’s not a wall, it’s not a well, it’s not the centre of the earth.

  Suddenly she heard fast, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs behind her. There was no way it was one of the elderly residents of the building. Penny wa
s the only young tenant in the midst of an army of retirees, all over sixty, and none of them could move in such an agile way. Her heart was on the verge of bursting, and there was no way she could stop it. A herd of horses galloped in her chest. For a moment she felt faint and stopped to lean against the wall, but then she mustered up all her courage.

  Like hell am I gonna let you win, you fucking creep!

  She picked up her pace again as a milky glow pooled on a flight of stairs below her. The asshole had a flashlight. Penny started to run with the chaotic fervour of a wounded deer, until finally she reached her floor. Panting, she dug in her bag for her keys, but they were nowhere to be found, as if even they were in league with Grant. She continued to rummage, feeling her way through a tide of junk – her wallet, scattered M&Ms, tissues, a bottle of nail polish, cocoa butter lip balm – the whole artistic jumble that filled her Mary Poppins-style bag. Everything was there except for the one thing she needed, and then finally she felt them, cold and hostile against her palm. Victorious, she pulled them out and groped for the keyhole with her fingertips.

  Grant was very close by now, the light from his flashlight about to reach her, and then Penny’s keys fell to the ground, ringing out like scattered coins on a sidewalk.

  You idiot! she thought to herself. You’re like the girl in some cheesy horror movie – the one who runs from the monster straight into the nearest parking garage, deserted road or forest. You deserve everything coming to you!

  She knelt on the floor, her eyes flooding with tears, unable to stem the flow of her fear. The keys appeared just before the beam of light blinded her.

  Penny remained on the ground, her back against the wall, one hand in front of her face. The light was pointing straight at her now, like the laser eye of some evil cyclops. Behind it she could make out the silhouette of a man. Grant – it was Grant for sure.

  An arm stretched in her direction, reaching out to overpower her.

  ‘Touch me and I’ll kick you!’ Penny exclaimed. It wasn’t easy to hide her panic under layers of fake bravery. She hadn’t eaten all evening but a little food came up anyway, as if all the meals from the last ten years were climbing up her throat.

  While she fumbled in indecision – What do I do? Do I try to hit him? Should I run? Should I shout? Should I pray? – a hand grabbed her and pulled her up, though more gently than she’d expected.

  Penny was dumbstruck for a moment, and then the man moved his flashlight away from her eyes, and in the dim light she realised it wasn’t Grant. This new sight, however, made her feel like she was going straight out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  What she saw was a kind of giant – a man of about twenty-five, tall and sturdy as a redwood. Well, her imagination was probably getting carried away looking for comparisons, but she had no doubt he was over six foot four, and he couldn’t have weighed any less than two hundred and fifty pounds, not because he was fat but because his muscles were enormous, bulging even through his clothes. He could have snapped her in half with a single forearm, the same one helping her get back to her feet, and on which she noticed a dense weave of tribal tattoos in shades of grey and black. His wrist was as solid as a trunk of petrified wood and streaked with raised veins, visible even in the semi-darkness.

  Having previously imagined it was the beautiful, cruel and crazy Grant on her tail, it almost seemed to her as if this man, dressed all in black, with his appearance of a heavyweight champion and his military-style crewcut and ice-cold eyes – blue, or maybe grey? – might be some kind of heavenly spirit sent down to rescue her.

  ‘You scared me,’ Penny whispered, still wondering if she was right to feel relieved or if this was some new threat that would be harder to fight off than Grant himself. How could she even begin to keep this one at bay?

  The man froze and glared at her, his eyes like shards of glass. His glacial stare was unnerving, but Penny continued to look at him bravely, and for a handful of strange moments they remained like this in the shadows, gazing at each other. Silence surrounded them, broken only by Penny’s anxiously rapid breathing.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked finally. It was undoubtedly a stupid question to ask of this Herculean stranger, who perhaps harboured a similar intention to hurt her as Grant did, but she couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  The man pointed upwards as if to indicate the heavens.

  ‘Are you an angel?’ she continued, knowing it sounded a little ridiculous.

  An angel? Looking like that? He looks more like a demon guarding the gates of hell.

  ‘I live upstairs,’ the man replied. He had a powerful voice to complete the package. A hoarse, deep voice that was as imposing as his body.

  Penny squinted, incredulous. She knew no one lived up there. It was a sort of dilapidated attic, more like a pigeonhole than an apartment, inhabited by mice and old moth-eaten furniture.

  The man, correctly interpreting her obvious astonishment, added in a monotone: ‘I’m the new tenant.’

  ‘Tenant’ was not a word that much suited him. A ‘tenant’ sounded like someone who moved in with rubber plants and striped silk sofas, painted the walls a creamy yellow and bought sets of pots to steam their vegetables in. This guy, on the other hand, made her think of old cellars where people drank and fought, of wrestling rings spattered with blood, spit and sweat, and damp sheets after wild sex.

  Flushed to her ears, Penny didn’t think there was any need to remain in the company of someone who was either a new tenant or a dangerous lunatic.

  Then she asked him with a little bitterness, ‘If you live upstairs, why don’t you go, then? Why are you still here?’

  ‘I’m waiting to see you safely inside,’ he replied.

  ‘Why?’ she asked with suspicion.

  ‘Because of the look on your face.’

  ‘What look?’

  He was silent for a moment, and then felt around in his pockets as if looking for something. Penny wondered if he was going to pull out a knife and slit her throat right there, but instead he took out a pack of Chesterfields and a lighter. He brought a cigarette to his lips and lit it. His face was illuminated with a reddish glow that momentarily revealed large eyes, a straight nose and full lips, his mouth slightly furrowed on one side from a small scar. He drew on the cigarette and said, ‘Whenever I see a woman with that face on her, I usually stop to make sure she’s not in danger, even if I don’t know her.’

  ‘You’re much more likely to be the danger here!’

  He raised an eyebrow, and his sarcastic laugh was accompanied by a slight hint of annoyance in his generally impassive demeanour.

  ‘I’m no danger to women – not in the sense you mean, anyway – and even if I were the type, you wouldn’t be my first choice.’

  Penny gritted her teeth, feeling a sudden intense hatred towards this man. She was well aware she wasn’t enormously attractive – she’d fought to maintain a simple, even anonymous look for over twenty years now, but had shed many a secret tear over it as a teenager. Her lack of self-esteem was the reason she’d thrown herself into the arms of someone like Grant in the first place. Why should someone as intriguing as this stranger even bother to give her a second glance, she asked herself, though she nonetheless found it intolerable that he’d had the nerve to insult her quite so openly.

  ‘You can take yourself upstairs by the balls with my blessing,’ she told him.

  She didn’t have to say it twice. The stranger directed his flashlight towards the stairwell and walked off without a word. Penny couldn’t help but follow him with her gaze until he had melted away into the darkness, then she quickly put her key in the lock and went inside. She pulled the door shut carefully behind her, secured the chain her grandma had left off so she could get in, and only then was she able to start breathing normally.

  The apartment where Penny lived with her grandmother, Barbara – known to her friends as Barbie – was a cramped and simple place with few windows. Two bedrooms, a bathr
oom and a living room with an open kitchen, all crammed into one little area. Penny’s grandmother would always say, ‘Hi, I’m Barbie, and this is Barbie’s house – that’s why it’s so small!’

  Even Penny’s dreams were as miniature as dolls. She had hoped to go to college but had failed to get a scholarship. But it was better this way – otherwise she would have been forced to choose her own destiny, and she knew what she would have chosen: to stay with her grandma.

  With no options, there was no room for conflicts of interest. Penny knew that, had college been an actual possibility, Barbie would have insisted she move on to campus and look for a job so she could keep up her studies. But she also knew that her sweet grandma, who always seemed young despite her seventy years, would have suffered immeasurably without her, and so she had stayed and had not regretted it for a moment. She loved her grandma more than anything in the world.

  Penny flicked on the kitchen light. She undressed in that room, letting her drenched work uniform fall to the floor: her grey coat that pooled around her calves, her skintight T-shirt, her pleated miniskirt that screamed slutty Sailor Moon from her favourite manga series, and her nude tights with a red garter on the left thigh, having kicked off the rubber boots she’d slipped on before she left the bar, where she was forced to wear four-inch skyscraper heels. What was under her clothes was the body of a twenty-two-year-old who was skinny and pale – neither beautiful nor ugly, but somewhere in between. Brown eyes, a nose equal to a thousand other noses, and decent lips – the only part of herself she didn’t detest. Smooth, dark copper hair, cut into a short bob by a neighbour who had once been a hairdresser. The result was a shaggy, asymmetrical pageboy style with one longer, pale pink section that hung over her face. She took off her single earring: a long silver cross dangling from her left ear, and placed it on the table.

  After this, Penny went to the bathroom and climbed straight into the shower to wash off the smell of the bar – the greasy food and the smoke and all the sugary cocktails she’d mixed.

  Only then, refreshed and unadorned except for her pastel lock of hair, did Penny look towards the door of the room where Barbie was sleeping and tiptoed in. Her grandma hadn’t heard a thing – not even what had happened out on the landing. She was enjoying the blissful sleep of a child with their favourite teddy, cosy under the covers.