Flirting in Italian (17 page)

“Violetta!” Luca exclaims.
“Ma che cosa—che cazzo ci facevi—”
He catches himself and stops, his lips parted, before starting again in a language I have more hope of understanding. “What is happening? Why are you in the
passaggio segreto
?”

He looks at me incredulously. My hair’s falling down again, and I’m sure I must look completely manic with shock.

“Someone locked me in there,” I say weakly. It sounds so mad, as if I’m the stupid heroine of a horror film, the idiot who went downstairs to the basement—when everyone knows that’s
exactly
what you never do—and fell into the trap the villainess set for her. “They left the door open, and when I went in, they shut it and latched it.”

“Cosa?”
His eyes go even wider. “But no, I have not
understood you. It is not possible that—” He looks me up and down.
“Vieni qua,”
he says. “Come here.” He turns me, guiding me along the corridor a few steps to a window seat set back in the paneling, with a faded old velvet cushion. He must have realized how near to collapse I was, because I crumple onto it almost bonelessly, more grateful for soft fabric beneath me and the daylight filtering in behind me than I can say.

Luca sits down next to me; the seat isn’t that wide, and his thigh presses against mine as he positions himself so we’re facing each other.

“You will not hit me again?” he asks solemnly, and I writhe in shame at the memory.

“I’m really sorry about that,” I mumble. “I shouldn’t have slapped you.”

“It was not nice,” he says with that half smile that twists his mouth with a hint of cynicism. “But I was not nice, either.”

“No, you weren’t,” I blurt out. “But I still shouldn’t have—”

“Then we agree,” he says. “Sometimes I am not very nice. I am sorry too.”

He reaches one hand out, and I think he’s going to stroke my hair or pull me toward him; my breath catches in my throat. What he actually does is pick a big, gray, dusty cobweb off my hair, show it to me, his mouth quirking further in amusement, and then drop it to the floor, dusting off his hands.

“It did not suit you,” he says seriously. “
Meglio senza
. Better without.”

“Ugh! Are there any more?”

He tilts his head and surveys me.

“No,” he says. “No more
ragnatele
. So please, tell me again why you were in that place.”

“I told you!” I say. “I lost the group and tried to catch up. Someone left the door open, and when I went down the stairs, they shut the door and turned off the light!”

I glance back to the door, hanging open still; beside it I see a small brass plate, half concealed by a painting, that is clearly the light switch.

“But it is not possible,” Luca says, frowning. “It is not possible that someone does that.”

“How else could I get shut in there?” I ask, cross now. “You saw that I was locked in! I had to put my hair clip into the doorjamb and lift the latch to get myself out!”

“No,” he says infuriatingly. “I get
you
out. I come down the corridor and I see movement on the door to the passage, very strange. Why is it moving like that? I ask myself. Is there a ghost? So I go up and I see the
serratura—
”

“Latch?”

“Latch—it is going up and down—”

“Just up! I was lifting it up!”

“And so I unlock it and open the door and an English girl falls into my arms.” He shrugs. “It is a surprise, but a nice one.”

“I unlocked it!” I protest.

“No,” he says firmly. “I unlock it. I save you.”

“I didn’t need you!” I snap. “I was doing it by myself—I didn’t need you to come along!”

“Bene,”
he says, taking my hand and lifting it to his lips,
a gesture so unexpected that I goggle at him, wide-eyed, my mouth gaping very unattractively as he kisses my fingertips. “You are very modern. You save yourself. We agree this story.”

“Because it’s true!” Narrowing my eyes, I snatch my hand back from him. “Don’t make fun of me!”

“But—” Luca stops, and looks as if he’s thinking something over. His face is too close for me to be comfortable looking directly at him, so I drop my gaze down his body, to the hand he dropped to his lap when I pulled mine away.

I drag my gaze away so I’m looking at my own feet in their red sandals. Leather straps crisscross my toes. My toenails, mercifully, are freshly painted, red to match the sandals. Having the beautifully groomed Paige and Kendra around is definitely raising my game.

The silence drags on, and I can’t bear it. Any moment, the other girls and Catia and the principessa will come back, looking for me, and I’ll just be sitting here with Luca, not saying a word. Which would be ridiculous. Almost at random, I hear myself say:

“I thought you were in Florence. Elisa said you were.”

“I was in Firenze, si,” he says absently. “But Elisa sends me an SMS to say she is here, visiting my mother and Signora Cerboni. So I come back early.”

Did he come back for Elisa, or to see me? Did he realize that if Catia was here, we all were too?
I’m dying to ask, but it would sound so flirtatious that I’m not brave enough.

“An SMS?” I ask instead. “What’s that?”

He mimes texting on a phone.
“Un messaggio,”
he says.

“Oh, a text.”

He nods. “So when I come back, I go through the kitchen, and there is Maria making a tray with drinks and biscotti for all of you, and she says ‘
Guarda
, Luca, there is a girl here with Catia Cerboni who looks just like your aunt Monica,
figuriamoci
.’ She says my mother was surprised, because you look like my family.”

“Did you think that when you saw me?” I ask but he doesn’t answer. Then I add, “You don’t. Not your dad’s family, anyway.” And then I worry he’ll be offended, but he smiles instead.

“I know,” he says. “My mother is from the north, from the Veneto. In the north people look more like me. Taller, more pale, blue eyes. I am just like my
nonno
, my grandfather. That makes him happy. But you—” He shrugs again. “I say to you before you look like an Italian girl. I did not think you look like my aunt Monica.”

He stares at me, and it’s the hardest thing in the world not to blush or look down. Especially because his expression is so pensive, as if he’s considering some complicated mathematical equation.

“You do not look like my cousins, though,” he says. “Monica’s children are very different from you.”

“Do they live near here?” I ask.

“Si e non.”
He pulls a face. “Yes and no. They live in Firenze with their father. My aunt Monica, she runs away years ago with an
amante
, a lover. She is maybe in Thailand, we think.”

“You don’t know?” I ask, horrified, and he shakes his head. A lock of hair falls over his forehead, and he reaches his hand up to push it back, the one with the silver rings on
it. His black eyebrows wing up at the outer corners, straight lines, as if drawn with a ruler; I noticed that before, but by daylight everything seems clearer.

“She does not come back to see her own children,” he says. “It’s very sad.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” I say. “My dad’s living in Hong Kong now, but he rings me, and emails me, and we Skype, and I see him at least once a year. It would be horrible if he just disappeared.”

“Your parents are divorced?” Luca asks, and I nod.

“I live in London with my mother.”

“You are lucky,” he says unexpectedly, and there’s an edge of bitterness in his voice that takes me aback. “I wish my mother and my father were divorced. But here it is not very common. Not for
gente come noi
. People like us. For a long time, divorce in Italy is very difficult, because of the Church. Now it is more easy, but still my mother will not do it.”

“You want her to?” I ask, puzzled.

He jumps to his feet. “Yes,” he says, biting out the word. “Of course. My father, he lives in Milan, in the family palazzo. He pretends to work but really he is a playboy.” This last word sounds so different with his Italian accent that it takes me a while to understand it, particularly because it’s so old-fashioned. “He goes to parties with models and to the Cannes Film Festival, he has many girlfriends, all young, all stupid, like the ones who dance in bikinis on television, on the news.”

Girls dance in bikinis on the news?
I think, completely confused, but Luca is pacing back and forth now, scowling, and I don’t want to interrupt him.

“It is embarrassing,” he spits out. “For my father to be like this. And he was always like this. Always there were girlfriends.
Capisci?
”

I know this means “Do you understand?” and I nod, because I do. He means that even when Luca was young, maybe even as soon as his mother and father got married, his father was never faithful.

“Da fare schifo,”
Luca says savagely. “Disgusting.” And there’s an expression in his eyes that I recognize, a twist to his mouth.
After we kissed, that’s how he looked
, I realize.
Just before he applauded me. He looked … bitter
. It makes me nervous; I inch back on the window seat, watching him, concerned that he might turn on me again as he did before.

But his mouth softens, and he says sadly:

“My poor mamma.”

“That’s why you want her to get divorced?” I ask carefully.

He nods. “But she won’t. No woman in her family has ever been divorced. And she loves Chianti, this castello, she says she wants to stay here. She helps to run it, the vineyards. She loves to grow things. She does not like the city.”

“But she could go somewhere else in Chianti,” I suggest. Clearly, it appears that there’s enough money to buy the principessa a lovely estate if she wanted.

Luca throws up his hands.

“Esatto!”
he says in frustration. “This is what I say too! Ugh,
mi fa incazzare a bestia
.” He glances at me, black brows drawn tightly together over blazing blue eyes. “It makes me very angry,” he says.

“Mi fa incazzare a bestia,”
I echo, and Luca’s expression
changes in a flash, from furious to open and laughing. He jumps toward me and puts one hand over my mouth.

“No!” he says, laughing. “You must not repeat! Bad words!
Bestemmie!
I must not teach you bad words!”

His fingertips are light against my lips, more a caress than a constraint. The bracelet dangles off the knobs of his wrist bones; I dart my eyes down and see that it’s woven with black rubber in between the steel links.

I don’t dare to move. I don’t want him to stop touching me. But I can’t just sit here like an idiot.

What I really want to do is kiss his hand, but I’m not brave enough for that. I wish I were.

And then Luca’s hand moves, just a little, to touch my hair again. He winds his finger through one of my curls.

“Che boccoli,”
he says, sinking again to sit down next to me on the window seat. Our knees touch. “I don’t know the word in English, but my cousins have these too. Bigger, curly, like African hair. And my father. Maybe you
are
some kind of relative, Violetta-who-looks-like-Zia-Monica. A cousin. My pretty Italian cousin. You know, when I first meet you I say you look Italian.”

He’s leaning close to me now, and I’ve completely forgotten how to breathe. I glance sideways at his finger, long, elegant, very pale by contrast with my dark brown curl wrapped around it.
“Boccoli,”
he said. I must remember to look that up.

“I hope I’m not your cousin,” I say simply.

“And see how dark you are.”

He lets my curl fall and takes my hand, holding it up next to his, my skin much sallower.

“I am white from the north,” he says. “My mother’s Austrian blood. But you, the color of your skin is from the south, or at least
Centro Italia
, my pretty Italian cousin.”

“I don’t want to be your cousin,” I say again, nearly in a whisper.

“Why? Because we have kissed?” Luca’s still holding my hand, but his eyes go darker, almost cynical. Almost bitter. “A kiss means nothing. Don’t you know that yet, Violetta? Kissing,” he says, so close now I can feel his breath on my face, so close I can almost feel his lips against mine, “is nothing at all.…”

I know I should pull away. Even before anything happens, he’s told me it means nothing to him. I should push back, get up, go and find the group.

But if he doesn’t kiss me now, I will go insane.

Our hands twine together. Our heads move in unison, tilting fractionally. Our mouths touch, our eyes close, our breaths merge. Our bodies edge even closer on the seat, wrapping around each other.

I’m completely and utterly lost in him.

I reach up, kissing him, and wind his silky hair through my hands. Despite his dismissive words, his mouth is sweet on mine, his hands warm as he traces circles on my neck with his thumbs. I melt against him, feeling like a cat purring in delight.

He’s so much trouble,
a voice says at the back of my mind, trying to alert me to danger.
Look at what he just said to you right before you kissed! He told you it didn’t mean anything! You’re an idiot if you can’t take a warning!

I should push him away. Listen to the voice. But instead I pull him closer, twist my fingers even tighter in his hair, and give myself up to this endless series of slow, drugging, hypnotic kisses.

Don’t do this!
entreats the voice.
He’s going to make you so unhappy!

Luca’s tongue slides into my mouth, slow, drowsy, intoxicating. I hear myself make a little involuntary moaning noise, and I’d be embarrassed to my core if he didn’t echo it almost immediately, his hands cupping the back of my neck, his fingers caressing my skull now, as I caressed his. It’s the most delicious feeling. Everything is exploratory; everything we do seems to feel better than the last thing, which was as wonderful as I thought it was possible to feel. I run my hand around his neck to the collar of his shirt, slide my fingers under to feel the skin I can’t see, impossibly smooth, and one of his hands joins mine, covering it, to move my palm even farther under his shirt, at the open neck, sliding it to cover his collarbone, his skin so warm above and below mine that I gasp, and he does too.

“Violetta,”
he whispers into my mouth,
“Violetta, cosa mi fai?”

I open my eyes just a fraction, to peep, and see his are still closed, his lashes trembling long and black on his cheeks, silky as his hair. There’s something thrilling about seeing him like this, so carried away, when he doesn’t know I’m looking; it feels illicit, almost like spying on him.

And I’m obviously not a very good spy, because I linger too long, watching his closed eyelids, a vein pulsing in his forehead, the color in his cheeks, like a wash of pink under the smooth pale skin, like blood seen through fine china. Luca senses something, perhaps that my attention has drifted from kissing him to watching him kiss me; he
pulls back, his eyes flutter open, their blue shocking against his white skin and black lashes.

“Oh!” he exclaims crossly, the sound that Italians make a lot, and is actually more like saying “O!” because there isn’t an
h
in it, and their mouths round perfectly when they’re saying it.
“Non è giusto!
You look at me!
Cattiva!”

“What does
‘cattiva’
mean?” I ask.

“Bad,” he says instantly, shaking his head in disapproval. “You are bad.”

Our knees are pressed tightly together; we’re mirroring each other, leaning toward each other from the waist. And I stare at Luca, his face tilted at just the same angle as mine. It really is as if we’re looking into a mirror, or like a film I saw where one lover visits the other in prison, and though there’s a big sheet of glass between them, they place their palms in exactly the same spot on the glass, as if they’re touching, the closest they can get.

“You look so sad,” Luca says very softly.
“Come mai?”

“Violet! Violet, you’re not
still
looking at the portraits, are you?”

It’s Kelly, calling down the corridor, but it doesn’t really matter who the voice comes from; it’s enough that we’re not alone anymore. We jump apart as if there were an electric fence instead of that sheet of glass between us. Luca’s hands shoot up to his hair, pushing it back off his face, and I can’t watch, because I want to push back his hair myself so badly.
I jump up and run to retrieve my silver hair clip, which, despite what it’s been through in the last half hour, is surprisingly intact and working. I have a feeling that I’ve read in a book about someone being caught with her hair down, and now I fully understand the expression: hair loose implies that you’ve been up to something you shouldn’t have been doing. I twist my curls into a spiral on the back of my head and spear them through with the clip, nearly stabbing myself in the skull in my frantic haste.

Kelly’s thundering along the corridor now like a charging buffalo, Kendra a short distance behind her.

“There you are!” Kendra says as they pull to a halt in front of me. They both look flustered and cross. “We were totally freaking out,” she says angrily. “Where
were
you?”

And then Luca rises up from the window seat, and their expressions change so fast it would be comical if I didn’t know that I’ll pay for this later.

“Ohh,”
Kelly says, clattering to a halt a few feet away, a world of understanding in her voice, and Luca, looking amused at my obvious embarrassment, flourishes her a little bow and holds out his hand.

“I am Luca di Vesperi,” he says, taking hers with a debonair smile.

I expect Kelly to crumble under this charm onslaught, but I underestimated her; she’s made of tougher stuff.

“Of course you are,” she says dryly, looking up at him. “I heard about you. What were you doing, showing Violet the family paintings? From your lap?”

“Kelly!”
I plead desperately as Kendra muffles a giggle.

“I do not understand everything you say,” Luca says to Kelly, his blue eyes gleaming, “but I think you are funny.”

“Oh.” This does disarm her. She coughs gruffly. “Well, thank you. We should be getting back. Your mum and Catia are doing their nut.”

“Their
nut
?” Luca looks over at Kendra, who shrugs, an elegant rise and fall of her smooth shoulders.

“Don’t ask me,” she says. “It’s like my dad said, the UK and the States are two countries separated by the same language. Everyone’s in the Gold Salon. We should head back.”

I shoot ahead with Kendra. The last thing I want is to be led back, the errant foreign girl distracted by the handsome son of the house, walking next to him like I’ve been caught out, just to make the point further. Kelly and Luca follow, and it sounds like he’s getting a lesson in English slang from her; they’re chattering away, and she’s making him laugh a lot. Which in turn makes me jealous. I know that’s ridiculous, but it does. I am pathetic.

We head down another flight of stairs, through a huge dining room boasting a mahogany table with at least twenty high-backed chairs that looks as if the last time it was used was centuries ago, through a sitting room with masses of occasional tables, silk-buttoned chairs, and embroidered screens, so maneuvering our way through it is like running an obstacle course for debutantes. Kendra navigates us expertly into another sitting room, this one with gold brocade walls and wide french windows open onto a stone terrace. The principessa and Catia are standing by a table in the center.

Catia is livid; I recognize the signs all too well from teachers at school when a girl in their form is naughty at assembly. She’s making a heroic effort to control herself—as the teachers do in the headmistress’s presence—but her jaw’s set taut, her eyes are narrowed, and everything about her stance tells me that I’m going to be in serious trouble when she gets me back in the form room again.

“Where have you
been
, Violet?” she snaps in a small, tight voice that’s much more frightening than a full-on shout would be.

“Oh, hey!” Paige bustles in from the terrace in a blur of color. “I was looking out at the garden. I thought you might have wandered out there. You really like flowers,” she says with a wide, white smile. “And, like, nature. You’re always staring at it.”

I’m temporarily distracted by this: clearly, Paige is a better observer than I gave her credit for. I blink hard for a second before I say to Catia and the principessa:

“I’m so sorry—I was …” And then I trail off, realizing that I’ve been so distracted by Luca that I haven’t given a moment’s thought to how to deal with the fact that I was locked into the secret passage by someone. My head spins. Should I tell them? Would it be better not to, in case it makes me sound like a paranoid, delusional idiot? Even Luca, I know, didn’t quite believe that I had actually been locked in; I could see the disbelief in his eyes as I told him what had happened.

I pause, my breath catching in my throat, a furious debate raging inside me, but Catia and the principessa are already looking beyond me and Kendra, to Luca and Kelly.

“Oh, Luca,” his mother sighs in disapproval.
“Eravamo cosi preoccupate!”

My heart sinks: I am suddenly very sad indeed. Because I can’t help but recognize in the principessa’s voice a resigned familiarity, which tells me that this is not the first time Luca has been dallying with a foreign girl visiting the castello, causing a fuss, only for the two of them to be eventually ferreted out, snogging in a broom cupboard or on a balcony. Or a window seat in a corridor opposite the door to the secret passage.

He likes to kiss the girls
, Elisa informed me bitchily that night at Central Park.
Every summer, the foreign girls. Very many
.

Well, maybe
, I think miserably,
she wasn’t being bitchy at all. Even though that’s how she meant it. Maybe she was actually being helpful, despite her worst intentions. She was warning me away from him
.

And he warned me too, didn’t he? Kissing is nothing at all, he said, right before we went ahead and did exactly that
.

I make myself remember the rule Milly and I instituted at St. Tabby’s, when girls were having boy problems and spilled them out in mind-blowing detail.
What would you advise a girl who just told you what you told us?
we would ask, and if the answer was “Forget about him,” “Dump him,” or “Un-friend him immediately so you can’t see what he’s up to and be tortured every minute of every day,” then the girl would have to bite her lip and admit that yes, she knew she ought to delete his number and move on.

It’s easier said than done, though. Especially after a kiss like the one we just had. For the first time I understand those girls I thought were completely feeble, the ones who cling
to boys who pick them up like a toy when they want to play with them and drop them from a great height when they get bored. Milly and I had rolled our eyes and folded our arms and sworn we’d never be that needy or weak.

I swallow hard and pray for the strength not to be like that with Luca. I’m determined not to be just the latest in a long line of girl-toys he plays with over the summer.

And then, I recall her words to me at Central Park as a thought flashes into my mind like a bolt of lightning:
Elisa. Where is she? The last I saw her, she was walking off arm in arm with the principessa, as cozy as anything
. I dart a glance around the room. No Elisa in sight: she isn’t lounging on a chaise longue, enjoying my embarrassment, or talking on her phone on the terrace.

So where is she?

Is she the one who shut me in the secret passage?

I snap out of my preoccupation to realize that Luca and his mother are talking in rapid-fire Italian. The principessa gasps again, turning to me, one hand raised to her chest in the universal gesture of shock and disbelief.

“This is true?” she says to me. “Luca finds you in the
passagio segreto
?
Ma com’è possible?
”

Well, that’s certainly made the decision for me. I can’t hide it now
.

“When I came along to join you all, the door was open,” I say, speaking slowly so she’ll understand me. “I thought you had all gone down there.”

“What, down a small dark little staircase?” Catia interjects in a tone so sarcastic that each word drips with acid. “Why would we do that? Ridiculous!”

My own eyes narrow into slits of anger.

“Because,” I snap, “
you
said that we were going to visit the dungeons. I thought that was the way down there and I was catching up to you.”

She looks really cross that I have an answer for this, rocking back a little on her heels.

“But then why couldn’t you get out?” Paige asks bluntly.

I take a deep breath.

“Because someone shut the door on me,” I say.

The principessa sinks into an armchair, her blue eyes wide with surprise. Catia shakes her head.

“The door just got stuck,” she says. “And you panicked and couldn’t push it open again.”

“No, the latch was down!” I’m really angry now at being disbelieved. “Ask Luca! He came along just as I was wedging it open again!”

“I let her out,” Luca says, walking to the back of his mother’s chair and leaning on it with both hands. He looks at me challengingly, and stupidly, I rise to the bait.

“You did
not
,” I insist. “I got out myself, using my hair clip.”

“Using your—” Catia throws up her hands incredulously. “This is the craziest story I’ve ever heard! Donatella”—she turns to the principessa—“it’s clear what really happened.”

She darts a quick, meaningful glance up at Luca. Obviously, she’s implying that Luca and I bumped into each other and promptly started making out, then came up with the whole secret-passage excuse so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I bridle indignantly, about to launch into my own defense, when Kelly, behind Catia, raises her hand and draws a line
across her own throat, signaling that I should shut up. And Kendra, next to me, nudges me hard, telling me the same thing.