Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

Rafael

The mop of golden hair swirled in wild curls around his head. I would have recognized his back in any crowd on the darkest night. Now, he slouched before the Trevi Fountain, the orange and yellow lights beaming from around him lit his hair aglow. The halo extended from him to the fine spray above the pool.

It was as peaceful as this little plaza could be. Several couples walked by, stopping by the railing to admire the fountain in the only hours when there wasn't a wall of people between them and the iconic site.

Something powerful tugged my heart deep into my stomach. The choices were limited, and none led to a good place. And it wasn't all that new, this feeling, except that I was much older and more experienced than I had been a decade ago. I see you. I fall for you. I lose you . Whatever good had happened along the way had been an exception, not the rule. I needed to remember it as such. Be grateful for what you had , I reminded myself. So my course was decided for me.

Drawing a deep breath of air, I descended the stone steps to the lower level nearest to the fountain. Luke didn't stir until I sat next to him and put my canvas bag next to my feet. His grip tightened around his sketchbook, his body stiff for a moment before he looked at me.

"Hello," I said in a tone that was both light and casual. I had walked all this way to clear my mind and decide whether to confront him or give up that fight.

"Hi," Luke said. He held his breath, blinked, and straightened his back. "I wasn't sure if you'd come."

"I was up anyway," I said. I had been deep into developing the content plan for fall for our sponsors. Cozy places for October travels were a good draw for hospitality industry sponsors. "Besides, how often are you and I in the same city at the same time?"

"I could count it on one hand," Luke said.

I stretched out my legs in front of me and crossed them at the ankles. My sneakers had two shades of brown and a smidgen of black, combining well with my cream pants and midnight-blue shirt, my sleeves rolled to my elbows, a leather bracelet on my right wrist, and a silver ring on one finger of each hand. Exhaling softly, I let my bluntness rise to the surface. I had decided not to bring all my old grudges with me tonight, but it was up to Luke to choose whether my forwardness was an act of aggression or pure and simple honesty. "Why are we here, Luke?"

He blinked and turned his gaze to the fountain .

"I mean, is this going to be another minute romance? Are we adventuring through the night and falling madly in love?" I snapped my mouth shut before my voice could quiver.

"Can't we still see each other every half a decade?" Luke asked.

If I knew I wouldn't love you and lose you in the time it took the sun to rise again, we could . "Maybe," I said.

"I almost didn't call you," Luke admitted in a tone that said we had put the debate to rest. He was like that. "But I realized I wasn't going to leave my room and see this city on my own."

"Mm, traveling simply for the joy of jet lag in a hotel room is what life is all about," I agreed. After a silence, I added, "It's a beautiful city. The most beautiful, perhaps." Not that I had seen much of it lately. I had moved here two years ago and gazed at it with a tourist's wonder for the briefest of times. The move itself had been a stab wound that wouldn't completely heal. After, life simply took over. I flew on autopilot through my daily tasks. Chores took up the majority of my time in Rome. They were good, sturdy chores I could always trust to distract me from the emptiness that never fully went away.

The truth was that Rome, however beautiful, was the consolation prize. And that was a feeling I just couldn't shake off.

"I'm sure plenty of agencies offer tailored tours," I said for no other reason than that I had just stung myself with memories.

Luke pressed his lips into a tight line. His jaw was stronger than when we had met one another in Paris, and his cheekbones were more pronounced. It didn't hurt me how beautiful he was but that he was so beautiful to me. No matter what had gone down, no matter how long I had known him, I couldn't stop thinking of him as the most beautiful person I had ever encountered. From the clumsy first encounter when I had been driven by the desperate need to exchange our names in Paris to this very moment, Luke had always been the end result of every artistic effort to bring something divine into our small human lives.

"The thing is," he said while gripping the sketchbook harder, "life hasn't turned out that great. I'm…a little lost."

I nodded, although his gaze was firmly on the statue of Oceanus. This was not a cue for me to say mine had been going downhill for years, too, so I kept my tongue still.

"I'm not sure if going down a memory lane is a way to help that, but I needed to get out of the city. And where better than where I might run into you by chance?" He let out a soft laugh. "Those times always heralded something good in the near future."

For him, perhaps. Every time he slipped out of my grasp, I returned to something worse.

"But since I couldn't drag myself out of the bed and the room, I had to push fate around a little," he concluded.

After a silence, I shifted to face him a little more. "What happened?"

"Work," Luke said right away. So, it wasn't really work. "I have this thing nobody wants. I'm too in love with it to give it up, so everyone else is wrong, and only I know what's right." He recited it with just enough self-deprecation that I noticed. But he hesitated for a few moments before saying what really haunted him. "Lucy and Tony had a beautiful baby girl," he said carefully. For a time, he held in the rest that was on his mind, but he ultimately looked into my eyes and dragged on an almost amused smile. "Aren't I the worst person ever? They got married and had this miracle of a child, and all I do is feel sorry about the way my life turned out."

"It's okay to sometimes be jealous of people you love," I said.

"Give me a break," he scoffed. "That's the sort of thing we tell ourselves with a blanket check of prioritizing our mental health. It doesn't make me any less of an asshole."

"Do you want to take it away from them?" I asked, agitation filling my voice. "Do you scheme to ruin it?"

"What? No," Luke huffed.

"That's the difference between true jealousy and what you feel," I said. "It's perfectly normal to see someone you love do well, to be happy for them, and to feel like crap because they have what you want. It doesn't make you a monster, Luke."

He was silent for a long while. I turned my gaze from him to the fountain. I'd never seen it like this. Two years of living here and I had never bothered to visit it at night. Not until Luke found me. Some things never changed .

"Are you seeing anyone?" he asked.

I sucked my teeth. "Who's got the time for that?"

He chuckled dryly. "Yeah. Same." Then, tilting his head back and forth as if weighing whether to say it or not, he continued. "I tried. It didn't work out."

Molten rocks spilled through my chest before I could tamp my own jealousy. "Why not?" My voice might have been slightly too strung to pass as casual.

Luke hesitated. "When we…were over, you were the only reference point I had," Luke said grimly. "It turns out you set the bar pretty high."

And if I couldn't have you, who could hope to stand a chance? Instead, I elected to say something that wasn't better in any way. "I don't think the blame is with me. That's entirely your doing." If he had wanted someone like me, he never should have…

"I know that," Luke said, interrupting my thoughts, annoyance unmistakable in his tone. "Don't you think I know that?"

I wanted to point out that I had no idea. Like always, things happened inside his skull that I wasn't allowed to see. Decisions took place before I knew something needed to be decided. "Okay," I said. "Time-out, then."

He glared at me.

"I'm sorry I said that." I refused to hold my hands together meekly. Instead, I rested them on my knees and thought about everything. "I told myself I would be nice or wouldn't come at all."

"It's fine," Luke said. It wasn't. "It's not really surprising that we can't act like we're still eighteen. "

I chuckled a little. "Can you believe it's been almost ten years?"

Luke let out a low whistling sound. "I'm struggling to remember it's not still 2020, and you're hitting me with that."

"We were so na?ve," I said. "To think you could just go away with a total stranger to another country with your mother's blessing…" A laugh broke out of me.

It was more than just that. Our little misadventure put things into motion that neither of us could have predicted. It had created a shift in the relationship between Luke and his mother that, however painful, shaped Luke into who he was. I didn't think there was a better outcome in another universe.

For all the pain and sorrow, we still got a pretty good bargain. For every night I'd spent wondering what the point of it all was, there had been a dozen nights when I dreamed of seeing him again once the restrictions were lifted.

"Half of this decade went by in this sort of frenzy," Luke said, his tone growing softer, more distant. I was losing him to the memories that absorbed him. I knew the feeling. They were like quicksand. No. They were softer, squishier, but just as powerful. They could fool you into surrendering yourself with the allure of reliving the better days, but once they had their hold on you, you couldn't break free. "I didn't think it would happen until the moment it was done."

I shuddered when I remembered the first walk to a supermarket when the madness took hold of people. I had my phone out, speaking to Luke on FaceTime as I rounded the corner to the store. People with carts so packed they couldn't fit a toothpick stared around with wild eyes, white with fear. Shelves empty of the barest necessities.

Struck with shock and a hefty pinch of horror, I had packed my little shopping basket with enough cans of beer and returned to my apartment to get epically drunk. Luke had gone to a meeting with his editor, which ended up being the last in-person meeting he would take for the next ten months, then joined me to drink ourselves blind, watching the end of the world. Neither of us had asked what would happen to the trip we had been planning. Neither of us dared to be so selfish to worry about our relationship just then when the world seemed to be on the brink of dying.

I put my hand on Luke's before I could think clearly enough to stop myself. "I'm glad you called me Luke."

Luke didn't pull his hand away. There was a familiar comfort in this, too. "So, we're not going to have that fight after all."

"What would be the point?" I asked.

He nodded carefully. "I'm glad you came."

I lifted my hand to check my watch, breaking the contact. It was nearly four in the morning, but I was used to ditching sleep in favor of anything but staring at the ceiling in total silence. Normally, I worked, but tonight was a special occasion.

I looked around, but there was nobody there. The fountain and the plaza were ours.

Lifting my canvas bag from the paved ground, I produced a bottle of red wine. "Ta-da. "

"What's that?" Luke asked with a pleased expression painted on his face.

"Call it a birthday tradition," I said. "And this time, I come prepared." I pulled out a corkscrew from the bag and mustered a grin. It wasn't my most honest smile, not when my heart was still in shreds and forever would be, but as far as singular moments went, this was a pretty good one.

"I remember you asking that waitress to open the bottle for us a whole nine years ago," Luke said while I screwed the opener into the cork. "I remember thinking how easily you stole her heart that night."

"Passing fancy," I said, my focus on keeping the screw steady and not breaking the cork.

"It worked on me that night," Luke said softly. "It worked before we walked out of the bookstore, to be honest."

"We shared something special," I said, pulling the cork out with a pop. "It was completely different." I handed him the wine.

"You were so charming, and I was so impressionable," Luke said. Nothing sounded particularly romantic when it was boiled down to its simplest, barest components like that. People were just sentient and particularly chunky soup; the universe was just a bunch of sand spinning around. I preferred it when things seemed to have a meaning.

"We were young and in love with ourselves. And each other." It wasn't hard to admit it anymore. For a brief time, while our long-distance relationship had been taking shape and form, I had realized I could say these things to him without the risk of being judged. But that all blew up spectacularly, and I hid the truths away because they hurt too much.

This was a simple one. I had fallen for Luke Whitaker before he even noticed me sitting in the corner. I had fallen for him hard and fast, as if Cupid had shot me through my heart with a particularly potent arrow. Who wouldn't have fallen for him in my place? A tall, slender, dreamy young man with wild curls and big eyes and an armful of books in the heart of Paris, Luke was everything I had been looking for in my dreams.

And that right there had doomed us.

We had both fallen for each other based on a tiny pinch of reality and a truckload of fantasy. And when time and anxiety over the world's end chiseled away the fantasy, what remained could no longer be loved. He could not keep loving me the way he had loved the idea of me years before. It was the idea that he had stayed a virgin for; it was the idea he had saved his first and second kisses for. Not the tired old me.

Luke drank, and then I took my turn. An ancient memory tickled me, and I let out a chuckle.

"Huh?" Luke blinked at me.

With a grin, I recited, "In the ineffable intricacies of cosmic composition, love ascends as the ethereal nexus, harmonizing the enigmatic melodies of existence into a transcendental crescendo of perpetual unity, enshrouding souls in the infinite embrace of eternity's enigmatic embrace."

For the longest moment, Luke stared at me, then threw his head back and laughed out loud for the first time that I had seen in two long years. "Not that overwritten crap. Are you kidding me?"

"Overwritten? I beg your pardon, good sir, but if you don't take that back, I'll be forced to remove my glove and spank you." He choked as soon as I said the words, my own heart stumbling momentarily.

He recovered quickly and shook his head. "I can't believe you let stuff like that occupy your memory. It's not infinite, you know."

"I still haven't run out of it," I said with a shrug. I remember everything , I kept for myself. Every sigh and word and kiss, the sound you made when you entered me, and the sob you swallowed when we said goodbye. "Since we're already here in the city that's made of memories, we might as well share some of ours."

"Is that what we're going to do?" Luke asked.

"Unless you have a better idea." The challenge was just present enough to make him lift one eyebrow.

Luke nodded. "It sounds like a good plan."

Dawn was near, and the dark blue sky was getting ready to surrender to the sun's bright golden rays in a little while. "Let me show you my city, Luke," I said, standing up slowly.

Luke tucked his sketchbook under his arm and picked up the bottle. Like two teenage scoundrels we had been a decade ago, we turned away from the fountain and set out to explore an ancient city with nothing but wonder and hope filling our hearts. Whatever regrets existed between us, I had no time to spare for them and no room to give them. Luke had never spent long in my life, physically at least, so I would do this just for the hell of it. Just like he had asked. And if one thing was true about my entire existence, it was that minutes were exponentially better when they were shared with Luke.