Page 123 of Casanova LLC

I threw my hands up. “You think I’d still be standing here listening to this insanity if I didn’t feel the same way about you that you feel about me?”

He stepped back into my space, grabbed my face. “Then what are we arguing about? What else matters?”

“Everything.” I put my hands over his. He looked so confused, so unmoored, so adrift. And that’s when I realized: he’d never been in love before. In this sole respect, I was the experienced one. I couldn’t say what I needed to say to his face so I pulled him into a hug, wrapping my arms tightly around his neck. “You don’t know what love is.”

He tried to pull back. “Of course I do.”

“For three days, you do. Your training did not prepare you to have forever, only to avoid it. You don’t know that love doesn’t solve anything, it only complicates everything. You don’t know what happens when it’s not enough.”

His arms tightened around my back. His voice wavered when he said, “Just say yes. Just let me know I have you and everything else will work out.”

He wasn’t getting it. He couldn’t. This was irreconcilable.

I pulled back. I took his hands from around me but held them. Squeezed them. Looked into his desperate eyes. “I won’t have the person I love, and fight for, and believe in, every day, for free, available for purchase. Something in this life has to be priceless. If that has a price, then everything does. This isn’t one of your paintings. This is you.”

He stared at me. Then he spun away, growling. “It’s not! It’s not me! It’s the fantasy version of—” He turned around, came right up to me. “You are asking me to choose between you and two hundred years of unbroken tradition. This house. The service I give to hundreds of women. My obligation to the closest thing I have to a father.”

“Yes.” I could tell the simplicity of my answer had shocked him. The utter lack of apology in it.

“You can’t ask that of me, Claire.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s…it’s…unfair!”

I finally snapped. “Unfair?!” My voice rang like a church bell into the night. “I’ll tell you what’s unfair. This entire business. What you do for the women you service. You say you’re showing them the path to real love, to real pleasure, to some melding of the sexes, the perfect balance between masculine and feminine power. But then you step off that path and send them into a world where the kind of man you’ve modeled for them doesn’t actually exist! What’s fair about that?”

He was reaching for patience. “Giacomo Casa?—”

“Giacomo Casanova died alone, in exile, living off the generosity of a reluctant patron. That’s your saint? A man whose name has come to mean nothing more than a man who uses women under the guise of loving them? Think about that. What legacy, exactly, are you preserving? What are you sacrificing yourself for?”

“Family!” he hissed. “This!” He flung an arm toward the palazzo. “The principle of something to aspire to! I understand that I am a unicorn, but I am also the last of my kind. Doesn’t that count for something? Isn’t that something worth preserving?”

I was starting to lose patience, lose my composure, lose my head. It would be so easy to just say yes. To kick the can down the road and give myself what I wanted.

But I knew what happened when you ignored the unignorable for short-term happiness.

“You can’t ‘deal’ your way out of this.” He sighed. “No, I’m serious. I think it’s part of your family lore for a reason. Beware your Forever. Why? Because it will destroy who you’ve been made to be. It will destroy the legacy. So why are we standing here trying to make it work? We can’t. You can’t have both or someone would have figured out how to do that in the last two hundred years.”

He clasped his hands in front of his chin. “You’re asking me to be the one to end it, to burn it all to the ground, for you.”

“No! For us. You have been telling me all weekend to listen to my voice, the one that tells me what I want, and, I’m sorry, but that’s what I want.”

We stood there. Faced off. Two gunslingers with no bullets left.

The embarrassment of being this vulnerable was too much. “So I can’t stay. I’m going to go now.” I walked back to my suitcase. I wheeled it past him, neither of us saying anything. But when I got to the door, I couldn’t resist a parting shot. “I thought when a woman loves a man he becomes more.”

“And when a man loves a woman she feels more,” he shot back.

I turned around, slowly, to face him, and shoved my hands deep in my jacket pockets to keep them from shaking. My right one found the forcola and wrapped around it. “When I would remember that night at the gallery, you know what I’d feel? Pleasure. It was wrong and complicated and now I know just how much…but I meant what I said upstairs: it made me feel alive. It was a good memory. But this?” My breath was shaky. “I was prepared to put this weekend in the past. Put it behind me. But you changed that. You made it forever. The curse that hangs like a cloud over the entire history of this palazzo follows me now, too. This time with you…it’s become painful.” I realized tears were streaming down my face. I wiped them furiously away with my left hand before burying it back in my pocket. “Good memories are banked. Like valuables kept in a safe-deposit box. We have to intentionally retrieve them. But bad memories live with us. A constant reminder of the pain we’ve endured and the pain that’s yet to come. We feel the bad memories. Why couldn’t you have just left me where you found me?!” I was panting now, anger rolling off me. “Why couldn’t you have let me give you the paintings without a barter? Why do I have to remember this—you—forever?”

He was rawly honest when he answered, “Because you want to live it, not remember it.”

And I was rawly honest when I whipped the forcola out of my pocket and hurled it at his head and screamed.

He ducked.

It sailed past him and landed in the canal with a faint plunking splash. An insignificant sound so at odds with the magnitude of what I’d just thrown away.

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