Page 77 of Casanova LLC

“Why?”

“It just is.”

“It just is?”

“There’s that echo again.”

“If anyone should be embarrassed, it should be me.”

“You? You belong in a painting.”

“But you’ve made me look like a ballerina. The grace, the lines. There’s a lightness. A radiance. It’s not me.”

“Yes, it is.”

His voice was different; it was real. I looked at him over my shoulder and found a gaze to match. We stared until I couldn’t handle it anymore and looked away, into the room. I was about to say, “when I’m with you,” but the words were short-circuited when I realized something:

I was in his personal space. Correction: I’d barged into his personal space.

I shouldn’t be here. And I shouldn’t say anything else.

The painting, his words, were as close to a declaration of real feeling as I would ever get from him.

Which saddened me.

Because I wanted more.

Picking up his brush to paint again infused the man before me with the man I’d met five years ago

If he were both of those men, together, I’d…

I’d…

I’d better stay away from that. Because how would I leave that? How would I ever recover from that?

But I wanted it. My internal voice, so fucking clear now: I wanted this for however long I could have it.

I went back to the painting. I hadn’t noticed: he had sketched-in my wedding ring.

Which was still on my finger.

Which I no longer wanted on my finger.

I slipped it off and went to put it in my pocket, but my robe didn’t have any. So I turned around and dropped it into the terry cloth pocket of his. “Let’s go learn about men.”

Alessandro

This was not the night I had been gearing up for. As we walked into the sala, I asked her, “What would you like to drink?”

“That tea sounds good now.”

I was way past tea. “Nothing stronger?”

“No, not right now. I’m still not a hundred percent.”

An inconveniently good point.

I had her take a seat on the couch in front of the fireplace, then went into the bedroom and started the kettle. The sun had fully set by now so I went back into the sala and around the room, turning on lamps. In the bedroom, I finished the tea and when I brought the pot out, she was bent over the fireplace lighting candles. Candles I’d intentionally not lit because I didn’t want to make this romantic. Candles that now illuminated her face like the ones in the dining room had Thursday night. She came back to the couch, tucking her legs beneath her, the silk robe hitting mid-thigh, the candlelight hitting her skin. Beautiful. A woman ready to…

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