Page 49 of Duke for the Summer

Nate?????

Omg wake up it’s like noon over there already. Did you party too hard last night?

Nate groaned and set his phone back down. His muscles felt like lead, and even lifting his head up made his lower back spasm in a worrying way. Fifty circuits. He’d tried to do fifty circuits of stair climbs. He wasn’t sure how far he’d gotten, just that he had puked at some point, and that it had seemed like it good idea to rinse his mouth out with more grappa, and thatthings had gone downhill from there, and Jacopo was definitely going to scold him, because–

Oh, God. Jacopo.

Nate pulled himself up into a sitting position, his body flooding with dread.

He didn’t want to remember the night before, almost wished he had been drunk enough to scrub it from his mind. It wasn’t any easier to deal with in the light of day. Nate wanted to be angry, wanted to be furious at Jacopo, because then he could just write this off, get the hell out of here and never look back. Everybodyleaves, and it would be better to be the one to do the leaving.

If only he didn’t feel so sick.

Nate had never wanted kids–and this wasn’t even a kid. If Jacopo had been in college then that meant she was a teenager, just existing somewhere out there, not knowing that her dad was gay, or that he was tall and handsome and loved words, or that he was so locked inside himself that he had never dared to contact her.

Last night, like an idiot, he had been ready to burn every relationship he’d built on this island to the ground, if it just meant Jacopo would stay. And God, he still wanted that. Even with all the weirdness with Jacopo’s family and, yes, even the fact that he had a daughter. Nate thought of Jacopo’s expression on the beach at night, how alive he’d seemed out there under the moon. He thought of him laughing uncontrollably in the sitting room, untethered from anything that worried him. Numbly, he typed out a text to Thea, although he kind of already knew the answer.

What’s the two of cups in tarot?

She replied back almost immediately.Wtf?

And then,it’s usually the love and relationships card. Why??

do you have something to tell meeeeeeee???

Yeah, I do, thought Nate.I have massively, massively fucked up.

Thea was still texting, but he stuffed his phone in his pocket and forced himself out of bed. He was limping a little as he hurried down the stairs, but the aches in his body were nothing compared to the fist clenched around his heart. Nate needed to see Jacopo, needed to hold him and feel his solidness and breathe in the smell of him. It was the only thing that would fix the well of unease in his belly, make his heart stop pounding.

But when he got to the cottage, he found it empty.

Nate sat at the table for hours, hoping, even though part of him realized it was stupid to hope. The vespa wouldn’t come puttering up the hill, and Jacopo’s tall, lanky frame wouldn’t fill the doorway. There were gaps on the bookshelf. He hadn’t taken much, but he’d taken his favorite books, and when Nate tried calling, his phone went straight to voicemail. A generic message in Italian, not even Jacopo’s voice. Nate would probably never hear his voice again.

Nate curled up silently in Jacopo’s bed, pressing the blankets to his face. He stayed there as the day wound down and the room began to get dark.

*

Jacopo had only been in London for twenty-four hours, and he hated it. The huge, bustling city that had seemed so romantic from afar was overwhelming, sprawling out endlessly, connected by the arterial lines of the Underground, which he’d already gotten lost on twice. He had never seen so many people, so many lives crammed into one place, and he felt like he was suffocating as he tried to make his way through the mass of tourists with phones upheld, busy families pushing prams, revelers spilling out of pubs. He had wanted to get dinner, to sitin a restaurant and have a glass of wine, to establish that he washere, in this place he’d dreamed of for years, but when he tried to ask for a table, he found himself stumbling over his words, all the English bleached out of his brain by anxiety.

He bought a strange, tasteless sandwich from a convenience store, and sat eating it in his sterile little hotel room.

His phone was full of missed calls, but just like he hadn’t been able to get his tongue to form words at the restaurant, he couldn’t will his fingers to check the notifications, to see if any of them were from Nate. It wouldn’t matter if they were, anyway. Nate obviously wanted nothing to do with him.

It was all wrong. He’d imagined that he would come to London and reinvent himself, become someone that his daughter wouldn’t be ashamed of, someone she’d be excited to meet. Not some stammering nobody in a restaurant. Not some coward who ran away from the man he loved–yes, there was no other word for it, and he shouldn’t kid himself. He was in love with Nate. Even before he’d fallen, he’d known it was inevitable. Since that moment on the balcony, or maybe on the airplane, when Nate had comforted him with music about the evils of American society. He was in love with him, and he had left him, because he couldn’t stand the look of bewildered disappointment on his face. Jacopo had failed at so many things in his life, and now he was failing at his one grand dream, and he had no plans and was running out of money and if one of those jaunty double-decker buses swerved just right and knocked him into the Thames, he’d probably be thankful for it.

He stared down at his phone, not really seeing the screen. He could forget Lucia’s number, stay out of her life. His daughter would probably be better off without him, anyway. He could stay out of Nate’s life, too. He could crawl back to Italy and disappear, living a nondescript life somewhere in a nondescript town, andeverything would be the same as it had always been and he would still be trapped.

He had Lucia’s phone number memorized from that long-ago email. He’d tapped it into his phone too many times, never having the courage to actually press call.

This time, the floor seeming to drop away beneath his feet, he did.

18.

Jacopo almost hadn’t expected anybody to answer, and the sound of a voice saying, “Hello?” in English startled him so much that he nearly dropped the phone. White noise was buzzing in his ears, and he licked his lips, trying to speak.

“Hello?” the person on the other end repeated.

It was a woman, but he wasn’t even sure it was her, and panic flooded Jacopo’s chest as he wondered if he had the wrong number, after all, if there was no way to contact her and no way to make things right. His tongue felt numb, and he forced himself to ask, “Lucia?”

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