Page 59 of A Winter in New York

“Tell me I’m nothing like him.”

Gio is behind me, he must have ducked into the kitchen for something. His fingers curve around my hip, and he quietly tugs me into the kitchen and closes the door.

“Are you okay?” I say, touching his face. “That must have been a shock for you.”

“He always does that. Appears out of thin air like a genie out of a bottle.” He shakes his head, a resigned lift of his brows as he puts his hand against the door over my shoulder and leans into me.

“I’m so glad you’re here,cucchiaino,” he whispers.

The term of endearment takes me back to our first night together upstairs, to the movie, to the rooftop, to his bed. I stand on tiptoe to kiss him and straightaway it’s how it always is between us, a lit fuse on dynamite. He takes it up a notch further, urgent, trying to escape the reality happening on the other side of the door.

“We should stop,” I say, wishing with every fiber of my being that we didn’t have to.

He rests his forehead on mine. “I know. I just needed to be with you for a moment.”

“I have a lot of moments like that,” I say, unguarded, and he pulls his head back and looks me in the eyes. He doesn’tsay anything, just cups my face and strokes his thumb over my cheek. I look at him, and he looks at me, and there in the kitchen with his entire family on the other side of the door, we say things with our eyes that we can’t say with our mouths. His breath fans my lips as I silently tell him of the darkness I hold inside me, and his heart beats beneath my palm as his eyes tell me he longs for me, for the magic that happens when we touch.

“Better now?” I say.

He nods. “Better now.”

I busy myself covering the half-eaten cake while he heads back through to the party, and after a few calming minutes I slip back in there and find myself collared by Sophia.

“Iris, come meet my rock-star uncle,” she says, limoncello-tipsy.

I nod and paint on a wide smile. “Hello,” I say, sticking my hand out for something to do and immediately wishing I hadn’t.

He studies my hand for a few seconds, surprised, and then shakes it because it would be rude not to. He locks eyes with me and I feel his handshake slow and see his brow furrow.

“Have we met before?” he says, his head on one side.

I shake my head. “I don’t think so,” I say, hoping it’s not a lie. I was a toddler when my mother moved us to London from L.A., and I don’t know if she ever saw Felipe Belotti in the interim years. Not that he’d recognize me personally, of course, but there are echoes of my mother all over my face.

I’m glad Sophia has had enough champagne to not think anything of the slightly odd exchange, and Pascal looms with booze to top up everyone’s glass. I use the distraction to moveaway, gathering my jacket from the coat stand. I can’t see Gio anywhere, so I take one last glance around and let myself quietly out into the crisp, cold night air on Mulberry Street.

Hey you, have called it a night before Pascal can catch me again with that limoncello, I can already feel it going to my head. Call me later when things have calmed down. Xx

It’s a lame excuse to not say goodbye but the best I can come up with as I walk briskly away from the gelateria, safer with every step I put between me and Felipe Belotti.

25.

“What am I going todo, Smirnoff?”

The cat was waiting for me on the noodle house step, a grumpy doorman in need of tuna to restore his mood. He’s now well fed and sitting on my windowsill giving his paws the once-over, thoroughly disinterested in my conversation.

“The thing is, I don’t know if Felipe is going to realize why he thinks we might have met before.”

I have my mother’s scrapbook open on my knees, a monochrome shot of a young Felipe back-to-back with my mother onstage, electric guitar slung across his body, microphone in her raised hand. Her head is tipped back on his shoulder, her mouth open mid-song. She’s in a black vest and jeans, he’s in faded jeans and a sweat dampened T-shirt, tattoos running riot down his arms, a joint behind his ear. It looks like an eighties album cover. Her hair is cut in choppy bangs not unlike mine, her profile so similar to my own. She’s probably nineteen or so, frighteningly young now I have Bella to compare against, as close to a child as a woman. She fell pregnant within a year of this photo, and there’s a whole swathe of her life I know barely anything about. I close the album and put my hands on it, my guts churning with anxiety. There’s only one thing I can think of to help my mood right now, mychildish fail-safe. It’s turned ten already and my gelato machine takes a while, but even the action of loading the ingredients is soothing.

I jump when my cellphone pings.

Midnight gelato date?

I sigh with relief. Bobby.

You have the ears of a bat.

He sends me back a string of emojis, bats and ice creams and love hearts, and I pull the two pink melamine bowls from the back of the cupboard and line them up in readiness.

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