Page 11 of Slow Burn
I smiled to myself. I knew all mothers thought their sons were special, but it still felt good to hear it. It warmed my heart that somebody – even if it was my mother – could see positive attributes in me that had nothing to do with the way I looked, or even the way I danced.
‘What are you doing for your birthday?’ she asked. ‘Something with friends? You don’t have a girlfriend to tell me about yet, my love?’
I’d reached Covent Garden tube and stood outside, watching the tourists, the gaudily decorated tuk-tuks and the shoppers out with friends, and I felt quite alone. Everybody had somewhere to go, someone to be with. This was why dance had saved me – the dance company would be like my family for the next nine weeks, but then they would be gone, leaving me with nothing and nobody. Again.
‘Working, Mama,’ I said. ‘But that is what I do best.’
‘But there is life outside of dance, Gabriele, and you must not forget this. Ah, here is your father. He wants to speak to you.’
I suppressed a sigh, not because I didn’t want to speak to my father, but because it always left me in a strange mood when I did and I was already on the verge of feeling depressed. This is what birthdays did to me.
‘Fine, put him on,’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
There was a rustle on the other end of the line. I heard my father clearing his throat.
‘Gabi?’ he said. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘Grazie, Papa,’ I replied. ‘How are you? How is the farm? Business good at the vineyard?’
‘Busy. We will have to employ more staff this summer, there is so much to do,’ he said.
The familiar feeling of having disappointed my father surged through my body, as it always did when I thought about the family business. In his mind, I should be there in Tuscany now, helping him make and sell wine, not travelling the world doingthis, a job he’d never fully understood or wanted for me.
‘I do need to speak to you, Gabi,’ he said. ‘About things here, about my plans for the future.’
I tried to laugh it off. ‘Okay, but this sounds serious. Can we not do this today, on my birthday, of all days?’
May as well use the birthday excuse.
‘Then when?’ he hissed.
I felt the stirrings of panic.
‘You are not the only one getting older,’ he said. ‘Soon I will not be able to put in so many hours at the vineyard. As my only son, you should be here, taking over. Remember it will be left to you when I am no longer here. Don’t you want to know how things run? Don’t you want to support the family business that has paid for your schooling, for your dance lessons?’
‘Papa, I—’
I heard a tussle on the other end of the line, my mother’s voice. She was scolding my father, telling him not to upset me on my birthday, berating him in his own language, Italian.
‘Gabi?’ said Mama. ‘Do not listen to him today. Now go and have fun on your birthday, yes? Promise me?’
‘I promise,’ I said.
Although having fun was a promise I was not convinced I could keep.
CHAPTER FIVELira
Jack and I had had an arrangement, if that’s what you could call it, for the last year or so, since I’d paid for a course of actual personal training sessions with him at the swanky and extortionately priced local gym I’d signed up to because I could feel my body changing as I got further into my thirties, and not for the better. Of course, I didn’t have the pressure of being a dancer anymore – I wasn’t competing or on tour, because if I was, that would have come with a much more urgent need to be at my fittest and to look at my absolute best. But how my body worked, how strong it felt – it was still important to me. And Jack had pushed me to my absolute limits during our training sessions, which I’d whined and moaned about at the time, of course, but once I started seeing results, it had all seemed worth the effort.
Then one day, after a particularly intense session, we’d ended up having sex up against the lockers in the men’s changing rooms. It had all been so out of the blue that I hadn’t even had time to worry about what would have happened if somebody walked in and saw us. Since then, our PT sessions had morphed into sessions of another kind, which I had to say were ten times more enjoyable than pounding it out on the treadmill for forty-five minutes straight.
I knocked on his office door – he was the gym floor manager now, so he spent less time training clients and more time doing admin, which made it believable, I supposed, that I’d need to see him in his office for an extended period of time. According to Jack, nobody had ever questioned why, occasionally, we’d spend half an hour in there with his door locked, although, to be honest, I preferred it when we met at his flat. He’d even been to mine once, when my parents had been away and I knew there was no way either of my sisters would pop in unannounced.
‘Come in!’ called Jack.
I pushed open the door, closing it behind me. He was perched on the edge of his desk, wearing racing green gym shorts – and they wereshort– and a white polo shirt that made him look like he’d just come off the rugby pitch. His blonde hair was short at the sides and longer on top, and when he reached out his hand I already knew to lock the door behind me – no point in taking chances.
‘Come here,’ he said softly.
