He leans back against the wall, which makes his wet golden muscles stand out starkly in all their solid glory, like they’re yelling adore me! I’m beautiful! You want to touch me!
“You haven’t,” he says.
“One problem at a time, and the first problem is that your grandmother’s sneaking up the stairs to listen in on us.” She’s not, so far as I can tell, but I need to get control of this conversation before I lose my brain and ask Luca to marry me. “Also, is this a one-bathroom house? Why do you live in a one-bathroom house? And is she going to stay here? Or is she only threatening to so she can make sure that we’re dating?”
He leaps to work, throwing all of my clothes into my suitcase, and when he touches my panties, the pair I’m wearing gets wet.
And now all of me is officially soaked.
I breathe through it, because this is okay.
He’s right.
I should learn how to have casual sex.
Maybe that can be a lesson for after I break up with him. That’s how it has to go to satisfy his grandmother, right?
This can’t be his fault.
It can’t be even remotely close to his fault, which means not only do I have to break up with him, I have to have the reason above all reasons to break up with him.
I’m going to have to tell TikTok Nonna that I’ve discovered I’m supposed to become a nun.
I can’t use the kidnapped by a rockstar trope, or the found out I’m expecting another man’s baby trope, because in both cases, Luca, as my doting boyfriend, would come to my rescue and take my surprise baby as his own, except, surprise!, there wouldn’t actually be a baby. If we do the failed friends-to-lovers thing, he gets in trouble for not trying harder. Neither of us can develop amnesia, because if it’s him, his nonna won’t believe it, and if it’s me, The Eye would dictate that Luca nurse me through it.
The only way Luca gets forgiveness from his grandmother and a delay of The Eye is if I discover I’m supposed to be a nun.
Also? That’s so cool that he has a grandmother who gives The Eye.
“Are you going to help me?” he hisses.
Oh, crap. He caught me ogling his ass again. “I’ll get Confucius.”
“No.”
“But he’s my muse.”
“He’s not going in my bedroom.”
We lock eyes as I process exactly what he said.
I’m moving into Luca Rossi’s bedroom.
I’m moving into Luca Rossi’s bedroom.
Possibly I hadn’t thought this all the way through.
Possibly he hadn’t either.
“Do you have two beds?”
“What is this? A fifties sitcom? No, I don’t have two beds.”
“So we’ll take turns sleeping on the floor?”
“Don’t be a ninny, Henri.”
“Did you just call me a ninny?”
“You’re the one who wants two beds.”
Uh-oh.
Have I misjudged this? Was he glad I didn’t marry Jerry? Did he stay with me all grumpy-pants at the lake after my not-wedding because he likes me?
Does he not hate love?
Impossible. I’m good at reading between the lines, and my research confirmed he is so not the commitment type.
I read an interview he gave one time talking about how much it shaped him when his parents got divorced.
Weird how his parents’ divorce led to him never wanting love, while my parents’ divorce basically drove me to being a romance novelist and getting addicted to it.
I shove my laptop into its case and lower my voice to a whisper. “You don’t want to have sex with me, and I’m not falling for any implications that you do, because I know you’re doing it to scare me off.”
“Don’t I? Do you just lay there? Do you have a third nipple that’s super distracting? A birthmark in the shape of a poomoji? Would you call me another guy’s name when you come?”
“No. I mean, that’s for me to know and you to not find out.”
“Nonna expects to hear us having sex, probably often, from now until the end of the season. And she’s going to expect us to shower together. And she’s going to expect to walk into the kitchen and interrupt you giving me a blow job.”
“Oh my god. You—you’re—you’re trying to get free sex out of me.”
He yanks my suitcase off the bed, straightens, and glares at me.
I risk a glance down south, and what does it say about me that I’m disappointed at the lack of Mr. Woody?
Actually, what does it say about him that he can talk about sex with me without getting even the teensiest bit of a rise going?
Does he have some kind of erectile dysfunction?
Is he tiny?
Or is he honestly not at all attracted to me?
Yeah. I know.
He’s not at all attracted to me.
Which should be a good thing.
Right?
Because the point is to not fall in love.
I square my shoulders and nod to him. “I agree to your terms. We’ll fake this relationship until your season is over. We’ll sleep in the same bed. Make noises like we’re having sex. We can shower together, because we’re adults, and it’s not like we’ve never seen naked bodies of the opposite sex before. But I’ll have to draw the line at the blow job.”
His cheek twitches. “Great.”
“Great.”
We stare at each other.
We’d probably stare longer, except at that exact moment, the smoke alarms go off.
7
Luca
As if it’s not bad enough that I’m not scaring Henri away by making her think I want to have sex with her, now my house is burning down.
I race downstairs to find Nonna fanning the open oven with a hot pad while flames shoot out of the ziti.
“Your oven is possessed, Luca Antonio! I told you this house was a bad idea.”
I dive for the sink again, trip over Henri’s cat, which is playing the role of a soaked floormat—and I’ll wonder later at the weirdness that’s a cat that seems to enjoy being wet—and I catch myself on the counter before I end up having to explain to the coaching staff that I can’t play today because I gave myself a concussion while trying to leap over a bunny-cat to put out a fire.
Henri and I are having a talk immediately after this about where her cat is allowed to go in this house.
No, we’re having a talk immediately about her and her cat leaving as soon as Nonna does.
I fling open the cabinet under the sink, grab the fire extinguisher, jump back up, shove Nonna out of the way, and I commit the biggest sin of my life.
I destroy the fuck out of her flaming ziti.
Undercooked ziti?
We eat it.
Burnt ziti?
We eat it.
Ziti accidentally made with salsa instead of marinara because Nonna refuses to acknowledge that she grabbed an old pair of reading glasses that aren’t strong enough anymore?
We eat it—and then we throw away the reading glasses when she’s not looking and blame it on my cousin Angie’s dog.
Ziti covered in whatever this chemical shit is that comes out of a fire extinguisher?
No way.
Not even for the sake of The Eye.
Heat courses down the back of my neck, and it has nothing to do with the fire I extinguished, and nothing to do with living in a house lacking air conditioning in August, and nothing to do with anything other than the ooooooh, fuuuuuuuck on the tip of my tongue.