Without letting go of my hand, he said, “To avoid any other misunderstanding, I want you to know that even if I said I’d borrow this, I’m not giving it back to you. Like, ever.”
That made me chuckle. “Yeah, that’s pretty much how it works back home too.”
“But,” he continued, “you and your family are more than welcome to come tonight. Actually, I might be offended if you don’t.”
My mouth fell open. I think I forgot how to speak for a moment. “I… I don’t know, I’d feel really out of place.”
“Nobody is out of place when it comes to eating. Seriously, we’ve invited half the town and the other half is coming anyways. We grill the meat and everybody else brings a different dish. Oh, the Germans from the house down there will come too.”
I had literally no idea there were Germans in the “house down there,” and I really didn’t know why I should care. He must have read that on my face, because he added, “They speak English.”
“Oh.”
“Trust me,” he said in an awfully warm tone of voice. His hand tightened around mine. “It’ll be fun.”
ROBERTO
Twenty-two messages in one hour. For being too busy to come home with me, Luca sure had a lot of free time. I knew I should reply to him, but I didn’t feel like spending all my precious vacation texting; I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I quickly scrolled through the messages, just to be sure none of them said anything that was actually important, and then I settled to reply only to the last one. “I miss you,” the text said. I braced myself and typed the words, “I miss you too” and then deleted them. Instead I wrote, “I’ll call you soon” and hit the send button. Both were lies, but the latter was a tiny bit less of a lie. I did plan to call him. Eventually.
Luca was my boyfriend of two years. After fooling around for years when I was a university student, as soon as I found a job, I decided it was time for me to look for a stable relationship. I had experimented, had fun and tried everything I wanted to try. I felt it was just time to settle down, and Luca was perfect for me. We met in 2015 at a Madonna concert in Turin and started out as friends. We liked the same things: books, movies and, obviously, blonde popstars. Our relationship was never too passionate – none of my relationships ever were – but we were fine. It worked. We moved in together after just a few months, as if it was the natural outcome of us dating. It was convenient since his house was closer to my workplace than my own, and it was bigger as well. Why spend hours driving to the other end of the city when we could just both go home and spend time together there? It was almost a matter of surviving; especially when you live in Milan, which during rush hour is basically a gray jungle covered in smog.
Living with Luca was simple, maybe because we were two perfectly complementary stereotypes of a Southerner and a Northerner. I cooked and he cleaned. I drank and he drove. I spent money and he saved up. I teased and he rolled his eyes. But every time I kissed him, he kissed me back. My life with Luca was very domestic and normal, and I had had no doubt in taking him home to spend Christmas with my family, especially when I found out his relationship with his parents was close to nonexistent.
I’ll never forget my parents’ faces when they met him. In South Italy, taking a partner home is something big. It means “I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this person.” That’s kind of old-fashioned, and a lot of couples split up anyway even after the introductions have been made, but that’s not the way it should be. The rule, if that’s what it can be called, is that you’ll marry the person you bring home. Because once they set foot in your house, eat with your parents and sleep under your roof, they become part of the family.
When Mom saw Luca for the first time, she was beyond excited. She couldn’t believe there was someone willing to settle down with me. It was probably because none of my relationships ever lasted more than a few weeks, since I was a teenager. I always had tons of friends and never had problems finding a date, but somehow, I couldn’t get them to stick around.
My cousin and best friend, Francesco, once told me that I wanted too much, which I didn’t believe was the truth. I never asked for more than what my partners were willing to give me. If they ever lamented something, it was actually that I didn’t want enough. Often I heard things like, “Are you sure you don’t care if I do this?” or “I hoped you’d tell me no,” or again, “I’m not sure that you care.” Sometimes it almost felt like they wanted me to be jealous.
I never understood jealousy, and I have no idea how some people find it attractive; denying freedom to the person you are supposed to love doesn’t really make sense, does it?
Luca wasn’t jealous of me and didn’t complain that I wasn’t jealous of him. I always thought that’s why we’d make it work. Before things turned weird between us.
Last February he changed jobs and started working in shifts, so the time we spent together was quickly reduced to less than an hour a day. After a little while, I realized I enjoyed spending that time alone. I didn’t feel the need to tell him about my day, and he didn’t ask. When I asked about his job, I was bored by his answers. Even sex turned out to be nothing more than a habit; we did it because we needed to and were supposed to, and it was good. Not exceptionally good, but good enough. We were barely enough.
Suddenly I found myself thinking, Do I have to live like this for the rest of my life?
With the excuse of coming to my hometown for a cousin’s wedding, I invited him to stay here with me for the whole summer break, hoping this would help us refresh our feelings a little, but Luca said he’d rather stay in Milan and work, and maybe take a vacation later on.
I didn’t really mind, but at the same time I thought I could use these few weeks of vacation to reflect on our relationship. When I told him, we had an ugly fight. Luca accused me of not caring enough, of wanting to ruin everything.
The story of my life, basically.
That ridiculous scene only made my doubts grow. I tried to calm him down, and in the end, I asked him to give me some time to think about our future. I would have asked for some space as well, had I known he’d end up texting me every five minutes.
“So, are they coming tonight?” Mom asked me, bringing me back to Earth.
“Who?” I said, blinking my eyes a couple of times.
“The Americans,” she remarked, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was funny how Mom and her friends were fascinated by our new neighbors; they’d talk about them, wonder what their life was like, and then they’d get too scared to get to know them.
“Yes, I think so,” I told her. “That boy was really nice to me. I think you misjudged them, Ma.”
She looked at me silently and went to the kitchen.
“You must be blind,” my brother Marco told me quietly, while diving his face into a huge slice of watermelon. He had been so silent this whole time, I had almost forgotten he was there. “That guy clearly has a crush on you.”
Marco’s passion for gossip reminded me of Mom’s. Considering the age gap between us, we had never been too close, but recently I barely recognized him as my little brother. Since I had moved to Milan, he had grown a lot and seeing him only for Christmas and in the summer wasn’t helping our relationship. Now, in particular, I wasn’t expecting him to comment on James and his supposed crush on me.