She sighed, flipping through messages on her phone. “Yeah, it’s not great. The volunteers, well you know, they make or break a job sometimes. Especially with tight funding. We moved someone else down there to pick up some of the slack, but now we’re short someone to replaster some of the Romanesque vases that we found.”
“I like plaster.”
“You like plaster?” she repeated, confused.
I nearly bit my lip to take back what I’d said, but then I thought about it. The instinct was right, I had the training, why couldn’t I help out? “I’ve got experience. I mean, as recently as a few years ago at least. And it’s in exactly this kind of work, restoring Romanesque vases.”
She was quiet for a minute, wheels turning. “You’re serious. Oh my God, you’re serious? This is the best!” She catapulted her lanky body and landed on me, squeezing my neck. “It’s nothing major—not that you couldn’t totally handle major, but it’s just a vase. Well, vases, as in plural. This is kick ass; you know that, right? We can go to work together. You can . . . oh—”
“Oh what? Oh no or oh yes? Let’s still focus on the yes!”
She pulled away, sitting back on her haunches with her phone clutched in her hand. “It’s at my office. We’ve got a restoration studio there and . . .”
“And?” I said, not seeing a problem with me coming to volunteer some time in her office and . . . oh.
“Marcello,” we said together.
She shook her head like crazy after thinking a minute. “You know what? I’ll talk to him tomorrow. It’ll be fine. The work area is on the first floor and he’s way up on five, you’d hardly even run into each other. Maybe. Probably.”
I nodded, not feeling at all as hopeful and excited as I was a minute ago. Would this work? Would he be okay with this? The idea of helping out in my field, even in a small way, was an exciting prospect. Something that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Back home in Boston, whenever I thought about what I was missing out on by choosing to stay at home and not work in my field, I bottled it up. It didn’t matter that I was good, really good, at what I’d studied, what I’d worked toward all those years. I’d made a choice, and when I made that choice I knew full well what I was deciding.
But still . . . the instinct lingered. I’d been in Rome twenty-four hours and I was throwing my hat into the Romanesque vase ring without a second thought because it just felt right. Even just to volunteer, it was something.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Daisy scrambled off the bed and dashed back into the other room, snapping me back from my own thoughts. When she returned, she looked very proud of herself. “I brought you some coffee to go with your pastry. I wanted you good and sugared up for the rest of the story.”
“The story?” I asked, taking the coffee and giving it a taste test. Mmm . . .
“The story, she asks,” she said to herself, rolling her eyes. “The story! You! Marcello! The Love That Ate Barcelona! I gotta hear the rest!”
I laughed in spite of myself, glad she was getting such a kick out of my long-ago love affair. “Sure, sure, that story. Where’d I stop?”
“Park Güell. Good-looking Italian. Naive yet attractive American. Never told a soul even though her best friend is awesome. Comes home for a job.”
“That was succinct.”
“Yeah, but you left out all the good stuff, all the in-between. Gimme that part.” She tucked her legs underneath her and got comfortable. There was no way I was getting out of this.
But I found that in the light of day, sitting here with a great cup of a coffee and a ridiculously good pastry, I wanted to tell the rest of this story. Give it some air and some light and see if it was as bad as I remembered it. Well, only the ending was bad. Everything leading up to that had been . . .
“It was fucking magic. Daisy, I can barely describe it, it was just . . . God it was good.”
“Now when you say fucking magic, I assume you mean that the fucking was magic?” She mimed a finger going very specifically into a hole conveniently created by two other fingers, then was quite surprised when a pillow hit her smack in the face. Peeking up over the edge, she blinked. “Too soon?”
“Promise me never to do that again with your fingers and I’ll promise never to hit you again with a pillow. And no, not too soon. And yes”—I covered my face with my hands, knowing I must have been blushing every shade of red—“the fucking was magic.”
“I knew it!” she cried, kicking up her heels. “I always knew that man had to be killer in the sack; just look at him! I mean, I’m not interested in him, we’ve only ever been just friends, but come on! You just know a guy that looks like that knows how to hit it!”
“Oh he hit it,” I admitted, still blushing, but determined to give Marcello his due. “I mean, I’d only been with Daniel, who was always quite nice in bed, you know, but this guy. This guy was . . .” I paused, trying to put it into words.
“What, what? This guy was what? Huge? Awesome? A freak? What?”
This. This is what was missing last time. I never got to squeal and scream and laugh and giggle over Marcello with my girlfriends because as far as my girlfriends were concerned, he never existed. Somehow, getting to talk about this now even all these years later reminded me that what had happened was real, it was tangible.
But how could I describe Marcello in bed? I’d need hours to recount all the wonderfully filthy things he’d done to me, and encouraged me to do to him. How he’d made me gasp, moan, groan, and cry . . . all in the same moment.