Flirting in Italian (10 page)

“I think you’re really rude,” I say angrily. “And superficial.”

Luca shrugs once again.

“I tell the truth,” he says. “
E la cosa più importante nel mondo
. The most important thing.”

“You can know what you
think
is the truth,” I snap, “but no one’s making you say it out loud.”

Like that Italian boys won’t fancy me
, I think bitterly.
He couldn’t have told me more clearly that he isn’t interested in me if he’d written it on a big sign and held it above his head
.

Luca leans toward me, an expression of intense interest on his face.

“So,” he starts slowly, “if I am thinking that I want to kiss you, I should not say it out loud?”

Oh, he’s completely messing with me now. Taunting me
. I feel tears of shame and rejection rise to my eyes.

“Please,”
I manage to say in as withering a tone as I can manage, “I thought you were all about telling the truth. And now you’re nothing but a big liar.”

His lashes lift as his eyes widen. His lips part and I watch, hypnotized now, as he says softly, so softly that I find myself tilting toward him to catch every word:

“Violetta,
cara mia
, you are wrong. I am not a liar.”

He doesn’t reach out to take hold of my shoulders, or take my hand to pull me in. He’s so sure of himself that he simply leans down, so close I can feel his breath scented with Prosecco warm on my face, for a split second, and then his lips meet mine.

His confidence is breathtaking; when I’ve been kissed in the past, the boys always touch you just as they’re about to do it, make sure you’re willing, put an arm around you, hold your hand. It gives them a moment’s grace, a few seconds of self-protection, so if they’ve misjudged the situation—if you pull away—they won’t be left standing there looking like a fool, with their head craning toward you and their lips pursed like one of those baby dolls he mentioned that blows kisses when you pull the string in its back.

Luca, however, doesn’t lay a finger on me. He simply kisses me. And not in a soft, tentative, exploratory way; his mouth is long and narrow, his lips hard and insistent. It’s not the kind of kiss I’m used to at all.

I lean in. My back arches, my head tilts up, and I meet his insistence with equal fervor. I can’t help it. You’d have to lasso me around the neck and yank me away to stop me from kissing him back. Even if this is some kind of awful joke, even if he’s kissing me to somehow lure me in and make a fool of me, I can’t help it.

Our lips part; our bodies are pressing together now. I’m really glad I’m wearing heels, even if they’re not that high;
Luca’s much taller than I am. And then I feel his hand in the small of my back, his fingers splayed out, lifting me toward him, and his other hand slides around my neck, tilting me up more. It’s the most incredibly intimate sensation I’ve ever felt; a spark flares up in the pit of my stomach, like the head of a match scratching along the rough powdered glass and phosphorus of a striking strip on a matchbook.

Ripping, tearing the flame into life. Not pretty, not romantic, not the kind of kiss you expect under the stars with white muslin curtains blowing in the distance. Not at all. Luca’s tongue is in my mouth, mine meeting his eagerly, so eagerly I’d be embarrassed if he weren’t dragging me to him now with a powerful flexing of his muscles. And I’m gripping his upper arms, feeling the biceps swell, long and lean, like tensile steel rather than the big plump muscles of more solidly built, sporty boys.

My brain is racing. It has to. If I stop thinking, I’ll be completely lost, overwhelmed with sensations I don’t know how to process. Right now, feeling Luca’s body all down the length of mine, his tongue warm and wet, all the excitement bursting up in me, all the emotions swirling around, plug right back into the kiss, making it more and more intense with every moment that passes. It’s as if we’re creating a cyclone around us, wrapping tighter and tighter, spinning us around with enough energy to lift us right off our feet.

I’m clinging to Luca not just to pull him closer, but for support now too: I don’t trust my ability to stand up on my own.

And that realization jolts me back to some sort of reality.

I’m in public, in a club in Florence, snogging a boy who I met only a couple of hours ago, so madly that I’m weak at the knees … in full view, if they looked over, of his friends and two girls I barely know.…

My eyes snap open, and I drag my mouth away from Luca’s, gasping for breath. I find my feet under me, pull back from him, and promptly grab the edge of the table to steady myself. My hair’s fallen down again; I can feel it tumbling down my back. My lips are wet. I raise a hand to wipe them dry, aware that my eyes are stretched wide with shock. I literally cannot believe what just happened. I feel like someone just gave me a violent electric shock.

Luca looks equally disheveled. His hair’s tumbling forward in straight black lines, his blue eyes wide, his lips redder from kissing me so hard. He looks as amazed as I am.

“Ammazzati,”
he mutters.

I’m still too close to him. I can feel the force field between us. I take another step back, still gripping the table’s edge, because I see his expression change unexpectedly. His blue eyes darken, and his mouth twists cynically.

“So,” he says, his tone sarcastic, almost bitter, “you are a success in Italy, Violetta.
Congratulazioni
. You spend only one day here and already you are kissed by a boy! Your friends will be envious.”

My blood boils. He’s making it sound as if I asked him to kiss me, as if I’m the kind of girl who would flirt with him and lead him on just so I could get a first notch on my belt, to score one up on Paige and Kendra and Kelly. I stare at him, furious, and then he raises his hands and claps his long clever fingers together, once, twice, as if he’s applauding me for getting kissed.
Against the odds, because, as he’s already
pointed out, Paige and Kendra are much more attractive to Italian boys than I am—

The clapping is insufferable, the last straw. He’s mocking me; he’s deliberately ruining everything that just happened between us. I don’t understand why, but it makes me so angry that, to my absolute amazement, my hand raises, my open palm slapping his cheek with more force than I even knew I had, a smack that seems to echo all around the bar.

We stare at each other for a moment, both of us in shock. I don’t say a word. I don’t trust myself to come up with anything sufficiently articulate. All I can do is swivel on my heel and walk away, toward the table where Paige and Kendra are sitting. It takes all the courage I have, because people are glancing our way; I don’t know how much they saw, but the noise I made slapping Luca has definitely attracted attention.

I’m cringing inside. I’ve never slapped anyone in my life. I didn’t know I was capable of it, and I hate that I just did it.

But if it happened all over again
, a voice in my head tells me,
you’d react just the same way. You’d slap him, you know you would
.

I’m startled by my own behavior. Luca brings out dark things in me I didn’t even know were there.

Stay away from him
, the voice advises, and if it wouldn’t make me look like a lunatic, I’d nod fervently in agreement.

“Hey!” Paige calls out, turning in her chair, wooden legs scraping on stone, boys jumping aside as she waves
enthusiastically at me; she’s a bit tipsy, her gestures even larger now. “You all danced out?”

I start to answer, but she’s already racing ahead eagerly:

“We thought we should maybe get going, ’cause it’s getting late, but we’ll stop and get some pizza on the way home.” She throws her arms wide, palms up. “Apparently they have pizza in Italy! Who knew?”

“Allora,”
Leonardo says, pushing back his chair and holding out his hand to Paige to help her get up. “We go to get pizza, yes? Because the pizza, we have it in Italy too!” He and Paige fall over each other, roaring with laughter.

“It was funny the first time,” Kendra says dryly to me. “But that was, like, a while ago.”

Still, Kendra looks like she’s had a really good evening too. She’s not tipsy or merry, like Paige, but she’s glowing, her skin luminous and plumped out by compliments. It’s obvious that the two American girls have been the belles of the ball tonight, surrounded by handsome Italian guys who’ve been competing for them, exactly as we all dreamed of spending our summer in Italy. Even as Kendra stands up, Andrea and two other guys jump to attention, jostling each other in their attempt to be closest to her. Kendra’s pretending not to care, but I can tell by the gleam in her eyes how much she’s loving it.

“So, you have a nice time with Luca?” says a sharp, high voice right behind me.

I turn to see Elisa.

“Luca likes to kiss the girls.” Elisa seems to be confiding, but also manages to smirk at the same time, which is sort
of impressive. “Many girls.
Molte ragazze
. Every summer, the foreign girls. Very many.”

Cold spreads across my rib cage as if she’s held an ice cube to my breastbone. But Elisa isn’t the first mean girl I’ve met in my life, and I’ve got plenty of experience dealing with them.

“Don’t be jealous!” I say, tilting my head to one side and giving her my best faux-sympathetic smile. “He’s free now.” I glance sideways and spy at Luca, who’s standing by the bar table, finishing his Prosecco as coolly as if he’s entirely unaffected by what just happened between us. “You could go over and see if he’ll kiss you. Though I warn you, I’m a hard act to follow.”

I spoke slowly and clearly, but I don’t know how much she understood; enough, anyway, to make her eyes and mouth narrow into slits.

“Stronza,”
she hisses, tossing her head and walking away, swaying like a giraffe on the impossibly spindly heels.

I shrug dismissively, and see that Ilaria, who’s been waiting a short distance away for Elisa to drip her poison into my ear, registers this gesture. They made enemies of us the moment they called us
“maiali,”
they declared hostilities first: I’ve lost nothing by showing Elisa that I can take her on and beat her at her own nasty game. It might have been nice to have made some friends with Italian girls, but they wouldn’t let us, so now they’ve made their beds and they can lie on them.

“Luca!” Leonardo calls as our group masses together and starts to move across the bar.
“Si va, eh? E ci si ferma per una fetta di pizza—abbiamo anche la pizza in Italia, sai!”

He cracks up, and Andrea does too: they’re clearly bringing Luca in on the whole “pizza in Italy” joke. I realize suddenly that Luca is our designated driver, and I stiffen at the thought of spending any more time in his company. But it’s such a bustle of activity as we stream out of the club, divide up into different cars, and head in a convoy through Florence, that there are always people between us. The boys at the table, Leonardo and Andrea’s friends, follow along, and Elisa and Ilaria are on the fringes too: when we pile out at the little open bar on a roundabout next to the Arno river, lights still twinkling over the bridges and along the riverbanks, there are at least fifteen of us, laughing and joking, a big jolly group. I make sure I’m close to Paige and Kendra. I do notice ruefully that Luca’s right: the boys surrounding them barely pay any attention to me. They’re too busy calling “Payyge! Kain-dra!” and teaching the girls Italian words, teasing them at their pronunciation, showing off their own basic English.

Luca, as seems to be his way, stands off to the side watching the show, propping his shoulders against the side of the bar, drinking an espresso. I don’t look at him. I don’t want to feel the rush of emotions that will come if I accidentally meet his eyes. I concentrate on eating my slice of Margherita pizza, greasy and delicious, which really hits the spot.

It’s great, too, to have something to do with my hands. I take small elegant bites so I don’t look like the pig Elisa called us. By the time I’ve polished it off, taken a handful of napkins from the dispenser, and wiped my hands clean, we’re all piling back into the cars again. An enthusiastic peck on each cheek from the boys, European-style, which
adds up to more kisses from boys in this one night than in the whole rest of my life to date, one sparkling-eyed, dark-haired, floppy-fringed boy after another leaning in to kiss me in a waft of pizza breath and aftershave, even if I am the also-ran in the Hot Foreign Girl stakes.

Luca’s already in the driver’s seat, and the atmosphere is so boisterous as he starts up the car that I don’t have to say a word to him. The car twists and turns up a sweeping, majestic avenue lined with overarching cedar trees, which opens out into a huge square overlooking Florence, with the dome of the Duomo terra-cotta against the night sky, glimpses of the Arno river twisting through the city. A stunning statue of David is lit up in the center of the square, making all of us girls exclaim in surprise, oohing and aahing in wonderment.

“How romantic!” Paige sighs, seeing the dark shapes of entwined couples leaning on the stone balustrade at the far side of the piazza, looking down at the panorama below. “
Super-
romantic!”