Authors: Maxim Jakubowski

I Was Waiting For You (20 page)

BOOK: I Was Waiting For You

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Jack studied the map carefully and found her street. He drove off downwards in its direction.

Via Luigi Credaro was a cul-de-sac and a small supermarket occupied the ground floor of the apartment building where she had returned to live with her parents. He managed to park a hundred metres away on the opposite side of the road.

Though he had never been here, he seemed to remember Giulia saying that the family's apartment occupied the top two floors of the building. Did her bedroom overlook the street, or was it on another side of the building facing the hills or another part of the city?

So, this was where she had mostly grown up, apart from those years in the country when she had commuted to school in the city by train. It felt strange being here. He kept his eye on the door to the building; the supermarket was now open and customers trickled in and out.

Jack opened the glove compartment and took out the gun and placed it between his thighs on the car seat. He'd never fired a gun in his life, let alone owned one. But he had read enough books and articles and knew the basics â the safety, the calibre, the damage it could invariably cause.

I'm crazy, totally crazy, he thought. He'd been in love before, of course, but never had he been so obsessed by a woman, a girl, or missed her so much. Without her, he had sadly realised, he was nothing.

However much he knew that things could never have worked out between them after the initial yearlong honeymoon of covert meetings and fiery fucks in forbidden placesand foreign cities, Jack still couldn't give up on her totally, admit defeat, let her, and him, get on with their respective lives. She was younger. She still had a life â
adventures
, as she'd so often put it â ahead of her. Even after whatever she might have done since Paris and that other older man. He didn't. Not without her.

It was a few weeks before when he had been researching for some still unfinished story that he had stumbled across a pornographic website replete with photos actually submitted by non-professionals; openly voyeuristic images of nudity, both simple and extreme, and of couples enjoying sexual intercourse. He had distractedly spent a quarter of an hour surfing through the images and noting the monotonous repetition of positions and angles, when he had come across a series of eight shots in which the woman's face was always out of the frame but her opulent white arse stood front and centre, her wet, pink gash circled by unruly black curls, fully exposed along with the puckered, darker areola of her back door. The young woman was on her knees, her rear right in the camera's face. From image to image the arse came nearer and nearer to the fore and in the final three photographs a resplendently thick and hard penis took aim at the woman's cunt and was then seen entering it, finally ending deeply embedded in it up to the ball sack.

He had of course seen a thousand photographs of this kind before, but this time the shape, the colour, the details of the woman's arse recalled Giulia's in indelible resemblance. Jack had been violently sick, rushing to the bathroom and spewing out all the contents of his stomach over the carpet long before reaching the safety of the ceramic bowl. It had been like a knife to his heart. Naturally, Jack knew there could be no way she had not moved on to other men after him and the sad episode with the dead man in Paris in the years following their break-up, and since when do women in their twenties have to act as nuns? But somehow the images on his laptop had brought it all home, the sheer reality of another man fucking her, owning her, playing with her and, worse, getting her to allow him to even broadcast photographs of their terrible intimacy across the web.

A few hours later, he had hesitantly peered at the photographs again and realised it wasn't her, couldn't actually be her. A few meshes of the woman's hair were in the frame of one of the images and the shade was assuredly not hers; also, there was also a distinctive mole absent in a familiar area of her lunar landscape, he discovered, to his relief. But the scar was still there. Inside Jack. Who was she with now? Who did she love now, she who had once loved him?

The door to the building opened and a woman walked out, plump, dark-haired, almost a vision of what Giulia might look like twenty years later. Her mother? Would Giulia also age badly and put on so much weight around her waist and backside?

The heat of the day hammered against the parked car, but Jack couldn't switch the air-conditioning on or the battery would rapidly go flat.

Was she now alone in her roomin the large two-floor apartment?

Or maybe she was now in a small hotel room by Lake Bracciano, being ploughed by another man? It had been, after all, she who had once discovered that hideaway.

Enough. Enough.

I am sick. I am sick.

Sick enough to climb the stairs to the apartment, ring the bell, confront her when she opened the door and brandish the gun?
If you can't be mine, you can't be anyone else's â¦
? The pitiful stuff of tabloid journalism. Come on!

He could sit here all day and not see her, he realised. And even if she did emerge, what would he thendo? Follow her? Stalk her? He'd lose her in traffic most likely.

In her anger, when he would refuse to let her go and beg for a last meeting, a final embrace, a penultimate conversation, she would always fire back that he had no respect for her and could not accept what she felt. She had these crazy ideas about respect, but he understood what she meant.

In a letter, one of so many, too many, he had written that loving her was also knowing when to let her go, but it was a precept he had proven incapable of adhering to.Â

What the fuck was he doing in Rome? What the hell was he doing with a gun?

There was just no way he could kill her. Let alone a sensible reason â¦

Damn.

Jack drove off, found the highway that led out of town, past the desolate and empty market place where the whores were said to congregate at night like in a Fellini movie, sped past the RAI buildings and into the countryside.

The sky was blue.

Maybe he could find peace after all.

There was a junction with a road that led to Lake Bracciano and Trevignano. He sighed and drove past it, his mind assaulted by more memories of nearby hotel rooms where they had made love and had once been unbearably happy. Watching her emerge from the shower, her wet, unfurled hair hanging all the way down her back. Jack putting that cheap necklace around her throat. His final gift.

The next turnoff was for the medieval town of Calcata. He was just over forty kilometres from the city, in the Parco Treja Tuscia region. Here, behind the high, fortified ramparts in a small stone house, where the February cold had chilled their bones to the marrow and forced them to spend almost two whole days in bed â talking non stop between the tender fucking, learning about each other, getting accustomed to the taste of each other, growing bolder with mind and body and plunging headfirst into transgressionâ he had moved inside her for the first time and fallen in love with her. For ever.

Calcata looked the same. In all likelihood it had not changed in a few hundred years. Once abandoned, the small town had been repopulated several decades ago by hippies and was now turning into a historical arts centre, with medieval summer houses for rich Romans, artists or visiting lovers, art galleries and a handful of tiny country restaurants. The whole town, whose population still didn't number more than nine hundred people normally, was built on a hilltop of volcanic rock.

He parked the rented blue Fiat outside the ramparts and walked up the stone street into the town, past the arches and fortifications.

The small cottage where they had frozen and spent a whole thirty-six hours all that time ago was still there. He wondered what sort of couple was now inside in that unforgettable bedroom you could only access through a shaky wooden ladder (aaahhhh, the vision of her climbing those stairs, stark naked, his eyes looking straight at the voluptuous and bouncing flesh of her arse as he ascended behind her, his cock hard and ready, his mind aglow with tenderness and desire â¦).

Jack walked past the steep stone steps leading to his forgotten paradise and ventured past narrow alleys, closed craft shops and freshly washed clothes hanging loose from windows until he reached the narrow promontory that dominated the valley below.

The view was quite beautiful, rugged, untamed. In the distance, forests dominated the far landscape, but below the damaged stone walls protecting this side of Calcata was a lunar expanse of rocks as far as the eye could see.

Jack sighed.

Best remember the good times.

When she smiled at him and her eyes expressed a million things unsaid.

He pulled that silly gun from the plastic bag and hurled it into the gaping void. It fell in a large arc and it felt like almost a minute before he saw it actually hit the ground some five hundred metres below. It didn't go off. He had left the safety catch on. No need to draw attention to himself even though there didn't appear to be a soul for a mile around.

He closed his eyes.

“
My sweetie
,” she would call him.

He took a deep breath.

“
My wild gypsy,
” he would often say to her.

Jack pulled his left leg over the wall, raised himself energetically so that he now stood on the edge of the precipice.

Looked down one final time.

Those fierce and distant rocks should do the job, he reckoned.

And jumped.

Sex in the City Range
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski