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Dario looked at me with a flash of irritation.
I wondered if I’d overstepped – but I figured our friendship wasn’t worth much if I couldn’t speak my mind.
“Innocent, but makes your blood ‘run hot,’” I continued. “Tits and ass and a lovely face, but loyal and kind – and loves her family above everything else. A good girl and a bad girl. A virgin and a whore.”
He glared at me… then broke into a rueful smile and shook his finger at me jokingly. “You need to stop calling me out on my shit. I don’t like it.”
I pointed at the wall: Get back to your training.
He sighed and started punching the wall again. “And I should have never agreed to teach you Italian. It makes it that much worse to hear all my faults in my native tongue.”
“Well, there’s a simple solution.”
“What’s that,” he said drily.
“Avoid the type of woman you dated in the past, and start looking for the ones you say you want.”
“That’s the problem: I don’t run into many good women in the circles I travel in.”
“Maybe you’ve just been looking in the wrong places.”
“I know I’ve been looking in the wrong places. Nightclubs… strip clubs… Ibiza…”
“Sounds like you need to go to church more often.”
He burst out laughing. “We’re in Italy, my friend. Even the women I’ve been dating go to church. I don’t, so I think that’s the wrong place to look. And even if it was the right place to look, there’s still one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“There was an old American actor named Groucho Marx. Ever heard of him?”
“Sure – the Marx brothers. Guy with the glasses and cigar.”
“That’s the one. He had a saying: ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.’ That more or less sums up my situation.”
“These women you say you want – why wouldn’t they want you?”
Dario gave me a sad smile, one that implied there was something he couldn’t tell me. “Let’s just say I have a past that any good woman would want no part of.”
I was about to ask him more when he turned the interrogation back on me.
“What about you? Is there a good woman on the outside waiting for you?”
I immediately felt depressed as I thought about Rachel. “She’s a good woman, yes… but I don’t know if she’ll wait.”
“Does she love you?”
“Yes.”
“And do you love her?”
“Absolutely.”
Dario stopped punching the wall and looked at me searchingly. “Is she – ”
And he used a phrase I didn’t understand.
“Say that again?”
