I drag my gaze away from where it can’t help resting on her mouth and try to stop myself thinking about how when she moistened her lips just now I got just a glimpse of her teeth, and imagined her biting her lip. I force myself to think instead about the architecture surrounding us.
‘That’s a very gothic-looking building.’ I point.
Emma doesn’t hear me immediately; she was definitely thinking about something else.
‘Building?’ she echoes.
‘Building,’ I say, extremely firmly. ‘And I read earlier that there’s a legendary bronze fountain of a boar near here.’
Emma nods, still facing me. ‘That is… fascinating.’
She tilts her head to one side and I find myself mirroring her action.
I have to fight very hard with myself not to take a step towards her. I can just about manage to stay where I am, but I can’t move away. My legs won’t go in that direction.
I search for words. ‘Are you interested in Italian history?’ I ask. Wow. Boring question.
She does the lip-moistening thing again. ‘Very,’ she says.
‘Very?’ I croak. We must not kiss.
‘Soooo interested,’ she almost purrs. Oh. God.
‘Me too.’ I’m still croaking.
We both take a small step closer to each other. We’re almost touching now. But not.
I lift my right hand and very gently trace the shape of her cheek with my forefinger. I can’t not.
Emma breathes a deep sigh and puts her hands on my chest, as I bring my other hand up to cup her face.
‘Emma,’ I whisper.
‘Mmm,’ she says.
We’re looking into each other’s eyes, and I have no idea what else is happening in the vicinity, because it feels as though there’s nothing except us.
I can’t believe that after all this time we’re here like this together.
I open my mouth to say something – I don’t even know what – and oh, okay, that’s what’s in the vicinity: there’s a big crowd of English-speaking tourists and they barge into us. I realise that that’s the very definition of being saved by the bell. We would beinsanetokissnow.
I mean, it’s going to be hard enough to get our heads round seeing each other again, definitely for me, and I’m guessing for Emma too, going by how she’s reacted to our conversation. There’s no point making it even harder.
And oh my God, what if she thinks that now we might get back together?
I don’t want to say explicitly that we aren’t going to, I really don’t, because that would not be a good conversation for either of us. I just need to demonstrate it via my actions. We’re old friends who’ve met again and been pleased to catch up with each other and when we finish our journey our paths will diverge again. And in the meantime we very clearly will not be kissing or anything else of that nature.
I manoeuvre so we’re more side to side than facing each other as I say with as much of a laugh as I can muster, ‘I think we’re in the way of a lot of people.’
‘I think we are,’ says Emma, and laughs too, thank God.
‘I think this is the Cattedrale dell’Immagine.’ I point at the cathedral ahead of us.
‘It’s beautiful.’ She isn’t really looking at it, because she’s looking up at me.
‘I feel like—’ I’m choosing my words carefully because I don’t want to upset her,ever, but I also want to get away from too much intimacy, which won’t help either of us afterwards ‘—given that we’re in Florence, we might regret not actually at least looking at the buildings. You know.’
Emma laughs and says, ‘You mean we should pay attention to the whole Florence-is-a-stunning-city thing,’ which hugely relieves me.
