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‘So you sent a mirror reminding me that I was abandoned—and not just by my parents!’ She let out a tense breath. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘It’s an unfinished portrait,’ Dante said, recalling how he had felt on the day he had purchased it.
Twenty years old and wishing he had the courage to send it, while worrying if he should even spend this much, when surely the cash would be better used by his mother. At the time it had been the biggest purchase he had ever made. Wasted, almost. But then his mother had died and he had returned home, and he had slipped it into the package he had found and mailed it.
‘I felt we were unfinished.’
‘We slept together once.’ She said the same as he had to her.
‘I bought this before we slept together, Alicia.’
Now she turned and looked at him.
‘I wanted to come back and I wanted to say yes when you suggested coming to Rome.’
‘Yet you didn’t.’
‘I was homeless,’ he said.
‘Dante, you had an apartment a short time later. You had family and money—’
‘Alicia.’ He was very serious. ‘You don’t just wake up and life is better. At least that was what I thought,’ he said. ‘That morning in Milan was like a dream come true. I’d been trying to sort out my life, and I think I was trying to sort it out for you...’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘So why are you sitting here at the statue?’
‘I was thinking of Beatrice.’
‘No.’
‘I was reminding myself how you used me, kissed me, just because Matteo was nearby.’
‘You are such a liar, Alicia Domenica,’ he accused with a smile. ‘You were waiting for me. And I am glad that you came to the fountain.’
Alicia nodded. ‘Say what you have to, Dante.’
‘Can we go back to mine?’
‘No. We can talk here.’
‘There are a lot of people.’
‘Say what you have to here.’
She wasn’t so bold when he did.
‘Have you slept with anyone other than me?’
‘You have no right to ask that!’
‘I actually don’t want to know the answer,’ he admitted. ‘Or I didn’t. I am messed up,’ he said. ‘Not as messed up as I was, though, believe me. Alicia, do you know why I dropped your hand that day? Because I was full of raging hormones and I didn’t understand that that was normal.’
She frowned.
‘I hate it that I made you feel ugly when you were flirting with me. And do you know what else I hated?’
‘What?’
