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CHAPTER EIGHT
MAREN
I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t wait any longer.
I’ve called Cittadella Financial probably ten times over the past week, since Alessio isn’t receiving my calls on his personal phone. Three of those times were today, over various points of my journey: once from Dulles, once from the airport in Rome, and once from the ferry landing at Mgarr. All three times, the secretary has said that she’ll ask Alessio to call once he gets out of his meeting. “It’s a very important meeting,” she said apologetically the last time I called. “The whole company has been very busy with this project for weeks and weeks, and it is crucial. But I promise I will tell him of your calls.”
I can’t be wrong about him, I just can’t. I’ve invested too much of myself in him, and this trip, to be wrong.
It’s not very late when I get out of the taxi in front of Alessio’s villa, shoving a handful of euros at the driver. “He’s not home,” the taxi guy points out.
“Then I’ll wait,” I say with more confidence than I feel just now.
That confidence has been dripping away since I’ve been unable to speak with Alessio, but I seize it firmly. He will come home. He will be alone, and he will be happy to see me.
This is love.
I wipe the sweat off my forehead, thankful I wore light linen clothes for traveling but wishing I had a hat. It’s a good bit warmer than it was at the time of the conference, and more of the countryside is bursting into bloom. Now that I’m here, there’s nothing to do but wait.
I watch the birds swoop in the sky, and listen to the donkey down the road complain. I watch cars drive past, their occupants staring curiously at me. I watch the silver-and-red public bus go by, four times. I watch the sunlight move across the stone walls of the Cittadella, up on the hill. And I think about what love can do.
It changes hearts. It changes lives. That fever I felt at Carnival was real warmth, and it’s brought me back here, to a place I knew nothing about three months ago.
There is a peace in my heart—a free peace, the sort of peace a bird feels on the wing, when it does what it was meant to do—when I finally see a car I recognize coming my way. Alessio’s little white Peugeot, far more modest than his net worth might suggest, parks on the street and I see him wearily gathering a briefcase, a suit jacket, his mobile phone. He opens the door.
He sees me.
And in a move that probably looks funny to other people but which I will treasure in my heart forever and forever amen, he drops all his stuff and trips over his feet as he makes a beeline for me. My chest aches with pure happiness, and I stand up just in time for him to seize me in his arms and lift me as he buries his head in the crook of my neck, saying my name.
As I’m saying his, over and over, and as my arms go around him and squeeze as tight as I can.
“You came! You’re here!” he keeps saying, interspersed with something Maltese I don’t understand but I don’t need to, not yet, I’ll learn it.
And then, finally, he kisses me. He backs me up against the door and kisses me like there is no tomorrow, no other time than this time, this now that is timeless. I don’t want it to end, but the honk of a car horn pulls his head up, and he laughs, and it’s only then that I see that his face is wet, that his chest is heaving. “You’re here,” he says once more. “Do you know what I was coming home to do tonight?” I touch his face, wipe away a tear, and shake my head no. “I was going to buy a ticket to America. I was going to call my Uncle Leo and beg him for the name of your university, beg him for your contact information even though he’s an upright moral man and he was probably not going to give it to me. And I was going to come to you.”
“I told you,” I say, almost exasperated with him. “I said I had to finish teaching the semester, and then I’d be back. I did say it.”
“I didn’t trust it,” he says sadly.
“I see that,” I say. “But I meant it. I quit my teaching job. I quit the college. And I’m here—with you.”
“I was too scared to give it a chance, but I am so glad to be wrong.” He cocks his head suddenly. “Was it you calling my office today?”
“Of course.”
He laughs again. “I must give Silvia a rise in pay. She never insists, but she would have insisted today except that I dashed out the door.” Another car drives by and honks, and I hear laughter. “Let’s go in,” he says, and opens the door.
“It’s not locked? I could have gone in without waiting on the step getting all sweaty?”
He just laughs, and brings my suitcase in. “Gozitans don’t lock their doors. Shh, don’t tell the tourists.” He picks me up. “And I have other ideas on how to make you sweaty.”
“I should take a shower,” I demur, but Alessio picks me up and hoists me over his shoulder, slapping my butt lightly. He hauls me up the stone staircase without apparent effort, so I reach down and get a good hold of his butt. “Mmm. Nice.”
“Marry me?” he says, unloading me onto his large bed. I bounce a little. “I mean, that is why you’re here, yes?”
“It absolutely is,” I assure him, and reach for his tie. He lets me untie it while he unfastens my sandals and slips them off. “My parents want to come visit soon. Before the wedding?”
“It will take time,” he says with a shrug, divesting himself of dress shirt and belt. I reach for his zipper. He’s rigid already, that long shaft of his already weeping a drop at the tip. “Six weeks at least, and that’s if we have a civil ceremony.” He grins wickedly at me as he tugs my linen capri pants down along with my underwear. “Or we could wait three months for a church wedding, and I warn you right now that my Nunna won’t consider us really married until we do that.”
