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Dom watches in amusement as Matthias brushes the crumbs off his shirt. "Excuse me, my name isMatthias.That's an Italian name."
Why do you of all your brothers have an Italian name?" Dom asks, lips twitching.
Matthias shrugs. "How would I know, perhaps because there is actually reason to believe that my mother had an affair with an Italian winemaker around the time I was born?"
The look that Anna gives him is full of sisterly affection. "Maybe, I'm not sure why that is, but you definitely sunburn like a ginger Englishman."
"I do not!" Matthias pulls his shirt sleeve up and it shows an angry red tint that has appeared just from sitting out on the balcony for half an hour. "Never mind."
The rest of us laugh so hard we drown out any protests that he makes.
We follow up lunch with a game.
Chronology,they called it, where you have to line up cards that represent human events based on when they happened in history. The first to ten correctly placed cards wins.
When Dom, Matthias and I all reach nine correct ones at the same time, the competitiveness boils over into some pretty colorful trash talk.
"Matthias, if you paid as much attention to history as you did any ass that walks by, you would've won by now!" Dom taunts him.
But Matthias doesn't let that slide. "Hey now, Dom, if you paid attention to material that you stole off Wikipedia for your lectures, maybe you wouldn't be trying to make me look bad in front of your wife." He adds, "Who you stole from me."
"You tell him, Dom!" I yell, in support of any one but Matthias.
"Don't you talk, as far as I can remember you cheat," Matthias says, a grin on his face.
"Okay, to win the title of reigning Chronology overlord, Matthias, when was the Great Wall of China finished?" Dom reads off the cards. Matthias's face turns serious as he thinks then his entire face scrunches up and he folds, banging the table. "I'm going to guess it's between 200 BC and 175 BC."
A grin dances over Dom's face and he throws that card down and yells, "And you are wrong!"
Everyone but Matthias jumps up cheering, while he groans and drops his head into his hands.
Dom grabs another card off the pile. "Okay, Clarissa - when did Vincent Van Gogh... die?"
I grin and jump up, do a silly little dance, which I have never ever done in my entire life. "Why, Mr. Art Professor, that would be in 1890, so between these two," I point at the1860 and 1912 cards.
We all wait, breaths held, as we wait for Dom to give the answer.
Finally, he hands me the card, "Congratulations, Clarissa Masters, you are the new champion of Chronology, unseating our current champion, Matthias the loser!"
Anna jumps up and gives me a hug, cheering as Matthias protests, but with a smile on his face.
The men put the game away while I help Anna carry the plates into the kitchen. She tries to wave me away when I grab a tea towel to help her dry the plates, but I insist.
"You two are good together," she says, after a few minutes listening to the music streaming through the speakers.
"Why do you say that?"
"I tend to say what I think," she laughs.
I let it sink in, and can't help wondering how many other women she's said that to. Maybe this is where he brings women when he wants them to like him. I inwardly laugh, Matthias has never had trouble getting women to like him. If anything, I'm probably the one he's taken the longest to break in.
But he has most certainly broken me in.
I don't know what that says about me or him.
"He let you win, you know. Matthias never lets anyone win. He beats my kids at every game he plays with them. My daughter is five years old, by the way."
I frown. "He didn't let me win."
