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The gentleman scoffed. “They don’t require an escort. They just want me out of the palazzo.”
Fiore raised his brows at this revelation; or rather, he supposed, this confirmation of his prior suspicions.
“The impresario is probably glad to see me go,” the gentleman continued. “Now the audience will aim their glasses at the stage rather than our box.”
Not just a resident of a palazzo, but one who could afford a box at the opera. Fiore withheld a low whistle. “Do you attract much notice?”
The gentleman shot him a glance. At first Fiore feared he’d overstepped in his sarcasm, but then the eyes lit up with another smile, and a low chuckle emerged from beneath the mask. “Some.”
Whether an innate courage or a mere desperation to be anywhere else drove him to speak on, Fiore couldn’t say, but his mouth opened again regardless. “Shall we venture off somewhere we might attract less notice?”
Astonished delight gleamed in the dark eyes behind the mask. “Let’s. Only—” he added, hesitating again with a glance toward the opera house. “I ought to tell my companions of my intent to abandon them.”
“Of course.” It seemed the gentleman had a touch more sense of honor than Fiore gave him credit for.
The gentleman bowed and returned to the opera house. He took the entrance stairs two at a time; whether for speed or to show off his long, lithe legs with their splendid calves, Fiore couldn’t say.
Several minutes passed as Fiore waited for the gentlemen to re-emerge. He spent the time casting winning glances at passersby, particularly those wearing sumptuous slashed velvets and those whose hands glittered with rings. Some nodded, some smiled, but none took him up on his implicit offer.
“Shall we be off?”
Fiore flinched just as he had before—the looming opera houses keeping him ever on edge—but smiled when he turned to find the gentleman had returned as promised.
“We shall.” Fiore offered his arm.
The gentleman hesitated. Belatedly, Fiore recalled how the gentleman had preferred to look rather than touch at their last meeting. Perhaps he had an aversion to touch of all sorts. Or perhaps he had some wound which troubled him.
But before Fiore could do or say anything to smooth the matter over, the gentleman seemed to steel his nerve by drawing himself up and, with a soft smile in his masked eyes, slipped his arm through the crook of Fiore’s. His tentative touch held a warmth like sunshine.
“What may I call you?” the gentleman asked.
“Fiore. And you?”
The gentleman blinked. Evidently he hadn’t expected to hear his own enquiry echoed back at him. Yet all the same, he replied, “My friends call me Enzo.”
Which might be short for Vincenzo or Lorenzo or Innocenzo or anything, really. The gentleman had answered Fiore without giving him any real information—and yet, whilst at the same time giving him permission to indulge in an intimacy. “Are we friends, then?”
“I’d like us to be so, at the very least.” Enzo’s words carried a note of cautious hope.
Fiore found it charming despite himself. “As would I. Where shall we go?”
Enzo shrugged. “I know not. I’m newly returned to the city, after many years’ absence.”
“What drew you away?” Fiore asked before he could think better of it.
“The plague. When I was a boy. The threat of its return kept me away until time came for me to attend university. And now…” Enzo gave an expressive twirl of his wrist.
Rather the inverse of Fiore’s own history. “If I may speak on the city’s behalf, we’re delighted to have you returned.”
The eyes beneath the mask crinkled in a smile. “All this to say you doubtless know Halcyon better than myself. Where would you suggest?”
“I know of a charming and accommodating bathhouse.”
Fiore couldn’t see what sort of look appeared on Enzo’s face under his mask, but he did notice how his whole posture stiffened, the arm entwined through his own tightening in his grip as the shoulders tensed up. Not one for the bathhouse, then. He supposed he ought to have foreseen such modesty from a gentleman who wore a bauta even outside of festival days.
“Or,” Fiore added, “perhaps a coffeehouse would better suit our purposes.”
Enzo’s tension eased. “Lead on.”
