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Thus distracted, he got them to allow him to sit in on the afternoon sessions, and he even found himself leading the class for a few minutes—even if his presence did make all the classes start late because everyone had to go over the fundraiser, minute by minute.
His well of human excellence filled, Alessandro left the Studio at nine o’clock, and his thoughts returned at once to Megan. How had her day been? Her text had been annoyingly mundane. Did she want to talk to him as badly as he did to her? Or had real life awakened her to the insanity of being in his world?
He sat in the back of the limo while Nelson drove him to a weary night of room service. He’d call her, of course he would—he wasn’t about to ghost a woman after a night of lovemaking that could make a man change his entire future—but the farther they drove, the more nervous he got. She had more to give up than he did. He only had to give up his lack of trust in people.
He used his special card to get in at the employee entrance and took the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. Back in his room, he tried not to think about how much more homey Megan’s apartment was. Pale-blue walls glowed like the ocean when the sun came around to them, and a deep slipcovered couch—oh, that couch!—and thick rugs made a large open-plan living room cozy. Yes, The Rosette was a five-star hotel with a Michelin star hanging on its restaurant. Alessandro would rather be doing the dishes in Megan’s well-used kitchen.
His fingers had dialed her original number before he remembered the burner phone. He was about to hang up, but her voice came on the line.
“Hi,” she said.
He tried to figure out in that one word how she was feeling. Impossible. “Hello,” he said instead. “I thought you turned off this phone.”
“I haven’t given the new number to my family yet. I don’t even know which of them are still talking to me.”
“Your eldest sister is the one you had the argument with. You think the others will take her side?”
“They called me on Saturday. I didn’t call them back because…” She paused. “Because I didn’t want to.”
“Did you see your brother at work today?”
“No.”
He heard the pain in her voice. “I am sure he is not ignoring you. He must have been busy.”
“Yeah.”
He wanted to take that pain away so badly. But he didn’t know how, short of having Nelson drive him over to her apartment again, and that would just feed the gossip machine.
“He will not take Cat’s side over yours. I met him, remember? I could see how much he loves you.”
“Thanks.”
She sounded so defeated. She’d chosen him over her family this weekend, and now she was suffering for it.
“I am sorry I am not there,” he said, the words going straight from his heart to his mouth. “I would cook for you. And I would pour you a glass of wine and choose a movie with you.”
“That sounds great,” she said on a sigh.
“What are your favorite dishes?”
She was silent for a moment. Then she told him about Thanksgiving dinners when she was a child, before her parents died. Much as he’d appreciated his friends’ invitations, Alessandro had never understood the bowls of solid, immovable baked dishes he’d been given when he’d attended their Thanksgiving celebrations over the years. The event itself had been bittersweet for him, watching his friends’ families greet each other with joy, going over their family memories, showing him yellowed photographs and playing music they would all sing to. Perhaps that had affected his taste for the food.
But Megan talked about her family’s staples and somehow he was brought into the scene. He could smell the cinnamon and hear her father lightly arguing with Kane about turkey legs. He could see the fireplace burning in the dining room that the kids fought to sit away from. He could picture Megan in her boosted chair next to her mother, younger than all of them, fidgeting through the conversations, asking to be excused so she could fall asleep on the squashed couch in the family room, only to be woken by the crowd coming back to watch the football game. Alessandro saw all of it, and his heart broke for her. For all of them.
“Tell me about your childhood,” she said, “as the psychiatrist said.”
Alessandro began talking, again giving her only the good parts, which also meant the parts before his teen years, before he began disappointing and then infuriating his parents. Before his brothers started laying into him for being “soft.” He told her about his family’s signature dishes, his grandmothers who were engaged in a silent but furious war for their children’s and grandchildren’s affection, so Alessandro and his siblings and cousins spent every weekend after church being exhorted to eat for twelve hours straight. He talked of playing football in the streets with his cousins, and how he had to find new friends when they moved from Sicily to Rome. That they’d made fun of his accent and his parents’ high-culture jobs until he’d scored so many goals off them, everyone lost count. He’d discarded his Sicilian dialect as fast as possible, the first of many adjustments and compromises he’d made on his journey to becoming an actor.
“Did you ever go back to Sicily?” Megan asked.
“Once or twice, at first. But my parents did not like how we fell back into the dialect. They became Roman and did not want to look back.”
“I should have guessed that Italy would have the same snobbery for some areas over others that we do.”
“There is pride for our regions, like for your states, but Italy has dialects that can separate us. When I moved to Milan, I had to learn yet another way to speak.”
“Why were you in Milan?”
