The wine was a spumante, some
obscure label that meant nothing to any serious Italian. Still, it was wine, golden in the light with
a swirling sweet taste. I hoped she
would approve. Stella waited for me to
pop the cork and then brought forward the glasses. After the right explosion of sound and smoke
the wine pooled into the bowls, splashing up to the brims. I wiped the lip of the bottle, set it down
and took the glass Stella offered.
I looked at her. I wanted to speak, to say something poignant,
but no words came. Stella stared back at
me with those Italian eyes of her, went to speak, said nothing. Her eyes dipped towards her wine.
“What shall we toast?” Stella raised her eyes again and found mine.
Her glance was almost a challenge.
“Let’s just toast this
moment. You. Me. The wine, and the discreet absence of
time.”
Stella nodded, her full Roman
lips parting with a smile. While her
front teeth were turned slightly, it was a beautiful smile.
“Poetic,” she replied. “Salute.”
We clinked glasses and sipped the
wine. The bubbles worked their way into
my sinuses as the sharp taste prickled my tongue. It was dark outside the confines of our room
and the air was firm in its February chill.
Stella sat down on the bed. I took the chair from under the old desk
against the wall, set it down with a creak and then sat facing her.
The collar of her sweater dipped
to show all her slender neck. I knew
she’d put it on for me. Olive skin
spilled out of that sweater, her finely-sculpted collar bones disappeared
behind the thick black flow of her hair.
Outside, cars shuddered along ancient cobble streets the Romans had
laid. Beyond the city, the sea was soft
and eternal as it lapped the shore.
Stella’s eyes fixed on me as she
took another sip of wine. The flaking
white paint of the walls and the faded cream of the hostel bedsheets were
ghostly against the fullness, the vitality of her. I felt a sudden chill roll beneath my skin
from my spine out to my fingers and felt ghostly as well.
“You know I’ve come to love
you.”
Stella’s voice was tight, but her
eyes never wavered. I took a long sip
from my wine to blunt the edge of her words.
It hurt to look at her, those eyes, but I couldn’t look at anything else.
“It… it isn’t fair that you go.”
“I know” was all I could
say. In my mind, I was already gone.
Sweet lies suggested themselves
to me – don’t worry, Stella, I’ll be back or why don’t you come with me,
knowing full-well that she could not. I
swept such poison aside with another sip of wine. I had sworn to be honest with her, nothing
but honest, and that’s what I would do.
This time, I’d get it right.
“No”, I said, perhaps more
bluntly than I’d hoped. “It isn’t
fair. It probably wasn’t fair to let
this happen at all.” I smiled sheepishly. “I guess I just couldn’t resist you.”
Stella blushed and turned her
head down to one side, a sweet, innocent gesture that sweetly and innocently
emphasized the curve of her breasts.
Feeling like the Great Bastard of the World that I probably was, I relished
the gesture, recalled and anticipated the taste, the heat of her skin. I tossed back the rest of my wine and
refilled my glass.
“God, Stella – you don’t make it
easy.”
“Good.” Her answer was sharp and
her eyes went hard as she gave it.
“I guess it’s no easier for you,
is it?”
“Aaron. Please, tell me something. I know you’ll be honest.”
She was right. Knowing that eased the ache, if just a
little.
“Anything, Stella.”
“Did you come to Italy with a
plan to be with a girl? For a, what do
you say – a holiday fling?”
“It was something I considered,
yes.”
“When we first met, what did you
want from me?”
“Oh Stella.”
“Please, Aaron. Tell me.”
I paused to put words to my
feelings.
“When I first saw you at the
club, dancing with your friends… the way you move is very sensual. Sexy. You know your body so well, every inch
of your gorgeous curves and how to control them. The way you looked in that outfit… it was
rapture. Do you understand this word?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“In that moment, I could only
think about what your body would look like, taste like, how that body would
feel pressing against mine. I could
picture those soft lips of yours whispering my name in my ear. When our eyes met, I felt that you were
thinking something similar. Was I
wrong?”
“No.” Stella blushed with the admission.
“Stella, please don’t be like
that. There’s more. When I asked you to dance I wanted to have
you, yes, but then we started talking, and then we were sitting down to talk,
and talked for hours. It was
amazing. The way you paint pictures as
you speak, the way you described the hills of Tuscana…”
“I love Tuscana. So much space, freedom, like a body to
explore every inch of.”
“Yes! Like that, just the way you said that. There was so much beauty in you, too, I
wanted to know it all. Inside and out. And you wanted to know me, too. But when I went to kiss you, you put your
fingers to my lips to hold me back, but smiled at the same time.”
“I did it as much to control
myself. I wanted you, I didn’t think I
could stop myself. It frightened me.”
I didn’t know that” I replied as
she blushed. “It felt like you were in
complete control – of me as well, I couldn’t resist. You gave me your number and kissed me on the
cheek, then you left. That night all I
could do was think about staying, for you.
I’m a backpacker, a tumbleweed – I’m not supposed to think of staying.”
“But you did. You’ve been here a month.”
Stella could put such emotion
into her voice. I closed my eyes and could see the her face looking at me
filled with love, like the Madonna. Her
fingers grazed my cheek, gently bringing me back to the moment. I opened my eyes to see her kneeling forwards
on the bed, resting on one hand, her face close.
“Oh Aaron… my friends, they told
me to watch out for you, that you only wanted sex. I knew better. If it was only sex you were after, you would
have found someone else that night. You
wouldn’t still be here with me now.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Here I thought your friends
didn’t like me because I’m not Italian.”
Stella slapped my knee and laughed,
a sound that rolled across the room like the waves on the shore close by.
“No, they thought you were the
devil.”
“They were right.” I smiled my
best, wolfish grin and kissed the back of her hand. Shortly after I started courting Stella, one
of those friends had taken me aside and explained she had recently been hurt by
a boy who cheated on her. Stella didn’t
need a foreigner like me licking her wounds with a fleeting tongue.
The defensiveness felt like an
attack and stung. It was important to
know, though. It wasn’t until the end of
the second week that we allowed our passion to erupt in a flurry of kisses and
touches. Even that had filled me up; we
had gone no further, holding that taste in our mouths and savouring it.
We said everything with our lips
and eyes, our fingers both exploring and texting the feelings growing within
and between us.
I had told Stella my flight home
was coming up fast, but we both chose to ignore it and focus instead on the
intoxicating love we were brewing. Time
would wait. At least, it was good to
think so.
Time ignored us and came anyway;
in the morning, I would leave. This
night was all the time we had left.
I felt sad that it would happen
in a paint-flaking hostel room and with a cheap bottle of Spumante. There was so much we still needed to share,
to say, to feel together – all the things that could only be absorbed through
osmosis over a lifetime spent together.
And I was leaving. I felt the
burn of truth in my eyes and licked them with hers.
“Stella, I am grateful this
wasn’t a fling.”
“Aaron – what am I to you? What
is this between us to you? Does it mean anything?”
“Too much. Leaving is like tearing roots from the
ground, but I have to. I’ll go home,
you’ll stay here. I’m sure that
somewhere down the road, we’ll have moved on with our lives. But right now, I can’t feel it. All I can feel is you and I don’t want to
go.”
“Are you saying?” There was desperate hope in her voice that
shattered me like glass.
“No. I did the long distance thing once, it was
horrible. And I’m not going to live in
Italy. And I know you don’t want to leave, either.”
For the first time, Stella looked
frail, like a blossom caught in the first snowfall of winter.
“Then… this is all we have?” Her eyes began to water. Picking up the pieces of my shattered self I
went to her, wrapped her in my arms.
Stella’s control collapsed and she gasped in sadness, the warm tears
pouring out onto her cheeks.
“Stella, no. We will always have this, this moment” and my
words sounded hollow in my ears, like brittle candy. I shoved them aside and took her face in both
my hands. What needed to be shared was
beyond the limits of words.
Our lips joined, tender at first
but the stream hurtled forward and became a torrent. There could be no barrier between us, and we
tore away the layers of clothing and fear until we were revealed to each other
completely. With eyes open wide we
joined, started directly into each other’s souls, salt tears of sorrow and joy
staining our cheeks and mixing together sweetly. We soared together and grasped each other and
cried out as though in the embrace of death.
When it was done there was the sick feeling of things which have
withered and died. We held each other in
the silence, warm where we touched beneath the cool air.
Stella got up on unsteady legs
and dressed.
“Don’t”, she said. “Please, don’t.”
With one last kiss she let
go. As I closed the door behind her, all
warmth left the room. My sleep was empty
and stale, like the glass on the desk.
The air was still cold the next morning when I left for Rome.
