By the time we reached Daisy’s, it had started to drizzle. I looked up at the late-afternoon sky, blinking through the drops and loving the coolness it brought to my skin. Even though today was mentally exhausting, I felt like I came out of it stronger, wiser even, and most certainly in a better place with someone who was once so important to me. We could even end up as friends at the end of this . . . whatever this was.
When I looked back to Marcello, he was watching me intently, and his features had softened the tiniest bit.
“Did you want to come in?” I choked, and quickly explained, “I meant out of the rain.”
“I’ll be fine. Go inside, Avery.”
Climbing the stairs, I turned to where he waited. “Bye, Marcello. And thanks for today.”
“Ciao,” he called, waving once before returning his hand to his pocket. “I guess I will be seeing you soon.”
It wasn’t until he disappeared around the corner that I let myself in the front door. Leaning against it, my head thudded against the wood and I counted to ten. Then to fifty, and finally, when I reached seventy-five, I felt solid enough to walk up the stairs to the apartment.
I WOKE TO BUSTLING NOISES in the kitchen that seemed much louder than usual. Clatter. Clatter clatter. Coffee beans grinding. Clatter clatter. Grind grind grind. I’m all for a good cuppa joe, but this was ridiculous. Finally, silence reigned and I scrunched up the pillow, trying to nestle back in. Closing my eyes I tried to drift back to sleep, a sleep enhanced by the dream I’d been having about two giant men named Romulus and Remus kicking Daniel square in the—
Two more clatters, then a pronounced banging that sounded like someone repeatedly opening and closing the fridge. Giving up, I shrugged into a robe and padded out to the kitchen.
“Oh! Sorry, did I wake you?” Daisy asked, blinking at me as innocent as a kitten.
“I’m sure that someday, someone somewhere will fall for your bullshit.” I yawned and grabbed a mug from the cupboard. “But today is not that day.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” She grinned, knowing full well she’d been caught and not giving the tiniest of a damn. “But now that you’re up . . .”
“I’ll tell you all about yesterday? Which I could have told you about last night. Where were you? I finally went to bed at eleven.”
“Sorry about that. You got my note, right? I’m telling you this bank job is a killer. I’ll be glad when it’s done. Then it’s on to the next one. But not right now; right now I require Marcello details. As soon as the coffee’s done—I feel like this is going to be the kind of story that’s told over coffee.” She headed over to the Signor coffee machine, I joined her, and the two of us watched it drip.
“Didn’t we do this twenty-four hours ago?” I asked.
“We did. What does that tell you?”
“That you need a new television show to obsess over?”
“Bite me, Bardot. Tell me what the hell happened—”
I grinned in a way that made her sigh with delight. “Yes!” she exclaimed.
“No, no. Don’t get too excited. We just had coffee,” I confirmed. “And we talked. And I apologized. And he growled a bit, in that Marcello stubborny way he has; you must have seen it before.”
“He has a bit of a temper, it’s true,” she agreed.
“But to be fair, rightfully so. Although frankly if it hadn’t been directed at me, it would have been something to see him hot and angry. But it was at me, and while things aren’t great, they’re not awful, either.”
“Not awful is good, Avery. Great, even. It’s a start,” she said, emptying the dishwasher.
“Then I came home.”
“And then you came home,” she repeated, looking at me incredulously. “And that’s it?”
“Yes?”
She stopped with the dishwasher and started pacing around the kitchen, looking in drawers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Pliers, to pry more than two words from your lips before I’m late for work.”
“There’s no dirt to dish—honestly. We just had coffee, I apologized for how I left things, we walked home, and then he . . .” I didn’t need a mirror to know that my eyes went starry.
“He . . . he what?”
“Nothing, he did nothing, really it was just a look, and I’m not going to be that girl who reads into it,” I insisted, but kept the vision of him staring up at me in the rain in my mind. “It’s all very confusing, and I really don’t have much to tell you.” All of that was the truth. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. It’s a lot to try and compartmentalize.”
Where to put Marcello into my already-overflowing box of feelings was the question of the day for sure.
“Maybe you shouldn’t? Compartmentalize it, I mean. You’ve got to stop bottling everything up, sister. Let yourself feel bad for hurting him. Or confused for whatever is happening. You can’t keep ignoring your feelings.”
“I can’t?” I asked, pulling at a string on my sleep shirt. I already knew the answer, but I tended to stuff things away, forget about them, deal with them tomorrow.
She sighed and pulled a stool up in front of me. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what I think you should do. Because I’d probably be halfway to his house already, naked under a trench coat and ready for Avery and Marcello 2.0, the Italian Adventure.”
“Wow.” I gave her the biggest pie eyes I could.