Chapter 24
836 Words
Chapter Twenty-Four
After my encounter with Chloé, I take off to our vineyard near Etna not even waiting for lunch to be served.
From our office there, I make a phone call to Mother and let her know that I am going to sleep at Taormina vineyard because I have a meeting there early in the morning and my work here will probably run longer than I anticipated. It’s not entirely a lie, since I do have a morning meeting there.
After a full day of work when nothing exciting happens but the corrupt mayor requesting fifty bottles of our best spumati for his wife’s upcoming birthday party, I drive myself to our beach cabin.
The terrain is verdant and colored with flowers as a result of the heavier-than-usual rain in the spring months.
I stop and put down the top of my black Karmann Ghia to bask in the last rays of the early summer sun, glad to have some time alone to think.
Some stretches of the autostrada wrap me in the intense purple of the bougainvillea demonstrating that when it comes to flowers, Sicily is more regal than any other Italian region.
It’s not unusual for me to spend time alone in this cabin, the most simple of our properties in Sicily, and I am glad my family respects my need of privacy.
When my darkness closes down on me, I can’t stand being around people, not even my loving mother and brothers. They know not to ask questions, but I can’t stand their looks of pity, which make the memories worse than they already are.
So, I come here to this rustic wood three-bedroom cabin. There is another house a few yards away. Big, opulent, spacey, but it’s here where we lived with my father before his successful experiments with grapes that I feel…comfortable.
Or at least, less uncomfortable.
And as he did, I do my alchemy, too. But it’s done not with grapes but with words. I like to write and I have already several books finished and locked in a small compartment I built under my bed. Not that I intend to publish them, but I like to lose myself in the words.
I don’t have to be myself but whatever character I want to be. I don’t have to live this life of mine, but whichever I wish. I don’t even have to think about my own life—or the lack of it—since my characters are so much better or much more worse. I don’t have to be a winner or a loser.
The hours—my problems and my pains—fade away as I attack crisp white pages and fill them with gray scribbles, plots of logical arguments, clean, easy, notes falling one after the other in a melody I can play with my eyes closed. Their happinesses and miseries are all mine and at the same time, not.
On the pages, in between the lines, I can play God. And not be played in His name.
I am the one in control.
But today I am too reckless to sit down and write.
At the cabin, I change into trunks and I go for a swim.
The cold sea water and the straining exercise calm me and cool my ardor—and my anger.
Yeah, I know it doesn’t make any sense to be feeling inflamed and infuriated but I was not expecting Salvatore to bring her to my house.
My woman.
The only one I ever dream about.
The woman of my dreams.
I remember well the first time I saw her. Boarding the same ferry I was already on in Calabria, her laughter spiraling in the air as she jumped to catch her hat the wind had blown.
Lovely.
Lively.
And it blew me off—literally—when I opened my eyes to a whimper and found her watching me m**********g to her image in my mind.
And now?
Of all the ways to lose her, that would’ve been the stupidest: to my own brother!
Not that I have ever had her.
To have her in my dreams is more than I deserve, and I’m damned grateful for it. I choose not to analyze how pathetic this is and I focus on how unfair it is that I now I get to see her and talk to her in my own home, and know she is not mine, even though she appears in my dreams.
Isn’t it bad enough to be scarred on the inside?
But damned if I am not selfish enough to want her anyway. And instead of trying to sweeten her when she caught me ogling her, I taunted her. My d**k was hard and I was angry. Inferno.
What a great intellectual man of words I am, thinking with my d**k. Not that I won’t excuse myself to a certain extent…
Dio, she’s beautiful.
Remembering her eyes gleaming and her mouth parting breathlessly, all the while staring at me, made my body respond like it never had.
But Lord knows I am a loser—Exactly how I felt when I opened my eyes and saw that she had left—and I doomed to die without knowing a woman’s love.
- Writer
