15
THAT NIGHT, ALEX DOESN’T call Paul. He sends him a short email — Hi, I love you, Rome is good, but I’m not up for talking tonight — so Paul won’t worry, then spends the rest of the evening alone, sitting in the big bay window in his room, one leg hanging outside. Gallivanting around Rome with a hot Italian photographer is not what Alex had expected to do with his break, and he wants some time to just turn over the events of the day and his plans with Gianni.
He’s happy to take the next day to do nothing more but call the kids and sleep some more. The morning after that he shoves his new, not-actually-for-tourists map into his bag and heads out to meet Gianni.
Gianni takes him to part of the city that’s an ordinary jumble of business people and chaos. If tourists come here, it is by a
