Say Yes: A Nostalgic Summer Romance Read online

  Or rather, the professor’s reaction to my assignment.

  “Ah, someone who needs wine as badly as I do,” my roommate, Angela, said with a chuckle from the kitchen. Our dorm was suite-style, with two separate bedrooms but a shared bathroom and petite kitchen. In fact, kitchen was an understatement, considering it was nothing more than a small counter, a sink, an electric kettle, and a mini-fridge.

  Angela carefully pulled a second wine glass from the rack and filled it halfway with whatever her red wine of the evening was. Then, with both glasses in hand, she met me at the door.

  “Here,” she said, handing me one glass while she tilted the other into the air. “To your good day.”

  I grumbled, lifting the glass in her honor before I took the first sip.

  Angela picked up my bag from where I’d tossed it, hanging it by the door before she plopped down on the old, smelly sofa that the university provided in our common room. It had to be from the sixties or seventies, orange and brown and faded, the cushions warped from the weight of countless bottoms. That and our beds were about the only furniture, but at least they had the decency to supply us with wine glasses.

  “Wanna talk about it?” she asked as she took another sip, tucking her feet up under her hips.

  Angela was the kind of beautiful that spanned centuries. She had dark black skin and long black hair that she wore in hundreds of tiny braids, some with gold rings and some without, and she had mesmerizing, honey-gold eyes that rendered me speechless the first time we met. I’d never seen her wear a stitch of makeup, but her lashes were still somehow always black and long and curled, her lips a perfect dusty rose.

  She practically lived in baggy sweatpants and Tommy Hilfiger tube tops, which was exactly what she was wearing now, and if I had a lean, toned stomach like hers I would show it off every chance I got, too.

  And though I’d only known her a couple weeks now, I knew the three things she loved more than anything else in the world: Italian wine, Italian architecture, and Italian women.

  Not necessarily in that order.

  I sighed, plopping down next to her. “I know we don’t get grades until the end of the summer, but if today is any indication, I’m leaving here with a big fat F,” I said, pausing to take a sip of wine before I pointed at her with my pinky. “And I don’t mean F for Florence.”

  “Then you must mean F for fantastic!”

  I tried to smile but fell short, settling on a huff of annoyance, instead. “He hated it. I worked all week long on that painting and he hated it. He called it… ugh, what was the word.” I strained to remember. “Prevedibile?”

  Angela winced. “Ouch.”

  “You know what that means?”

  She nodded with a grimace that told me she didn’t want to translate, but reluctantly she said, “Predictable.”

  I sighed, letting my head hit the back of the musty orange couch. “Sounds about right. He went on to lecture me on how he didn’t feel anything when he looked at it. Just what every artist wants to hear.” I shook my head, heart kicking in my chest with the next part of my memory. “And then this stupid boy across the room from me practically moves him to tears. And he didn’t even start his painting until last night!”

  “Hey, I told you procrastination pays off,” Angela said, tilting her glass toward me before she took a drink.

  “It’s infuriating. I walk the halls of the Uffizi every day. I’ve been studying Michelangelo and Botticelli and Angelico since I was too young to even pronounce their names correctly. I know for a fact that I worked three times as hard on my painting, but this guy just waltzes in eight hours before the assignment is due and blows me out of the water.” I huffed. “Sexism.”

  Angela laughed at that. “Okay, you know I’m the first to call out patriarchy, but I don’t think that’s what this is.” She shrugged. “Maybe he got lucky. Or, maybe he’s really talented. Did you see the painting?”

  I grumbled. “No.”

  “See?” Angela took another sip and waved me off. “So what. The professor liked that guy’s painting and not yours. That’s bound to happen. You’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.”

  “But I need to be his, or I’m going to fail out of this program and be stuck behind a desk crunching numbers for the rest of my life.”

  “It was one assignment,” Angela insisted, reaching over into my lap and covering my small hand, which made me flinch a little, the instinct to pull away automatic. But Angela just gave my hand a gentle squeeze as her smile spread. “You’ll have plenty more to prove him wrong. For now, take whatever lesson you can from his critique and forge ahead.”

  “Forge ahead,” I repeated on a mumble when Angela pulled away. “Right off the edge of a cliff.”

  “You’re so dramatic,” she said with a laugh. Then, she downed what was left of her wine and popped off the couch. “Come on. Let’s go out.”

  I shook my head. “I just want a shower and my bed.”

  “Too bad. We’re going out for dinner and more of this,” she said, shaking her now-empty glass.

  “It’s a school night.”

  “It’s a school night,” she mocked. “Come on, Harley. You’re twenty-two years old. Your body is in its prime and you’ve still got youthful, wrinkle-free skin and the ability to bounce back from a night out without a raging hangover. And you’re in Florence, Italy, for Pete’s sake.” She reached down for my hand, wiggling her fingers. “Come on. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  I looked at her hand, then at the wine left in my glass, and then up at her bright, expectant, honey eyes.

  She was right.

  I hated it, but she was right.

  So, I followed her lead, knocking back the rest of my wine before I let her peel me off the couch and drag me out into the bustling Florence streets.

  The Art of Seduction

  After stuffing our bellies with delicious white truffle ravioli from a small restaurant down the street from our dorm, Angela and I found ourselves in the back corner of a wine bar called Vino di Fiume.

  I wasn’t sure if it was always where the younger crowd gathered, or if the students in our program had just taken over since we arrived in Florence two weeks ago, but this seemed to be the place for everyone studying abroad. Students lined every inch of the bar and took up every seated table, too.

  The lights were low, a combination of candles and dimly lit chandeliers, and the wall behind the bar was lined with more wine than I had seen in my entire life. Soft Italian music played from a boombox behind the bar, too, but you could only hear it if you were ordering a drink. Otherwise, it was the steady hum of conversation and laughter, which I loved just as much.

  “Man, I bet this place is great during the holidays,” Angela mused, looking around the dark bar. “Did I ever tell you about the time I hosted my family for Thanksgiving?”

  I shook my head.

  Angela scoffed. “I don’t know why I even wanted to. I think part of me wanted to be like my grandma. She’s always hosted our holidays, you know? She’d cook her heart out for Thanksgiving, have the biggest and best tree every Christmas.” She smiled. “But I was in college. Sure, I had a little apartment that I shared with a few girlfriends rather than a dorm, but still, I had no business hosting a holiday.”

  “How many people did you host?”

  “Fifteen,” she said after taking a sip of her wine. “My whole family. Parents, grandparents, mom’s sister, and two of my cousins, my three brothers and their significant others.”

  I laughed. “How in the world did you fit them all in an apartment?”

  “Uncomfortably,” Angela answered. “My roommate had a dog at the time. Bastard jumped up on the table when we weren’t looking and ate all the cheese and sausage we’d cut for appetizers. And because I’m a kid and not an adult, I made instant mashed potatoes and stuffing.” She shook her head with a wide grin. “That was the angriest I’ve ever seen my grandma — including when I told her I was lesbian.”
r />   I chuckled.

  “Everything just went to shit. I cooked the turkey too long, so it was dry, and I forgot to take the giblets out so that all got cooked along with it in this gross bag of juice.”

  She wrinkled her nose as I laughed again, imagining the scene.

  “We ended up driving all over town trying to find somewhere open for us to eat, and there was this small, family-owned dive bar just like this.” She looked around with a soft smile. “We played pool and Grandpa spent at least a hundred dollars on the juke box. The family who owned it joined us after a while. We shut the place down.” Angela’s eyebrows bent together. “That was the last time we were all together and happy. It was before I told them.”

  I frowned, reaching over to cover her hand just like she’d done to me in the room.

  “Yeah,” she said after a minute, shaking off the memory as she reached for her wine. “I bet this place is great during the holidays.”

  I smiled, looking around at the exposed brick and low-hanging chandeliers. “It does have quite the vibe.”

  “What does your family do for the holidays?”

  I shrugged. “Usually it’s just the three of us; my mom, Dad, and me. We have a tradition of getting McDonald’s on Christmas Eve.”

  “Ew.”

  “I know,” I admitted on a laugh. “It’s weird because when we do go to my grandma’s house, she has all these traditions and dishes she cooks every year. She makes the best green bean casserole,” I added, mouth salivating at the thought of it. “But we don’t go very often. I think it hurts my mom to be around her siblings and all their perfect kids.”

  “Perfect kids?” Angela said after swallowing another drink of wine. “Pretty sure that’s an oxymoron.”

  I tried to smile. “My mom is one of five kids. She wanted to have five kids, too. But then I came first and… well…” I held up my right hand, wiggling my pinky and thumb as evidence. “She thought I’d be a handful, no pun intended, so she and Dad decided one was enough.”

  Angela watched me for a minute before she said, “You’re not responsible for your parents’ decisions. And for what it’s worth, I think you would be a rad big sister.”

  “Right now, I’d rather be a rad artist.”

  “Well, let’s get you drunk. Maybe that’s the missing piece. Lots of artists experimented with drugs in their prime, you know. Just look at Picasso.”

  I laughed, reaching for my wine glass and tilting it to meet hers. They met with a satisfying ting in the middle of the table, and at that exact moment, I looked behind my roommate and found the boy from my art class.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What?” Angela asked with wide eyes, whipping around to look where my eyes were trained.

  “That’s him. That’s the boy from class.”

  I didn’t have to tell her which one I meant. It was easy to see from the confidence radiating off him. It might as well have been a pungent cologne for how he wore it, his shoulders square and wide, eyes lazy and a bit glazed, a sideways smirk playing on his lips. He looked carefree and a little bored, like he could be anywhere he wanted to be in the world but chose to wander into this bar just for fun.

  His hair was even messier than it had been in class, tousled on top of his head like he’d just had his hands running through it. He did at least change his clothes since I’d last seen him, but there was no evidence of a shower. He wore wide-legged, baggy jeans and a cream-and-brown plaid button-up with a denim jacket over it. It was far too hot to be wearing that jacket, as was it far too dark to be wearing sunglasses inside, but he donned both.

  “Ugh,” I muttered under my breath, shaking my head as I lifted my wine glass to my lips. “Doesn’t he just exude prick energy?”

  “That’s one word for it,” Angela muttered back. When she turned around to face me again, she clicked her tongue. “I know him. Liam Benson.”

  “How the hell do you know him?”

  “Last week, I ran into this girl crying in the common room, on the first floor of the dorm building, ya know?” She shook her head. “She was heartbroken over this guy who hooked up with her and then ignored her the next day. One guess who that guy was.”

  I sighed. “Liam Benson.”

  “Ding ding ding,” she said, winding her finger up above her head. “Don’t worry — I cheered her up. It took all night,” she added with a smirk. “But I didn’t mind.”

  “How do you do that?” I asked on a laugh.

  “What? Hook up with straight girls?”

  I nodded.

  Angela shrugged. “Every girl has an appreciation for beauty in other women. And sometimes, especially when we’re heartbroken over yet another man, we decide to give the other team a shot. I mean, I’ve always known I was attracted to women, but some girls don’t wake up to that fact until they’re older.”

  “So you just flip a switch, huh?”

  “Not always,” she said after a sip. “Sometimes they wake up the next morning and slip out of my room before the sun comes up and I never hear from them again. They scratch an itch and never look back. But sometimes…” She arched a brow with a wide grin. “Our team needs to order a new jersey, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, I guess I can’t blame her. If I was going to be hot for any woman, it would most certainly be you.”

  “Sorry, roomie,” Angela said with a wink. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

  “Gross.”

  She waved her hand. “It’s an expression.”

  We both chuckled, and then Angela grabbed our empty glasses and headed to the bar for a refill. At this point, we should have just bought a bottle, but at least this way we got to try different blends.

  I watched Liam from my dark little corner, fighting the urge to roll my eyes as he put his arm around a beautiful girl I recognized from the Uffizi. He pulled her close and whispered something in her ear that made her laugh and shove him away, only to cuddle into his side a moment later. She started kissing his neck, and at that exact moment, he took off his sunglasses.

  And he looked at me.

  I should have been embarrassed. I should have torn my gaze away with flaming hot cheeks. But for some reason I couldn’t look away, not even when those dark eyes lit up with recognition of who I was.

  I let out a long breath, wishing I had my wine glass so I could at least do something other than stare at him. But he didn’t seem annoyed. If anything, he seemed to enjoy being the subject of my attention.

  I didn’t mind it, either.

  Until the moment his gaze fell to my right hand.

  I had it propped under my chin, not even thinking about it, since it was just me and Angela in the corner. But when he looked at it, that flush I thought I’d feel from him noticing me staring at him finally found me, and I hastily shoved my hand under the table where he couldn’t see it anymore.

  His eyes met mine, then, and he frowned, brows bending together to form a thick line between them.

  In the next instant, the girl on his arm slid her manicured nails back behind his neck and turned his face until he was looking at her again.

  I closed my eyes on an exhale that burned my lungs, shaking my head before I opened them again and looked for Angela. She was still at the bar, our wine glasses full now, but she was caught up in conversation with the bartender.

  A beautiful Italian woman who seemed to lean just as much over the bar as Angela, a curious smile on her face.

  I know where this is going.

  Grabbing my purse off the table, I slid out of the booth and tucked my hair behind one ear, stopping by the bar long enough to tell Angela I was going to head out.

  “But I just got this for you!” she complained, motioning to one of the full wine glasses.

  I smiled, tapping the bar as my eyes found the bartender’s. “I think you two can handle it.”

  The bartender smiled at me first and then Angela, and my roommate gave me a knowing grin before she leaned in and kissed
my cheek and told me to be careful walking home.

  My hair fell in front of my face as I turned, but I didn’t tuck it behind my ear this time.

  I used it as a shield to hide me from Liam Benson as I pushed past him and out into the night.

  I didn’t know why I ended up in the classroom.

  I didn’t know why, when I left the bar and stepped out into the warm summer evening, my feet decided to walk me in a straight line toward campus.

  Maybe I wasn’t ready to go home. Maybe I didn’t feel like sleeping yet. Maybe I was still worked up from the day and needed to walk it off.

  Maybe I wanted to see what Liam Benson had painted.

  Whatever the case, I found myself alone in the classroom — one Professor Beneventi gave each of us the combination to unlock so that we could work whenever inspiration struck us. Last night, the room had been filled with students finishing up their projects. Tonight, it was empty and quiet, the atmosphere a little haunting in its aloneness.

  I let out an audible sigh as I walked over to my painting first, dropping my purse on the barstool and staring at the canvas. An image that had brought me such joy just twenty-four hours ago now made me want to rip it all to shreds. I no longer saw the bright and beautiful yellows and oranges and reds. I no longer saw some of my best brush work in the river, or the clarity of the people walking the streets even when using thick oil. I no longer saw a landscape I’d be proud to hang in my home or to see displayed in a gallery.

  I only saw mediocrity.

  And suddenly I understood what the professor had said.

  It was predictable.

  Shaking my head, I turned my back on the painting and walked along the edge of the room, eyes glancing at the other works as I did. Some students had taken theirs when they left, but most of them remained, and I saw some that were far worse than mine and just as many that were better.

  I painted my first picture when I was three years old using a watercolor set my grandmother had given me. To this day, I swear that was my first memory. The first little snapshot of time my brain held onto was the splashes of blue and purple watercolor on that white sheet of paper.