Gabriel's Inferno (Gabriel's Inferno 1)

When she returned to the table, she read the wine label: Serego Alighieri Vaio Armaron Amarone  2000.

“Is that who I think it is?” She extended a finger toward the bottle.

Gabriel took her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. “Yes. Dante’s son bought the vineyard in the fourteenth century, and the Masi family still produce wine from it.” He sat back in his folding chair and regarded her quietly. She seemed awestruck.

“I didn’t know his family had a vineyard.”

“It’s a very good wine. Although in light of our past, perhaps you find the choice overly sentimental?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I don’t.”

“I had to work late, but I wanted to have dinner with you, so I went to Pusateri’s and ordered take out. There’s manicotti, Caesar salad, and a loaf of bread. How’s that?”

Julia looked at the array of food set in front of her and immediately felt hungry. “What are these?” She pointed to a cellophane package of cookies that had a reindeer on the label.

Gabriel grinned. “Lime cookies from the Dancing Deer Baking Company. They’re my favorite. Why don’t you let me look after this while you dry your hair and drink your tea?”

He reached out his hand to run it through Julia’s long, wet curls.

“Why do you keep feeding me?”

His hand stilled. “I told you, I like giving you pleasure.” He withdrew his hand, his expression quizzical. “This is how a man acts when he is interested in a woman, Julianne. He’s attentive and anticipatory.” He flashed her a wicked grin. “Perhaps I’m trying to indicate that if I am this attentive with respect to sating your culinary longings, I’ll be even more attentive with respect to satisfying other — ah — appetites.”

Julia flushed immediately, and Gabriel touched her cheek with his hand. “Your skin is lovely,” he breathed. “Like a rose in first bloom.” He gazed at her admiringly. “Rachel stopped blushing when she started sleeping with Aaron.”

“How do you know?”

“As I recall, we all noticed it. One minute she was reading The Little Prince and the next she was buying lingerie.”

Julia chewed at her lip thoughtfully. “I loved that book.”

“We need to see with our hearts and not our eyes,” said Gabriel.

“Exactly,” she murmured. “I like the part when the fox talks to the prince about the process of taming. And the fox decides that he wants to be tamed, to be the prince’s fox, even though doing so will make him vulnerable.”

“Julianne, I think you should dry your hair now.”

He removed his hand from her face and stood up quickly, turning his back on her allegedly so that he could prepare dinner, leaving Julia to wonder what had so disquieted him.

After dinner, they found themselves sitting on her bed as if it were a sofa. Gabriel propped up some pillows against the wall and leaned back, putting his arm around her waist.

“I’m sorry it’s so uncomfortable,” she apologized meekly.

“It isn’t uncomfortable.”

“I know you hate this place. It’s small and cold and — ” She gestured to the room with a wave of her hand.

“I will regret forever what I said to you when you were kind enough to invite me in. I don’t hate this place. How could I?” He interlaced his fingers with hers. “This is where you are.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you for making everything beautiful just by being.”

She smiled as he brought their hands up to his mouth and kissed each of her fingers tenderly, one by one.

“Now tell me about your meeting with Katherine.”

Julia had to wait a moment until her fingers stopped tingling before she began. “She was exactly as you described. But she was very happy I’d read Charles Williams. I think that warmed her up a little. She agreed to be my advisor.”

“And what did she think of your proposal?”

“Um, she thought it was derivative and so she suggested that rather than comparing courtly love and lust, I should compare aspects of the friendship between Virgil and Dante with the theme of courtly love. So rather than discussing lust and love, I’ll be discussing love and friendship.”

“Are you happy with that?”

“I think so. We decided that I should take Professor Leaming’s Aquinas seminar next semester because it’s going to be on love and friendship.”

Gabriel nodded. “I know Jennifer Leaming. She’s quite good.”

Julia fidgeted with the duvet.

He placed his hand over hers. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“No hiding, Julianne. What is it?”

“I e-mailed Professor Leaming a week ago to ask if she would be my director. That was before you and I had our, um, conversation.”

Gabriel’s eyes grew momentarily cold. “And what did she say?”

“She didn’t.”

“Jennifer is very busy. She’s untenured, and I doubt she has time to supervise graduate students outside of the Philosophy Department.” He paused. “When I told you I would find you another director, did you not believe me?”

Julia squirmed. “I believed you.”

“Then why did you feel the need to go behind my back?”

“I wanted to see if I could fix it on my own.”

Gabriel pressed his mouth into a hard line. “And how did that work out?”

“It didn’t.”

“Sooner or later you are going to have to trust me. Particularly about things having to do with the university. Or this isn’t going to work.”

She nodded, chewing the inside of her mouth slightly. “Tell me about your meeting with Christa.”

“I’d rather not. She’s a pest.”

Julia tried in vain to smother a smile.

“She’s far too busy trying to rescue her dissertation proposal to trouble us. I won’t accept her project as it is, which means she has to find another supervisor. And as you know, I’m the only professor supervising theses on Dante at the moment.”

“So Christa is out?”

“I told her today that I would give her until December eighteenth to turn in an acceptable proposal. And that was a gift. So don’t worry about her anymore. Her academic future hangs by a thread, and I’m holding the end of it.”

Good, thought Julia.

“I had an interesting conversation with my lawyer today.”

She took another sip of wine and waited for him to continue.

“He said that he’s going to look into the non-fraternization policy, but he strongly warned against any kind of romantic relationship with you while you’re in my class.”

She reddened. “Does that include kissing?”

“Assuredly, but he pointed out that the university is concerned primarily with sexual activity. So as long as we’re chaste and discreet this semester, I don’t think we’ll have a problem.”

Julia reddened even further and looked down into her wine glass.

“So you’ll have to keep your hands to yourself, Miss Mitchell, until I’ve turned your grade in. After that, well…” He grinned at her suggestively.

“You can’t be kissing me one minute and grading my essay the next.”

“At this point, I couldn’t be objective about your work even if I tried.

I’ll have Katherine grade it.”

“Won’t she find that peculiar?”

He smiled. “I’ll make an excuse. And I’ll buy her a bottle of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. It would resurrect the dead.”

“You’re still proposing fraternization — of a sort.”

Gabriel cupped her face in his hands. “But it’s less serious than an affair and therefore puts us at much lower risk with the administration. I have my lawyer looking at all the loopholes.”

“I don’t want to be a loophole.”

“I don’t view you as one. Do you want me to stay away for five weeks and not see you at all? Not hold your hand or put my arms about you? Is that what you want?”

Julia thought for a moment, and the idea made her ill. She shook her head.

“I’d like to continue to see you, as friends of course. You’re still deciding if you can trust me, and we’re still getting to know one another. What the university doesn’t know won’t hurt us.” Gabriel took her wine glass and placed it alongside his on the card table. When he returned, he pulled her so that she was almost sitting in his lap.

“We can pretend we’re both in high school and living in Selinsgrove.

We’ve just begun dating, and because we’re good little teenagers and slightly old-fashioned, we’ve taken a vow of chastity.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“I have a vivid and detailed imagination when it comes to you,” he whispered. “And maybe I wish we’d been teenagers together.”

“So this is headed toward an affair?”

Gabriel was quiet for a moment.

“I had in mind something less tawdry. But Julianne, much of what our relationship will or won’t be rests entirely with you.”

She nodded to indicate that she’d heard him, and they both fell silent.