When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

“No,” I assured, running my nails over his freshly shaven jaw. “I can’t wait to go there with you.”

The Amalfi Coast was the jewel of Italy’s natural beauty. The steep cliffs festooned with brightly colored homes like something in a patisserie display window, the long rows of sun-baked lemons giving off a sweet, slightly tacky aroma on the sea scented breeze, and all that greenery bursting with multitudes of vivid blooms in the long spring and summer seasons. There was a quality to the light there that brought artists through the ages to those craggy shores in droves, but people visited for the food too––the sweet-tart tomato sauces smothering pastas and pizzas and eggplants, the green bite of pine nut pesto, and the lemon liquors thick with cream or sour as biting straight into the flesh like an apple. The people wore their sun leathered, sea weathered skin with pride, their bodies agile beyond their years from climbing up and down the countless stairs and hills that made up the topography of that pointed peninsula.

It was a beautiful place filled with beautiful, vivacious people.

And I’d hated it since I was sixteen.

It was filled with memories of the stupid teenage girl I’d been, believing myself in love with a man who had never loved me back. He had used me the way one uses a tissue, carrying me around crumpled in his pocket, hidden and dirty, to pull out when there was a deposit to be made into it.

Disgusting.

Filthy.

The entire affair.

I could think of it now, after years of therapy with less self-loathing. I didn’t want to throw myself off a cliff at the realization of how stupid I had been when I thought myself so worldly and wise. Now, I just felt sad when I thought of that time. Then, it had been the happiest period of my life. I’d laughed and danced, I dreamed and played piano as if I was possessed, emotions flowing through me to hammer at the keys. Music spilled from our little house in Forcella at all hours of the day when I wasn’t with Christopher.

It was why I avoided music so much after we moved away and left him behind.

It wasn’t possible to sit in Dante’s Lamborghini as we easily navigated the harrowing turnings on the cliffside roads of the coast on our way to Sorrento and not remember the relationship that had poisoned me against sex and love, against Giselle, and against myself.

“No one loves you,” he said in English, the words staccato compared to the way my own Neapolitan dialect tended to meld each sentence into one long ribbon of sound. “Do you understand me?”

I shook my head, because I didn’t really. English was the one subject in school I struggled with despite my best efforts. I didn’t understand the strange, pattern-less rules of grammar, and my mouth seemed incapable of biting off the consonants properly.

But that was okay, because Christopher had offered to give me private lessons. My own father was a native English speaker, but he was rarely home and even when he was, he seldom took an interest in his bookish eldest daughter.

Christopher took a keen interest. He knew Seamus from Papa’s few years working at the local university, and they’d stayed friends.

I liked him. He was quintessentially foreign in every way, from his round, faded denim blue eyes and pale face inclined to burn in the hot Napoli sun, to the way he drank tea instead of our strong Italian coffee. He was exotic. To a preteen girl with a head stuffed full of escapist dreams, he was utterly tantalizing.

And he knew it.

“No one loves you,” he repeated again, this time in Italian. His words were as soft and tender as the hand he passed over my head, down the back of my hair. “Not really. No one except me. You know that, don’t you, Elena?”

I blinked up at him, remembering how much bigger he seemed than me as a thirteen-year-old girl. The descending sun backlit his hair, burnishing it so that is shone almost as copper toned as my own. I wanted to touch it and his words of love gave me the uncharacteristic confidence to do so. He smiled encouragingly as my fingers rubbed a strand of light brown hair.

“Capisci?” he asked again. “This is why you are always so alone. This is why I come to play with you.”

It was true. I was often alone in our little house on the outskirts of the city. Seamus owed too much money for Mama to stay home all the time, so she worked at a trattoria in town. Even Sebastian had a job at eight years old, helping at the docks, and Cosima had already begun to model locally.

Only Giselle and I didn’t work, though I could and did argue that I worked as the house wife my mother should have been, the one Seamus still expected when he eventually turned up back at home.