The Passionate Italian 11 DECEMBER EPUB (18 page)

Giovanni and Rose exchanged glances. All Rose could do was to shake her head.

“But it didn’t end nicely for your Rose did it? Poor girl was upset that I didn’t want her any more. Looks like she’s been trying to get back at me for rejecting her, with all this sleuthing work.”

“Shut up Alberto. You’re lying. You may have wanted to, but you haven’t touched her. Rose has told me everything.” He turned to her. “Haven’t you Rose?”

“Giovanni, I—”

“Haven’t you Rose?”

Somehow the pain had turned his voice cold.

Alberto laughed. “You really think it was coincidence that she disappeared after your return from those months overseas? She disappeared because she couldn’t bear to be with you after she’d made love to me.”

“She has never been with you.”

“Yes she has, brother. And very nice too. But, you know? I didn’t want your leftovers.”

“Rose. Why didn’t you tell me?”

But there was nothing but blank shock and pain on her face. It said it all.

Something strong sapped out of Giovanni then and he turned, balled his fist and threw it into his little brother’s face. The pain inside dulled the pain of the punch as he left the room.

He turned to the policeman. “Charge me if you must.”

“Why, signore?”

“I’ve assaulted my brother.”

“None of us saw anything, signore.”

Giovanni entered the lift and fell back on the metal cage. As the lift slowly grated its way down to his room, all Giovanni could hear were the pathetic screams of pain from his brother and the quiet sobbing of his wife.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was the silence that awoke her the first time.

After trying to follow Giovanni out into the night, after refusing to go to hospital and after dismissing the nurse that Giovanni had arranged, the doctor had given her a strong shot of sedatives and pain relief that had knocked her into a long and dreamless sleep.

But then, too soon, the drugs had worn off. It was in the early hours that she’d awoken to hear the sound she’d dreaded—silence.

There was only the hum of the ever-constant traffic; the sudden shout from people returning from a long night of revelry and the distant, repetitive thud of a drum beat. But those sounds were ever present, the background, white noise of city life.

What she wanted to hear—and didn’t—was the sound of someone moving close to her; someone’s breath flowing in and out beside her ear; someone calling her name.

Not someone, she realized, but Giovanni.

She turned over painfully, the absence in her heart greater than her physical hurts.

She squeezed her eyes closed as if to shut out the pain. But it was contained within. The heavy, humid night air had been as oppressive as the silence.

She’d lain awake for some hours before taking more tablets to numb the pain of her thoughts and heart.

Oblivion had eventually claimed her and now the soft light of morning filtered through her window once more.

The silence was different however.

It was the weighty silence of someone else in the room—someone watching but not speaking—that awoke her.

Her senses prickled with awareness.

“You’re there aren’t you Giovanni?”

She could feel his presence without seeing, or hearing him.

A chair scraped heavily on the floor and footsteps approached the bed.

She closed her eyes with relief.

“You really should stop watching me while I sleep. It’s becoming a habit.”

She turned and looked up at him, a smile ready on her lips. But he looked worse than she felt. Dark shadows lay below his eyes and his clothes were disheveled and still damp from the morning air. He looked as though he’d been awake all night.
 

He ignored her attempts at humor. Perhaps he hadn’t even heard them.

“How do you feel?”

“My head will recover. That’s not my main concern.”

She pulled herself up in bed, wincing as her head throbbed with the effort.

He reached over to the medical supplies on the table, soaked some cotton wool and gently blotted away the fresh blood that had sprung up at her temple.

But he was too calm, too proficient.

She looked into his eyes, the brown almost charcoal in the cool light of morning. He was so close and yet so distant now. It made her realize that, this time, it was over.

Twice she tried to speak and twice he shook his head, silencing her.

“I have things to do now Rose. I suggest you rest. I just came to make sure you are recovering.”

“I’m fine but we need to talk.”

“About what? It seems there is little you wish to confide in me.”

“It wasn’t how Alberto said, we didn’t—”

He brought his hand to her mouth to stop her from saying anything further. “No.” He shook his head and walked away. “I don’t want to hear any more. The details are unimportant.”

“Giovanni. I’ve tried to tell you before. But I was scared. I tried, Giovanni. It was too difficult.”

“It is not so difficult if you really love someone, really trust someone. I think you do not love me enough.”

Stunned, the words vanished from her lips. His face was like a mask to her. Suddenly it didn’t seem like him, not her Giovanni. He was talking to her with the same polite, distant manner he reserved for casual acquaintances. The words were a parody of the intimacy they’d once shared.
 

He obviously took her stunned silence for agreement.

“I thought that might be case.” He got up and walked to the door. He shook his head as she tried to follow. “You need to rest. You’re still in shock.”

“No listen—”

“It’s too late.”

“When are you coming back?”

He shrugged. “What does it matter to you? Very little it would seem.”

“How can you say that?”

“How? Because I have seen nothing to suggest you feel otherwise.”

“Come back. I can explain then. I need you Giovanni.”

“Need, but not love? I can’t live with that.” He turned away briefly and she couldn’t see his face. But the change in his tone spoke volumes: rasping, emotional, final. He’d gone from her. “Rose, it is so difficult, loving you. I’ve made so many changes, tried to show you what life could be like if you’d only trust me. And you haven’t listened to, or understood, a word. And you’re not prepared to make any changes for me. This is not the behavior of a woman in love. You put yourself and your needs first. You are a selfish woman.”

“I’ve had to be selfish, Giovanni. My whole life. I couldn’t trust my own mother. It was the only way I could survive; the only way to make sure I didn’t slip into her dependent ways. If it wasn’t drugs, she was dependent on men, even me in the end.”

“Don’t think I don’t understand, Rose, because I do. But you had me. You had
me
, but you didn’t seem to notice or care.”

She flinched at the past tense.

“It’s hard to change. It’s hard to feel safe. I still felt there was no-one I could trust more than myself.”
 

“There was our love. Couldn’t you even trust that?”

She shook her head. “That night when Alberto…” She trailed off, not knowing whether Giovanni had discovered exactly what had happened that night.

“I know the truth about what happened. It is surprising how a little pain, and the threat of more, loosened my brother’s tongue. I am so sorry for what he did to you. But you should have trusted me with the truth then.”

“I know.” She looked down, pleating the covers with her fingers, trying to say the words she should have said years ago. “It was just that our love seemed too good to be true, too good to last. Deep down it felt that, somehow, a mistake had been made. Nothing had lasted in my past before, why now? When he attacked me, a part of me thought: yes, that’s right, that’s how it ends.” She looked over at Giovanni but he was gazing fixedly out of the window. “But you’re wrong. It wasn’t selfishness that stopped me from telling you about Alberto. I did it for you.”

He turned to her in disbelief.

“You did it for me? You thought that I needed protecting from myself? That I would endanger myself in some way because of what Alberto had done to you?”

She nodded.

“You think I am a fool, Rose?”

“No of course not. I think you are a passionate man who sometimes allows his passion to over-ride his sense.”

He sighed. “Truthfully. I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe it would have been as you say. Maybe not. But not to trust me with this? It undermines everything. There is no possibility of a future now. It’s gone. You’ve destroyed it.”

She didn’t see his face again.

He slammed the button on the lift and waited head down, leaning his weight against the grille, with his back to her.

In despair she turned away, her head in her hands, her legs slowly pulling up to her chest until she lay curled and sobbing, listening to the lift clank its way down the shaft, taking with it her last hope at happiness.

When she heard the front door slam shut, she stumbled over to the window, her legs nearly buckling under her, her hands propelling her along the smooth desktop.

A cold, clammy sweat settled on her skin as she watched him drive off into the pale misty morning.

One minute she’d had everything and now? She had nothing. Giovanni would forgive anything but not loving him enough, not returning the passion he felt for her, not trusting him.

She slumped down into the chair beside the window, images of Giovanni’s confrontation with Alberto flashing into her mind, out of sequence, without meaning. Giovanni had been in complete control. By bringing in the police, he’d ensured justice was done. She hadn’t given him enough credit.

She hadn’t trusted him enough.

Two things were certain. He was right. And he wouldn’t be coming back for her.

She pushed herself up and looked out at the slowly awakening world, shaking her head. She couldn’t live without him. She couldn’t see a future without him. He must come back.

And perhaps he would. He was hasty, perhaps he would return shortly with flowers, with anything, with just himself.

She pressed her face to the window—her vision blurred with tears.

There was no sign of him.

Slowly her focus withdrew from outside and she saw herself in the light of the desk lamp—reflected back to her in the window—ghost-like, white-faced, her hair crazily wild, tumbling around her face. Shocked to see this outward vision of herself when so much of her reality was centered on her emotional turmoil, she recoiled.
 

She turned sharply away. Her gaze swept the room. Unimportant papers were strewn around the room. The shredder filled with millions of pieces of important papers. Her laptop destroyed.

Pointless, she thought. Alberto must have known she’d have copies, that she would have stored such important information in a number of different places that were secure and impossible to find.

And yet he’d come here to destroy the evidence.

She lay down on the bed and curled up into a ball, too stunned for tears, too wired for sleep.

He hadn’t come here to destroy the evidence, she realized numbly; he’d come here to destroy Giovanni through her. And he’d succeeded.

Where was Giovanni now?

The pain of wanting him forced her off the bed again.

He’d come. He had to.

She’d tidy the room, that’s what she’d do. And shower. And get ready, because he would be back. He had to come back.

But the day passed into night, and night passed into day again and the next morning saw Rose shivering, dry mouthed and red-eyed beside the open window once more. Her head resting against the folded-back shutter, she stared out into the slowly lightening sky. The long night had been a confusion of strange, sporadic dreams and cruel awakenings.

Stiffened by the night air, her sleep had merged almost seamlessly with her consciousness until there had seemed no end and no beginning, only the pain of wanting and waiting.

It was as if her body had ceased to exist, so divorced was she from physical feeling. She knew she should feel pain from the places Alberto had hit her, but there had been nothing. Simply a sickening need that she realized would never now be filled.

But a small part of her kept on hoping; made her stay by the window, even as the light slowly grew into the gentle, long drawn out dawn of summer. She recognized the beauty of the early light flickering through the leaves of the stately plane trees that lined the street but felt nothing of it. She heard the brief chorus of birds that took refuge in that old and leafy part of Milan, but felt no joy.

All she could think of was the look on Giovanni’s face when he’d realized that Rose hadn’t trusted him with the truth.

Up until then, he’d believed she’d told him everything; he’d believed that she’d trusted him; he’d believed that he’d been able to show her that he could be trusted.

But she hadn’t.

She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the cool windowpane.
 

Why not? Because she was too afraid. Afraid that her world would fall apart if she gave even one small iota of herself to another person.
 

But her world had fallen apart anyway, because of her fear. And she’d been too stupid, too blind to understand.

But Giovanni had understood and he’d been patient. He was right. He’d made all the changes, he’d done everything to make it work. And she’d done nothing. It had been her fear—her selfish needs—that had come first.

She looked outside at the strange mixture of people walking along the ancient road that led to the heart of the city and wished she were one of them: one of the street’s wealthy inhabitants, diving into a car, or one of the tourists, soaking up the atmosphere, in awe of the beauty that surrounded them.

But she wasn’t one of them. She leant back. There was nowhere to run any more. Because she realized she’d been running from herself.
 

A car horn blared and she looked up suddenly.

A tourist leapt to safety and the car continued on its way.

It was as if she’d awoken from a trance.

She sat up and looked at the clock.