Love Far Away: 2 Page 7

  “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” asked Megan, after Becca had consulted the map for about the fiftieth time. We were standing on a narrow, deserted cobbled street that was probably very charming in the daylight, but the sun had set and so instead of being delighted by its quaintness I kept anxiously looking over my shoulder for muggers. “This doesn’t look like it...”

  “Hmm,” she said. “I think I see something up ahead. That’s probably it!”

  We ended up in a piazza with a horde of tourists surrounding what we eventually figured out was the Trevi Fountain. “How do you mess that up?” demanded Ashley, trying to peek at Becca’s map. “They’re in totally opposite directions!”

  “Well, sorry,” said Becca, snatching her map back. “You try being the navigator for once and see how you do! Without me to figure out where we’re going and what we’re going to see you would just be going from bar to bar and wandering around aimlessly.”

  “You’re doing a great job, Becca,” I tried to smooth things over. “I’m actually impressed this is the only time you’ve gotten us lost.”

  She gave me a halfhearted smile. “Thanks, Jules. Can you take my picture in front of the fountain?”

  It took a very long time, and several attempts thwarted by pushy tourists taking their own photos, but I was finally able to snap one for her. It was a bit anti climatic for me, being there- surrounded by hundreds of tourists, carts hawking t-shirts, and ice cream trucks, instead of the image I’d had in my mind this morning of Sébastien and I holding hands as we tossed pennies in the water and made wishes. I was a little relieved to escape in to a cafe with the girls and enjoy a glass of wine as we watched the people walking by. We made plans for tomorrow- up early, per Becca, followed by a day at the Roman Colosseum and the Forum walking around looking at all of the historical sights.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, I checked my email to see if there was a message from Sébastien about meeting up. Nothing. I reminded myself that it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since we’d disembarked from the boat and that as the captain arriving in a new port, he would probably be busy with paperwork and whatever else it was that yacht captains did. He would get in contact with me when he had a chance, I told myself. In the meantime, obsessing about it would only make me feel more anxious.

  I turned off my phone and tried my hardest to be present while we had breakfast in our hotel, before heading out for a day of sightseeing. It was pleasantly distraction to follow Becca around Rome’s subway system and follow the hordes of tourists to the Colosseum. The line was really long so we watched people get their pictures taken with actors dressed up in gladiator costumes. Inside, it was packed. A Japanese tour group and about a hundred German teenagers with matching backpacks were right in front of us, and the tour guides shouting in various languages I didn’t understand combined with the relentlessly bright sun was giving me a bit of a headache.

  After the Colosseum, Becca brought us to the Pantheon, through the Roman Forum, and to a series of churches. We stopped only briefly- once to eat sandwiches from a vendor outside the Pantheon, and late in the afternoon she let us stop to eat some gelato in the Piazza di Spagna after we had climbed the Spanish Steps.

  “Oh look,” said Becca, glancing up from her guidebook and pointing to a nearby building. “That’s where the English poet John Keats lived until his death from tuberculosis in 1821. He was only twenty-five- that’s sad! Oooh, there’s a museum in there dedicated to him! Should we go?”

  “I’m kind of tired,” said Megan. “We did a lot of walking today.”

  “I feel like I’ve just looked at five hundred identical statues and churches,” said Ashley. “I know this stuff is important and historical and all but it all looks exactly the same after a while. What I really want to do is eat an enormous plate of pasta. That tiny sandwich I had four hours ago isn’t cutting it.”

  Becca looked at me. “What do you think, Jules?” she asked. “Want to go check it out?”

  “I’m kind of tired too,” I admitted. “And a little hungry. And dirty. Should we go back to the hotel and change?”

  “I don’t even care how gross I look,” declared Ashley. “I want to eat right now, so let’s just go to a restaurant filled with unwashed tourists and stuff our faces. Then we can go back to the hotel and change and go out for a drink.” She stood up. “That’s what I’m doing, at least!” She started to walk down the steps, and we all scurried to keep up.

  That is what we ended up doing, and it was a great time- the food was delicious, and the bar we chose was the kind of place you could relax and just enjoy the company of your friends and not worry about them ending up in a VIP room doing cocaine with a Belgian tennis star. Before we went to bed that night, Becca made us promise to spend the next day visiting the museum at Vatican City. I checked my email and didn’t see a message from Sébastien, so I told her I was excited to visit the Sistine Chapel.

  When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t grab for my phone right away. In fact, I didn’t even think about Sébastien until I’d showered and dressed. But an offhand remark Megan made about the breakfast buffet the morning on the yacht took me right back to that day, and I immediately pulled my phone out to check.

  There it was! He’d even sent it last night, late, after I’d already checked for messages. He had finished up everything he had to in Civitavecchia, he said, and would be spending the next three days in Rome before taking out a group that had chartered the yacht for a week. He wanted to know if he could spend some of that time with me. If I was free today, all I had to do was let him know the name and address of my hotel and he would come and get me.

  I put my phone down. “Er, Becca,” I said, “I’m really sorry, but i don’t think I’ll be able to come to the Vatican today.”

  “Whaaat?” Becca looked upset. “Why not? What happened?”

  Megan and Ashley were staring at me too. I felt self-conscious all of a sudden and thought about faking a stomach bug or something- nobody would argue with diarrhea- but decided it was time to stop chickening out. “Sébastien is coming to Rome today,” I said. “He asked if I’d like to spend some time with him if I was free.”

  “What did you say?” asked Megan.

  “Nothing yet.”

  Becca looked down at her plate. “Sure. That sounds fun. Go for it.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. Becca nodded.

  “Well...okay then.” I emailed him back, telling him where to find our hotel, and while the girls headed out for another day of seeing as many historical monuments and churches as possible I went back to the room to wait for Sébastien.

  I didn’t have to wait for long. I got a call from the lobby not twenty minutes later that I had a guest downstairs, and I hurried down to see him. “I thought you wouldn’t be here for at least an hour!” I exclaimed, rushing to give him a hug. “The train from Civitavecchia takes at least that long!”

  He laughed. “What would you say if I was already in Rome and was just waiting to hear where to go to meet you?”

  I smiled at him. “So where are we going to go today?”

  “Well, I had thought I might take you to see some of the famous landmarks of Rome- the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum...”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “We visited those yesterday.”

  “The Forum?”

  “That, too. And the Spanish Steps, and the Pantheon, and a whole bunch of churches and other various statues and fountains and obelisks.”

  Sébastien looked impressed. “Well, you were very busy for just one day! What did you think of them?”

  “It was really interesting to see things I’ve read or heard about,” I said. “There sure are a lot of tourists in Rome, though. It was a little overwhelming. Lots of tour groups everywhere...it was a little harder to appreciate what I was seeing.”

  He perked up at that. “I think I know just what we shall do today! Come with me, Julia.” He took my hand and led me outside.
My heart skipped a beat as I walked down the busy sidewalk next to him. I assumed that we were walking towards a parked car, but instead he led me to a small grocery store where we bought bread, cheese, grapes, and a bottle of wine. Then we entered the metro station and he bought two tickets. “The drivers in Rome are extremely crazy,” he explained to me as we waited for the underground train. “I do not drive here unless I have to.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked him. “The Vatican? That’s where my friends went today.”

  “No, not the Vatican,” said Sébastien. “It is a surprise. I think you will like it, though.”

  We rode a metro train for a few stops, got off, and went up a flight of stairs. I thought we would find ourselves in a different part of the city, but instead we got on another train. This train seemed to be heading out of Rome, through the outer suburbs. “We’ll be coming back later tonight, right?” I asked anxiously. “I told my friends I was just going out for the day...”

  “We will be back to the city in time for dinner,” Sébastien assured me. “We are not going so far away.”

  We got off the train at a station called Ostia Antica, and I followed Sébastien across a parking lot to a small gatehouse. He spoke to a man there in Italian, gave him some money, and then gestured for me to come with him through the gates.

  I followed him in, and looked around. The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was. Gone were the bus tours and school groups and actors dressed up as gladiators. We were standing on a cobbled path, surrounded by trees. There were some old, crumbling buildings I could see up ahead, some broken pillars, and what looked like a decorative water trough. “What is this place?” I asked, my voice hushed. Even though we were outside, the whole place had the air of a museum.

  Sébastien smiled. “The other day you arrived in Civitavecchia, the port of modern Rome. Today you are in Ostia Antica, the port of ancient Rome.”

  We walked a little further, until we came to an amphitheatre. Sébastien sat down in the seats and gestured for me to join him. He opened the bag of food and started sawing away at the loaf of bread with a Swiss Army knife. “Are we allowed to do this?” I asked uncertainly. “Yesterday we weren’t supposed to touch anything....”

  “Oh, of course!” said Sébastien. He pointed ahead of us. “Up there is where the ancient markets were held. I like to come here and walk around. It is always so quiet and peaceful. It always amazes me that such a remarkable place is always so empty. I suppose it is not large and famous and important like the other sites in Rome, but it is very nice to spend the day walking around. I like to imagine sometimes that I am living in ancient times myself when I am here. Much easier to do it here than at the Colosseum!”

  “That’s for sure,” I said, taking a piece of bread and some cheese. It was so pleasant to sit there in the sunshine, and listen to the birds singing, while we ate our simple lunch and looked around at the ancient theater and market.

  After eating, we started to explore. There was a main road down the middle, surrounded by ruins on both side as far as I could see. There were houses, warehouses, public baths, taverns- it was literally the size of a town with every kind of building you could find there. We watched archaeologists work from a distance in a roped off area. Headless statues and half-fallen walls of houses overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers and tiled mosaics on the floors and walls of what was left of the town’s buildings stretched on and on in front of us. Some of the paths and dirt roads between buildings were marked with simple street signs. “This place is amazing,” I kept repeating. “Just think of the people living here two thousand years ago!”

  “It makes one feel very small and insignificant, I think,” said Sébastien, stepping forward to examine a mosaic. “It makes me wonder what I might leave behind in this world- if anything will be left of me in two thousand years’ time.”

  I stood next to him, watching him study the mosaic. I thought about my own mortality, and what I might leave behind in this world for my children’s children to discover. The sun beat down warmly on our backs, and it was quiet enough that I could hear crickets chirping and the occasional twitter from a bird. There was nobody around. I leaned against him, and he felt comfortingly solid. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” I said. “You always say just what I need to hear to challenge me, to make me think. I’ve spent the past few years at home, and I love my children, but I’ve become complacent. You make me remember that there’s more out there in the world.”

  He turned and looked down at me, and caressed my cheek with one hand. My heart was pounding away in my chest so loudly that I was sure he could hear it. He bent down and kissed me.

  My eyes closed, my legs melted, and I had to wrap my arms around his neck to keep myself standing up. Bound together under some kind of unspoken agreement, we half danced and half walked to where there had once been a wall in the ancient building, but was now an open space. We stepped out in to the sun together, and opened our eyes briefly enough to look around.

  Aside from one blackbird perched on a half wall opposite us, it was deserted. I couldn’t hear any voices or see anybody else around. I looked at Sébastien, and we locked eyes. An unspoken agreement passed between us, no words needed.

  The next thing I knew he was laying me down gently on the soft grass. He pulled a foil packet from his trouser pocked and tore it open in one smooth motion. I held him and kissed him and stroked him as he reached up under my summer dress and pulled down my panties. I unbuckled his belt and there, in the middle of the two thousand year old ruins, I felt him enter me with a surge of power.

  Our bodies worked together, gasping and gyrating, and he slid a hand up my dress and found the sweet spot. “Ohhh,” I couldn’t help but groan. “Oh, God, don’t stop!”

  “Shh,” he murmured, and slowed down. “We must stay quiet!”

  I buried my face in his shoulder so I wouldn’t cry out with pleasure, and bit down on his shirt with a muffled cry as the slow rocking motion built up inside of me. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped- only to be replaced with the deft touch of his fingers. I moaned aloud as he worked in my glistening wetness, alternating fast and slow, hard and gentle. With his other hand, he reached up and stroked my face. I grabbed his hand and channeled my passion in to sucking on his index finger, using every part of me that wanted to scream out with pleasure to remind him of what I could do.

  “Oh, Julia,” he gasped in a low whisper, “tu me rends fou! You’re driving me mad…I must have you!”

  His hands brought me to the brink, and just as I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer, he quickly slid me on to my side. He slipped between my legs and it seemed he was penetrating me to my very core. Now the thrusts came hard and fast as he expertly massaged in just the right place, and if we had been alone in his bedroom like the other night, I would have let loose with a throaty cry of passion. But out here, amongst the millenniums-old ruins and the chance that any second we might be discovered, I placed a hand over my mouth to muffle the sound.

  Finally, the build-up reached its apex and I was overcome. Seconds later I felt the release from Sébastien and he collapsed on my chest. We laid there together, holding one another close, trembling from exertion for several minutes before he pushed himself up to a sitting position.

  “I’m so sorry,” he apologized. “I always try to be a gentleman, but I don’t know what came over me. In the moment I simply could not resist you.”

  I sat up too, and crawled next to him. We leaned against one of the ruined half-walls and I rested my head on his shoulder, feeling the warm sun wash over us. “Don’t apologize,” I said. “That was amazing. I’ve never done anything like that before. I bit my own hand- see?” I held it out to show him. “If we weren’t in here, I would have been screaming out with pleasure.”

  He leaned over and kissed my head, then ran his fingers through my hair. “You are so very beautiful,” he said. “I don’t know if I have ever met anybody like you before. This is all new t
o me. I’ve never been so overcome like that, where I simply could not wait one second more to have you.”

  I tilted my head back and gazed in to his eyes. “I’ve never felt like this either,” I admitted. “I know it’s crazy. I only met you a few days ago. But I feel like I’ve known you forever.”

  He bent down to kiss me and I closed my eyes and leaned in. Suddenly, a prickling on the back of my neck made me open them. I looked over and, standing examining the same mosaic we had been looking at in the moments before our passionate encounter, was an elderly couple. I drew back and nudged him slightly, nodding towards the couple. “Just think,” I said. “A few minutes later and we would have been discovered!”

  Sébastien smiled at me and gave me another kiss. “We are very lucky,” he said.

  Chapter Ten

  I spent the next day with Sébastien, too. We visited Piazza del Popolo in the middle of the city and then spent hours wandering around the Villa Borghese, a huge park in the middle of the city. That night, we had dinner together in a small, dimly lit trattoria where we talked about our very different childhoods- his idyllic in the sun soaked south of France, mine in central Ohio. We’d struggled after my father had been laid off at the plant, and my mother had hidden from us kids the fact that we’d been on food stamps for a while. Sébastien’s childhood of swimming and sailboats sounded like bliss to me, but he confessed that growing up so close to the opulent wealth of St-Tropez he had held a warped view of what it was like to be well off, and had thought that his family- with just one sailboat and one short ski vacation per year- was poor compared to some of what he saw around him. Where I had gone to college and gotten married right away, he had dropped out of university a few credits shy of a degree in technology and done some travelling- picking fruit in Australia, working as a bartender in Greece. I still hadn’t visited the Vatican, so we made plans to do that tomorrow, my last full day in Rome before we would have to return to Paris to catch our flight home.