Breathing Room

FROM BREATHING ROOM…

You’re too much, Michael had said.  Too much of everything.  So why did Isabel feel as if she were too little?

She drank the first glass of wine more quickly than she should have and ordered another.  Her parents’ long term love affair with personal excess had made her wary of alcohol, but she was in a strange country, and the emptiness that had been growing inside her for months had become unbearable….

At the next table, two women smoked, gestured, and rolled their eyes over the absurdity of life.  A group of American students just behind them gorged on pizza and gelato, while an older couple gazed at each other over thimble-sized aperitifs.

I want passion, Michael had told her.

The implication was too painful to contemplate, so Isabel studied the statues on the other side of the piazza, copies of “The Rape of the Sabines,” Cellini’s “Perseus,” Michaelangelo’s “David.” Then her eyes settled on the most amazing man she’d ever seen…

He sat three tables away, a portrait of Italian decadence in a rumpled black silk shirt with dark stubble on his jaw, long hair, and La Dolce Vita eyes.  Two elegantly tapered fingers curled around the stem of the wineglass that dangled indolently from his hand.  He looked rich, spoiled, bored —Marcello Mastroianni stripped of his clown face and chiseled into perfect male beauty for an avaricious new millenium.

There was something vaguely familiar about him, although she knew they’d never met.  His face could have been painted by one of the masters—Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael.  That must be why she felt as if she’d seen him before.

She studied him more closely, only to realize he was studying her in return….

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Ren had been watching the woman ever since she’d arrived. She rejected two tables before she found one that pleased her, then rearranged the condiments as soon as she was seated. A discriminating woman. She wore the stamp of intelligence as visible as her Italian shoes, and even from here, she radiated a seriousness of purpose that he found as sexy as those overly lavish lips. 

She looked to be in her early thirties, with understated make-up and the simple but expensive clothes favored by sophisticated European women. Her face was more intriguing than beautiful.  She wasn’t Hollywood-emaciated, but he liked her body—breasts in proportion to her hips, tapered waist, the promise of great legs underneath her black slacks. Her blond hair had highlights she hadn’t been born with, but he’d bet that was the only thing fake about her.  No artificial fingernails or false eyelashes.  And if those breasts were stuffed with silicon, she’d be showing them off instead of keeping them tucked away underneath that tidy black sweater. 

He watched her finish one glass of wine and start on another.  She took a nibble on her thumbnail.  The gesture seemed out of character for such an earnest woman, which made it weirdly erotic.

He studied the other women in the café, but his eyes kept returning to her. He sipped his wine and thought it over.  Women found him—he never went after them. But it had been a long time, and there was something about this one.

What the hell…

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