The Italian

"What are you thinking about?" Jane asked her. The question she had been waiting for, yet would not answer.
Her mind wandered back to those days in Rome, to the day she met Cesare.

Italians were a lot more easy going than she thought. Yes, this did meant that the level of appreciation bordering on sexual harassment she received walking down the street was higher. But what it also meant was that he had had no problem approaching her in the club, even though she was surrounded by her friends, male and female. He didn't ask whether she was with anyone, whether she was taken, he simply took her hand and introduced himself. This olive-skinned Roman with those piercing blue eyes.
His English wasn't very good and her Italian was average at best. They understood each other by gesticulating, laughing, touching, and not long after, that final first kiss.

The time she had spent in Italy had confirmed that her Nordic looks were not considered particularly beautiful or elegant there. Men would occasionally make a passing comment when she walked by, but they wouldn't stare at her for more than a few seconds. But Cesare didn't seem to notice. He gently poked her freckles and played with her heavy, reddish hair.
"Carota." Carrot, he said, twisting it around his finger.

Italians don't know how to handle rain. She smiled as she remembered teasing him about it: "You're hardly going to melt!" she laughed at him, as Cesare ran to take cover under a terrace of some elaborate political building. A few drops had fallen. In England, this would go unnoticed. In Italy, people raised their umbrellas in defence and shrieked loudly, until they found somewhere that would protect them from the rain.

Of course, they fought like animals. She had never dreamt of becoming one of those women that shouts at her lover in the streets, only to then push him against a wall, slapping and kissing him. The deep, unflinching British social etiquette would never have allowed it. Here, it was a demonstration of mad passion. They fought and loved and desired each other from Piazza Navona to Via Veneto, from the Colosseum to the Castel Sant'Angelo.

She couldn't pronounce half the food they ate together and he tickled her when she called him "pet".

"So are you looking forward to the next time you end up in the Eternal City?" Jane asked her friend.
She smiled.
"Oh yes."