I frowned, confused.
“It just seems like you would. You’re gorgeous and single, which tells me you’re probably quite picky.”
I couldn’t force my blush to recede. “I mean…there are a few things—”
She clapped. “I knew it! Tell us then, from the beginning.”
“It’s not much, really. He has to be intelligent and handsome…”
“Boooo,” Katerina moaned. “Tell us the real stuff. He obviously has to be smart and handsome. What are you really going after?”
I grinned, giddy from the wine. “Fine, okay. Preferably he would like to read. He’d have a well-worn edition of Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities—y’know, proper literature.”
Katerina nodded with a big cheesy grin, encouraging me.
“He’d be tall, but not gargantuan, you know? Um, let’s see…he’d like to have a good laugh. He’d like footie, but he wouldn’t be obsessed with it or anything. Oh! Most importantly, he’d be open and ready for love, without a ton of baggage—”
Massimo tossed his napkin on the table and leaned back. “That rules out Luca.”
Katerina laughed, but I didn’t.
What did he mean?
Gianluca was peeling the label off his beer bottle, seemingly unaware of the conversation going on around him, but then he glanced up and locked eyes with me. It only took a moment for me to see that he hadn’t just been ignoring us, he’d been in another world altogether.
He fidgeted, aware of everyone’s eyes on him, and then dropped his beer and stood.
“This has been fun, but I ought to get back before the sun drops too much lower.”
He reached into his back pocket for his wallet, tossed a few bills onto the table, and offered us a curt nod.
“I’ll see you around,” he said to Massimo and Katerina before turning to me. “Gigi, nice to see you.”
What the—
My mouth dropped, but he’d already turned and moved past the table before I could shout after him that he’d gotten my name wrong. We’d sat across from each other for the last two hours and he couldn’t even remember my name.
Katerina reached her hand out to touch my arm. “Please don’t take it personally. He doesn’t mean to be rude.”
Massimo nodded. “He’s been like that ever since Allie.”
I MET ALLIE at university the spring before we graduated. I was already set up to take a job in finance in London and she was going to teach. We should never have crossed paths, but we did. We crashed into each other’s lives. I was riding my bike on campus, racing to meet my mates at a pub a few blocks away. Allie was heading in the opposite direction. I skipped a traffic light and collided into her. She went flying and landed with a thud on a spotty patch of grass a few feet away. Her pink bike was nearly bent in two.
I opened my mouth, prepared to defend myself, but she was laughing, lying flat on the grass with a giant grin on her face.
“Oh god, are you okay?” I asked, rushing forward to help her up.
She didn’t move right away, not really concerned with me.
“Why are you laughing?”
She tried her best to quell her laughter, but it was no use. For a minute, I thought she might be insane, but finally she pressed her hand to her mouth and glanced up to me. “I have absolute shite luck. My parents bought me that bike as a graduation gift, just this morning.”
I groaned. “And now I’ve gone and ruined it.”
Good going, Luca.
She sat up and shook the hair out of her face. For the first time, I got a good look at her. She was lovely. Blonde and sweet.
“It’s okay, really.” She turned to assess the damage and her smile faded. I didn’t want it to fade. “I’ll tell them a car smashed it. They’ll moan about it but—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head adamantly. “I’ll repair it.”
Her brows rose. “You know how to mend bikes?”
“Yes,” I lied.
She grinned. “Brilliant. It’s the least you can do considering it was you who crashed into me.”
She was teasing and I liked it.
I didn’t end up meeting my mates at the pub. No man on Earth would have gone to meet his mates after meeting a girl like Allie. I rolled our bikes back to her flat and she invited me to come in with a promise of “lukewarm beer, crisps, and a well-stocked first aid kit.”
We got married a year later, ignoring our parents’ warnings about how young we were. Allie and I knew what we were doing. There’s no sense in waiting, Allie would say.
She moved to London with me and looked for a teaching job. My entry position at the firm kept me busy, but Allie and I made the most of the time we had together. We loved being outside, riding bikes, and hiking. On the weekends, we’d pack the car and go on adventures. We talked about getting a dog and raising kids in the city. We strolled hand in hand through Hyde Park, feeding the ducks in front of Kensington Palace.
We’d been married for four years when she started falling behind on hikes, blaming it on a sore knee. I encouraged her to see a physio about it, but she put it off for a few months, icing and laying off of it when she could.
Finally, I set up an appointment for her, after a canceled backpacking trip with friends. The first doctor she spoke to chalked up her injury to hiking, and suggested more ice, rest, and naproxen.
Six months later, Allie fractured her tibia on a simple hike we’d breezed through dozens of times. At the hospital, the MRI revealed an osteosarcoma tumor.