The Pairing(71)

“Hard to imagine anything more interesting than what I’m looking at right now.”

“What about four people sharing one cone of gelato?”

I blink. “What?”

I follow their gaze to a gelato stand where the Calums, Dakota, and Montana are passing around a single runny cone of stracciatella.

“Ooh.” I frown approvingly as Ginger Calum tongues down the cone, then holds it out to Montana to give her a taste. “They’re in the Italian spirit.”

“I wouldn’t do that with someone unless I was fucking them,” Theo says. “The two girls they were talking about, the ones who had a threesome with Blond Calum . . . do you think they meant Dakota and Montana?”

Dakota licks a streak of chocolate off Blond Calum’s hand, and I have to hold my applause. Sluts forever. “Good for them, then. Looks like they’re figuring it out.”

“Maybe they settled the score,” Theo suggests. “Maybe we’re not the only ones who got some action in Cinque Terre.”

We find Fabrizio at our meeting point in the piazza, arguing with another guide in vehement Italian over the best spot in front of the cathedral. He finishes with fire in his eyes and a fuck off gesture of his hand under his chin, but he gets the spot he wanted, which instantly puts him back in a good mood.

“Buongiorno, amici!” he shouts, clapping his hands. “We will begin our walking tour of Firenze? Sì? I think today, because we have many lovers in our group”—I swear his eyes land mischievously on mine—“I want to take you on a special tour of the passion of Florentine history. The secret affairs, the betrayals, the great loves, the scandals. What do you think? Yes? Andiamo!”

We begin at the cathedral, Fabrizio’s voice smooth as he explains every intentional panel and detail, the contrasting stripes of red marble from Siena, green from Prato, white from Carrara. He points up to where a scorned stonemason secretly mounted a bull’s head with its horns pointing at a tailoring shop owned by his lover’s husband. Then he ushers us away to Palazzo Pazzi, a rugged palace once home to the powerful Pazzi family, who conspired to stab the even more powerful Medici princes to death at the altar of the Duomo in the middle of Easter Sunday mass. On its exterior is a small door around chest level, a wine window left over from the plague days, which Theo finds so delightful they stay behind to get a good photo for the Somm.

The next stop is—whoa.

The old alleys are so close and gnarled, Piazza della Signoria seems to open wide out of nowhere. It sprawls in a lake of black stone, clusters of tourists swirling like schools of fish. Directly ahead, water erupts from a majestic white marble fountain embellished with bronze figures of fauns and satyrs, a huge, powerful sculpture of a nude man borne on a shell-shaped chariot at its center.

“The Fountain of Neptune!” Fabrizio announces with a flourish.

I’ve beheld the cheeks of a thousand nude sculptures, and yet I swear this is an extraordinarily hot rendition of Neptune. Maybe it’s the ambient horniness, but the full, muscular ass on this Neptune is—

“Bodacious,” Theo pants, breathless from running to catch up. “That ass is bodacious.”

I turn to see Theo flushed with exertion, shadows of perspiration beginning to show through their shirt. Ambient horniness, buongiorno.

“Sì, very sexy!” Fabrizio says. “So sexy, the sculptor eventually denounces this Neptune and his other nude sculptures for leading people to sin.”

“Is that true?” I ask.

“More or less,” Fabrizio says with a wink.

At a bronze statue of a man on horseback, Fabrizio tells us Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici was so enraged when his chamberlain leaked his plans to marry his mistress that he stabbed him through the heart with a trophy boar spear in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti. We study the sculptures in the Loggia dei Lanzi: Giambologna’s iconic Sabine Woman with her supple, achingly lifelike flesh; a bronze Perseus with the severed head of Medusa so difficult to cast that the goldsmith desperately threw his own kitchen chairs and pans into the furnace for fuel. We learn about Cosimo’s slutty son Francesco in the courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio, frescoed with Austrian landscapes when he married Joanna, archduchess of Austria—something to keep her company while her husband fucked the mistress he’d installed in a palace nearby.

Past the Uffizi Gallery, we cross the Arno via Ponte Vecchio, where men of the Renaissance furtively fucked in back rooms of butcher shops. We visit the palace of Bianca Cappello, the mistress Francesco loved so much he would’ve had his Austrian bride murdered, only for his brother to (allegedly) poison them both. Inside Palazzo Pitti, where most of the Medici family’s art collection still hangs, we see paintings by Lippi and Raphael, and Fabrizio tells us how insatiable desire ruined them both.

It’s all so rich, so warm, so flavorful, that when tour ends at the Boboli Gardens, I feel glutted on Florence. I’m sweating, barely keeping ahold of myself. Theo is pink and shining in the heat. We’re nearly to the place I planned for us. This, finally, is the moment.

“Well,” Theo says. Fabrizio has dismissed us for the afternoon, leaving us beside a leafy pond with a nude statue of the sea god at its center. “Right back where we started. Sexy Neptune.”

I can’t wait any longer.

“Can I show you something?”