Nick smiled. “It was a long flight.” He squeezed her hand.
The bus began to slow and Nick leaned over her to look out the window and stood, pulling his hand away. She glanced outside and saw a two-lane country road lined with coastal pines. Though as far as she could tell they were nowhere near the water. Nick pulled her up. They disembarked.
The air was crisp, fresh, a slight note of citrus blossom, but there were no citrus trees. There was an open field. A warehouse at the far end of it. A house painted a Tuscan orange. A squat redbrick apartment building.
Nick began walking. She followed. She felt him watching her. “What?”
“I think I’m a bit in shock that I can just . . . look at you. That I can think about you and then just . . . look at you.”
Sewanee smiled. “If you’d rather text, I’ll understand.”
Nick hooted a laugh. “Not when the reality is so much better than whatever I’d cooked up in my head.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He shrugged. “It’s the truth.”
She stopped walking. She had to. “Nick. I heard what you said on the bus and I understand it, I do.” He stopped walking, too, but that made it feel like too much of a discussion, so she started walking again. “But it’s hard for me. You met this me, but there was another me once. And for the record I found it as difficult to believe men and what they saw when they looked at me then as it is to believe you and what you see when you look at me now.”
“Is that supposed to help us?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “What I’m saying is, I want to move forward. I just don’t think we can realistically forget how this whole thing started.”
“But how it started is not how it ended.”
“But it did end.”
He laughed. “Then for Pete’s sake, what are we doing here?”
She stopped again. He had a point. But it still didn’t feel settled. So she threw out her arms. “Where is here, anyway? Where the hell are we?”
Nick only smiled and reached for her hand and she let him take it. And they walked like that down a sidewalk somewhere in Italy.
When the silence got to her, she looked over at him and found he was watching her again. “What?!”
He looked down. “Just thinking this time.”
She smiled. “About?”
“Honestly?” He looked up. Then back at her. At her hairline. At her mouth. At her eye. Taking stock. “Right now? In this moment? About moving to L.A. and taking you down to City Hall and figuring everything else out later.”
“Nick,” she breathed.
He shook his head, squeezed his eyes closed. “Sorry. You know I don’t have a filter.” He took a breath. “Ignore me, I’m jet-lagged.”
But what if I wanted that, too? she thought. It was appealing, the prospect of it. Of giving up on figuring anything else out right now. To have someone instead of herself to focus on. To just be happy for as long as possible. To ignore the future.
She realized she’d been silent for too long when Nick asked, nervously, “Now, what are you thinking?”
She looked wistfully up at a tree. “That we should finish the series. Here.”
A beat. “What?”
She smiled at him. “We’re together, the scripts are ready. Jason wanted to do Duet Narration for the sex scenes. Why not?”
Nick dropped her hand and skipped out in front of her, turning around to walk backward. “Recorded on location in Venice, Italy!”
Sewanee chuckled. “Ready-made promotion!”
“Ka-ching!” Energized, Nick whipped his phone out of his pocket. “Let me text Jason, see if he can find a studio for later today.” He quickly typed while Sewanee gazed about. Eventually, Nick stopped walking and she figured he needed to concentrate on his phone, but when she looked at him, he was looking up at her, his hand wrapped around one pole in a large, open iron gate. A sign proclaimed:
LUXARDO–MARASCHINO.
Sewanee blinked at it. Then she blinked at Nick. “As in . . . the cherries? The liqueur?”
He smiled. “Fancy a Last Word?”
Chapter Sixteen
“The Consummation”
BY THE TIME THEY ARRIVED BACK IN VENICE, JASON HAD SECURED A studio and e-mailed the scripts there. They would lay down one episode that afternoon and the other the next morning and then the series would be done.
They found the studio on a quiet backstreet in the Jewish Ghetto, rang the buzzer, and climbed to the top floor, where they were greeted by a small man with a rock ’n’ roll face and chin-length hair. He introduced himself as Cosmo and gestured them into the space.