“New York City, baby!” Viv laughed, spinning around, making his heart jump. “This place is crazy, I want to stay here forever!”
Her words reminded him of the thing she’d said to him earlier, in the movie theatre. I think I might love you. Had he misheard her? He knew these streets like the back of his hand but saw them afresh through her pretty blue eyes, noticing beauty in the street art sprawled across the frontages of the closed-up stores and buildings, feeling the restless energy like a heartbeat pulsing beneath the sidewalk. Did she really want to stay here forever? And what would that mean for him, if she did? They were questions he couldn’t believe he was asking himself, but she brought out something in him that he hadn’t known was there, and she made him feel more himself than he ever had before.
* * *
—
“COME INSIDE, EVERYONE’S GONE home,” he said, pulling the keys to the gelateria from the back pocket of his jeans.
“Cool door,” she said, running her fingertips over the painted glass as she followed him inside.
“Sit down.” He gestured to the oxblood leather seats lining the counter as he moved behind it. “Let me make you some coffee, serve you like my favorite customer.”
She grinned, smoothing her ruffled tartan miniskirt over her thighs as she perched. “And gelato too? Vanilla, of course,” she said.
He shook his head. “There’s none to be had—we make it fresh every day, and it’s all gone.”
“You don’t have tubs in the freezer?”
He laughed. “I told you. Secret recipe. Fresh every day.”
Her eyes shone with mischief as she leaned in, her elbows on the counter. “I love secrets. Do you know the recipe? Will you tell me?”
“Of course I know it, and no, I can’t tell you. There’s only ever two of us in the family who know it at a time, and the only reason two people know it is just in case something happens to one.”
“In case one of you falls off a cliff or something,” Viv said, laughing.
He shrugged. “Something like that. It’s me and Papa now.”
Viv noticed the pride in his voice, and her eyes scanned the framed photos on the wall behind him, many generations of Belotti men standing behind this same counter. How very different his life had been from her own foundling beginnings. She was a blank slate, the gold signet ring on her wedding finger her only link to the mother who had abandoned her.
“You’re lucky to have all of this, you know. A place, a family, a history.”
“I know,” he said.
“And they’re lucky to have you too,” she said. “Because otherwise they’d have to rely on Felipe.”
“True,” Santo said. “He hardly comes here. I sometimes wonder if he feels guilty.”
From what Vivien had seen of Felipe, there wasn’t much in the way of guilt going on, but she spared Santo that knowledge.
“You make an excellent cup of coffee,” she said, sipping from the small white cup and saucer Santo pushed across the glass counter.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said.
She wrapped her hands around her drink. “Have you had a lot of practice with girls too?”
Santo’s easy expression faltered. “Not so much,” he said.
There was clearly more to that story, but Viv found she didn’t actually want to hear it, so she slid from the stool and walked slowly around the gelateria, trailing her fingers along the chair backs and wooden table edges.
“You have a piano,” she said, pleased. “Can I play it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you?”
She laughed softly, taking a seat on the piano stool near the window.
“Excuse me, sir,” she called, craning her neck to look at him over the piano top when he took a seat at a table with his coffee. “Do you have an admission ticket for this concert? It’s very exclusive.”
He patted his jean pockets and pulled out his cinema ticket from earlier. “Right here,” he said, laying it on the table.
She nodded, flexing her fingers. “Any requests?”
“You choose,” he said, and something in the way he held her gaze turned her stomach in slow somersaults.
“Okay,” she murmured, placing her fingers on the keys as she mentally flicked the pages of the songbook in her head. Ah, of course. Biting her lip, she closed her eyes as she began to play, and she kept them closed as she sang the opening lines of Madonna’s “Crazy For You.” It wasn’t the kind of song she sang with the band, but it was wall to wall on the radio just now and she secretly loved it.
She meant every smoky word she sang to her intimate audience of one, the low-setting summer sun casting golden hues across her face. She opened her eyes for the final chorus and found Santo standing close by with his hand resting on the piano top, and the raw vulnerability on his face almost sent the lyrics clean out of her head.
“Did you mean it when you said you wanted to stay here forever?” he said.
“Yes?” she said. “No? I don’t know. If every day could be like today, then yes, but that’s not real life, is it?”
He rounded the piano and sat beside her on the stool, his face close to hers.
“But what if it was like this every day? You and me? I know you’re supposed to leave for the rest of the tour, but you could stay here, we could make a real go of things maybe. I could make you gelato every day…”
She reached out and placed her hand on his cheek. “Santo, I…We don’t —”
He leaned in and kissed his name out of her mouth. “Don’t say another word,” he whispered. “Think about it tonight?”
Viv allowed herself to momentarily imagine the life she could build here in New York. Would it work? Could she be happy working alongside Santo in the gelateria, settling herself down here, becoming part of his story? Or would she always wonder what might have happened if she’d stuck to her plan and followed her dreams? She’d spent her entire eighteen years clinging on to the edges of life by her fingertips, eating at other people’s tables, sleeping in other people’s beds, and she was, frankly, exhausted. The random meeting with Louis had finally set her free from having to depend on other people for the food in her belly or the roof over her head—giving up that hard-won freedom and fragile sense of security on the off-chance this thing with Santo became something more was a huge gamble. She’d fought so hard for this dream, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to start on a new one just yet, as beautiful as Santo made it sound.
“I’ll think about it tonight,” she said, pressing her forehead against his. “I promise.”
* * *
—
VIV CRAWLED INTO HER small bunk in the band’s apartment an hour later, her head spinning with images of Santo, the painted glass door at Belotti’s gelateria, and the evocative pull of being invited into a proper family. She’d lived her whole life alone, more or less—looking at the Belotti family history up on the wall in the gelateria had twisted her heart with envy. She closed her eyes and tried to see herself behind that counter alongside Santo in five years, then ten, then twenty. Would they go the distance? Have children, grow old together? Would his hair turn grey, her limbs soften with the fat of contentment? It felt like an impossible dream, not something that happened to people like Viv. And then she thought of the band, and Louis, and the string of gigs set up across America. She loved performing more than anything else in the world. Would she regret giving up this golden opportunity to make a name for herself? She spent the small hours of the morning turning the decision over in her head, wondering which path to walk, which to leave untrodden and wild. To have either would be once-in-a-lifetime precious.