“It’s this place.” I refused to look, motioning with my head in its direction. “I don’t like the way it feels.”
Brando turned toward the darkness, eyeing it with no fear. Romeo did the same, and after a moment, plunged into it. A moment or two later, he called out, “All is fine!” He was so quick that I couldn’t scream for him to stop, or wait, or to take someone else with him. He emerged, a cocky grin on his face.
It slipped after I slapped his arm. “Don’t do that!” I hissed. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“It is okay, Sissy. Nothing but an abandoned villa.”
“Uh huh, tell that to the thugs that live in the darkness waiting to pounce.”
“I amthethug,” Romeo said, grinning again.
“It is just dark,” Thomas said.
“Scarlett,” Brando called, and I looked up at him, seeing the concern in his eyes.
“Yes,” I whispered, attempting to shake it off. “Perhaps it’s just dark.”
As we pushed forward, I still couldn’t help but feel that someone followed us.Or something.It took a little while for me to relax, if I could even call it that. Lothario had called Brando to his side again. He went with a sigh, giving Romeo a look that meant,watch her.
“Sissy, look,” Romeo said, jumping into another dark entrance way. “Woooooo,” he made a funny ghost noise. “Not even ghosts will dare to touch this.”
Just as “will dare to touch this” emerged from his mouth, the door to the villa opened. Light from inside illuminated Romeo and a middle-aged woman in a robe on the other side of the door, a long loaf of baked bread in her lifted hand. Both of them let out a high-pitched cry before the bread came down on his head with a stale crack, flakes sprinkling to the ground like rain.
Guido and Thomas started laughing so hard that they had to bite their shirts to keep their voices down. Brando, Rocco, and Lothario all said Romeo’s name at once, in a reprimanding way.
Four—make thatfive—cats shot past the woman’s legs, one or two letting out an echoing meow as they flew past us. The smell of boiling pasta floated from her villa in a starchy perfume. “What are you doing?” she hissed, reminding me of a cat herself.
At this point, any of his brothers would have turned and left the situation, finding it not worth their time. Not Romeo. He wanted to see how this scene would play out.
He knocked crumbs from his impeccable hair, and after he made it rain crackers, he smoothed his soft locks back, setting his head to perfect rights.
“I am lost.” He meowed.
She narrowed her eyes, looking him over from top to bottom, and then glanced our way before settling on him again.
“I take in strays,” she almost purred. “I am making pasta. You want?”
“Romeo!” I made a motion for him to step away from the door. The situation had gone from zero to a hundred in under a second.
“Who isthat?” the cat lady asked, suspicion in her voice.
“Ah, my wife,” Romeo lifted a hand to me. “She is…ah, a bit possessive over me, I am afraid. I am only allowed to eat her tuna and feed her pasta.”
Thomas was going to die from lack of oxygen. He wheezed like an asthmatic.
“Romeo,” Brando warned. “I have tolerance, but only so much. Even for you. Leavemywife out of it.”
Niccolo sluiced through the sea of people, a towel over his arm. He stopped when he came to me, eyeing the scene before him with curiosity. Lothario sighed and rested his back against the wall.
Niccolo was the perpetual bachelor. Somehow I felt his fate and Lothario’s had gotten screwed up, in regards to the meanings of their names, if the myth that names dictated who you became in life was true.
“Excuse me,” Niccolo said in Italian, going to stand beside Romeo. “Has my nephew been giving you trouble?”
The cat lady didn’t know what to make of the new addition, but seeing as he was an older version of Romeo, she quickly got it together and answered, “Yes.”
“I am hungry,” Niccolo said, sniffing. “Perhaps we could work out a solution to his naughty behavior over pasta?”
Romeo told me to close my mouth after his uncle disappeared behind the cat lady’s door, going in forpasta. I wondered if that was some kind of code word for sex.
