“One look at you, Rosalia, and it was over for me. Lights. Fucking. Out. That’s why it happened.”
“Hamartia,” I said, thinking of the inscription on the plaque.Hamartiameant fatal flaw.
“It’s not always obvious,” he said, and leaning down, he placed a soft kiss against my lips.
15
Rosalia
After the evening and night I had, I couldn’t sleep the next morning.
Bambina slept in her tent. Cilla had left for work. The condo was quiet.
It was only me and my thoughts and the fan whirling in the corner. I used it even during winter. It wasn’t the cool to soothe the burn of early summer that I was after. The whirring noise usually helped me fall asleep. It was like a security blanket.
My thoughts were louder than the noise the fan made.
I stuck a pillow over my head, closing my eyes tight, but all I saw when I did was the Hamartia Garden. All I heard were the words echoing from hollow memories on repeat. They played out in my mind like a movie, all happening in chronological order.
After Aniello had given me a kiss that lingered, he looked at his watch and told me I had to go. He gave me specific directions on how to get out, and told me to go to the locker room as soon as I made it back to Club D.
I did as he’d said, and a few minutes later, Big Bismo found me sitting on a plush couch, probably looking as forlorn as the “sad girl” he knew how to get to in the garden. He gave me a look full of pity and then left, waving away all the complaints from the girls trying to freshen up.
The night was uneventful after that, even though my mind was lit up. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that had brought me to where I was.
Aniello was always at the forefront of my thoughts, but once he explained to me why the girls all hated me, it was hard for me to not think about the other girl—Bria—and what my life must have been like then.
It seemed so far away, yet so close.
Even though he’d told me what had happened, it wasn’t like a curtain had been lifted and,voila!, memories restored. The doctor had said something—a person, a place, a scent, a random thing—might trigger them, but there was a good possibility that they would never return.
I was starting to think she was right. I was starting to face the fact that they would probably never come back, and I’d have to accept that.
I was also starting to think that Aniello was not telling me things on purpose. When he’d go to fill in some of the blanks, he hesitated. And that wasn’t like him. The man never hesitated or even used a filter.
It was almost like he knew he had to tell me about Bria, because no one else would, because it directly affected my future. Since Ben was involved and Richie once was. But when I’d told Aniello about the scar, and how I’d pieced it together, he almost looked…satisfied that I had pieced it together myself. He didn’t have to fill in the blanks andtellme how I felt. I felt however I felt on my own.
Maybe it was his way of finding out if my feelings were the same as they had been before.
If that was the case, it was frustrating, but I understood. If I were in his shoes, would I want to tell him how he felt about me? Or would I want to use subtle actions, borrowing things from times before, to maybe tease the missing memories to come forward? Or to remind an even deeper part of him, places that went beyond memories, that I was once the person he had risked his life for?
It was the longer route, no doubt, but it meant something to me. That he didn’t feed me his memories but was trying to help me rediscover mine in the only way he thought he could.
Before I left the Hamartia Garden and him, I’d asked him one thing.
“Was our first time together the same as it had been that night?”
“Sì,” he’d said simply.
I knew then.
We’d both given in to desire—damn the consequences—and accepted the path we were on.
We were on the road to perdition.
I’d been on it since the moment I looked at him. He had been on it since the moment he looked at me. He’d been on similar roads before, but for reasons other than me.
Maybe we’d both known it in that moment—the second our eyes connected. We were in this together. There was no longer him or me on two different roads, but only us, forever running together.
