Huh? “Did you seriously sign yourself up for karaoke?”
He shakes his head. “No, dear, I didn’t just sign myself up ...”
“With Elisa Benetti!” adds Vanni.
A devilish smile spreads across Michael’s face. “I signed us both up.”
Oh shit.
37
Michael
Joke’s on you, babe.
38
Elisa
As I stare at Michael, petrified, the sound of keyboards fills the air, and Vanni’s nephew hands me a second microphone, leaving me no escape.
“Do you still remember it?” Michael asks me.
Who could forget? We must have sung it two hundred thousand times when we were kids. Ivaldo, one of the vineyard workers, was a big Jalisse fan. He always used to drive us into the village and had a cassette of “Fiumi di Parole” on repeat in his car.
Michael and I were obsessed with forming a band, so we couldn’t resist singing along.
He belts out the first line, and the words have a strange new effect on me.
So, Michael remembers it by heart, too, and we start alternating verses as he keeps me locked under his gaze.
When we sing the chorus together, I shiver from head to toe, hearing our voices in unison after all these years.
It makes me want to smile, but I shouldn’t. I can’t. I look away to avoid showing my feelings, but he takes me by the hand. When I hear him sing “goodbye,” I find myself thinking,Please, no!and all my determination fades.
We continue to sing with a kind of distance between us.
I replay all our beautiful moments in my head, reliving the sensations he made me feel but also the intense discomfort of the other morning. I would be nothing more than a game for him, one among many, a holiday fling, and I can’t bear the idea of being cast aside.
I almost feel angry in the last verse, my eyes involuntarily blurring with tears.
By the time we finish, everyone in the audience has raised their lighters in the air, and then they break out into an applause like no other at the Belvedere karaoke.
As we stand there, looking at each other in a silence that says everything, we are interrupted by Vanni, who joins us, carrying a Dyson vacuum cleaner festooned with a bright ribbon. “The jury was unanimous! Congratulations!”
“Elisa,” Michael murmurs, ignoring Vanni. But I can’t stand the tension anymore, so I drop the microphone on the counter and run.
I take refuge in a wooden hut in the park next to the elementary school, my knees pulled tight to my chest, overwhelmed by a tsunami of tears.
I’ve never been the crybaby type.
I like Michael more than I thought I did, in a way that goes beyond a fleeting animal instinct, much more than a revived lukewarm teenage crush.
I like Michael as a man, even if he’s the wrong man. And to say that I like him is an understatement.
I can’t be with someone like him, a person who can have whatever he wants, however he wants it. Someone like him would leave me in the dust.
I hear a gentle knock on the roof of the hut.
