“Ah, you’re right!” Paola swooped back into the kitchen to pull out a black binder from the small bookshelf in the corner. “This is full of recommendations: restaurants, bars, cafés, places for aperitivo—do you know about aperitivo?—theaters, shops, clubs, whatever you need.”
Ramin thumbed through thirty or so pages of recommendations. It was incredibly thorough, but…
“What about, uh, the gay scene?”
He felt his cheeks heating. He really hoped he hadn’t read the two women wrong.
Usually his gaydar was pretty accurate, but that was back home in America. Did Italian gaydar work the same?
Thankfully, Paola’s eyes lit up. She looked at Francesca and had the kind of silent conversation that Ramin used to be able to have with Todd.
“Sì sì sì, we’ll get you a list. You have to have a card. We’ll get you one.”
“Card?”
“All the gay clubs take a membership card. It’s not like that at home?”
Ramin shook his head, flabbergasted. In all his googling, he’d never heard that about Milan’s clubs. The few spots he’d been to in Kansas City certainly hadn’t needed a membership card, just a cover charge and a good body…
No. That was his dysmorphia talking. His body was a good body. A healthy body. A strong body.
Maybe it was boring, but even if it was, fuck Todd for saying so.
“Crazy Americans!” Francesca said fondly. “Allora, we’ll let you get settled, and we’ll get you a card. Okay, Ramin?”
“Okay. Thank you. Grazie.”
“Grazie te, Ramin,” Paola said, pulling Ramin in for air kisses on the cheek. “Ciao!”
Ramin closed the door behind them—cranking the dead bolt three times, just like they’d instructed—and then he was alone.
“Well,” he said to the empty apartment. “I guess this is home for a while.”
The afternoon heat smacked Ramin in the face as he emerged from a boutique minus several hundred euros and plus four big bags of clothes. He wore a just-purchased azure polo and white linen shorts, relieved to finally be out of his plane clothes.
Relieved to be free of the swampass, too. His jeans were not meant for the late Italian summer.
Now he just needed food.
Boring Old Ramin would’ve found a salad bar. Or a grocery store.
Interesting New Ramin, on the other hand, spotted a gelateria acrossthe cobbled street and thoughtfuck it. He was allowed to eat gelato for lunch.
The tiny (and blessedly air-conditioned) gelateria had a service counter at the front and two narrow bar tops along the walls, each with three tall plastic stools. Ramin listened in as the people in front of him ordered. He understood a bit—lemon, vanilla, peach—but the rest of the conversation went over his head.
He had a decent knack for language, decent enough at least to ace his honors French in high school. Not that he ever used French in real life. And a decent knack didn’t do much when you only had three weeks of practice under your belt. Ramin cleared his throat as he approached the counter.
“Buongiorno,” he said.
“Buongiorno,” the vendor, a curly-haired masc person in their twenties, replied. Ramin smiled, remembering how curly his own hair had been at that age. He kept it much shorter now, easier to care for, with a sharp part down the left side. He’d adopted the style when he first started at SNK, Stark-Norris-Kauffmann, the marketing firm that hired him right out of college. The style was casual enough to be approachable, yet professional enough to lead a meeting or talk a highly stressed client off an imaginary ledge.
He was about to order a lemon sorbetto—literally, was there anything finer?—but once he actually saw the spread of flavors at the counter, something else caught his eye.
Ramin cleared his throat again. “Per me, un Persiano, per favore?”
The vendor nodded and asked something way too quick for Ramin to catch.
“Uh…” Ramin said.
