Page 8 of The English Bookstore in Bologna

Alice let loose the creamiest of giggles. “We didn’t have a television in our house, so no, I don’t know who Bob Ross is, and no, I don’t call this an Afro. It’s just a perm.”

“Just a perm?” Harold said with great animation, his voice nearly chirping. “It’s exquisite, the best hair I’ve ever seen. I’d like to put whipped cream on top and eat you like a strawberry shortcake.”

A standard eye-roll response followed, but one that came with a smirk, making her look even more tempting. Perhaps he’d top her off with a gumdrop and sprinkles.

“I will be forever curious about your childhood,” he said. “What does a family do without a television? My mom and I, that’s how we bonded. Dinner in front of the television. And she grew up watching Bob Ross and would always track down reruns. He’s a painter guy, had this big, I don’t know, bloom of hair and had the worst clothes and was always holding his palette of paints. It’s a nice memory. Anyway, take me once again back to your strange household in backwoods Colorado? Tour me through the early life of Alice Richter.”

She pulled her spritz toward her, still a smirk on her face. “How many times do we have to do this?”

“Until I see it. Till I see my girlfriend when she was younger, finding her way toward the exceptional woman she’s become.”

She reached for a cigarette, and he was there with his Zippo, a recent purchase. “We did chores,” she said with the first exhalation of smoke. “We read the Bible. Prayed. Went on walks. We shared what we learned that day at the dinner table.”

He closed his eyes and imagined this younger Alice among her six siblings. “Okay, okay. I’m seeing you. It’s very cultish. Was there any part of you that wondered if your life was normal?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed normal at the time.”

He lit a cigarette himself, trying hard not to cough, then snapped the lighter closed. “Was there any fun to be had? Not that my childhood staring at a computer was any better, just trying to understand here.”

“We played lots of games.”

“Ah, there we go. Four Square? Monopoly? Cards Against Humanity—Religious Edition?”

Her smile sprouted again, a flower stretching for the sky after a rain shower. “Parcheesi.”

“Parcheesi? I should have known.” He took another drag, a lighter one this time. “My mother and I played our fair share.”

“And we read,” she continued. “A lot. Not only the Bible. Reading is how I came to know the world, how I realized I wanted to travel.” He was well aware of her love of reading. She’d dragged him into the bookstore below her apartment multiple times. The comic selection was abysmal.

For the first time, he looked around at the other tables, a blend of students, businesspeople, and travelers, five or six languages among them, all easing into their evenings through the same Aperol spritz doorway. “They’d let you read whatever you wanted?”

She smiled as she blew out an oval of smoke. “For the most part. They were strict in some ways, but they gave us a thirst for knowledge and understanding. Let me study in Italy my senior year, you know. After some coercing, of course.”

He might be the smartest person in the room, but she was no slouch. He adored talking to her, the way they could go on forever, forgetting even where they were. Though he was not a smoker, he was learning, because it seemed to enhance this person he’d become and these wondrous Italian moments they were inhabiting.

Alice was near the top of her freshman class at the University of Bologna and had lived here for almost a year now. Having studied in Bologna when she was in high school, she spoke impeccable Italian, and there wasn’t anything sexier than when she rattled off their order like a native.

Only because fate does exist—as Harold could now attest—had she happened to be in Denver visiting her best friend when the two came upon each other.

Their meeting in fast-forward: her grand entrance in the coffee shop in Denver, a surge of energy as they spoke for the first time, a few lies spilled, followed by a fancy lunch together, then an even more expensive dinner, then a weekend of museums and art galleries, Harold falling harder with every passing hour, followed by Alice saying as she kissed his lips, “I’m going to miss you, Harold.”

There had been only one possible response to that: “What if I came with you?”

Sometimes he couldn’t even hear what she was saying, as he was too taken with her presence. Her sunglasses were pulled up and nearly lost in her Bob Ross, strawberry hair. Her leprechaun eyes (a cute leprechaun, naturally) sparkled like emeralds in the setting Italian sun. Somehow, he had the sweet fortune of being in current possession of those lips, molded by the Stradivarius of lip makers. Her petite body was a masterpiece of wonder, and she was currently offering a glorious, braless side-boob shot due to the nature of her loose top. If he were a poet, he could write endless verse on the wonders of her small but mighty breasts.

Alice was the perfect balance of sexy, brilliant, and adorable. For God’s sake, she was Gen Z, but she loved The Cure and her favorite movie was Say Anything, about as eighties as you could get. In other words, she was into the oldies.

She had a silly, bubbly nature that made up for his own shortcomings. He could embrace his geekdom, staying quiet, while she played the role of the spokesperson, the press secretary of the Harold Gibler White House, if you would.

“Are you listening to me?” she asked, pulling the president from his musings.

“What?” Harold asked, stubbing out his only half-finished cigarette into the marble ashtray. “Oh, yeah, of course.”

“What was I saying?”

“Well,” he started, reaching for the hand sanitizer in his pocket, smoke still rising from the ashtray. He squeezed out a dime of gel and smoothed it into his hands. “You were saying a lot of things.”

“That’s the third time you’ve gone for the sanitizer since we’ve been sitting here.”