Is the sun shining brighter in Naples, or am I just a Pollyanna? Or maybe I’m just so fucking happy to be more than one hundred miles away from Steve that this city seems better than it is. I don’t notice the trash lining the street or the old men yelling at each other in the park as I stroll across town after I leave the museum. I just feel so free that nothing bad can touch me.
I should be worried about what that says about my relationship, but my stomach grumbles, and all I can think about is pizza. I shake out of my jacket in the dim restaurant and decide to leave the existential relationship crisis for later because this mood is too good to chase away with worry. It deserves red wine and pizza.
I ask to sit in front of the window so I can look out on the square while I eat. I wish it was a little bit warmer so I could sit outside, but plane tickets to Italy in the summer were nearly twice the price, and our same hotel in Rome would have doubled as well, so Steve and I had chosen to visit late winter to preserve our meager budget. Or maybe that had been my decision, and he had just grunted and nodded while killing an orc in some game.
Maybe next time I come, I’ll be able to afford a summer trip, I think as I fall into a chair and smile to myself. I purposely ignore the silent question at the back of my head wondering if I’ll come alone or with Steve. Avoidance feels really wonderful right now.
“Welcome to La Casa Colonica,” the waitress says, setting two menus, one on top of the other, in front of me. She taps the small one on top first. “Drinks, and food,” she says, tapping the larger one on the bottom.
“Grazie,” I say in a shy voice. I know my Italian is terrible, even on simple words, but I’m trying. Please don’t judge me, I think at her.
She smiles and nods at me before turning away, something she probably does to all the tourists, and I exhale in relief.
I open the drinks menu and rub my hands on my thighs to warm them. I don’t need to read Italian to recognize most of what I’m seeing — which is great, because I can’t — so I navigate to the wine page and try and decide what looks good in my budget.
I don’t know much about wine since I’m barely past the Jägerbomb, lemon drop, hurricane stage of my life, but I do know that I like it, and I couldn’t come to Italy without drinking as much of it as my body and budget will allow. I’d imagined Steve and I at wine tastings pretending to understand food pairings, but instead, he’d complained so much that I’d been maxed out on Tylenol damn near every day, and drinking wine had seemed like a bad idea. But since I left my headache somewhere between Rome and Naples, I now want all the wine.
I look at the menu and translate what I can. I’m mostly focused on price because I don’t have any idea what might pair well with all the pizza I can shove in my mouth, but I do know what pairs well with my meager savings account. I look around the restaurant, searching for my waitress. My eyes skate past an older man with a thick head of gray hair sitting at a table alone reading a newspaper. There’s a couple sitting together in the center of the dining room, staring at one another over the table like they’re only seconds from fucking each other on top of it. I look away from them quickly, not because I’m embarrassed, but because I’m jealous; that’s how I thought Steve and I would spend this trip, looking longingly into one another’s eyes and making love all night.
I need wine.
I spot my waitress at the bar and catch her eye. I raise my hand a bit, and she nods at me. I’ve been a waitress long enough to know that if I need to know what to order, I should just ask the person who knows the menu best. I wait for her and turn back to the menus in front of me. When she’s close, I look up to see her walking toward me with a bottle of wine in her hand and a single wine glass in the other. I try to peek at the label to see what it is, thinking maybe I could order that, but then she sets the glass on the table in front of me and turns the bottle of wine, label out, toward me.
“Um…” I look up at her. “I didn’t order this.”
Her smile doesn’t falter, even though I’m sure she’s exasperated that I’ve said something so obvious. “Si. This is compliments of our owner.”
“Your… owner?”
She moves slightly to the side, and I look around her to see the older man with the gray hair and newspaper looking at me. I’d glossed over him before, but now I look — like, really look — at him. He’s wearing a pair of thin wire frame glasses perched just on the tip of his elegantly long nose, and he’s peering through the lenses across the dining room at me. And I know this sounds like a cliché, but he’s looking at me like no man ever has before, like he wants to watch me undress and then eat me for dessert. The desire in his eyes is so blatant that I gasp in shock. I feel the heat of his eyes on me in every vein in my body, but I feel how much I like him watching me in just one pulsing, needy, suddenly wet place, and shock isn’t a strong enough way to describe what that realization does to me.
I met Steve when I was eighteen. We’d been in our college dorms for four days. It was the second day of classes, and we were both lost. We passed each other in the hallway once and then again before he stopped me and asked what room I was looking for. It just so happened we were heading to the same Psychology 101 class and decided to find it together. It took us another five minutes to figure out that maze of a building. We were late. We sat next to each other that day and for the rest of the semester. I thought it was love, and maybe it was.
But what it wasn’t was lust.
I didn’t know that then. I didn’t even know there was a difference between affable growing attraction and an intense burning, clenching need. I didn’t know I could feel the latter. I had no idea what I’d been missing, but I know now, because when I lock eyes with the older restauranteur, I feel hot, everywhere. Hot enough that I could have sat outside in the late winter chill without a care. Warm enough that I feel as if I’m wearing too many clothes, and I want nothing more than to strip them off. For him. Or, even better, I want him to take all these clothes off me, his fingers skimming across my overheated skin. I want to look down my body at him and run my fingers through his hair. And then I want to gently take his glasses from his face before I nudge his head between my legs.
I’m so turned on, and it’s a foreign feeling. I’ve never in seven years felt anything like this for Steve, and I can’t escape the crashing disorientation of realizing that I feel more strongly for this stranger than I ever have for my boyfriend; the force of this lust illuminates that affection is not the same as love.
As I watch, the silver fox pushes up from his chair and walks toward me. I’ve never had a thing for older men or anything, and since I’ve been with Steve for my entire adult life, I’ve never had the opportunity to sample the many different flavors of men available in the world, but as I watch this man stroll toward me with the kind of confidence I’m certain must come with age — and a big dick — I wonder if I’ve been missing something, and the answer hits me like a brick in the face.
Of course, I’ve been missing something. I’ve never had sex with anyone besides Steve.
And speaking of sex, I think this man is probably amazing at it just by the way he walks, which makes me realize that Steve is not. Isn’t that a bitch? I don’t even need to have sex with anyone else. All I needed was the suggestion of it, to have the personal space and time to give sex with someone else real consideration to realize what I haven’t before; that Steve is bad at sex. Our sex life had always been unfulfilling, but I haven’t ever had any other partners to compare him to or to know that it could be different. He comes. I come… sometimes. We fall asleep next to each other. But it’s always his same impatient rutting on top of me, no variation, no trying new things, no dirty talk, no toys, no taking control and making me gag on his dick, no making me wet begging for it, no spending the entire night sitting on his face. Somehow, watching this man has opened a door of desire inside me where I finally see all the things Steve and I could have tried, all the porn that gets me off secretly while he’s at work that we could have emulated, all the sexual boundaries we could have tested to expand our horizons, but we haven’t, and I didn’t even realize that with another man, that might have been an option. That maybe if I had dated someone else, this fictional new boyfriend would have taken my sexual inexperience as the beginning rather than the end of the story. That with another man, I might have become someone else, someone who wasn’t such a people-pleaser, someone who asked for what she wanted in bed instead of silently taking what was on offer and remaining unsatisfied; someone bolder. My breath quickens as this man walks slowly toward me, and I feel all these possibilities in his every step.
Out of nowhere, I suddenly remember how Zoe described her first real orgasm with her college roommate — “like the sky split, the heavens opened, and my pussy sang a hymn.” I’ve never felt that. Steve has never made me feel that. Would this man?
He stops at my table and looks down at me. Up close, I realize that he’s not as old as the gray hair made me think. His face only has a few lines between his eyes and bracketing his mouth, as if he frowns a lot, certainly more than he smiles. Up close, he looks elegantly put together, from his hair to his apron to his perfectly manicured nails. This is a man who takes care of himself, and I imagine that this is a man who’d give my body the same kind of careful attention. I don’t know him at all, and yet I can picture that small cluster of wrinkles deepening as he touches me, kisses me, and fucks me the way Steve never has; maybe never could.
I know it’s not right to compare, but my brain refuses to let even a single difference between Steve and my impressions of this man go unnoticed. Steve is fine, boring, kind of slobby in the way most white dudes are in college and for five years to infinity after. I haven’t ever had anything to compare him to because most of our friends are about the same, but now that I do, I realize how much he’s always reminded me of the kids I used to babysit, not the kind of man I wanted to date. And suddenly, I can’t be surprised that this trip has devolved so quickly because this is how our relationship has always been, I just refused to accept it. But this man isn’t a kid. He looks strong and powerful, maybe even dangerous, and my pussy feels slick at just the sight of him.
He nods at the chair across from me in a silent question, and I nod eagerly in return. I feel young and naïve in that moment, eager for his attention, and I shiver in anticipation now that I have it.
He lowers himself gracefully into the chair, looks briefly away from me, and whispers something to the waitress in a soft burr of Italian. She places the bottle of wine and a wine opener on the table and then rushes away. I watch him with slow, heavy breaths as he leans back in his chair, crosses his legs, and smiles at me.
“Excuse me,” he says in the thickest, sexiest accented English I’ve ever heard, even after over a week in Italy. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. If you would like to be alone, I understand.”
“N-no,” I say. “Please.” I don’t know what I’m begging him for, but I do know that my voice sounds… different. Strained? Needy? Excited? It makes me think of sex, and by the small way his mouth tips up on the left side, I think it makes him think of sex as well. I’m so fucking thirsty in this moment as years of repressed desire and lust overtake me that I know I should be ashamed, but I’m not.
“Would you like some wine?” he asks.
“Please,” I whisper again. This time my voice is lower, huskier. I’m so very ready for him and this moment that I instantly know that fate — yes, I believe in fate — brought me to Italy for this, not for Steve to propose in front of the Trevi fountain. I’ve endured the last week just so I can experience whatever is about to happen, so that I can realize all that I’ve been missing before.
He watches me for a few seconds with a kind of quiet contemplation, and I let him. As the seconds accumulate, I realize that Steve has never looked at me for so long or like this. Not when we first met, or when we’re sitting across from each other at our dining table, not even after sex. He looks at me, but I don’t know if he sees me.
This man drinks me in, his eyes traveling over every inch of my face. It makes me feel beautiful and sexy and so fucking horny that I hardly know what to do with myself or who I am. Am I even the kind of woman who deserves this kind of consideration?
I lick my lips. His gaze takes that in as well.
“Beautiful,” he whispers at me, and that one word feels so intimate that my heart starts racing, and my thighs press together.
The waitress returns with another wine glass before rushing away again.
“Shall we begin, bella?” he asks in a deep whisper.
“Yes,” I whisper back without hesitation. Begin what, I wonder, but “Please,” is what I say instead.