Sexy Surrender Read online

  Not that I'm bitter.

  I can't see Elisabetta sleeping with Lucia's husband. It just wouldn't happen. Not ever.

  It's funny, I can barely remember the States. I'm speaking in Italian more and more. It hasn't shown through in this diary, I'm realizing, since I've stopped transcribing the Italian, except where it pops up when someone is speaking English. I had a dream in Italian. I called out Luca's name during sex, and instead of "yes, yes, yes," I said "si, si, si."

  Even now, I'm thinking I'm ready to go home, and the image that pops into my head is the house in Firenze, filled with light and laughter and love. And Luca. I can see myself in Firenze, in a little flat not far from Domenica and Dante's house. There would be flowers in a planter on the window, wash hanging to dry in the age-old way, a checked table cloth on a round table in the kitchen, a candle-holder fashioned from an old wine bottle.

  There might even someday be a little boy or girl running about the flat, ink black hair and dusky skin and cerulean eyes.

  The sun is setting, shedding fiery orange light onto the rippling azure field of the ocean. Gulls caw, children splash in the surf a hundred feet down shore. A sail blinks white on the horizon.

  So, the decision.

  Am I afraid of loving Luca? Yes. Hell yes. I'm afraid it'll end up like things with Harry did, and I'll be stuck here in Italy, an ex-pat with no money left and no ties to anywhere, old and alone and too tired to start over again.

  I'm afraid of being hurt again, betrayed again. I'm afraid of having a child with him, because that will mean I'm permanently tied to him, and if it ends, if he cheats, or doesn't actually love me till death do us part, then I'd be well and truly fucked.

  But I know, in my heart as well as in my mind, that he does love me like that. I know it on a visceral level. He came to Paris at a single phone call, even after I'd run away from him not once, but twice. He's shown me the wonders of sex. He shows me, each and every day, that I am beautiful, and worthy of love.

  He calls me "amore." His love. He looks at me with adoration shining in his coal-black eyes. He touches me as if I was a work of art, a sculpture crafted by God for Luca and Luca alone.

  I was.

  He makes me almost believe in God again, even though I stopped a long time ago.

  He loves me.

  And I love him.

  June 29

  I'm writing this from the swaying silence of a sleeper car in a train. Another train. This one is en route from Firenze to a winery in Tuscany. Why am I going to Tuscany? To find Luca.

  He didn't exactly run away, like I did on him, but he left rather abruptly.

  I got off the train in Firenze, practically ran to his parents' house to find him and tell him my news. I burst through the door into the courtyard, shouting his name. The courtyard was empty, silent.

  I stopped in my tracks, confused. He'd said he'd be here when I got back, waiting for him. I called him from the hotel before I left the coast telling him when my train would arrive.

  So where was he?

  I went into the kitchen, found Domenica sitting at the table drinking coffee and playing solitaire. I poured myself a mug of coffee, doctored it to my liking, and sat down with a huff. My breath knocked some of Domenica's cards out of alignment and she shot me an irritated glance, then noticed the distress evident on my face.

  "He had to work, child. It was some kind of emergency at one of the...cantine, oh Madre di Dio, what's the word--winers? No. Wine-making places. I cannot think of the word in English. But that is where he went. To Montepulciano. He will be back in a few days, he says."

  "Wineries," I said.

  "Yes, that is it. Thank you. So, please. Do not worrying. Only relax and have more coffee. Help me cook a dinner. Play me in some cards. He will be back before you know it."

  I shook my head. "No, Domenica. I can't wait. I have to talk to him."

  "Oh?" Domenica didn't look up from her cards, but I could sense her curiosity burning.

  I decided to reply in Italian, for some reason. "Io lo amo."

  "I know this, figlia," she said. "And so does he."

  Figlia. Daughter. My eyes burned at the casual way she said the word.

  "Well, I didn't. And he hasn't heard me say it. I need to see him."

  Domenica looked up from the cards, smiled at me. She left the table and went to a drawer in a corner of the kitchen, one full of random items, the ubiquitous junk drawer. She rummaged until she found an envelope full of brochures, flipped through them until she found the one she was looking for.

  "I believe it is this one he went to. If not, they should be able to locate him for you." Domenica handed me the brightly-colored, tri-fold sheet of glossy paper, printed in Italian. I found the address on the back, copied it down, thanked Domenica. I exchanged the clothes in my overnight bag for clean ones and headed straight back to the train station, acquired a ticket that would take me part of the way.

  Now I'm nearly there, and the train is pulling into the station. My heart is already in knots and butterflies, even though I know I still have to find the winery, and he may not be there.

  *

  It's four in the morning, and I can't sleep. My head's all awhirl, as my grandfather used to say.

  As I write, my fingers tremble, my gut churns, and my heart pitter-patters.

  I said yes.

  Argh. Go back, Delilah. Tell the story from the beginning. Telling the story makes it real, helps me tamp down the nerves and deal with the emotions.

  Luca snores next to me. Even now, asleep, he rolls over and his hand stretches across my lap to hug my hip. I can't help smiling at the peace in his features, the happiness.

  That makes it all alright.

  Go back to the beginning.

  *

  I stepped off the train, bag over my arm, sunglasses on against the brilliance of the Tuscan sun. I asked the teller at the station window how to get to the winery, and he suggested renting a car, gave me directions to the rental place just down the street.

  I got there, and they had no cars. Well, none that I can drive. See, I can't drive a stick shift, and all the cars were manual transmissions. So I ended up renting a Vespa, a little moped scooter thing. It was baby blue and nearly as old as I am, but it ran. I only had one bag which I strapped to the seat behind me with fraying bungee cords lent to me by the rental agent, who also gave me further directions.

  What no one told me was how far away from the main village the winery itself was. Maybe it wasn't that far. Maybe it was just my nerves combined with the turtle-like top speed of the Vespa, which wasn't much faster than I could've walked, honestly. Either way, it seemed to take forever.

  It was beyond beautiful. Quintessential Italy. Picturesque rolling hills, row after orderly row of grapevines vanishing over the horizon. Bright sun, blue sky, puffs of cotton clouds. Hot, but not stifling.

  I found the main building of the winery after over an hour of tootling along winding roads on an aged scooter. An older man found me wandering along a rack of dusty wine bottles, labeled and unlabeled.

  "Can I help you?" he asked in slow Italian.

  "Yes," I said, in a more normally-paced conversational tone, "I'm looking for Luca. I was told he might be here."

  "Luca?" The old man wrinkled his brow and rubbed a gnarled finger along his upper lip. "Oh, yes, yes. Luca. He is here, somewhere. Out in the grapes, I think. That way."

  He pointed at the rolling hills, a vague wave of his hand. "You could wait for him here. It might be easier, you know. The fields are vast. He could be anywhere."

  "What is he doing?" I asked.

  "Doing? Oh, I have no idea, I am sure. Something important. He is part owner, after all."

  "Owner? I didn't know he owned the winery."

  The old man shrugged. "Not fully. It's a new thing. There was some problem with the grapes, or an account, perhaps. I don't know. Wait here, if you wish. I can pour you some wine. Or you can go look. Leave your bag here. It will be safe.
I'm the only one around."

  "I'll go look," I said, setting my bag on a counter.

  The old man shrugged, took the bag and set it behind a counter out of sight, then waved to me and tottered off.

  I set out into the fields. They stretched in every direction, quickly confusing my sense of orientation. I walked for maybe ten minutes, birds wheeling above me, their twittering the only sound besides the wind.

  And then I heard his voice. I found him examining a section of vines which seemed to have been eaten by a bug of some sort. He was talking to another man, a few years older than him, in rapid-fire Italian. I watched from a few feet away, as the two seemed to be arguing rather vehemently and I didn't want to interrupt.

  A dog barked behind me, startling me. Dogs don't exactly scare me, but I don't like them. I shrieked and jumped about a foot in the air, turning to see a dog the size of a small horse standing behind me, tongue lolling out of its mouth. It had huge dagger-like teeth, paws as wide as dinner plates with things that looked suspiciously like swords in place of claws. The dog/horse/dragon trotted a few steps closer to me, sniffed my feet, my knees, and then my crotch. I squealed, stumbling backward away from the dog, who followed me and sat on my feet. It then barked, a sound loud enough to deafen me, showing me a mouth full of teeth and a long, pink tongue. Sure, it looked like it was smiling with its tongue flopped out like that, huffing its nasty breath on my chest. Yeah, it was tall enough sitting down that its head was near my tits.

  "Get away," I said in English.

  The dog didn't move. I heard muffled chuckles behind me, but I didn't dare take my eyes off the massive, flesh-eating beast in front of me. Then I remembered I was in Italy, and the dog wouldn't be trained to obey English commands, but Italian. That's not something I'd ever thought of before then.

  "Scendere me, cane! Scendere!"

  The dog just barked. My feet were going numb from the two or three tons of dog flesh sitting on them. I gathered my courage and pushed on its chest, but it didn't move. It was like trying to push a building. It nudged me with its nose, and I fell over backward, my feet pinned by its huge backside. It was probably smearing dog shit on my feet.

  I don't love dogs.

  "Brutus, vieni qui." Luca's voice washed over me.

  The dog, Brutus, barked in my face, spattering me with slobber, and then loped away to sit by Luca. I sat up, wiped my now slobber-sticky face, and struggled to my feet.

  Luca was unsuccessfully trying to smother a smile. "Delilah, amore, what a pleasing surprise to see you here!"

  He came over to me, lifted the bottom edge of his T-shirt and wiped my face clean with it. I pulled a travel-size bottle of sanitizer from my purse and smeared it on my face and hands, to the uproarious laughter of Luca and the other man. The dog had left Luca's side to sit on the other man's feet, and the man was scratching Brutus' ear absently.

  "Well, you were gone when I got back, and I had to see you. I wasn't sure when you'd be back, and your mom told me you'd be here, so I came. I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

  Luca waved his hand in a dismissal. "No, no. Just a little thing with the grapes. Some kind of insect was eating the crop. We will fix it, no problems."

  "I didn't know you were part owner," I said.

  Luca shrugged. "It is not so big of a thing. I work for Giancarlo and Mario for many years. When Mario retired, he sold me part of his share for discount."

  The other man, who I assumed was Giancarlo, waved at Luca and set out through the rows of grape trellises, Brutus at his heels. When he was out of sight, Luca wrapped me in an embrace.

  "You came all the way here only to talk to me?" Luca asked.

  I nodded, staring up at him, my arms wrapping around his waist. "I came all the way here to say three words: I love you."

  Luca smiled and kissed me, a slow, heated possession of my lips. "You had good thoughts at the coast, then?"

  I toyed with the top button of his shirt, and it somehow came undone. "It's not so complicated after all. I belong here, with you."

  Three more buttons had come undone while I spoke, and then his shirt was off, tumbling in the light breeze to the dirt underfoot. Luca's fingers skimmed my skin between shorts and shirt, then lifted my shirt over my head. He made quick work of the front clasp to my bra, and then I was topless among the vines, the hot Italian sun shining on us.

  "Will what's-his-name come back?" I asked as I unzipped and unbuttoned Luca's jeans.

  "Giancarlo? No. He was going home, he said. No one will come out to this section of the fields again." Luca stood naked in the sunlight, and my blood raced at the sight of him.

  It never failed. His beauty always stunned me, the toned perfection of his muscles, the hard angles and thick slabs of male strength. My shorts fell away, and then Luca spread our clothes on the dirt, lay on top of them and drew me down to him. He was soft beneath me, somehow, despite the hardness of his body. Our lips met, fire lighting in my belly and spreading down to pool between my thighs.

  We'd been together many times since I'd arrived in Italy. In beds, on the ground outside, various positions...but this was different. I'd finally broken through the final layer of resistance to the feelings between us. This wasn't just an education in the delights of sex anymore. It never had been. This was love. This was an expression of our feelings for each other, our desire to get closer to one another.

  The term "making love" is so often used you don't stop to think about it. But it really is an apt term for what sex truly is between two people who love each other. You are bare, body to body. It's complete vulnerability, physically. Every flaw of your body is on display. If you're in a relationship where you're open and trusting of your partner, then you're totally vulnerable with them emotionally as well. That takes bravery. If you think about it, making love, having sex, is an act of incredible trust. You are placing your body at the mercy of the other person. Your performance, your abilities and experience or lack thereof is presented for inspection. All you are, as a person, is there to be seen.

  With Luca, I realized--or I'm realizing now as I write this--that it had always been a physical relationship, for me. I enjoyed the things he made me feel. I enjoyed his touch, the sight of his body, the unbelievable bliss of orgasm. But I don't think I truly appreciated the gift Luca was giving me until that afternoon in the grape fields of Montepulciano. He was giving me himself. He was trusting me with his emotions. It was never just sex for him. He was taking a risk, a huge risk that almost didn't pay off. If I hadn't been able to face the truth of my love for him, he would have been heartbroken.

  I saw this in his eyes as he cradled me against him, there in the dirt with the smell of soil and sun on foliage. Our bodies merged in a dance of union. It wasn't mere penetration, it was beyond terms like "cock" and "pussy". I've used those terms, and I will again, because I like them. They're dirty and raw and honest. But there was more, in that moment.

  I struggle, even now, to contain and fathom the enormity of true love made physical expression. It seems a fairy tale thing, those words: true love. It's something for the storybooks. For the Prince and his lady, as they kiss against the sunset after defeating evil. It's something every girl dreams of, playing Barbies and House and watching the chick flick romance movies.

  And I almost missed it.

  He held me to his chest and kissed my lips with tender passion as he moved into me. His body was the softest, most comfortable bed, his arms wrapping me in a protective cocoon, his hands caressing my skin, his hardness sliding inside my slick heat, driving the fires hotter, pushing my love for him deeper with every stroke.

  Our kiss broke and our eyes met as we moved. I opened myself, heart, mind, body and soul, to what he was offering. I let the fears slide away, beading as sweat on my skin. He saw me, truly saw me, and he loved me, for all I was. I tried to take it in, to get my heart around it, to get my soul to grasp it, my mind to understand it, but I couldn't. It was too much.

  I smiled from pure
joy as tears streamed down my face. I kissed him, salty wetness mingling as our lips touched, and he didn't ask what was wrong. He saw the overwhelming flood-tide of emotions coursing in me, and he accepted it, radiated it back.

  He moved, he caressed, he slid and slipped and touched and kissed. He loved. Slowly, furiously, perfectly. He filled me, set me alight.

  I'll let one cliche slide: he completed me. Cliches are so often repeated because of their inherent truth. In this, the truth is undeniable. The person who truly, madly, deeply loves you does in fact complete you. The Bible speaks in Genesis about man cleaving to the woman, and they become one flesh. Even if you don't read the Bible, you've heard the phrase bandied about, most likely. Well, that's another phrase that has deep meaning if you stop to think about it.

  One flesh. It's more than a joining. More than a physical meeting of bodies. You truly merge, especially in the instant of mutual climax. Space and time and boundaries between identities fade away, until all that exists for those brief, endless seconds, is you, one melded person, one self. You. One you, from two fragments of I.

  We became one flesh. I stopped worrying about the future, about the past, about what if. I let my love well up and burgeon, become larger, swell and sway and ignite and catalyze. His body moved within mine, and passions flared until passion drifted away and became something else. I breathed in his scent, felt the heat of his skin against mine and his lips on my flesh and his hands on my back and buttocks and in my hair.

  Climax came as a sobbing eruption of raw emotion. His fingers coiled in my hair and he breathed my name, a prayer to the winds. He moved with desperation, writhing beneath me as if there was no way to get close enough.

  "I love you, Luca," I gasped.

  Our eyes met, burned, wavered with tears.

  "Ti amo, Delilah. I love you," Luca whispered, thrusting with each syllable. "Ti amo. Ti amo."