Chapter 10

Lazzaro gave him a look of profound pity. Lucy merely shrugged, then stood up, announcing she was going to the bar to get more beer. It seemed she had no desire to add anything further to the conversation. Fundamentally, Lucy had little interest in other people’s affairs; she was only listening this seriously because it involved Dante. When their other teammates talked, she usually let the words go in one ear and out the other.

Once the two men were left alone, Lazzaro leaned across the table, his posture dropping into a rare display of gravity.

“You need to accept reality, too,” Lazzaro advised in a quiet, serious voice. “There must have been a reason a man like your ex put up with your bullshit all this time. He wasn’t some naive twenty-year-old kid. A younger, wealthy man putting up with an older guy who threatens ‘let’s break up’ every other day? That’s not normal behavior.”

In the end, Dante couldn’t hold back. He swung his leg under the table and kicked Lazzaro hard in the shin.

“Agh!” At the heartfelt blow, Lazzaro groaned in sudden pain, instantly doubling over to grab his leg.

“What do you even know?” Dante hissed. “Rhys and I really loved each other.”

“A guy who really loves someone says they should break up every other day?” Lazzaro wheezed, glaring up at him.

“That was our love language!”

“Bullshit. What would a rich, handsome Manhattan guy like Rhys Elliott be so lacking in that he’d keep catering to your moods? Fine, you look decent. A little worse than me, sure, but I’ll admit you’ve got the face. But looks only stay useful for a year at most. Which means….” Still rubbing his shin violently, Lazzaro snapped his head up and eyed Dante up and down with a sudden realization. “Was your sexual compatibility that mind-blowing? Because otherwise, I’ve got nothing.”

Dante kicked Lazzaro’s shin a second time. But perhaps having developed a sudden immunity to the pain, Lazzaro merely cried out and kept talking right through it.

“You were both Betas, right? How do Betas even decide positions? Judging from looks alone, you’d obviously take the Alpha role….”

Every single one of Lazzaro’s guesses was dead wrong. Of course, anyone looking at Dante’s rugged frame would assume he was more suited to the dominant male role, but either way—no. The same went for their sexual compatibility. Separate from Dante’s own immense satisfaction with their sex life, he didn’t think intimacy had ever been a shallow commodity meant to keep Rhys tied to him.

“What are you two doing?”

Fortunately, Lucy returned before Lazzaro could spin any more nonsense. Carrying three fresh glasses of beer, she was immediately welcomed by Lazzaro as if nothing had happened. He hurriedly stood up to relieve her of the glasses.

“Dante wanted to go on the trip so badly that I was just encouraging him,” Lazzaro lied smoothly, flashing a brilliant smile. “Telling him he could totally do it.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “You literally told him not to go earlier.”

“I think you were right, Lucy. Wouldn’t he just be depressed staying in New York anyway?”

Lucy looked at Lazzaro, clearly wondering why he was suddenly uttering something logical, then handed Dante his beer. Dante wanted to tell her honestly what the bastard had just been talking about, but it wasn’t exactly content she would enjoy hearing, so he kept his mouth shut.

“So,” Lucy asked, looking directly at him. “Are you going?”

Dante quietly studied Lucy’s black eyes. Reading the faint, underlying worry hidden within them, a sudden memory of Rhys flashed through his mind. Of course, he was thinking about Rhys constantly, but this was a highly specific scene.

“We’re going to the Trevi Fountain too, right?”

On the day Dante had reserved the couples’ cooking classes—the very ones Lazzaro had just mocked—he had been tangled in Rhys’s arms. Lying together on the expansive sofa, Dante had been obediently eating pieces of chocolate Rhys fed him, tipping his head back against his lover’s chest. The pale lavender eyes looking down at him had been bright with pure excitement.

“The Trevi Fountain? Yeah, of course we have to go,” Dante had replied, speaking as if he knew exactly what it was.

In truth, he’d had no idea. He had only learned later that night, after secretly looking it up on his phone, that it was the iconic setting of a famous classic romance film, and that a legend dictated throwing coins into its waters.

“Then we have to throw coins.”

In Rhys’s living room hung an exquisite lamp made of vibrant, colored glass. Warm silver light flowed beneath the pastel-blue pane, making Rhys’s eyes sparkle like the moon. Kissing Dante softly on the forehead, Rhys had whispered, “We absolutely have to throw two.”

His lovely voice, sounding like that of a dreaming boy, possessed a strange, magnetic power that made Dante want to grant whatever he asked for, no matter how absurd. Dante had nodded, and Rhys had smiled. Watching that white, dazzling smile, Dante had thought to himself that he wanted to look at it until the day he died.

Two coins meant your love would be fulfilled. The exact details varied depending on who explained the myth, but the core meaning remained unchanged. Dante recalled the emerald waters of the fountain he had seen in the search results, and the thousands of silver coins scattered across its stone floor.

And in that moment, sitting in the bar, he desperately wanted to go.

“Yeah,” Dante said aloud, pulling himself back to the present. “I’m going.”

Rhys would no longer be standing beside him, but Dante wanted to see the place his lover had spoken of with such breathless excitement with his own eyes.

Lucy nodded in approval. Lazzaro didn’t offer any more nonsense after that, either; instead, he began annoying Dante by listing off specific culinary ingredients he absolutely had to source while in Rome.

By the time Dante finally returned home after a reasonably decent evening, it was late at night. He opened the door to his dark, empty apartment, stepped inside, and began picking up the stray cans rolling around the floor to clear them away. It was far too late to run the washing machine, so he half-heartedly washed the dishes piled high in the sink.

After finishing the bare minimum of what needed to be done, he lay down in bed. Although the apartment was warm enough, Dante felt a biting cold pierce through him. The phantom memory of being wrapped tightly in Rhys’s arms every single night off brushed past him. Still entirely unused to spending the night alone, Dante pulled the heavy blanket all the way over his head.

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