Page 45 of His Vicious Vow

The asshole next to me acts as if him sitting up for me to go to the restroom is the rudest thing I could ask of him. When I come back less than five minutes later he pretends he’s asleep. Loudly, I tell him in Italian to sit the fuck up so I can sit down.

Beady black eyes stare up at me with anger as he sits up. I ignore him as I move past him.

Breakfast is somehow even yummier than dinner was. I’m getting excited by the scene below the window. I always wanted to travel. This is a good thing.

The plane will land in Berlin and after a three-hour layover the flight to Florence is an hour long. I stay in the first class lounge my ticket gets me into the entire time of the layover. Despite sleeping most of the flight I’m sleepy and after some pretzel bites that were too salty with some weird dip that’s even saltier I curl up in a chair and try to get more sleep.

I sleep walk onto the flight. Great, the asshole from the flight is on the same flight. Thankfully, he’s several rows back. My nose is pressed to the window almost the entire flight. It’s a lot more mountainous than I thought it would be.

This is what I wanted for the last few years…that’s not true exactly. It’s what I thought had to happen because staying in the states wasn’t an option. But who wouldn’t want to see the world? I need to look at this as an adventure. The knot in my stomach is from fear of the unknown not fear this is a mistake.

The taxi driver takes my phone and keys the address into his navigation on his dashboard. He nods in broken English he tells me it will be almost forty euro, was I sure?

I nod and tell him in Italian it’s fine but thank him for asking.

“You’re Italian, it’s very good. But a little different. You learn in America?” He says in rapid Italian.

During the drive to the flat we talk about my nonna. How she came from Florence to America. He shares the ins and outs of the city. How I should stay away from some areas, they were for tourists. The areas I should go to for the best food. By the time we’re at the flat, I’m sad the drive is over.

I go into what’s basically a convenience store on the ground floor of the building. The man behind the counter hands the keys over. There are two and he explains one is to get me into the building and the other is for the flat itself.

It takes a few tries to get the large door to the building open. The stairs are concrete and I’m huffing and puffing as I go up them.

The door to the apartment is a lot easier to open. Inside I find a printed out sheet detailing all the important info. There’s a grocery store sketched out a block away. How there’s air conditioning, that the cupboard housing it needs to be opened so it doesn’t freeze and the information on how to log into the internet.

Excitement fills me as I look around the place. It’s so big and beautifully decorated. I get caught by a little plaque beside one of the bedrooms. I don’t really understand what it says, it’s Latin. But I trace the numbers, 1549 holy freaking crap. This place was built more than three hundred years before any building in Chicago. How cool is that?

I decide on the corner bedroom with a huge, attached bathroom. The windows are huge but there are no screens only hinged wooden shutters. Wood floors creak with every step as I wander through the place.

For the first time since Celia’s engagement party my mind starts racing the way it does when a panic attack is beginning. I shake my head. Grabbing the remote I find a channel and turn up the volume hoping to drown out what’s happening. It doesn’t work. I move fast and snatch up my wristlet, new cell phone, and the keys and get out of the flat.

Air is forced into my lungs as I take the steps slowly down. I decide to head to the Duomo. My sense of directions sucks. It doesn’t help there are no signs and all the buildings are high and the road barely wide enough for the tiny cars.

I remember the driver pointing to the left from where he was dropping me so I decide to veer left and see how far it is. Stopping on a corner I see a sign with an image of the Duomo and an arrow pointing the way I’m going. I’m wondering where it could be when the street ends at—wow.

I’m in awe of the sight before me. My awe is dampened a little by all the scaffolding for repair of the smaller ceilings in the front. Huh, this isn’t quite what I thought it would be.

My nonna came from Florence when she was a teenager. She mentioned spending long days in the Uffizi staring at the beautiful art. Her family disapproved of her roaming out by herself so she was not allowed to take money with her. She would find paper and create paper flowers or sketch the water and bridge that joined both sides of Florence and sell them for the small cost of the ticket inside.

Tickets for the Duomo are all sold out for today so I buy tickets to go tomorrow. There’s a gelato place in front of the Duomo. I get a cone with strawberry gelato and sit on a wide concrete bench. This is a scene out of a picture with the sun setting turning the sky bright pinks and oranges on the long row of buildings in yellow and greens and orange. Yet for the first time in a long time, I’m lonely.

As odd as it might be with me living basically alone for the last four years while Celia was away at school and my mom rarely home—I never truly felt lonely. I filled my days and nights drawing for clients and filling orders for my store and if I wasn’t working I was reading manga, watching anime and basically filling every spare minute on discord servers talking to other fans of the manga I read and anime I watched. While I might be alone, I was never lonely. If for a moment I felt the quiet creep in, I jumped on a server and someone was always on and wanting to chat. My world was never quiet, even when I was.

I run a hand over the skirt of my dress. A sigh escapes me at the beautiful clothes I left behind. I would never have the confidence to try the clothes on if I weren’t handed them by Lydia thinking she was the one to pick them out.

Only it wasn’t Lydia it was Sandro. He knew me well enough to know what I would want. How? One day and I’m guessing he got whatever Milos had on me. How deep did whatever Milos had on me go? But he could have only gotten it the day he met me. He said he didn’t know about having to marry me until then. Even if he knew at the beginning of the day and not three minutes before we met like me how could he get what clothes I wanted to wear yet didn’t think I would look good in from a file?

For so long I’ve worn my own kind of uniform of Sailor Moon cosplay even when I wasn’t in full gear. I wanted to be her: strong, powerful, and brave. I’ve been playing someone else for so long, I don’t know who I am. I know who I want to be. I think.

Sandro said I could be who I wanted to be in private but I would have a part to play in public. He even gave me the clothes I wanted yet didn’t dare believe I could wear. Not only did I look good in the clothes, I felt comfortable in them—as though I belonged in them, not that I was playing a part.

Ever since the panic attacks started, I hid more in the clothes and makeup but they didn’t make me feel the way they used to. They were more of a mask and sometimes the mask felt too tight and heavy to wear.

I don’t want to wear short skirts and button-down blouses. I don’t want to wear blue and green and bright pink eyeshadow or have a winged eyeliner with crystals along it. I want elegance and style.

I don’t want to run my online store—not like I could overseas. I’ve hated working with clients since I started. The reason I knew instantly who Milos was, was because he always paid without any delay or excuse. It didn’t matter how long and hard I worked for clients I came to a binding fucking contract with, they still always found one reason or another to not pay. In the beginning I was dumb and didn’t have contracts, I was ripped off by nearly every fucking client.

What I want to do…I think I’d like to draw my own manga. Reading all the stories caused me to have my own ideas. Ideas I would scribble out and ignore because it felt like it would be a huge ordeal and there was no guarantee it would make a dime. I also didn’t have the luxury of spending time on something that didn’t bring in money.

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