Page 38 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“You must find yourself disappointed a lot,” she said, her gaze pressed to the side of my face the way her fingers were the other day tothe glass separating her from Florence’s wonders. As if my secrets were just under the skin.
“My definition ofperfectis different from yours, perhaps. To me, it does not mean ‘flawless.’ It means ‘enticing,’ so vibrant you cannot help but find it beautiful, flaws and all.”
“And what would you consider a flaw?”
I hummed over that for a moment because too many came to mind, but I did not think she would enjoy my flippancy.
“Stupidity. Willful ignorance. A lack of loyalty to family and friends.”
She flinched as if I had hit her, turning toward the window so I only caught a fleeting glimpse of the self-recrimination on her face.
Uncharacteristically, I did not know what to say. I had not been deliberately insulting as I sometimes meant to be when we bantered, and I was strangely ... unsettled that my words had hurt her.
The tension in the car mounted as I maneuvered us silently through traffic to the other side of the city.
“Chi sta bene da solo, sta bene con tutti,” I said finally, pushing the words out into the dense quiet between us. “Have you heard of this saying?”
“No,” she said softly without looking at me.
“It means something like ‘If you feel good about yourself, you will feel good about everyone, and they will feel the same way about you in return.’” When she didn’t fill my pause, I sighed. “I did not intend to insult you, Guinevere, and I am sorry that I did nonetheless. I am sorrier, though, that you were so ready to believe I would. That Ishouldeven.”
“You were the one who called me anidiota,” she pointed out with a sharp look from the corner of her eye.
I wanted to smile at her show of teeth but refrained. “That was before I knew you. Now I do not think you are stupid or willfully ignorant or disloyal. Naive, certainly. New to Italian culture, clearly. But I cannot think poorly of you in any sense,cerbiatta, and I have onlyknown you for a week. I shudder to think how grand my impression of you will become if I know you any longer.”
She bit her lip to downplay her grin, but there was a noticeable shift in her energy, like sunshine slicing through a dense cloud.
“That was probably, in a very roundabout sort of way, the sweetest thing anyone has ever said about me,” she confessed.
“You should find better company, then,” I said mildly as we waited for the crowds of tourists to cross the street a block away from our destination.
“Sweet,” she echoed softly, turning her pleased expression to the window.
Of course, no one in my life had ever called me sweet. Not even my mother or sisters, who adored me. Even as a boy I had been calculating and brutally honest. I could remember making Delfina cry on her first day of high school because I told her that her perm made her look like Valeria Golino’s ugly sister.
Guinevere was the type of person to look for the good in everything. Even made men with very bad intentions. It didn’t make her stupid exactly, but it did make her easy prey to dangerous men and poor decision-making.
This was especially evident when I pulled in front of the apartment building where she had rented a flat for her six-week summer vacation and found a group of three young men dealing drugs just to the left of the doorway. It wasn’t surprising. Though there weren’t any seriously unsafe areas in Florence proper, the street behind Fortezza da Basso was an open secret with locals who wanted to buy anything from pharmaceuticals to hard-core street drugs.
“Hey, people my age,” Guinevere said happily, perking up from her lean against the window. “That’s nice to know.”
“If you like drugs, perhaps,” I drawled, twisting to raise my brow at her. “You do not look like the average user, but maybe I was mistaken.”
Her mouth dropped into a comical little O of shock. “They’re dealingdrugs?”
She whispered the last word as if she could get in trouble just for speaking it.
I was torn between hilarity and rage. “Guinevere, please tell me you were not raised in a convent.”
Her frown was fierce, and she crossed her arms, unconsciously mimicking my own pose. “No.I grew up in a college town, so I’m aware that people do drugs. I’ve never seen a drug deal before.”
Madonna santa, she was so young and unblemished.
So what did it say about me that I wanted to dirty her up with sin?
“Did you research this neighborhood before you booked the flat?”
The knot between her brows tightened. “Yes, Raffa. I’m not an idiot, as you yourself just announced. This area is safe.”
