Archive of Our Own

You saved me, you should remember me. 

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. 
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. 

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. 

I remember sounds like that from my childhood, 
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, 
something like that.

— Louise Glück, “Vita Nova”

The rain comes unexpectedly, with the kind of bold extravagance that makes Trish think as she watches it from the trattoria, Only in Naples. Within a handful of minutes the stones outside are slicked with it, glistening glasslike under the streetlamps and Christmas lights, and the excess runs down all the windows until the city loses its shape.

The decision to head home for the night is not vocalized, but rather tacitly accepted. This is a process of communication to which Trish had grown accustomed four years ago and to which she is accustomed still. Bucciarati is the first to stand up from the table, which of course means that Abbacchio is second. Trish waits until all the rest of them have followed suit—Giorno to get Narancia from the kitchen; Mista to tease a beleaguered Fugo all the way to the coat rack—and then rises from the bench and wanders to the foyer, her steps already hesitant. 

She stands on the outskirts of the departure a little awkwardly, with her arms wrapped around her middle. Bucciarati glances over at her while Abbacchio reaches over Fugo’s head for a pair of raincoats, white and black.

“Staying a while, Trish?” Bucciarati asks. 

Trish doesn’t know if staying a while is exactly the way that she’d put it, but she guesses that is, technically, what she’s going to do. One half of the truth of it is that a small part of her wants the trattoria to empty out so she can sit with the piano, which she’s been stealing looks at all night across the dining room—all the more after Bucciarati’s weird comment about it outside, and the implication that there’s something about it that Narancia has yet to tell her. The other half is the thin sheaf of papers tucked into her purse, folded three times, beside her mother’s compact.

She gestures to the storm through the glass. “I’ll wait for it to let up.” 

“Right,” Mista says before Bucciarati can reply, shouldering his coat on and winking obnoxiously at her, or trying to. He just looks like he’s about to sneeze, and also like an idiot, but that’s nothing new. “Wait for it to let up.” 

Fugo digs a vengeful elbow into his side before Trish has to, which is nice. 

“You sure we can’t give you a ride, kid?” Abbacchio asks as he passes Bucciarati an umbrella. “Where are you staying?” 

“Grand Hotel Parker’s,” Trish says. “It’s not far.” 

At that, Abbacchio barks out a laugh. 

“Shit,” he says, smiling crookedly down at her—and Trish realizes that she’s kind of missed being smiled crookedly down at by Abbacchio. “I take it back, then. You can afford that place, you can afford a cab.” 

“But we would be glad to save you the trouble,” Bucciarati interjects, and he gives Abbacchio a reproachful look when he takes his raincoat—the white one—from Abbacchio’s arm. “As it is Christmas Eve.”

“Yo, Bucciarati, can I get a cab?” Mista asks, pointing to himself with a grin. “The old geezer that drove me here charged me so much lire I thought his meter was gonna break.” 

“You may not,” Bucciarati answers, and when he briskly pulls up his raincoat’s zipper, he does it all the way to his chin. “Your expenses are at Giorno’s discretion now, Mista. You are free of me.” 

“And you of him,” Abbacchio says to Bucciarati, smirking when Mista flicks a hand out at him from under his chin. “I’m sure Giovanna will pay for it if you ask him nicely.” 

“I always ask nicely,” Mista retorts. A moment later Giorno emerges from the kitchen with Narancia behind him, the both of them laughing about something, Narancia wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Giorno! Money please!” 

Trish stifles a laugh at the bewildered look on Giorno’s face, but is distracted from his answer when Bucciarati sets a hand on her elbow. She catches an oblique smile at the right edge of his mouth before he ducks his head to speak more privately, although Trish doubts anyone would hear it over the racket Mista’s making, doubled now that Narancia’s back in the room with them.

“If at any point you grow bored of luxury hotels,” Bucciarati says, “I’ve a connection to a good house. Well-furnished, near the beach. Think about it.”

When he leans back away, the smile has become something faded, no brighter than the light from a candle, but it stays. Trish can’t argue with its existence, although her first instinct is to do so—to wonder what force had traded this Bucciarati with the one she remembers from the field outside a train full of withered bodies, who had dispensed an arrangement of body parts into a pond as if they were stones—and although this isn’t even the first of these gentle, living smiles she’s seen tonight.

“All right,” she tells him. “I’ll think about it.” 

Within a minute more they’ve all said their goodbyes and good wishes; Trish credits the fact that it’s near Christmas for her permitting Mista to ruffle her hair without snapping his arm off. Bucciarati and Giorno exchange a firm handshake; Fugo gives out a lot of polite nods; Narancia manages to corner Abbacchio for a hug, as he always does. 

“See you around, Trish,” Mista says as he pulls his hood up. “Keep doing what you’re doing, yeah? It kicks ass being able to tell people I know the Trish Una.” 

Trish isn’t sure how she feels about Mista going around telling people that he knows her, but she’s feeling nice. First the hair, and now this—she’ll have a lot to compensate for come the new year.

“It was nice to see all of you. Really,” she tells them. She realizes that it matters that she says it, and that they hear it, so she waits a moment and then repeats, with all the earnest emphasis she can manage, “Really, it was nice.” 

“Same to you,” Giorno says. “Please come to Naples anytime, Trish. It’s as much your city as it is ours.” 

“And when Giorno says it’s ours,” Mista adds, doing the terrible winking again, and miming a totally unsubtle gesture for money with his thumb and forefinger, “he means it’s ours, yeah?” 

“You are an embarrassment,” Fugo says. “To Passione, to yourself, to the world. Can we please go home now?” 

“Merry Christmas, Fugo,” Trish says dryly. 

A spasm of remorse crosses Fugo’s face. He clears his throat and mumbles to the floor, “You too.” 

“Narancia,” Bucciarati says, and lays a hand on Narancia’s shoulder, “thank you for the meal. It was delicious.” 

Narancia stands up ramrod straight with pride. His grin could light the whole room, and then some. 

“No problem, Bucciarati!” he practically chirps. “Anything for you!” 

“And for the rest of us,” Abbacchio says, “who are also here.” And he sends a pointed look at Trish, for absolutely no discernible reason.

Giorno cranes his neck when the beam of a headlight passes through the window beside the door. “Ah, that’s our car,” he says briskly. “Mista, Fugo.” 

“Aye aye, Boss,” Mista drawls, saluting the rest of them as he follows Giorno to the door, with Fugo close behind him. “Oi, Abbacchio, if you open that umbrella in here, I’m never gonna forgive you, got it?” Abbacchio threateningly lifts the umbrella, but Mista’s turned around to walk backwards, so he doesn’t notice. “Nice food, Narancia. Put it on my tab.” 

“You don’t have a tab,” Narancia snaps. “You always tell me to put it on your tab and then you never pay me back!”

Mista throws him a helpless shrug and smile, and then Fugo’s shoved him out the door, which closes with a jingle behind them. Narancia’s tied a brass bell over it, which makes a sound not quite like any other restaurant bell Trish has ever heard. It’s a nice sound. 

“Ours is down the street,” Bucciarati says. Beside him, Abbacchio unfastens the umbrella strap and shakes it out. “We’ll be off, then. Trish—” He softens, and Trish thinks for a second that he might be about to hold her shoulder as he had Narancia’s, but he doesn’t. “I wish you a sweet and peaceful Christmas.”  

Polite things like drive safely would be wasted on Bucciarati, Trish thinks, who has faced down more daunting threats than driving at night in the rain—but maybe that’s the point; it’s a kind of innocuous miracle that she has the occasion to say them at all. So she murmurs to both of them, as Abbacchio’s hand closes over the doorknob, “Drive safely.” 

The quiet of their absence settles around her like the walls are letting out a breath. It’s only her and Narancia now, and the piano. And the rain. 

She turns her head, glimpsing Narancia as he is now: familiar and composed, with a dishtowel flung errant over his shoulder and his hands on his hips. It astonishes her anew, how perfectly he fits in this place; he’s been so busy all night, rushing back and forth from their long wooden table with platters of spaghetti alla puttanesca and alici arreganate, chattering and fighting with Mista and Fugo, that he’s barely stood still enough for her to observe. 

He’s still got his hair in his eyes. The urge to reach over and push it back over his forehead is stronger than she remembers it being all that time ago, when that urge had felt out of place and foolish, instead of like a gentle ache all over.

Why do you restrain yourself? Spice Girl asks, a little grumpily, from the warm hollows of her chest.

“You gonna stay?” Narancia asks. 

It’s been a lively Christmas Eve, a night teeming with conversations and voices, things half-shouted across the length of a table—so this might be the first thing he’s said to Trish, and just to Trish, since she’d walked in the door. The clouds had only been gathering then, still at sea. It hadn’t been dark quite yet.

She realizes, belatedly, that she probably should have asked first, though asking has always been a superfluous thing with Narancia, who exists blithely as an answer to so many of her wants and questions. The sleeves of his white t-shirt are rolled up to his shoulders, and most of the fabric is flecked with tomato sauce. Stay is an easy command to hold, right then, with him standing only a few steps from her—standing, and breathing. Still breathing.

“Not forever,” she says. “I mean. Not all night, or anything. Just—until it stops raining? If that’s okay.” 

Narancia nods. His face is cast strangely; Trish can’t quite name the emotion at the center of it, but restraint seems close. These things have always been easier to spot on Narancia, who she has never known to hesitate about anything; when he does, the air seems to close up around it. 

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he says, and everything else aside she knows that he means that. “Sure.”

In the silence that passes back and forth between them for an instant, Trish trawls for something to say, but Narancia beats her to it, as usual. 

“I just gotta finish doing the dishes,” he says, pointing over his shoulder. “And put all the chairs up and—well, do closing stuff. But you can look around if you want! Just gimme, like—half an hour.”

He’s darted off before she can answer, up the staircase. Trish cranes her neck back to follow the path he takes until he vanishes toward some back corner. After a few seconds, in sections, the chandeliers and sconces go out, and then the trattoria is dark save for the kitchen, which sends a swath of old blond light onto the hardwood floor.

Narancia reappears over the banister a moment later, his shape still familiar in the darkness, and calls, “Oh, check out the piano! It’s right there!” He points straight down to where it’s set against the wall between the last stair and the kitchen, like Trish could miss it. 

“It’s nice. It’s beautiful,” Trish calls back, and at this simple observation Narancia’s smile becomes almost suffused with a glow. 

He thunders back down the stairs and passes her on his way to the kitchen, faintly disrupting the air in his wake so that it flits against her sleeve. Only after Trish had awakened her own Stand had she grown aware of the energy that follows other users everywhere: something like what sparks sometimes against her hand when she takes an acrylic sweater out of the wash, or reaches for the handle of a car door on a hot day. She wonders if Narancia feels it, too. 

Aerosmith, Spice Girl breathes, is restless. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Trish mutters, low enough that she doesn’t think Narancia will hear. 

I am just saying, says Spice Girl. 

Trish glares at the floor, like that will be a suitable substitute for her stupid nosy Stand’s face, and then looks hesitantly over her shoulder. She can’t see Narancia in the kitchen—through the doorway she spots a big sink with a pull-down faucet, and a terracotta countertop laden with dishes and pots and pans—but she can hear him, clattering thoughtlessly around and mumble-singing to himself, probably no different than he would be if he were completely alone. 

She can’t say why, but that makes her kind of happy. 

Rather than going straight for the piano, she wanders through the trattoria a while—it’s bigger than it looks from the outside, especially with the seating area upstairs. Most of the small tables are up there, while the larger communal ones are on the ground floor, flanked by long benches. There’s a trellis overhead from which some lights and fake vines are suspended, and along the walls Trish can see framed photographs, some American movie posters—Mista’s contribution, probably—and old tin advertisements for Campari, Barilla, Bonomelli. 

She moves closer to one of the photos on her way to the piano, a weathered one in a mahogany frame, mounted near the foot of the staircase. It’s been washed out either by time or exposure, and there’s a smoothed-out fold across the middle, but she can still make out the moment contained: a beach beneath a silver sky, and on the sand, two figures—a woman in a brown coat, her dark hair tossed aside by the wind, holding the hand of a boy with a blue hat and the same hair, who is pointing at the sky. 

Whoever had taken the picture had done so from behind, so Trish can’t make out their faces. Then again, she doesn’t need to. If only because nobody will see it, she smiles softly to herself and reaches up, stroking the silhouette of the boy with one finger, as delicately as she can. 

Small, says Spice Girl, with some affection. 

Trish glares at the ceiling. “Shh.” 

There’s a bench at the piano—the velvet cushion was probably red once, but it’s forgotten that color and is now brown—and after a moment’s deliberation Trish lowers herself onto it, running her right hand along the fallboard. It’s an upright piano with a walnut veneer; antique by the look of it. The shape of the music rack is intricate, like lace, and there’s a rose carved into the wood above it. 

It reminds her so much of the one at her old house—which had been her grandmother’s, and on which her mother had taught her the scales and arpeggios as the evening’s dying light crept down the living room walls—that an ache opens up inside of her and stays, mild and bruiselike. It’s nothing like the sleek grand piano at Giulia’s villa, or the keyboard at the studio. It’s had a life, she thinks, or several.

She fingers the topmost petal of the rose, tracing the curve of it. It looks real enough that Giorno could have grown it, real enough that its fragrance could remind her of something lost and beautiful. Her eyes wander over to the kitchen doorway. 

Narancia is at the sink now, with his back to her and his arms working away at a cloud of soap suds. He’s tapping his foot, muttering something to himself that sounds like rap, making wordless noises for the parts he doesn’t know. Content, Trish props her chin up in one hand and watches him for a while—she listens to the running water, and the continuing rain, and the rhythm of Narancia’s voice. I wanna take your misery, she thinks she hears in messy English, replace it with happiness. 

It coaxes a smile out of her before she can keep it to herself. As the rain continues drumming on the high roof, she sits up straight again and carefully lifts the fallboard. 

She presses the key for C with her middle finger, and the note comes out rich and woody. She finishes the scale carefully, stretching one hand over the keys, and then plays it back down, tripping over the last note. Then she does a Hanon exercise. She used to hate those, and the tedium of practice over creation in general, but they’re so much easier now, imprinted in her memory. She does another, enticing the simple melodies out into the empty restaurant—softly at first, and then with more confidence. 

Play like you’re reaching for someone, Trish, her mother used to say. Someone you never want to let go of. 

“Hey, it sounds pretty good!” 

Trish jumps, eyes snapping open—when had she closed them?—and hits a discordant note. When she looks up, she finds Narancia leaning easily on the top panel with his arms crossed, watching her with a bright-eyed absorption. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices that all of the chairs have been put up on the tables. She hadn’t even heard him moving around behind her. 

“You tuned it,” she says, not a question. 

Narancia blinks at her, then glances away, almost sheepish. “Well, I, uh, tried… Bucciarati loaned me this super boring book about it…”

Trish nods, looking down at the keys again, running her fingertips along a dozen or so. Even the lightest weight makes them sink by a fraction. It’s old wood, she can tell, painted white to resemble ivory—smooth and hollow. 

“It’s perfect,” she says quietly. When she glances furtively up at him, the pride on his face is unmistakable. “Do you play?” 

Narancia reaches up to scratch the back of his head with one hand and frowns at the wall.

“No—well, not in a long time,” he says. He turns his head in until he’s talking into his shoulder. “I’m not any good.” 

The last part comes out in a mumble, but Trish still hears it. There’s very little Narancia could say, she thinks sometimes, that she wouldn’t find a way to hear. 

She scoots over, patting the space on the bench beside her. There’s just enough room to fit two people. 

“Here,” she says. “Sit down. I can teach you something I like.”

Narancia’s face swivels back to her then, backlit by the kitchen, his features loose with surprise. He lowers his hand, but not all the way; it hovers in the air, propped up by the elbow, beside his cheek. 

“Really?” he asks. 

“I offered, didn’t I?” Trish says in lieu of an answer. “Come on, don’t worry. You’d be surprised how fast it comes back.” 

Narancia hovers for a moment, his gaze on Trish’s unbroken—and then comes over, lowering himself carefully onto the bench like he’s afraid it will collapse under his weight. 

The side of his thigh presses gently against Trish’s when he sits down, and his shoulder brushes into hers for a second, then leaves again. She can make out a tinge of color on his face when he mutters an apology, despite the low light.

She tries not to stare at that face for too long—tries not to give attention to the sleepy eyelids, the shape of his mouth, the scar on his chin—the things she remembers. She isn’t sure she does a very good job.

Spice Girl surfaces, fond and easy. Hello, old friend.

“Let me just—warm up.” Trish rights her hands a little too quickly, sits up a little too straight. As she moves them methodically through the scales, listening to the notes drift up to the ceiling to commune with the rain, she casts around for something to talk about and lands on: “How was school?”

“Huh? School?” Narancia tilts his head, ponders this a moment. “Boring sometimes,” he says, “and nice other times. I guess I’m glad I went.” 

“You guess?” Trish asks. 

“I mean, I am,” Narancia says hurriedly, waving both of his hands. “Really glad! It was kinda rough at first, but… I don’t know.” He sighs, eyes drifting to the keys, and hesitantly presses down on one, his hand beside her hand. G-sharp major. “Some days I don’t feel any smarter.” 

“You are,” Trish says, and then realizes how it sounds. “You were always smart,” she corrects herself, softly.  

Narancia glances over at her, clearly trying to look aloof about it, but Trish knows better. He’s never been too hard to figure out.

“Y-You think?” he mumbles.

Trish folds her lips in for a moment, and then nods. 

She lets the last note punctuate it, keeping her hand in place. There’s a strange comfort to be found in the way the sound retreats again into the silence of this place—as if it’s being given, not taken. Silence had taken a lot of things from her, once. 

“Pretty,” Narancia says.

“It’s just the scales.”

“Still.” A smile darts across his face. “Pretty.”

Trish isn’t sure she has it in her to hear that word in Narancia’s voice again, spoken with such tenderness, so she searches for another topic. There’s so much she has to ask him about—wants to ask him about. It’s been almost a year since their last phone call, which had barely lasted five minutes; she’d been on the roof of a hotel in Bilbao, and he’d been studying for exams, and time had taken away the rest. 

She’d really only heard about the trattoria from Giorno. Narancia had mentioned a restaurant to her once or twice, a long time ago, when the future had been a luxury instead of a right—but that had been a far cry from having one. It occurs to her that she doesn’t even know its name.

“So how’d you… I mean…” She gestures vaguely behind her. “Is this all… yours?” 

Narancia follows the arc of her hand, eyes roaming over the room from the ceiling to the floor, and straightens up proudly. 

“Yep. Giorno wanted to buy this place for me,” he says. “Bucciarati tried it, too. But it would’ve felt really lame just—taking it, you know? Like it wouldn’t really be mine. So I helped Bucciarati out on the boat for a year after graduation.” 

The past January, a letter had come to Trish’s flat in Paris in a square envelope, air mailed from Santa Lucia. Bucciarati’s blunt all-caps script had filled both sides of the yellow page, recounting afternoons and conversations, and asking after hers. She still clearly remembers the lone photograph attached by a paper clip: Narancia, slightly blurry, windblown and beaming on the deck of a fishing boat, wearing a pair of rubber overalls and holding up a humongous swordfish with two gloved hands. Behind him, the choppy winter sea had been gunmetal gray, and on the back of the photograph was printed, Success on Aurora, after a storm. 

Of course, I’m paying him handsomely, Bucciarati had written. As he deserves. Has he told you of his plans for the future? 

(Spice Girl had hovered over Trish’s shoulder, tilting her head at the photograph with the kind of curious focus Trish had only ever seen her reserve for snow, or meringues. Eventually she had murmured, in a tone that Trish could not interpret, He looks the same.)

“What was that like?” Trish asks, one side of her mouth quirking up at the memory. She’d thought pretty often of Narancia and Bucciarati in those days, the two of them seafaring back home on a boat named after the dawn. It had been a nice thought. “Here, try playing this.” 

Narancia watches the keys her right hand plays intently, and then lifts his own to mirror them, his brow creased with concentration. His pace is a little more halting, but the sound is just right, and he falls in time with her easily after she goes through it once more.

“I had to wake up really early every day—before the sun came up,” he says. This sounds horrifying to Trish, but he’s smiling. “I’d just walk from Via Toledo down to the harbor, let Aerosmith out for a while. Bucciarati was never, ever late. When we got into open water, I’d get to watch the sun come up, and I’d think about—”

He stops himself there; Trish can tell. He misses the next note. 

“Sorry,” he stammers. “Shit.” 

Elevated heart rate, comments Spice Girl, unimpressed.

“Relax,” Trish says, even though her heart rate is probably elevated now too, while she wonders what it was that Narancia would think about watching the sunrise. “Let me see if I still remember this.” 

She goes through the first couple of bars experimentally, wincing when the last part comes out flat. Narancia doesn’t seem to care, still closely observing the movements of her hands—always an apt and eager learner, despite his usual whining. On the second try, she gets it right. She remembers the tempo written on her old sheet music, the words sunlight-faded. Ad agio.

“Wait,” Narancia says after the first verse, eyes widening a little. “I know this one.” 

A sudden warmth blooms on Trish’s cheeks, without a definite source. “You do?” 

Narancia nods, his face a little softer and more open than it had been a moment ago. “Mom liked it.” 

“Oh,” Trish says when her heart twists. “Did she ever teach it to you?” 

Narancia doesn’t answer right away. He slouches forward on the bench, his arms going slack between his knees. His expression is comprised of so many things—sad things, wistful things, uncertain things—and Trish knows them all, without having to work or want for it. She stops playing. The only sound that remains, then, is the rain on the roof, muffled, ceaseless. 

How late has it gotten to be? Midnight, or something after?

“Not really,” he says eventually. “I only ever learned the… scales and stuff. Before. But I kinda tried to teach myself after. She played it a lot, so I remembered most of it.”

“You,” Trish says, “learned it by ear?”

Narancia shrugs, pointing sheepishly at Trish’s hands on the keys. “I mean, not like that. It didn’t sound—nice, or anything.” 

Then the closing up of air. He sets his face into a frown and looks away. 

“Anyway,” he mutters, “it was a long time ago.”

Trish nods silently in understanding, running a thumb along the key bed, and considers what Narancia has just given her. She realizes with a dull pang of yearning that she still knows so little of his life before the spring that he had died for her. Impressions, and little more—things that he had voiced in the small hours of the night once, before the scar on her wrist had vanished—a house painted white, a broad sky, a long funeral. A cold room. A bruised eye. 

It’s strange to think that she and Narancia had ever lived separately, not knowing how they would one day meet or understand each other—not knowing about the promise he would give her, before the undone end; not knowing about the downpour in Naples, or the sliver of once-red cushion between their legs—not knowing how long their hair would grow.

We missed him, Spice Girl says, as frank and clear as a fragment of sea glass. Didn’t we?

Trish shakes her head minutely, unsure of how to answer. Maybe she has missed Narancia. Maybe that’s what this feeling is. No song she ever writes, she thinks, could ever fit all of this inside of it—and there have been so many contenders. “Venezia,” the first cut on her sophomore album. “In volo,” on a hidden EP. The most embarrassingly obvious, which she had buried as a bonus track on a compilation of covers: “Profumo di agrumi.”

Nice songs, Narancia had called them, his smile obvious even in his voice through the phone speaker. He’s always called her songs nice. Really nice songs. 

(She doesn’t think he’s heard “Profumo di agrumi.”)

“So this…” She lets her hand slip down into her lap, leaning back a little, and nods at the piano. “Was this for her?” 

“Um,” Narancia says. 

Trish turns her head to see him staring at her hands with a kind of vague alarm. She frowns, opens her mouth around a question, but then he sits up straighter and locks eyes with her, and the question leaves her.

“Can you,” he asks imploringly, “play the whole song, Trish?” 

Trish has never been very good at saying no to Narancia, but with his voice like that—with the soft hitch in the middle—it’s harder than it’s maybe ever been. 

“All right,” she tells him, positioning her hands. “But only if you promise to stop acting weird.” 

“Huh? Weird?” Narancia stiffens, offended. “Who’s weird?!” 

Trish withholds a laugh that would double her over. He hasn’t changed at all. 

“Never mind,” she says. “You wanted to learn, right? Watch my hands.” 

Something strange flickers in Narancia’s eyes and is gone before Trish can name it. When his gaze drifts with painstaking focus to her hands, her stomach wrings itself out inside of her, and she can’t name that either, so she doesn’t try.

Accompanied still by the rain, she plays “Moon River” for Narancia from memory, as tenderly as she has ever learned to play anything. The lyrics unfurl in her head even though she doesn’t sing them—wherever you’re going, I’m going your way—so it’s more out of instinct than desire when she starts to hum along, or murmur a word to herself beneath the melody. Heartbreaker. Drifters. Huckleberry. 

The nerves recede eventually, as they always do, replaced by the familiar song she had once begged her mother to teach her, and by Narancia’s steady warmth beside her shoulder, and by the narrow breadth between these things. She’s reminded of another song, one that her mother would sometimes hum in the car with a note of sadness that it had taken years and loss for Trish to comprehend. They can’t take that away from me. 

You’ll come, won’t you? Giorno had asked her over the phone at the month’s beginning. For Christmas?

I don’t know, Trish had said, sitting on the kitchen countertop in her socks. Maybe. 

You do know, Spice Girl had interjected, a wave breaking on a lonely shore. You’ve already decided. Haven’t you?

It takes a second for Trish to recognize the smile that’s taken shape on her face. These expressions seem to come out of her without effort now, these little gestures of life. She can hear Spice Girl singing at her back, sort of like a whale, fathoms-deep and without language. 

“—Moon river,” Trish finishes, holding the vowels, “and me.” 

After the last note folds back into the silence, she turns her head toward Narancia. She’s about to ask if her hands had been easy to follow—if she’d gone too fast, if he needs her to do it again—but the thought scatters into pieces. 

Narancia isn’t looking at her hands. He’s looking at her. 

Trish doesn’t think she’s ever been looked at like that—like this. Like she’s a house at the end of a long road. 

“Narancia,” she whispers without knowing why, and then comes to her senses. “Um, how was that?” 

“Huh?” Narancia says, his stare hazy. “Oh. Really good.”

He handles the word good with a little bewilderment, like he’d forgotten what it meant until just a second ago. For an overwhelming instant, Trish wants to close the fallboard with one hand and close the narrow gap between their legs and—

And—

Her pulse thunders inside of her. Spice Girl’s going to freak. Narancia lets out a long breath, still looking, and swallows silently at the end. Trish watches the subtle movement of his throat, and her heart gets louder, louder.

“About the piano,” he says. 

Trish nods. “The piano.” 

Narancia says, “The truth is,” and breathes in deep. He turns his head away. His fists are clenched on his knees, but not tightly—tight only enough to grip another hand, maybe, and hold on. “The truth is it was, um, a present.” 

Oh, Spice Girl breathes, and Trish, too, breathes, “Oh.”

“I wasn’t even sure if you were gonna come,” Narancia continues, talking fast to the keys, “but since it’s, y’know, Christmas, I thought—if you came—it’d be nice to have one for you. And it’s—well, it’ll always be here for you, if you ever feel like you wanna play—and you, uh, can’t find a piano… anywhere else… this one’s yours. Is what I mean.” 

He clamps his mouth shut, rigid for a moment longer, and then relaxes. 

“If you want it,” he says over the rain. 

Trish stares at him, dumbfounded. She looks down at the piano and then back up again.

“But—” she says. “I wasn’t—I didn’t—” She shakes her head. “I—live in Milan, Narancia.”

Narancia glances sidelong at her and mutters, “Yeah.” 

“I don’t—I don’t come to Naples.”

“You do,” Narancia says. “You did.” He quiets. “You came.”

Trish keeps gaping and looks back at the piano.

“I,” she says, grasping for the right words, even though she’s sure she’ll never find them. “Narancia… but this is—”

“It’s not a—like, it’s not big deal,” Narancia interjects, leaning back to frown intently at the ceiling. “So don’t, I mean—don’t worry about it, or feel like you owe me, okay? And don’t stress about taking care of it or any of that—I’ll take care of it for you. Bucciarati taught me how. I’ll make sure it’s all ready for you when you—if you ever come back. If it’s tomorrow or in five years or whatever—or never, even—it’ll be here. Just like this.”

Then he grimaces and slaps both hands over his face. The impact echoes sharply to the ceiling.

“What the hell am I even saying…?” he groans mournfully into his palms. “L-Listen, if you don’t want it, that’s fine—” 

“I do want it,” Trish blurts out like a complete moron. “Wait—no, that’s not what I… I just mean…”

The expression you are looking for, Spice Girl says as Narancia’s hands start cautiously to slip off of his face again, is “thank you.”

“I’ll,” Trish murmurs, far too moved to say something as simple as that, “I’ll come back, Narancia. I’ll come back lots—over the summer, and every Christmas and—I’ll come back, and I’ll teach you whatever you want.” 

There’s a moment where she’s sure that this reveals everything. The nights without sleep, the songs she can’t play live, the faltering when planes pass by. Narancia must see right through her then, she thinks, clear to the other side of the room and then some.

“Really?!” Narancia’s face lights up in an instant, bright enough to put winter to bed early. “For real? Every Christmas?”

Trish feels a frown twitch on her forehead, but before she can reply Narancia has leaned eagerly closer to her until their knees are touching under the keys. When he flattens his hands on either side of the bench, one of his wrists nudges her leg. Trish tilts back to maintain the distance, but Narancia’s face is still right there. Right there.

“You mean it?” he asks. “You really mean it?” 

Stay. He’s made it easy for the second time tonight, with no effort at all. She can’t even be disappointed that he hadn’t seen her declaration for what it was. In fact, she’s kind of relieved. 

Helplessly, she softens, gazing back at him with an undisguised affection that she’s grateful she doesn’t have to see.

“Yeah,” she says, and lets out a bemused laugh. “Yes.” 

Narancia hesitates for a second, his posture drooping. 

“You—I mean, do you have time for that?” 

“Yeah,” Trish repeats, realizing the sincerity only once it’s out of her. “I have time.” 

Whatever time she doesn’t have, she’ll invent. Starting now, she decides. Starting right now. 

She and Narancia end up playing the piano and talking through the whole night. Narancia takes down the chairs from one of the tables upstairs, by the railing, and they sit facing each other with a votive candle between them, gesturing and laughing and talking, talking, talking, until Trish’s throat gets sore. Narancia gets up periodically to bring something back up from the kitchen—a bottle of wine, a plate piled with struffoli—and by the end Trish’s voice is barely hers anymore, but something low and eloquent, or maybe it just feels like that because she’s too tired to know the difference. 

She can’t remember the last time she stayed up through the night. The night after Abbacchio died, maybe—the night that had culminated in the Colosseum, beneath a different kind of rain—the night that she’d been sure would cage her forever. She’s exhausted in a new way by the end of this—a good way—with her hand cradling her chin and her drowsy smile pressed into the heel of her palm, as she watches Narancia laugh helplessly across the table. He’s got his wrist in front of his eyes, but she can still see his open mouth, joyful and unobstructed; she can still hear the sound shooting to the ceiling like a firework, a burst of color and light. 

The wine has her feeling warm to the tips of her fingers. Hours ago, time had relinquished its shape. Still, when Narancia lets out his biggest yawn of the night, stifling it behind one fist, she finally gives in and checks her watch. 

“God,” she mutters. “It’s almost six.” 

Narancia blinks sleepily at her, rubbing at his right eye with his fingers, and says, “Oh. Huh.”

“God,” Trish says again, biting back a yawn of her own. “I need to get back. And sleep forever.” 

Narancia nods heavily. His eyelids are drooping, but he’s grinning still, with a kind of absentminded ease. He slumps forward to set his folded arms on the table and drops his cheek onto them with a soft thud.

“You have a phone, right?” she asks, standing, so that she doesn’t have to sit there and think he’s cute. She stretches her arms over her head, humming when her back cracks. “I’m calling a cab.” 

“Mm.” Narancia disengages one arm and flaps it vaguely at the staircase. “Downstairs. Kitchen.” 

Trish gives him a fond look that he doesn’t see and then wanders down, her steps slow in the pale light. She stands at the foot of the stairs a moment, her hand brushing the last newel, and absorbs the hush. It’s Christmas morning.

The trattoria looks different at dawn, emptier and more unreal, easier to get lost in. Still, she finds the phone in the kitchen without much trouble. It’s mounted on the wall, and it looks old. Probably hasn’t been replaced since the place was built. 

There’s a phone book underneath with a bunch of pages missing, but Trish finds a cab company and calls. When she hangs up, Narancia’s standing in the doorway, slumped against the frame and scratching at his head with one eye squinted shut. 

“It’ll be here in fifteen minutes,” she tells him. “I’ll wait outside.” 

“You don’t have to,” Narancia says, and yawns again. 

“You’re about to fall over,” Trish says, with more affection than she plans. “And so am I. Go home. I’ll wait outside.” 

“Not going home,” Narancia mumbles, his head lolling over until it bumps into the jamb. “Gonna sleep on the couch in the back room. Sleep there all the time. But I’ll…” Yawn. “Walk you, okay?” 

Trish rolls her eyes. “Okay.” 

She can see the misty morning remembering itself through the window while she shoulders on her coat. The rain had stopped around 3 AM, and now all that’s left is fog and gleaming stone, gossamer-bright in the mild winter dawn. The buildings vanish into it as if they’ve forgotten their rooftops. She throws her scarf around her neck without knotting it and sticks her gloves into her pocket and takes her purse off of the wooden hook by the window. 

Trish, Spice Girl interjects with a sudden urgency, aren’t you going to—

Trish hears a sigh precede the shuffling footsteps behind her and turns around to meet it, doing up the last of her buttons. Narancia’s rubbing at one side of his face, his hair mussed, his body so warm that she swears she can feel it, a living thing between them.

For a single, sleepy moment, she wonders if that couch can fit two people.

“When are you leaving?” Narancia asks. His voice is low and languid, rougher than hers by half. Trish has heard it like this once or twice, over the phone at 2 AM, but this is different. This makes her lungs forget the air inside of them. 

“I go back tomorrow,” she says, and tries helplessly to distract herself by fluffing her drooping hair back up. “The 26th.” 

Narancia’s eyebrows twitch faintly toward each other. He says nothing for a moment, and then asks, with something quiet and mournful underneath, “Early?” 

“Yeah,” Trish replies. When she drops her hands to her sides again, she flexes her fingers, in and out. They’re cold. “Early. First bus.”

Narancia considers her so carefully that her first instinct is to look away, but in the end she doesn’t, or can’t. He opens his mouth, but nothing emerges. After a second, he scrubs both hands slowly over his face, holding his hair back at the end, and then lets them fall back down. When he nods silently in understanding, his eyes are closed. 

Emotion surges in Trish’s chest, but once again the words to make it real dart out of her reach, and all she’s left with is, “Narancia.” 

He opens one eye. “Mm?” 

“I’m…” Trish flounders for a moment, and is almost, almost brave. 

In the end she only points over her shoulder, at the place where she thinks the window might be, though she has suddenly forgotten the windows, and the walls, and the door she will have to close behind her when she leaves. 

“My—cab’ll be here soon,” she says, and reaches for the doorknob. “I’d better go. Thanks for—” Another surge, unbearable. “Everything.” 

For a minute, Narancia doesn’t move. Then he opens his eyes. 

Trish swears that a summer wind passes through the room, blows every window open, rushes up her sleeves—she swears that she understands the anatomy of flight, right then, the rising and the plunge. She swears that something converges. 

She stays very still when Narancia steps closer, so still that even breathing would betray her. She keeps her hand on the doorknob. Narancia’s eyes flicker over each part of her face in turn, lingering in places, and then they end on her mouth. 

“Trish, um,” he says hoarsely, and then swallows. “Um.” 

Trish feels a touch graze her wrist, one fingertip and then the next; she feels how the air shrinks in the empty space just before contact, about to spark. Narancia’s face is flushed, and sad, and perfect, and it is so close. 

He breathes out shakily, eyelids hooding. Trish notices belatedly that she’s craned her neck a little, and that her grip has loosened on the doorknob, forgetting the exit. 

Narancia remains completely still for another moment, and then he leans down and presses a fleeting kiss to her cheek. Heat blooms across Trish’s face, down her neck, to her chest, her hands, and stays, and stays.

She gapes up at Narancia as he pulls away. He bows his head to the floor. 

“I’ll—” The corners of his mouth turn down, just barely, withholding too much. “See you around.”  

Not yet, Spice Girl whispers with a mournful urgency. Not now. And Trish lays her left hand on the side of Narancia’s face, tilts it deliberately toward her, and rises up to kiss him on the mouth.

Her purse hits the floorboards. 

So this is what it’s like to kiss Narancia. This, the pull, the murmuring. This, a hand closing over her hand, holding it in place against his cheek. This: the “oh” that breaks against her lips, the door pressed to her back, the taste of wine, the tongue, the touch. The fingers in her sleeve. The breath, in fragments small enough to fit in one hand.

It feels like climbing. It feels like saying, And. And. And.

When she breaks away, Narancia’s face follows after hers for an inch before the separation catches up to him. He opens his eyes slowly, in a daze, and Trish breathes back at him, open-mouthed, like she’s just let go of something heavy. 

She’s expecting him to say something, but he doesn’t. He turns his face into her palm, still holding her hand up, and with a gentle hesitation he presses the skin to his mouth. When he sighs quietly through his nose, eyes drifting to one side, the air rushes clear and vital over her knuckles. 

“Sorry,” he says, speaking into the life line. “I just…” And then he sighs again, lowering her hand onto his shoulder, and says to the still morning, “I think about you all the time. All the time.”

Trish doesn’t know what she will say when she inhales to build an answer. The sudden sound of a car horn cuts through the light before she can invent it. She’s still against the door, so she can’t look out the window. 

Narancia tilts a little sideways until her hand slips down to his chest. His face clouds over. 

“Um,” he says, blinking rapidly, like he’s not sure if he’s still awake or not, “it’s your cab.”

Trish has her answer.

“Forget the cab.” 

Narancia looks lucidly back at her in an instant. The light slants across his face, dips into the small scar on his chin; it reaches to the farthest corner of the room, illuminating everything. It reaches the piano. 

“Forget the cab,” Trish tells him again, laid bare, and when she reaches up to bring him back, he lets her.

“Are you sure it isn’t stupid?” Trish asks.

It’s November in Milan, and over the wind-scraped weekend the trees had dropped the last of their leaves. Trish is sitting cross-legged on the granite countertop in the kitchen, one hand holding to the phone and the other fidgeting with the corners of the sheet music in her lap. It’s early—the sun hasn’t quite crept up the barren sky yet—and she’s still in her pajamas.

“Positive,” Bucciarati answers, steadfast and inarguable at her ear. She can hear gulls crying in the background, waking to the morning. “It’s a fine song, Trish. You’ve outdone yourself.” 

“Great key for you, kid,” Abbacchio adds, a little muffled.

“Thanks,” Trish says, even though she cares significantly less about the key than she does about the words. “The second verse isn’t too much?” 

“Not at all,” Bucciarati says. “It says just what it needs to say.”

Trish grips the page a little tighter until it crumples under her thumb. Regretfully, she smooths it out again. She’s handwritten so many drafts of this, scribbled out word after word and note after note. It feels weird to have it all right here in her lap, undeniable.  

Especially the second verse.

“If it feels like too much, that’s probably a good thing,” Abbacchio drawls. “Right?”

“I don’t know,” Trish says doubtfully. “Maybe I should just get him a shirt.” 

“He has a shirt,” Abbacchio sighs, his voice crowding closer to the speaker. Trish swears she hears Bucciarati click his tongue. “Several, in fact. Know who’s giving him a shirt? Giovanna. Is that really the kind of thing you want to give him? A Giovanna gift?” 

Trish huffs, finally releasing the paper to massage the bridge of her nose. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep and maybe it’s the fact that this stupid page of words and dots has been shining a searchlight on her for weeks, but her head feels like it’s about to split. 

“You’ve written half your songs about him by now,” Abbacchio says, which is so offensively untrue. “You could do it in your sleep. What’s so different about this?” 

“Yeah, about him, not for him,” Trish snaps. 

“Ah,” Abbacchio replies, with way too much comprehension for Trish’s liking. 

“It just feels like it should be—” She searches for the right word and comes up empty. “More. I don’t know. More than just… this.” She scowls down at the word want. “Just some stupid song. I mean, what kind of present is that?”

She hears Abbacchio sigh, the kind of sigh that preludes a dropping of pretenses, and braces herself. 

“Listen,” he says, low and strangely patient. “We’ve been over this. Narancia doesn’t need anything fancy. He’ll be happy because it’s from you. End of story.” 

Trish draws her knees up, curling forward to wrap one arm around them, pressing her chest to the words she can’t look at. It had taken her all week to get up the nerve to sing it over the phone without accompaniment. She feels raw and windswept all over in the aftermath, with a tightness in her chest that won’t unstitch itself. 

“Abbacchio is right,” Bucciarati says, and when Trish hears a satisfied hmph from Abbacchio, she can clearly envision the nod. “This is a wonderful gift, Trish. You’ve worked very hard, and it shows. Anyone would be moved to receive it.”

Trish doesn’t have anything to say to that. Something wells up behind her eyes, and she bites her lip. 

“I think you are better than you realize,” Bucciarati says after a moment’s thought, “at approximating the feelings of these things. One hand always on the heart, as it were.” 

In the pause that stretches out after, he seems to consider something carefully. Not even Abbacchio interrupts him—Trish wonders if maybe he’s left the room. He tends to do that, when Bucciarati speaks to her with this tone.

“All that is to say,” Bucciarati continues. “As you know, Trish, I’m no songwriter. So I’ll tell you this as a friend: the light comes through where it needs to.”

Trish tries for an exasperated sigh to cover up the noise that trembles, helpless, in her chest.

“You’re no help at all,” she tells him fondly. 

“Ah.” Bucciarati sounds as though he’s taken this feedback very seriously. “I see. My apologies.”

“I’m teasing,” Trish laughs. “I just mean… um—thanks. For listening.”

“Anytime,” Abbacchio says just as Bucciarati starts to say the same. “Don’t give him too hard of a time, yeah? He’s just proud of you. It makes him say some stupid things.”

“I’m perfectly capable,” Bucciarati retorts with a flare of something delightfully close to embarrassment, “of telling her that myself, Abbacchio.”

“We’re both proud of you,” Abbacchio says gruffly over him, but Trish can hear the smile plainly in his voice. “And proud of you both.”

Trish shakes her head, finally letting her legs drop again until her feet dangle in front of the cabinet where she keeps the plates. 

“Ugh,” she says, and lets out a loud, exhausted sigh when she slumps back against the wall. “Can’t believe I’m going to have to bring my stupid guitar all the way there for this. What a pain.”

Bucciarati and Abbacchio are silent for just long enough that it could be suspicious, and in fact is. Bucciarati moves in to recover first.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” he says, with the air of ushering something away. “I can have Giorno send a car.”

Trish narrows her eyes at the phone. “For my guitar?”

“Yes,” Bucciarati says, as if this is perfectly natural. “But we can discuss it more later, closer to your departure. Right, Abbacchio?”

“You can find another accomplice for once, thank you,” Abbaccchio says, matter-of-fact. “I would go to hell and back with you a hundred times, you know this, but not there. I will not go there.”

Bucciarati must cover the receiver with his hand after that, because she can’t hear what he says to Abbacchio. It sounds mad. She kicks her feet idly in the cold kitchen air and bows her head to the pages again, to the start of the third bar, where she’s written sky in pencil. 

She’d composed it for a piano, but it’s not like she can carry that to Naples.

Well? Spice Girl’s consciousness floats past, inquisitive. Is it finished? 

Trish lays the sheets down together over her legs and smooths them out. She breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth. 

Today she has nothing urgent or remarkable to do. The heat is on, the curtains are open, and the bowl on the kitchen table has four persimmons in it, almost ripe.

“Yeah,” she answers. “I think so.” 

Trish hasn’t slept through the night once since the year that she turned sixteen. For better or worse, she’s gotten used to resting in fits and starts, stealing naps in dressing rooms and on tour buses, wandering restlessly through apartments and hotel rooms at 3 AM with the lights on. It’s a noise that does it, usually, or the expectation of one. As with a lot of things, she’d found ways to exist around it.

When she kicks her boots off in the trattoria’s back room, she’s ready to exist around it. When she clambers over the armrest and tucks herself into the slim space between Narancia’s body and the back of the couch, she’s ready to exist around it. 

Maybe there’s no better way to say it: that with Narancia’s fingers in her hair—with the weight of Narancia’s arm across her middle—she exists differently. She falls asleep on that tiny couch so completely that she doesn’t even perceive it until she’s woken up hours later, at the afternoon’s end, without an inch of space left between them.

There’s a faint crick in her neck from where it’s bent at a weird angle against Narancia’s bicep, and her arm is wedged under her side, completely numb. She’s got one leg flung over his hip and the other curled up high, digging into his stomach at the knee. The blanket that he’d pulled out of a closet is way too small for both of them. 

She wonders if he’d been awake when he’d pulled her this much closer, so close that her nose is squished against his chest. Probably not. She wriggles free a little, but not by much—the couch, which is soft and brown and smells like him, is not remotely wide. It’s not remotely comfortable, either. But… 

Trish angles her head up carefully, shifting her grip on the back of his shirt. His body’s like a freaking furnace, radiating heat. He’s still asleep, breathing steadily through his nose, his features softened by some dream. His hair falls haphazardly over his face.

Trish still feels the ache. She reaches up and brushes it back with her fingers until it veils nothing: until even in the dimness, she can see the dark freckle by his temple, the tiny movements of his eyelids, the bowed lashes; the little scratch on his right cheekbone, still healing. When he makes a noise and rolls a little closer, his chin bumps carelessly into her forehead. 

She gazes into the warm dark of his throat and, after a second, shuts her eyes and nudges her nose into the skin there. His words come back to her, unbidden. This one’s yours.

Trish, Spice Girl says, as wakeful as ever, from that crucial corner of her heart. You are smiling. 

Trish thinks of the sheet music in her purse, and the spot on the second page where the ink is smudged. A line had come to her in the middle of the night a week and a half ago, so sudden and alive that it had nearly had a heartbeat. She’d been so desperate not to forget it that she’d written it down in pen without thinking. 

Narancia’s wrist twitches faintly at her ribs, and Trish pulls back to find his eyes half-open, steady and comprehending. She thinks she might hear the hum of an airplane, miles and miles up, cutting a course out to the open sea. 

“Oh,” he says, smiling blearily down at her through the space still left between their faces. “Hey.” 

“Hi,” Trish answers, and combs aside his hair again, unthinking. “Listen. I have something for you.”