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The thing is:
Of course, he loves her.
Everybody in the house knows that he loves Nicole, and it’s not like he would go out of his way to deny such. Producers would encourage the crew to say affectionate things to each other once in a while, as not to make all the episodes be incredibly hard watches. He lets his lips do the talking when he’s drunk. I love you. More often than not, Vinny hears from a friend of a friend that the way he says it—lingers, and that he’s the only one not to vomit all those words. Of course, I’m honest about liking Snooki, man. They just don’t know how much, that’s all. This is the one thing he will keep to himself. Vinny will rehearse the way he says I love you in bathrooms and balconies and places away from the boardwalk.
He will say those words to her at his own resolution one day.
A simple, hey Nicole, I love you.
But to get there is hard. Way too hard whenever she walks into his bedroom, barefoot, and sits on the side and she’s crying about how much she wants Jionni to be kinder to her, and he lets the relationship be antagonised because he’s her Vinny and he has never really been anyone else’s. To love something is to realise what it feels like in the absence of such things, so he runs a hand down her back and tonight, she won’t be lonely.
(They don’t touch, but this is what Jionni will use against him later.)
“And this one here is Vinny,” Snooki says before the person next to her even registers in his face, and it’s not like he needs introductions amongst a drunken crowd, but it doesn’t hurt to hear his name falling out from her mouth, the lilt to her tone whenever she says it. “He’s taken, by the way. Real stickler for one pretty girl living in god-knows-where since he keeps refusing women at the club.”
The strangers all laugh. Vinny wonders what kind of person comes to mind whenever they hear this about him, that he’s celibating for the right one. It’s not morbid, but he knows it does sound stupid. They’re on a reality show promoting sex, violence and drugs. He can haggle the deal down with not using on-screen, but what else does he have to offer if he omits both the other ones?
Then she takes him by the hand and he lets her, because there are a million things Nicole would do and he would let her, just cause. She smiles at him through the blurring of colours on the dance floor. He smiles as well.
The butterflies don’t die when he tells her, before going to bed, I love you, like a friend.
They leave early one time and the world expects him to know what to say when there is a cameraman sitting shotgun, and Vinny feels sloshed with all the beer inside his guts. She takes his hands first anyway. Snooki has been crawling out of her skin when they spot an old housemate.
“Angelina wants you,” she tells him at the back of a cab ride and his knuckles are intertwined with hers, and she’s a little drunk so all the lights flashing by them are too bright. Vinny pulls her in close enough to share the warmth. She rests her chin on the crook of his collarbone, buried like a flower with its root going into his arm.
He thinks about their housemates. Hard not to when everyone is so close, even the drop of a shoe can cause chaos. Jenni wouldn’t say this is cheating. Pauly, too. But it has always been a haphazard situation when it comes to them, and Vinny knows better than to take advice from the two people who would check for cameras before they indulge in conversations and… stuff. This is common knowledge. The longing only revels in proximity. Vinny thinks and here, forty minutes away from seeing their house, he can let her rest a little longer and it won’t drive him insane when Jionni comes over and enters Nicole’s room after dark. Maybe he should humour her. Maybe he should say, wow, really? about Angelina.
But before he can rehearse it on his tongue, Nicole looks up from under his chin and her eyes become the bottom of a bottle, caramelised and glinting in the right light.
“Is she even your type? Have you ever thought about her?”
No, he should say. Because they have just drove past the drugstore that he got her cold medicines before heading out to Italy, and his mom always asks about Nicole, and he sees her name on the shelves near checkout stations enough to send her more than two texts a day, like her ex. No, he leans in, mouth open to speak. He doesn’t think about anyone.
The camera shutters. Her lips are glossed.
He thinks about her boyfriend waiting at home.
“Nah, but I’ll think about it if you want me to.”
Their arrival is greeted just as he suspects, with Jionni on the couch and never the front door, and Nicole doesn’t look at him once when she toes off her high heels to trudge in, barefoot. She gives him Angelina’s new phone number in the morning, her shorts riding upward. Doesn’t add anything to the conversation. Doesn’t listen when he’s supposed to say, off-camera, I love you.
“You’re fucking stupid,” Pauly says, and he’s not inclined to disagree, but Vinny smiles anyway when his roommate returns the tiny scrap of paper with the wrong girl’s number on it. “Don’t call her up. You know what will happen when you do.”
There’s no logic in it though. A billion things can happen when he dials Angelina, and maybe Snooki has gotten it wrong in the excited cheering, and heard Vinny instead of any other names. It wouldn’t be the first time that happens. It may never be the last because she hears anything ending with the e vowel and calls out for him. Maybe Angelina doesn’t even want him in the first place. Maybe she’s not near her phone. But Vinny stares and he knows, knows it so well what may happen when he reaches out and the wrong girl accepts his hands easier than the right one, and he doesn’t ever have to think about rehearsing his I love you because there won’t be love.
He looks at the landline.
He can hear Snooki kissing Jionni in the kitchen.
He says, a little echoing to the other side. “Hey.”