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He walks out of her room and Jionni wants to know what is going on, and her voice is getting defensive whenever his raises, and she shoots Vinny a look as he peeks in, because she knows a head-on conversation would only make things worse. You can’t tell your boyfriend that the person to comfort you after he ran across the streets of Italy, leaving you sobbing in heaves for him to come back—was the one you previously said I love you to.
You just, can’t.
Her mind races when he slams the door. Paparazzi snapping pics. What would the tabloids say? The ones that Jionni keeps hiding from his family long enough to quiet down topics about her, quote-unquote, purity and what on earth their son is doing with his degree and a woman like this? Wouldn’t they kill the relationship before she even gets rid of her hesitation to talk him through?
“And I love him, like…” Nicole sighs, because it’s so simple and stupid all at once that she would blank out when it comes to describing Vinny, like the universe decides now is the right time to trip over her tongue, not after her fourteenth shot. She gets the word in anyway. “I love him like a brother, you know? Big brother Vinny. Yeah.” And it makes sense, because they can be siblings in some parallel worlds, like that movie Sam made her sit down one time to watch. Anything can happen in a parallel world where choices are made differently, and she can accept that inane bullshit. She can even be a muse to someone else with a shorter haircut than Jionny, someone with more patience. Someone who—
Nicole shakes her head again. Almost slaps at it.
Being near Vinny feels like gravity anyway, it’s hard not to fall.
“I love him like… it’s a muscle memory, you know?” Because she should use the words she’s learned in college when her semester lasted long enough to make an impression, and Nicole finishes with a nod to sell her point across. “I just—” love him, but it would be revolting. Bad. It would be incredibly horrible to go on national television and end her speech about another man who isn’t her boyfriend, won’t ever be her boyfriend, with something so honest and so flushed, I love him.
A sigh.
Two steps forward, three steps back.
“Well, Vinny is like a brother to me.” Beat. “The end. How does that sound?”
Against her best effort at piercing sentences together, her audience of one, outside of the camera crew, looks appalled.
“You can’t fucking tell Jionny that!”
Pauly sloshes the drink in his hands, putting it down on the coffee table and goddammit his expression really sells it. The guy can be damn sharp when he wants to be, and her nose scrunches up at the next words.
“Nicole—and you know I mean this with all my heart—I don’t ever want to fuck my brother.”