from IT HAPPENED IN FLORENCE

The warmth of his contact as he led her onto the balcony made her oblivious to everything but the ease with which she followed. They looked at the lights of Florence, her hand in his in a mellow possession that spread in waves through her entire body while the night bloomed into an idea of romance only the city before them could nurture.

The music wove around them with the evening river breeze. When he turned to her, basking in his glimmering gaze felt like stepping onto an endless meadow where untouched, tall grass was whipped by the wind. She didn’t feel his arms go around her waist, nor hers lift up around his neck. She only heard the music and felt them moving slowly in a circle, their bodies so close that their breaths mingled. The air they shared carried their secrets, and for a while, they weren’t strangers at odds in their dreams and hearts, but twin flames of a single soul that have at long last found each other.

Jennifer didn’t want the music to end. She didn’t want him to stop holding her. In his arms, her heart was at home, and she wanted to stay there. Like the other night by the pool, Jennifer remembered how delicious and how full a single moment can be and how, ever so simply, she could reach out and hold on to her heart’s longing.

**************************************************

...RETURNING TO FLORENCE

Hours on end, she sat in the sanctuary room in her Boston condo and trembled with the echoes of heartache that rumbled through her body like a springtime brook, threatening to flood the illusionary comfort of wintry time gone by. Florence gave her magic and hope, and as much of herself as she could ever know. The architecture alone would have been enough to transform her because every brick and crevice oozed enchantment of the clearest dreams. However, architecture was only one part of Florence that claimed Jennifer forever. David, her David, was the other.

David, a quiet man with sand colored hair, sat two rows in front of her on the far right side. He seemed to be one of those dreamy, introspective art types in Jennifer’s summer painting class. Jennifer had already completed the first of her two years at the Florence Institute of Art. She was awarded a scholarship for winning an international art contest in high-school. One minute, she was a spindly youth with burning brown eyes that seemed to dance to the rhythm of her inner thrill, the next, she was an artist in Florence, where she could still hear the chisels, brush strokes, and verses of the Renaissance masters.

Time stood still in Florence, recording only the taste of wine, olives, cheese, and fresh baked bread. Then, the green-eyed classmate introduced himself while Jennifer sat sketching on a stone bench at the Belvedere Fortress. They went out in the evening, and the two nights following. By the end of summer, they were in love. It didn’t matter that David was rich and his family spent summers in their lavish Florence villa, just as it made no difference that he had been warned to shun gold diggers. After completing his summer class, David enrolled as a regular student in the fall so he and Jennifer would have another year together.

Jennifer relived the year in her thoughts while considering whether going to Florence for the Donovan project would bring back an overwhelming past. At the end of the school year, David proposed and asked her to stay in Florence through the summer so they could be married. When he didn’t show up after visiting his parents in Venice, she agonized for days. He was going to tell them that weekend. When almost a week had passed with no word from him, she believed he had succumbed to his parents’ influence after all. She finally summoned the courage to go to his house. David’s father met her at the door in mourning clothes. He led her to a parlor where David’s mother sat dabbing her tearful eyes with a tissue. In a suspicious, almost recriminating tone, the woman told Jennifer how David had been killed in a car wreck seven days before. An icy dismissal immediately followed to meet Jennifer’s sobbing swoon. She hadn’t even had a chance to ask about the memorial service; she’d never felt so helpless and alone.

Back in the United States a month later, Jennifer found out she was pregnant. Amilya, her love child, her gift from David, never met her paternal grandparents despite Jennifer’s efforts to reach them. Just as Amilya’s birth salved Jennifer’s heartache twenty-three years before, so Jennifer’s love for her daughter helped her realize an added opportunity in the Donovan presentation. Amilya was on summer break after her first year in a graduate program at MIT, and Jennifer became elated about having Amilya join her in Florence after her work. Perhaps, Amilya could finally get a true sense of her father by following her mother’s footsteps in the great city.

Jennifer still yearned for David; the taste of him, the smell of him, the look in his eyes when he proposed in the Boboli Garden. David would have adored their daughter. More than anything, Jennifer wanted Amilya to be proud of the circumstances surrounding her creation and birth. Had it not been for Amilya and the Donovan assignment, Jennifer would have probably never summoned the courage to return to Florence. Still, she feared the looming heartbreak in her soul.

RETURN TO BOOKS