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#and the sparkling wine??? i know this country has an alcohol problem but maybe i dont have to clink glasses with wine i wont drink anyway

evarcana · 3 years

Text

Taking it out on you

Ev attends the court meeting only to learn that sometimes the second impressions are just as bad as the first ones.

characters: Ev Panopolis, consul Valerius and brief appearance of Volta

words: ~3k

warnings: alcohol (as expected)

notes: On some point I gave up on the idea of Ev being the apprentice, as she just does not have this "MC energy". So this is an introduction to her story, because there is no better way to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of this blog than to remember that a very long time ago I used to write fanfiction.

It has been almost a month already. Almost a month since she came to Vesuvia, almost a month since she was told that her services were not required here. The thought makes Ev frown, but she keeps a quick pace, the sound of her impatient steps on the marble floor echoing through the palace corridor.

It is just before eleven o’clock, and the last of crisp morning sun pours over the rich mauve of lustrous silk drapes and the gold leaf of intricately carved murals, drawing out the warm scent of orange blossom and beeswax from the polished panels of precious wood. Vesuvian palace is exactly what she was promised - a great wonder, and yet Ev doubts it could give any lesser impression while the backdrop to its striking opulence is the city torn apart by disease and grief.

There are no servants or visitors in sight, and Ev’s only company in this seemingly endless corridor are paintings on the walls, depicting what she can only guess are some of the proud moments of Vesuvian history - people and places so foreign to her.

She does simple math in her head: two months and two days ago she was marching down the corridor of a very different palace, eager to be on time for the meeting with Crown Princess Nafizah despite the quite literal last minute notice, and not knowing yet that she was about to hear details of this so-called diplomatic mission.

Back then it sounded straightforward enough. Prakra couldn’t ignore the news of Count Lucio's tragic death, not least because that meant Princess Nadia, the youngest daughter of the Prakran royal family, was left widowed and with the daunting task of handling the red plague epidemic in Vesuvia all on her own. Any ruler could do with an extra pair of hands and any country could benefit from the alliance with Prakra, especially in times of crisis like this. And it would have stayed straightforward if only the discovery of Countess Nadia’s mysterious illness and the unexpected, unreasonable, outrageous hostility of Vesuvian court did not bring this crisis to the whole new, now personal, level.

In theory, Ev did not have to deal with any of that. She could use the excuse that it was only appropriate to deliver such unsettling news about Nadia in person, go back and forget everything that happened in this palace like one of those unpleasantly bizarre dreams you get after a night of drinking. But Vesuvia was still the city Prakra cared about, Nadia’s city, and as far as Ev knew none of the people who came to be in charge of it were appointed by her. Prakran diplomatic presence was perhaps the only way to look after Nadia’s interests until she woke up. Even if Ev had no actual power over the court, returning to Prakra without accomplishing at least something felt like a failure, and failure has never been an option for Ev. With that in mind, she pressed the seal with enough force to imprint Prakran royal crest on the desk and not just on the drop of red wax marking the envelope, and stayed.

Now, after a month of living in the city, she has learned to see that there is more to her new role than just misfortunes. Her relocation allowance is generous, her new place is nicer than what she had in Prakra and she is getting rather used to the convenience of the wine shop next door. Even if parts of it are foreign and unwelcoming, Ev feels at ease in Vesuvia. The tension in her body relaxes, and she thinks maybe this palace can eventually get used to her too, but the thought faints away as soon as she sees the salon door. Ev presses a pile of papers closer to her chest and tells herself that she can think about everything else another time - the court meeting is about to start.

She pushes the door open but immediately freezes on the spot stricken by the gagging wave of nausea - nails dirty with soil and blood, sickly sweet buttercream pastries and rustle of feathers covered in mud. It is no more than a faint impression but even through the fogged mind Ev recognises the feeling - it is vestige, the afterimage of magic. She has felt it before, many times and in many different forms but never has it made her feel physically sick. What is even more unusual is that such a revolting sensation is coming from the palace quarters. One would expect tingles of bubbles from the charmed fountains of never ending sparkling wine or at least the impression of whispers, premium tea, treacle and bitter ambition from the walls which have been magically given ears, and not... whatever this is. Ev draws a deep breath, pushing down into her diaphragm and looks around the room. The salon is not set up for the court meeting, instead there is a tray of food and stacks of empty plates towering on almost every flat surface. Her eyes stop on greasy remains looking terribly out of place on the delicate porcelain plate and she unconsciously covers her mouth. Maybe she is mistaken after all - it is the strange smell of food and not some kind of creepy magic, and, more importantly, maybe this is not the salon she was looking for.

Before Ev gets a chance to mentally blame the chamberlain for giving her the wrong directions, a tiny figure appears from behind the chair. The white cornette is instantly recognisable and Ev is about to ask procurator Volta whether she is here for the court meeting too when she sees that behind the commotion of dark robes Volta is frantically trying to push the whole roast rack of lamb down her mouth. Dear gods. Somewhat unsurprisingly, one of the bones appears to be stuck. Clearly having not expected to have an audience, the procurator widens her eyes at Ev in a mixture of terror and shame. Unable to speak, after a few incoherent squeaks, she throws her tiny hands in the air helplessly, spattering herself with gravy and gestures to the open French doors leading to the balcony. Without giving it too much thought, Ev gives Volta a quick nod and takes an opportunity to escape the awkwardness of the scene.

Wrapped in the soft shade of the balcony, consul Valerius is casually leaning back in the chair, with the usual glass of wine in his hand. Even before she reaches the doors, Ev sets her eyes on his face. The consul is looking away, his face carved and unmovable, the tight knot of dark eyebrows making him look ireful and disgruntled, like one of those statues of stern gods she saw growing up in Zadith. Her next step lands much quieter and then, there steps in, Ev stops and stands very still wondering what thoughts could possibly bring this storm to Valerius’s face. Sun would suit him much more, she thinks, her eyes curiously trailing down the golden glints of his hair.

A loud snort catches Ev off guard and she realises that Valerius is now facing her, looking considerably more displeased than before, no doubt because of her. That’s more like it. How could she forget that this man is the very cause of her problems.

“Could I please have some of your time, consul?” she asks, heading straight towards him. Greetings seem excessive, they didn’t necessarily part on friendly terms last time.

“I didn't expect to see you here again.”

Ev allows herself a smirk. “I know.” I am not here to do what you expect from me. She stops inches away from his chair looking down at him, apparently enjoying the close proximity which, considering their formal relationship and the consul’s well known bad temper, could be regarded as both highly inappropriate and potentially reckless. But Valerius only turns away, more interested in his drink than in her.

“I have been studying the treasury records,” she continues, searching his face for any kind of reaction. His lips curl up in a sneer as he takes a sip of wine, but his eyes are still firmly fixed on the horizon. Ev follows his gaze expecting to see some radical change to the surrounding landscape, but there is only faint outline of the city roofs behind the lush green of the palace's vast grounds, - no columns of smoke, no ominous looking storm clouds gathering in the distance, nothing that could possibly be more interesting than her. Whatever. “Your tax system - ,” she hands Valerius neatly arranged papers, which he completely ignores,“- it is not working.”

“Vesuvian tax system remained largely unchanged for the last two generations, this is how these matters are handled traditionally,” says Valerius, once again denying Ev courtesy of eye contact.

Ev’s mouth twists at the sound of the last words. Too worried the conservative mindset might be contagious, she quickly withdraws her hand and takes a step back.

“I trust you understand that sometimes one should focus on what works, and not what is traditional,” she says, doing her best to disguise the growing irritation. “You don’t attract nearly as much foreign trade as you used to.”

What comes next is a very profound, uncomfortable silence. Ev sighs.

“Consul, you had plague in the city, people died,” her voice is louder now, “lots of people died”, and the irritation is obvious. “And Vesuvia cannot exist without its people. Somebody needs to bring food from the farmlands, make clothes, teach children, attend to the sick. Yes, in the past you could always import whatever you did not have but now people are scared to come because of the plague. You -”, she pauses in anticipation noticing Valerius shifting in his seat, but he only reaches for the bottle to top up his glass, “- you need to do something to make it attractive for them again. Lower the customs, lift the taxes for people whose skills you need, sell empty real estate cheap. There is plenty all around the city!”

Deep down Ev knows that none of these is going to work long term, but she doesn't care - she wants to do something and she wants to do it now.

Yet, nothing changes. She is still standing there, and he is still looking away. Ev would prefer him to disagree, start arguing with her - anything really, as long as it breaks this silence.

“Fine! If you don’t feel like changing this traditional system of yours, even temporarily, at least fix your mistakes.” Ev starts chaotically flipping through the papers searching for the one she needs, which would be a much easier task, if she was less flurried and if Valerius offered her a seat. She wonders whether he is now watching her, sneering at her struggle. “Your approved accounts, here,” this time she brusquely puts the paper in front of Valerius’s face blocking his view, “your numbers do not even add up! ”

For a split second she sees something on his face - a twitch, a flick of rage, and thinks that she has gone too far. But his question comes out in a calm, almost disinterested tone: “What makes you think that somebody like you is even qualified to check the city’s budget approved by the esteemed procurator Volta?”

A moment passes before Ev is able to break from staring at Valerius in disbelief. She glances to the salon where, judging by the sound, Volta has freed her mouth only to move to the next dish. Seriously? Perhaps she should be impressed that he managed to say it with the straight face.

And then there is a chilling sensation at the pit of Ev’s stomach. She asks herself what is going on here? What is this city under the reign of a person who questions everything and everyone except the obvious mistake in the accounts? And what is she - ? Angry, she reminds herself, is what she is, and throws a look at Valerius, who is taking another sip from his glass as in triumph. You don’t need to be qualified, you just need to have common sense. And you, Valerius, either don’t have it or you were not even bothered to look at what your court approves.

She pictures him lazily drinking wine, legs on the desk, his shirt unbuttoned, while completely ignoring his state duties. The image is irritating and yet not entirely unpleasant.

“We both know that I come from a family of alchemists and merchants. Trust me, I know how to count,” she says with a smile. It sounded right in her head, a ridiculous answer to the ridiculous question.

“I thought that during our last meeting you said that you had nothing to do with your witchcraft family.” A perfectly raised eyebrow, and that infuriating smirk.

Ev opens her mouth in protest but gives up quickly. Those were her exact words after all, save for the witchcraft part.

She begins to pace around the balcony avoiding looking at Valerius as much as possible. The consul clearly has a way of getting on her nerves, and she needs all her concentration if she wants to explain what exactly will happen to this goddamn city if they carry on with this approved budget.

“Think about the consequences for the people if this mistake is not corrected!” she shouts, her voice much louder than she would like it to be, and quickly turns to Valerius expecting a blowback. But the pale eyes are looking down, studying something on the floor, or on the edge of the fabric of her long sleeve, she really can’t tell. Oh gods, he is not even paying attention.

***

Valerius has firmly decided that he is not going to pay any attention.

The time of plague was exhausting: the palace suddenly full of people of all kinds and intentions promising to find a cure, pleas for help on the streets which he could not escape even behind the doors of the most expensive carriages, the count who was growing more desperate everyday and the white smoke of the Lazaret carried by the sea breeze towards the city, the memory of which still haunts him. And now there is the Satrinavas’ new pet here having an audacity to talk about his city’s problems - the problems which, out of all people, he should know the most about, he is the consul after all, and a Vesuvian.

Vesuvia he inherited is haggard and sad, and on top of that an enormous responsibility. The last thing he needs is a stranger questioning his authority, as if the incompetent court and the city demanding their beloved countess back have not been tiresome enough. Valerius lets out a short, barely audible sigh. He just wants this farce to be over so he can go back to thinking.

But the witch is not planning to stop, if anything she seems to be enjoying it. Look at her. Absorbed by herself and her ludicrous ideas, she is loud and talks too much with her hands. Her dress keeps slipping down the shoulder draping around the soft curve of a half barred breast every time she does one of these unnecessary, overconfident gestures. Valerius has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate or she is simply unaware of the indecency which keeps drawing his eyes.

He tries to distract himself by taking a drink of wine only to discover that his glass, just like the air around him, is full of this loud perfume of hers. Harsh cinnamon, incense and patchouli, very much alike their owner, have no concept of the personal space ruining the perfect balance of his red. The wine is not helping. He catches himself looking at the shoulder again. In fact, absolutely useless. He sets his unfinished glass aside on the small table. Valerius has had enough.

***

“Enough!” Valerius shouts. His voice is suddenly deep and rather forceful and Ev hates that it has the desired effect on her. She stops and looks at him. “You were not invited to the court meeting.” The consul’s face looks awfully angry now.

Ev narrows her eyes. “And what exactly are you doing at your court meeting?”

“That should not be a concern of the Prakran subject”, Valerius says, his words dripping with poison, “or whoever you are.”

“I am a diplomatic emissary -,” she does not get a chance to finish.

“Leave!”

Ev wants to scream and protest, but even she knows better than to yell at somebody who outranked her. She draws a breath. One, two, three. All right.

“I only came to give you the papers”, she says coldly, her eyes still locked on his, and leans forward to place the documents on the table. “But I am taking this away, one should work without the distraction of wine.”

With these words Ev snatches the glass from the table, turns away and heads toward the exit as fast as she can without breaking into running. She does not want to look like she is scared that Valerius will grab her by the arm. If anything she is slightly disappointed that he doesn’t.

“My regards to the court,” she raises her hand and waves the glass in the air without looking back. Behind her there is a sound of paper being torn apart.

***

Ev only slows down when she reaches the main staircase.

Suddenly feeling very tired, she leans against the handrail. Again, what is she doing here? Why did she need to turn up in person when she could send a letter? Ev closes her eyes and rubs her fingers together as if feeling for answers in the whorls of her own skin, and remembers about the glass in her hand. Another bad decision. It would have been wiser to take the bottle.

She raises the glass to her lips and breathes in the wine. It’s pleasant. Perhaps she would prefer its company to the boring palace affairs too. Ev twists the glass in her hand, eying the smooth rim before drawing one long sip. It leaves a blush mark of her lips firmly planted on the surface which she studies for a few seconds. “You better be as angry as I am now”, she says to the dark liquid at the bottom of the glass.

#no i didnt read the whole thing myself #the arcana #consul valerius #the arcana fic #the arcana fanfic #evpanopolis #valerius x mc #ev x valerius

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1dffchallenges · 4 years

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Boundless As the Sea

Written By: @wokeuptired

Characters: Niall/Bea

Summary: There's nothing Beatrix Madison finds as silly as Romeo and Juliet, but Niall Horan's a sucker for a love story—even though his own has gone off the rails. When he finds a letter from Bea's grandmother dated half a century ago in the wall below Juliet's balcony, he has to write back. He doesn't expect anything to come of it, and he certainly doesn't expect to find himself going head to head with Bea.

Author's note: The title is from Act 2, scene 2, when Juliet, on her balcony, says to Romeo, "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite."

Warnings: enough f words to earn an R rating

One - Bea

For as long as she could remember, Beatrix Madison’s grandmother had never taken lunch without a glass of wine. White, red, sparkling, it didn’t matter, so long as it was alcoholic and complimented the dish. So when Bea arrives for lunch today and sits down at a table devoid of wine glasses, she knows instantly that something is up.

There’s water waiting for her, and a cup of tea that Gran always orders for Bea even though Bea never drinks it. That’s their weekly ritual: lunch every Thursday at Gran’s favorite restaurant, the same meals every time, same table, same waitstaff, and same cup of tea that Bea will never, ever, drink.

The only thing out of place today is the missing wineglass that always sits beside Gran’s plate. Nothing seems amiss about Gran herself: her gray hair is piled primly on top of her head, her lips are touched with a pale mauve, and her cardigan is neatly buttoned all the way up. She’s Gran as always. Except for the wine.

“Is everything all right?” Bea asks, sliding her phone underneath her thigh so that she can give her grandmother her full attention. That’s another one of Gran’s things: she hates cell phones at the table as much as she loves wine. She hates them so much that she didn’t even have one, instead relying on a landline that she often fails to answer.

“Of course, dear,” her grandmother answers. Though she’s coming up on her 75th birthday, Gran certainly doesn’t look it. Nothing has slowed her down, not even taking on the responsibility of raising Bea from the time she was 9, after her parents’ death in a car accident. Gran was in her mid-fifties at the time, looking forward to retiring and traveling and a life free of responsibility, and then life saddled her with Bea.

Now, coming up on 80, she seems to be thriving, which is something that Bea does her best not to be too upset about. It wasn’t her fault her parents died, leaving her grandmother to raise her, but Bea feels guilty about it nonetheless, even now that she’s 25 and hasn’t been a burden to Gran for several years.

“Eat your salad,” Gran says just as a waiter appears and sets it down in front of her.

Bea picks up her fork and stabs at a tomato, misses, and spends another ten seconds chasing it around her plate before she catches it. When she puts it in her mouth and looks up, her grandmother is watching her.

“Are you sure everything’s alright, Gran?” Bea asks again. Her heart clenches, thinking of the worst. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“Of course not,” her grandmother says, smiling. Bea can’t remember the last time she saw her grandmother smile this much. Something is definitely going on. Maybe Gran has mastered a new banana bread recipe or purchased a new piece of art for the hallway and she’s eager to show it off. Yes, that’s probably it. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong. Tell me about your date on Friday. Did it go as expected?”

Bea grimaces. It was much, much worse than expected. “Not at all. He was twenty minutes late and then spent another twenty minutes talking about his ex. And he was wearing far too much cologne.”

Gran laughs. “You’re far too picky, Bea Bug. Maybe that’s your problem.”

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Bea says. “He really was awful, Gran. You’re lucky you’ll never have to meet him.”

“Mmm.” Gran’s eyes twitch to the side, where Bea notices an envelope sitting on the table. She also notices that her grandmother has barely touched her own salad, dressing on the side, just how she always orders it. “Speaking of love…”

“Speaking of love?”

Gran touches the envelope and slides it across the table towards Bea. “Fancy a trip to Italy?”

“Italy?” Bea turns the envelope over. It’s addressed to Gran at her estate just outside London, which, if you’re old and snooty, is what’s known as “the family seat.” It’s the house that Bea will begrudgingly inherit someday (hopefully not someday soon), along with all the accrued debt that will come with it. She slips her finger under the flap, which has already been unsealed, and finds a folded letter and another, smaller envelope inside.

“Juliet” is written on the outside of the envelope. Bea opens it and takes out the letter it contains.

Verona, 1965

Juliet, I don’t know what to do. I’m meant to leave tomorrow to return to London, where Robert is waiting for me. We’ve been betrothed since we were teenagers, and he is my destiny, the one I’ve always known about.

But now there is Alessandro, whose dark hair shines under the moonlight when I sneak out after dark to meet him. I feel like a teenager again, not like a university student months away from graduation and marriage. Alessandro makes me feel invincible. He makes me feel like I am worth the world.

Oh, Juliet, what would you do? I know what you’d do. You’d pack up your suitcase and run away with Alessandro tonight. You’d leave behind your destined life in England and choose a new destiny for yourself.

But what if, Juliet, what if I’m not brave enough?

Yours,

Carolyn

Bea reads the letter through a second time, her mind spinning. Finally, she raises her eyes from the wrinkled piece of paper and meets her Gran’s gaze. “Gran, did you write this?”

Her Gran smiles, nods. “Years ago, yes. Now you must read the other letter.”

Oh, God. What could it possibly be? Is it from Alessandro, writing to Gran after all these years, asking her to return to Verona and marry him? Did he find out that Gramps passed away ages ago and is regretting all the years he spent away from Gran?

And then another thought pops up, this one worse than all the rest. Gramps died just before Bea’s parents, which meant Gran was a free agent… until she had to take over caring for Bea.

Oh, God, Bea thinks.

Did I keep Gran away from her true love for 25 years?

Bea shakes off the question, for the moment, at least, and unfolds the remaining letter, keenly aware that it is about to turn her life upside down.

Two - Niall

It’s a strange thing, how you can go from being engaged one moment to being completely unengaged the next. Engaged, and then you’re not. Your whole life planned out, and then—nothing. Blissful, empty, beautiful nothing.

Rhiannon had gone from Niall’s favorite person on earth to his least favorite overnight. Or maybe it wasn’t overnight: he didn’t wake up, feel the sun breaking through the blinds, and realize that he needed to break off his engagement. But it only took a second for Rhiannon to react to the suggestion that maybe getting married wasn’t the best idea, and Niall knew he’d made the right choice.

“Oh, thank God,” she’d said. They were having dinner at their favorite restaurant in Seven Dials, which was to say, Rhiannon’s favorite restaurant and a place that Niall had neither particularly negative or positive feelings about. She’d started telling people it was their favorite restaurant, and then it became too late to correct her, and now they’d been going there at least once a month since the early days of their relationship.

Niall didn’t intend to initiate the breakup there, at their so-called favorite restaurant, but he was watching Rhiannon peruse the menu just as he had the month before, and he knew she was only moments away from ordering for him, and in his mind he imagined doing this for the rest of his life, and he knew he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

And Rhiannon had reacted better than expected. She’d always been a bit of a dramatic person, so he’d been prepared for her to throw down her fork and storm out, or at least raise her voice a bit. But instead she thanked him.

“I’ve been meaning to say something for ages!” she’d said. “But you know how my mum is. Which is why we can’t tell anyone.”

“I—what?” Niall had been reasonably confused. The whole point of ending their engagement was so they didn’t have to still be engaged. He did not want to pretend.

“Our Italy trip. My mum’s already paid for it, and if we tell her we broke up, she’ll cancel the whole thing, and you know how much I’ve been looking forward to it.”

Right. Niall knew. She talked about it constantly, was constantly texting him pictures of places she wanted to see and restaurants she wanted to try. He was not looking forward to three weeks of following her around a country where he didn’t speak the language, eating too many carbs.

But as he’d looked in her eyes that night, the night that should’ve been their last together, he figured he could do her this one last favor. He could stick it out for another month, spend three weeks with her in Italy and then be done with it.

So that’s how he’d ended up here, sitting on a bench in a square in Verona, staring up at a balcony purported to be the one from Shakespeare’s famous Romeo and Juliet, even though Shakespeare never even traveled to Italy. Rhiannon ditched him this morning, boarding a bus for a wine tour in the countryside that he had absolutely no interest in. Instead, he caught a walking tour and ended up here.

This bench is apparently his new home, as he’s been here for three hours and, try as he might, he just can’t get himself to move. He’s fascinated by what he is seeing: girl after girl, and even the occasional guy, shoving letters into the loose bricks under the balcony, tears running down their faces. The tour guide had said that people came here from all over the world to leave letters to Juliet, begging her to fix their love woes.

A while ago, someone had left a notepad on Niall’s bench after finishing their own letter, and someone else had discarded a pen on the ground. Niall had spent half an hour staring at it, feeling as if it was beckoning him. No one needs love advice more than him right now. He’s probably the only one in this country on vacation with their ex-fiancée and zero desire to win her back.

Now, finally, he stills the pen after spending twenty minutes spinning it between his fingers, and he begins to write.

Dear Juliet,

No offense, but I think your story is a load of bull. Love isn’t real, and it certainly wasn’t real for you and Romeo. You were only 14 years old, and neither of you made it out alive. That certainly isn’t the kind of love I want.

So what do I want? I’m not sure, but I know it isn’t Rhiannon. I thought I loved her once, but I know better now. I know that I just wanted to be in love. I just wanted someone to spend evenings on the couch with, to go to the cinema with, to introduce to my mates. Rhiannon was all of those things, but she was also annoying and difficult and after a while, not very much fun to be around. She made me forget what I once liked about myself.

Is that what love is, then? Someone who makes the things you like about yourself shine like neon? Someone who brings out the best in you, like they say in all the films?

Does such a thing exist? I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.

-- Niall Horan

London, England

When he finishes, he folds it up before he can think better of it and approaches the wall, looking for a good spot to stick it. It’s nearing sunset, and the wall is bursting with letters shoved here and there, crammed into every visible crack. If he can’t find room for his, how will anyone who came tomorrow find a place for theirs?

He turns, looking at the other visitors to the wall. A few feet away, a teenager presses a kiss to her envelope before jamming it underneath a loose brick. Further down, a woman takes a letter from the wall and drops it in a basket. Wait—she’s taking a letter from the wall? Niall inches closer.

Yep, that’s definitely what she’s doing. She stretches onto her tiptoes to grab a letter just above her head, and when she can’t quite reach it, Niall steps forward to pluck it from the brick for her.

“Grazie,” she says, smiling at him and holding out her hand for the letter. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Niall says. He holds the letter hostage for a second, though. “Are you stealing the letters?”

The woman laughs. “Stealing? No, of course not. We write back.”

“You write back?” Niall turns his own letter over in his hand and considers throwing it away. He didn’t realize someone would read it.

“Yes.” The woman slips her basket over her arm and holds out her hand. “I’m Sonia.”

“Niall.” She reminds him a bit of his mum, with soft smile lines around her mouth and light eyes. That must be why he returns her handshake.

“Nice to meet you, Niall,” Sonia says. “Would you like to help?”

Would I like to help? Niall repeats the question in his mind. On the one hand, he’s absolutely shit when it comes to love—the letter he’s hiding behind his back right now is proof enough of that—but on the other hand, he doesn’t have anything else to do.

“Sure,” he says. “I’d love to help.”

Three - Bea

Verona is full to the brim with tourists, something Bea should’ve been expecting. She’d deluded herself into thinking that since it wasn’t Florence or Rome or Venice, it’d be quieter, she’d be able to wander the streets and appreciate the cobblestones and worn door knockers without bumping into American tourists, but she was wrong.

American tourists are everywhere, and Japanese tourists and French tourists and Indian tourists, huge groups of them wearing matching lanyards and giggling as they clog the narrow roads, and Bea regrets this entire trip.

She’s regretted the decision to come since the word “yes” came out of her mouth, but once she saw Gran's smile, there was no going back. This was something Gran had been waiting years for.

Not that they’ve talked about that. Bea’s just turned it over and over in her mind, convincing herself that she’s held her Gran back from living a full life with the hot Italian man she loved when she was twenty years old. She can’t begrudge Gran her chance at happiness now.

“Mi scusi,” Bea mutters, pushing her way through a crowd of American teenagers. She’s just slipped out of lunch with Gran, telling her she was running into a store they’d passed to get a gift for her boss, and her time is limited. Now she’s going to have to do what she intends and duck into a store for a gift in the time it would take to do only the latter.

The alleyway ahead is crowded, which is a good indication that Bea is approaching her target: the house where the women who respond to Juliet’s letters meet. After reading the letter in the envelope and agreeing to Gran’s insane Italy plan, Bea had done a quick Google search, just to understand what she was dealing with.

From what she found online, the letter writers seem harmless, for the most part—just middle-aged and older women who like indulging the whims of lovesick teenagers. Teenagers being the key word. Gran isn’t a teenager, though—she’s a grown woman with disposable income and the ability to pick up her life and bloody move to Italy if she so chooses—and Bea needs to let these letter writers know just how much damage they’ve done.

Particularly N. Nancy? Natalia? Nicola? Bea will waste no time finding out when she arrives. N is the one who answered Gran’s letter, encouraging her to abandon her life and seek out her lost love, potentially setting herself up for heartbreak. Heartbreak again, because her heart was already broken once, 55 years ago, when she returned to England to marry Bea’s grandfather instead of running away with Alessandro.

What if’s are dangerous things, N had written, suggesting that it was better to avoid them at all, if one could help it. It was better to go after the things you wanted, even if those things might end up disappointing you.

This is not, suffice it to say, Bea’s life philosophy.

Bea passes the courtyard where all the tourists are gathering beneath Juliet’s balcony and makes a left. There is so much potential chaos ahead, so Bea rolls her shoulders back and focuses on the things she can control. First on the list, giving this N a piece of her mind.

At the end of the alleyway, Bea stops in front of the door that has a knocker shaped like an envelope. She’d read a description of it online, but there weren’t any photos: the letter writers like the anonymity, she gathered, of having a headquarters with no address. Bea smiles, proud of herself for locating it, and knocks.

A second later, the door opens, revealing a woman with dark hair and pasta sauce on her apron. “Bonjourno?”

“Hello,” Bea says, playing the odds that this woman speaks English. She grabs the letter out of the back pocket of her shorts and holds it up. “I’m looking for the writer of this letter.”

“Hmm.” The woman frowns and holds her hand out for the letter.

Bea hesitates. What if the woman doesn’t give it back? What if she destroys it because Bea’s breaking some unspoken rule by coming here? Maybe Bea shouldn’t hand it over.

“It’s alright,” the woman says, seeming to sense Bea’s reluctance. “I’ll just look at the signature, and then you can have it back.”

Bea nods, handing it over.

“Ah,” the woman says a second later, returning the letter to Bea. “He’s here today, actually. You’re in luck. Please, come in.”

He? But Bea doesn’t have time to think it through as she follows the woman into the house. They pass through a narrow corridor and emerge into a dining room, where ten people sit around a table covered in letters. Piles of letters, baskets full of letters, letters everywhere. It reminds Bea of that scene in “Harry Potter” when Harry’s letters from Hogwarts burst through the fireplace. It’s complete chaos.

“Niall, she’s here for you,” the woman says. A man with dark hair seated at the far end of the table looks up.

“For me?” he says, standing up and walking towards her. He has some kind of ridiculous, cartoon character accent.

“You?” Bea stares at him. This is impossible. This entire thing is impossible. It’s a dream, this all has to be a dream, that’s the only reasonable explanation. She clutches the letter in front of her like she’s warding off a demon. “You wrote this letter?”

Niall nods. He’s taller than her and wearing khaki pants, which, she decides, is the strangest thing about him, the whole writing-letters-with-old-Italian-ladies thing notwithstanding. An Irish, khaki pants-wearing, letter-writing, heart-breaking demon.

“I did,” he says. “But I take it you’re not the recipient?”

“Of course not,” Bea says roughly. “I’m her granddaughter whose life has just been entirely upended because of this letter, because my Gran has dragged me all the way to bloody Italy to try to find this bloke she loved 55 years ago, who might not even still be alive, and it’s your fault!”

Said bloke, instead of taking responsibility for his actions, smiles at her. He fucking smiles at her.

“Carolyn is here?” he says. “That’s excellent. Can I meet her?”

That is so not what Bea was expecting to hear, so it takes her a moment and a bit of sputtering to muster a sensible response. “No, of course not. Absolutely not. That is not happening.”

“Okay,” Niall says, nodding slowly, his smile lessening slightly. “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, then. It was nice to meet you.”

“It wasn’t nice to meet you!” Bea snaps before turning and rushing from the building before she can say anything else.

Jesus H. Christ, she thinks as she reenters the alleyway and slides around another group of tourists. Could she have been any more embarrassing? She’d had a whole speech planned out—she was going to tell the letter writer, who, yes, she’d assumed would be a woman, how irresponsible it was to respond to a letter from 55 years ago, knowing it was possible and even likely that she’d be upsetting the balance of someone’s life. She was going to lay it out simply and with such biting and intelligent language that the letter writer would be begging at her feet for forgiveness by the end of it.

Instead, she’d responded with a comeback worthy of a ten year old on a playground and run away in shame.

Best not dwell on it. Next mission: buy the first tacky gift she sees and get back to lunch.

Seven minutes later, snow globe bagged in her hand, Bea slides back into the chair across from her grandmother.

“Sorry about that,” she says, over-exaggerating her breathing to make it seem like she’d hurried back. “The line was crazy! This was the perfect gift, though, so I couldn’t let it get away.”

“Of course, dear,” Gran says. “I ordered dessert while you were gone. I got you tiramisu.”

“Thanks, Gran.” Bea smiles. Good old Gran, always taking care of her. Even now that she’s a full-grown adult, capable of ordering her own food and embarrassing herself in front of strangers all by herself, her Gran is still helping her along. “After lunch, do you want to—”

“Carolyn?”

Bea whips her head around and, oh, crud, he’s followed her. He strides up to their table like he’s been invited and extends a hand to Gran.

“I’m Niall,” he says. “I wrote the letter.”

“Oh!” Gran grabs his hand and uses it to pull herself to her feet, though Bea isn’t sure that’s what he intended. “It’s so nice to meet you! Thank you so much for your letter! Please join us.”

“Are you sure?” Niall says, putting a hand on the back of the empty chair. He looks at Bea, an eyebrow raised. “Bea invited me, but I really don’t want to intrude.”

Bea raises an eyebrow right back. The nerve of him, this Irish bloke with bright blue eyes and the audacity to upend her grandmother’s life and butt in on their lunch. How rude. How inconvenient. How inconvenient and rude.

“You’re not intruding. Please, sit!”

“Thank you!” He sits down right next to Bea as Gran flags over the waitress and orders three cups of hot tea. Niall will probably drink his, the bastard.

Four - Niall

An hour later, Niall has the full story and plans for at least the next two days. Caro, as she likes to be called, invites him to join her and her granddaughter on their Alessandro hunt, and who is Niall to refuse? Especially when it seems to be driving Caro’s granddaughter—Bea is her name—so crazy.

It’s been a long time since Niall’s had the pleasure of annoying a beautiful woman, and he’s not about to pass up an opportunity to continue doing so.

“You’re sure you don’t have other plans?” Bea asks for the third time, her voice so high-pitched that Niall wonders if she’s stopped breathing.

“No, definitely not,” Niall says, taking a sip of the tea that Caro ordered for him. Very polite, she is. “My, um, fiancée is off on a wine tour for the next few days, so I’m free.”

“You’re in Italy with your fiancée and you want to spend your vacation going on a snipe hunt with us across the whole countryside?”

Caro laughs. “You’re so dramatic, Bea Bug. It’s hardly the whole countryside, just one region. And a snipe hunt, what nonsense!”

Niall grins. He likes Caro; she has a pleasant voice and speaks warmly, as if it’s a pleasure to be listened to. “I’d love to join, if you’ll both have me.”

“I don’t think—”

Caro cuts Bea off. “Of course we will. It will be our pleasure.”

“It will be my pleasure,” Niall says. Bea scoffs.

Back at his hotel room that evening, Niall waits for Rhiannon to return from today’s food tour with a ball of anxiety swirling around his stomach. This is something he probably should’ve discussed with her before he agreed to it, right? Or maybe not. Now that they’re no longer engaged, they don’t have to clear things with each other anymore. Niall can do what he wants, when he wants. He can make decisions for himself without considering how they’ll impact anyone else.

So it’s a force of habit, then, that has him sitting in the armchair next to their bed—the bed they’re sharing, though it feels more like sleeping next to a friend than an ex-lover—and picking at his cuticles. He keeps glancing at the door, waiting for the moment Rhiannon is going to burst through. She’ll have acquired at least two bottles of wine on her bus tour, a slight sunburn on the tip of her nose, and, he’d bet 10 quid, plans for dinner with a new American friend.

Twenty minutes later, there she is, red-faced and smiling, exactly as he expected.

“Oh, Niall, you weren’t waiting for me, would you?” she says, setting her bags down on the bed. “I’ve got plans with my new American mate for dinner. We’re absolutely dying to try this place near the Piazza delle Erbe. I hope that’s alright? You can come with us, if you’d like.”

“That’s okay,” Niall says. “Actually, Rhi, there was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Sure.” Rhiannon flips open her suitcase and begins digging through it, throwing a pair of shoes on the floor, and then another. She’s looking for a particular dress, he expects, one that will show her new American friend just how London cool she is. “What’s up?”

Niall contemplates how to explain. Best to keep things as simple as possible, he reckons. “I met some people today and they invited me to travel with them for a couple of days.”

“Hmm?” Rhiannon finds the dress she was searching for and smiles at it triumphantly before picking up her makeup bag. “A few days? That sounds nice. Travel where?”

“Around Verona, to some of the vineyards and smaller towns.” That sounds truthful enough, doesn’t it? There’s no need to mention Caro or the letter or Juliet’s balcony, and there especially isn’t any need to mention Bea, the granddaughter whose sass and long legs make Niall’s blood boil.

“Sounds like fun,” Rhiannon says. She looks up from her makeup bag, a tube of mascara in her hand, and smiles at him. Crazy how that smile used to make him smile in return, and now it does nothing to him. “Teresa, that’s my new American mate, wants to take the train out to Venice for a day or two. Should we touch base in a few days?”

“Oh,” Niall says, feeling strangely hurt by this information. He’d expected Rhiannon to be upset, or at least slightly inconvenienced by the plans he’d made that did not involve her, and instead, here she is, with Niall-less plans of her own. Would she have even told him about her plans if he hadn’t brought up his first? He doubts it.

As soon as they’d landed in Italy, Rhiannon had taken off her engagement ring, sealing it into the inner pocket of her makeup bag.

“I’ll give it back to you when we have our staged breakup, when we get back home,” she’d told him.

Some bit of Niall, some deep, ego-driven bit of his soul, had been hoping that Rhiannon was using this trip as a ruse to win him back. She didn’t want to break up, not really, so she conned him into coming on the trip with her so she could prance around in skimpy summer wear and lure him into loving her again.

He didn’t want to love her again, of course, but part of him, that ugly, prideful part, wanted her to want him to lover her again.

It didn’t make any sense, he knew that, and it wasn’t until Rhiannon took off her ring that he realized he was being tremendously silly. But part of him still aches, even now, a week later.

A breakup is a rejection, even a mutual breakup. As Niall was rejecting Rhiannon, she was rejecting him right back, and part of him, though he’s loath to admit it, is hurt by that. This conversation has just reinforced those feelings.

“Sure,” Niall says, attempting to shake off the emotion welling in the back of his throat. “We’ll touch base in a few days. I’m leaving in the morning, so you can check out of the hotel whenever you’d like.”

Rhiannon smiles. “Thanks for being so understanding about all this, Ni,” she says. “Coming on the trip and everything. You really didn’t have to do all this for me.”

Niall shrugs. “I’d be crazy to turn down a free trip to Italy.”

Five - Bea

“He should be here any minute, dear.”

Bea looks up from her phone and resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Great,” she says. “I’m eager to get on the road.”

Eager is a bit of an exaggeration. Bea knows she would’ve been crazy to pass up a trip to Italy, even a trip with her grandmother, but this is far from ideal. Their travel companion is as far from ideal as one could get.

But this matters to her grandmother, so Bea will suck it up, put her best face forward, and pretend she likes the Irish bloke.

Well, she’ll at least pretend to tolerate him.

As they wait, Bea begins to develop a list of things that she doesn’t like about Niall, just to fill the time. First, he doesn’t care about anyone aside from himself: he didn’t give a thought to how his letter would cause upheaval to Gran’s life (or the lives of those around her) before he wrote it. Second, he hides his evil tendencies under a charming appearance, complete with sweet blue eyes and a homey accent and well-fitted shirts. Gran, bless her heart, will never discover just how disingenuous he really is.

But Bea knows. And, she decides, it will be her mission on this trip to make sure that Gran realizes it.

She’ll have to do it subtly, though. Very subtly—no big speeches or yelling, or Gran will realize what Bea’s trying to do, and she will not be pleased. She’ll pull Bea aside and scold her just like she did when Bea was a child on the playground, cutting other little kids in the queue for the swings.

“Oh, there he is!” Gran says now. “Beatrix, look!” Niall is climbing out of a taxi at the end of the hotel’s round driveway. He accepts his bag from the driver in exchange for a couple of folded bills and steps out of the way so the car can leave.

Bea considers him as he pauses and adjusts the roll of his shirtsleeves—they’re cuffed just above his elbows, which is definitely not attractive in any way—before he grabs his duffle bag off the ground, swings it over his shoulder, and turns towards the building. Even the way he walks is infuriating, all jovial, like he doesn’t have anywhere he’d rather be.

Bea can think of a thousand places she’d rather be.

Gran waves instantly. “Niall! Over here!”

Bea forces a smile onto her face as he approaches. He’s smiling too, though it dulls significantly when his eyes meet hers.

Go away, she attempts to communicate through her glare alone.

Over my dead body, she imagines his glare answering.

“Good morning, Caro, Bea,” he says. “Are you two ready to go?”

“Yes, certainly,” Gran says. “We’re so excited to have you joining us. Bea will drive. Bea, can you help Niall with his bag?”

“Of course—”

“That’s not—”

Bea and Niall speak at the same time, meeting each other’s eyes in a staring contest of wills that ends when Niall looks away and picks up his bag.

“Pop the trunk, would you please, Bea?” he asks.

Bea grits her teeth and complies. This is going to be a long, long few days.

Five minutes later, they’re all in the car, Gran and Niall chatting as Bea tries not to grip the steering wheel too tightly. Driving has never been easy for Bea. She’s always worried about what the other drivers are going to do. Will someone merge into her lane without signaling, leaving her little time to brake or merge out of their way? Will someone run a red and bash into her car? There are so many things that can go wrong, and none of them are in her control.

Which is why Bea has remained in London, even as so many of her mates moved out to the suburbs. In London, you don’t need to drive. You take the Tube or an Uber or a taxi to get where you want to go, and you never have to worry about having enough petrol or parking illegally by accident and getting a ticket.

Driving in Verona is nearly as bad, or maybe worse, than driving in London, Bea decides as yet another taxi driver forces his way in front of her car. She grits her teeth again; her dentist is not going to be happy with her.

“Macbeth is my favorite,” Niall is saying, and, were Bea less focused on the road, she would pipe up to tell him how wrong he is (Hamlet is obviously Shakespeare’s best work), but as it is, there’s nothing she can do. She comes to a stop at a red light and forces herself to take a deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth.

“Make a left at the next signal,” the Apple Maps robot voice chirps from her phone, which is clipped to a vent on the dashboard.

Fuck you, Bea thinks, gritting her teeth. She can see the next intersection, and a left turn there isn’t going to be easy. Protected lefts do not, apparently, exist in this country. The light changes and Bea eases into the intersection. The car in front of her appears to be looking for a parking space, but the entire block is packed on both sides of the street.

“Gah,” she huffs, letting out a breath.

“Don’t forget to turn left up ahead, Bea bug,” Gran says.

“Got it, Gran.”

Bea takes another calming breath, but she feels anything but calm.

Six - Niall

Bea is the most tense driver Niall has ever witnessed, but that shouldn’t surprise him, considering how tense she is as a human being just existing. They’ve only been in the car half an hour, but from the looks she’s sending him in the rearview mirror, he’s sure she’s thought about ways to kill him at least half a dozen times.

Before they got in the car, when he pulled her aside so he could tell her the address of their first Alessandro, she looked at him like she wanted to murder him. Not just murder him, but chop him into tiny pieces and scatter him about the Italian countryside.

If Caro wasn’t in the car as well, he’d probably already be dead. She’d flip the car off the side of the road and land them in a field full of grazing cattle, where, if he by some miracle didn’t die in the crash, he would be licked to death by cows.

“What was it you studied in uni, dear?” Caro asks him, drawing his attention away from Bea, who absolutely doesn’t care what he studied in uni.

“Political science,” he says. “But I’m a journalist now.”

Bea scoffs. “Of course you are,” she says quietly.

Caro either doesn’t hear or decides to pretend that she didn’t. “That’s wonderful. What do you write?”

“Human interest, mostly,” Niall says, which is the simplest way of saying, I spent six months shadowing a homeless encampment on the South Bank last year. “My last piece was published in The Guardian, but I freelance.”

“Oh, how freeing!” Caro exclaims. “Bea, you should consider that. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have no boss? No schedule! You could have as many vacation days as you wanted! And no one would shake his finger at you and tell you to work harder.”

Niall tries not to smile as Bea’s grip on the steering wheel tightens.

“Gran,” she says, her annoyance obvious to Niall, but Caro keeps on smiling. “I don’t think you can teach primary school from your sitting room.”

“Oh, poo,” Caro says, swatting her hand in Bea’s direction. “I’ve always told you that you can do anything you set your mind to, Bea bug.”

Bea bug? There’s a lot to grab onto in what’s just been said, but Niall’s not an idiot; he knows that teasing Bea about her Gran’s nickname for her would not be the smartest move right now. She is in control of the car, after all. So he goes for the second lowest hanging fruit.

“You teach primary school?” he asks, trying and failing to keep the surprise out of his voice.

Her glare in the rearview mirror nearly burns him alive. “Yes,” she says through gritted teeth. “I’m goddamn delightful.”

Niall can’t hold back his laughter at that. “I’m sure you are.”

“All of the children love her,” Caro says, turning in her seat slightly to look at Niall head-on. She’s apparently missed the hint of sarcasm in his last statement. “She sings the sweetest songs for them. I knew those piano lessons would pay off someday, but I certainly didn’t imagine Bea would use her talents to entertain five year olds.”

“They’re seven, Gran,” Bea corrects.

Caro waves a hand and continues. “You’ve a beautiful voice nonetheless, dear. You really do spoil those children. Perhaps we can convince you do sing for us tonight after dinner.”

Niall looks from the pride on Caro’s face back to Bea, who looks more annoyed than she has all afternoon. Her grandmother goes on and on about how all the parents positively adore her and how Caro knew she was destined to be a teacher since she was a child herself, and Bea seethes.

She’s seething. That’s the only way he can think to describe the way she keeps her eyes steady on the road and her grip tight on the steering wheel and a perpetual frown on her mouth. His gaze traces the slope of her sharp nose and the indent of her cheek that suggests, were she to smile, a real smile, she might have a dimple.

Dimples. On this girl. This stubborn, tempestuous, argumentative, always frowning girl. Preposterous.

Dimples, he supposes, would make her almost appealing.

But as of now, she’s nothing but a nuisance. She probably thinks the same of him, though, he supposes. As Caro continues to sing Bea’s praises, much to Bea’s chagrin, Niall reaches into his backpack and pulls out the notebook where he’s made some notes about the mysterious Alessandro Bianchi. Based on Caro’s letter and some details she’s filled in for him, he has determined the following:

1. Alessandro would be about 80 years old now, as he’s a few years older than Caro.

2. He is likely still in the Veneto region of Italy, as when Caro knew him, he was set to inherit the family lands and winery.

3. He rides horses.

4. He is, in Caro’s words, “the handsomest man I’d ever set my eyes on.”

It’s not a lot to go on, and there are some major issues. The Veneto region first of all, is massive: nearly 5 million people live there, and it stretches all the way north to the Austrian border. Niall’s hopeful Alessandro is still in the province of Verona, a much smaller area that only has a million people.

That’s still a million people to sort through, though. From some database searches on his laptop last night, Niall turned up a list of Alessandro Bianchi’s from that million and then narrowed down by age. His smaller list contains 50 names, smaller in comparison but still a huge number when one is driving around the country going door to door.

There has to be some way to narrow the names further. Niall pulls out the list, which he printed in the hotel business center, and, when there’s a lull in the conversation, passes it up to Caro.

“This are the Alessandro Bianchi’s I’ve found,” he says. “I know the list is long, so I’m hoping you know something else that can help us narrow it down.”

Bea glances sideways as Caro examines the list. Niall’s distracted by her mouth, which has morphed from a frown into something sadder, more regretful. Intriguing.

What’s she hiding? he thinks.

But that’s not a question for now.

“Does anything stand out to you?” he asks Caro. She slides her reading glasses up her nose and moves the paper closer to her face. “Anyone look familiar?”

After a moment, she shakes her head. “I don’t suppose this list comes with photos?”

“Unfortunately not,” Niall says. “It’s a combination of property ownership and voter registration, but it’s not one hundred percent reliable, since people move and don’t change the address on their licenses and such.”

“Of course,” Caro says. She lowers the paper to her lap and pulls her glasses down, allowing them to hang around her neck. “It was rather silly of me to expect this to be easy, wasn’t it?”

“No—” Niall begins, but Bea cuts him off.

“You’re not being silly at all, Gran,” Bea says. She reaches across the center console to take Caro’s hand. “Alessandro is important to you, so we will find him. With or without Niall’s help.”

“Thank you, dear,” Caro says, squeezing Bea’s hand. “But since we’ve got him here with us, we should absolutely take advantage of Niall’s help. He is a journalist, dear, don’t forget.”

Niall is certain that his occupation has done nothing to endear him to her, if the look Bea gives him in the rearview mirror is anything to go by.

“Take the next exit,” the GPS chirps, drawing Bea’s attention away. He misses the fire in her gaze immediately, and that unwelcome realization occupies his mind for several minutes—seriously, what the fuck, brain—until the car turns up a winding dirt road and comes to a stop in front of a cute, if modest, country house.

“This is the first address,” Bea says, voice completely devoid of excitement.

Seven - Bea

“This is the first address,” Bea says, but what she’s thinking is, this cannot be the first address.

The house is, she supposes, cute enough, but it’s run-down. It hasn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in decades, the steps leading up to the porch are crumbling, and the house’s facade is covered in overgrown vines, the kind that slither in cracks in the plaster and make their way into the pipes and destroy everything.

“Let’s get out, then,” Niall says, already opening his door and climbing out of the backseat. He opens Gran’s door for her and helps her out, so Bea has no choice but to follow. She pockets the car keys and follows them up to the front steps.

“Should we knock?” Gran asks, looking from Bea to Niall and back to Bea. Bea can see a bit of nervousness in her gran’s face, and a hint of timidness. It’s strange, seeing it there; it’s not an emotion Gran normally expresses. Gran is always in control, taking the lead, charging headfirst into battle, Bea trailing behind her. That’s how they ended up in Italy, .

But right now, it seems like Gran needs Bea to take the lead. So she steps forward, planting herself between Niall and Gran, and puts a hand on Gran’s shoulder.

“What do you want to do, Gran?” she says in a tone she hopes is gentle and encouraging. She squeezes Gran’s bony shoulder and tries not to think about how much of Gran’s life she’s spent alone, dreaming of her lost love. “Do you want us to knock?”

Gran’s hand drifts to her neck, her fingers playing with her necklace. It’s a thin gold chain, gifted to her, Bea knows, by her husband, Bea’s grandfather, who died before Bea’s parents did. She wonders what Gran is thinking. Is she concerned about being unfaithful to her deceased husband? Is she regretting her marriage to someone who wasn’t Alessandro entirely? Or is she simply nervous about the possibility of seeing Alessandro again after so much time has passed?

“Gran,” Bea says again. “We can stay here as long as you need.”

Bea can feel Niall’s eyes on her, but she ignores him. He shouldn’t even be here; he’s intruding on a private family moment, no matter what Gran says to the contrary. But at least he’s smart enough to be keeping his mouth shut right now.

“No, that’s alright,” Gran says, dropping her hand from her necklace and shaking her head. “I’m being silly. We came all this way, and it’s probably not him. We’ll have wasted a trip if we don’t find out for sure.”

Bea looks up, toward the front door, but on the way, her gaze runs into Niall’s. He’s frowning slightly, like he’s confused. She wrinkles her nose at him, and he grins. If he weren’t so annoying, it might be cute. He might be cute.

“Okay, Gran,” Bea says, slipping her hand into Gran’s for a squeeze. “Let’s go, then?”

“Let’s go,” Gran repeats. She takes a step, then hesitates. “Niall, will you do the honors?”

“Me?” Niall meets Bea’s eyes, his eyebrows raised, but she’s just as surprised as he is. Niall is a guest here—and barely that. He’s an interloper. But Gran wants what Gran wants. Bea shrugs.

Bea watches with bated breath as Niall climbs the battered steps to the house and knocks on the door—twice, and then a third time, louder. She counts the seconds, waiting.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven.

Twelve.

Finally, the door opens.

The man is backlit by the sun as he steps outside, so it takes a minute before she can see him fully. Dark mustache, suspenders over his shoulders, tan shirt, and a face that’s much, much too young. He can’t be Gran’s Alessandro.

Gran asks anyway, though, drawing on her rusty Italian to ask for Alessandro Bianchi. The man shakes his head.

“It’s not him,” Gran says quietly, tugging on Bea’s sleeve. “He says no one with that name has lived here for years. Decades.”

Bea looks back at the man, who is standing on his front porch looking irritated, like the knock on his door has interrupted his entire day.

“Grazie, signore,” she says, allowing Gran to tug her back to the car, Niall following behind.

As she starts up the car and waits for Gran and Niall to decide where they’re headed next, Bea analyzes her feelings. Annoyance, of course, at Niall for being present, and a smidge at Gran for dragging her all the way out here. Frustration at the poor infrastructure of Italy’s backcountry roads. And—wait, is that disappointment?

Yes, Bea admits to herself. It sucks to strike out this early in the game. It sucks that Gran has spent so many years without Alessandro, and now she’ll have to wait even longer to find him. And what if they never find him? How long will they keep looking? How long will Niall follow them around the country, riding in the backseat and running new Google searches to grow their list of possibles?

Bea looks at Gran, who has pulled her gray hair back in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck to get it out of the way while she compares Niall’s list with a paper map. Gran, who has weathered so many storms. Gran, who has carried Bea through the worst of them.

Gran, who has bounced back from this disappointment like it was nothing.

So Bea will do the same. She will put on a brave face and input the next address Niall gives her into the GPS app, and she will force herself to be hopeful that this Alessandro will be the one they’re looking for.

And if that one’s not him, she’ll hope the same for the next Alessandro.

And the one after that.

Eight - Niall

After they scratch three possible Alessandros off the list, they stop for the night at a boutique winery hotel buried in a valley. It’s dark by the time Bea parks the car, but Niall expects that the surrounding countryside will be beautiful in the morning. Maybe he’ll wake up early and watch the sunrise, notebook and pen in hand, knowing he’ll never have words enough to describe its beauty. Back in college, he took a poetry class and tried his hand at some sonnets, but it was never really his thing.

Maybe now it will be, though. He’s only been in Italy a week and a half, and he’s already done things he never expected to do. Write a letter to a fictional character, for example, and join a girl and her grandmother in the search for a long-lost love.He’s been surprising himself for a while, actually, ever since he made the decision to end his relationship with Rhiannon.

Rhiannon. As Niall unloads the bags from the car, he wonders what she’s doing right now, who she’s spending her time with. Rhiannon has never had trouble making friends, and neither has Niall. That’s one of the reasons they were so good together. At least, that’s what he used to think. He also used to think that any time spent away from Rhiannon was wasted time, but now he knows better.

Today was not wasted, despite three failed attempts to find Caro’s Alessandro. The first man was too young and not named Alessandro anyway, the second man was far too old, and the third was a woman who was completely aghast to find out that she was misnamed and misgendered in the census data. Caro kept in good spirits, always positive in the car, but Niall could tell that her energy was waning. And Bea, meanwhile, was growing more and more annoyed with every grape vine they passed.

Now, as Niall walks the ladies to their rooms, it’s obvious that Bea is ready to be rid of him. Caro hugs both him and Bea goodnight outside her room, whispering, “thank you for being here” in Niall’s ear before she lets him go. Bea takes off down the hall, clearly in disagreement with the sentiment.

“I told you I could carry my own bag,” Bea scoffs when Niall reaches her door. He rolls her suitcase to a stop and chuckles as she grabs the handle, eager to have it back in her possession.

“What kind of gentleman would I be if I didn’t help you with your bags?” Niall asks.

“You’re no kind of gentleman.”

Niall raises an eyebrow. “I can carry your bag back out to the car, if you’d like. Then you can wheel it in yourself.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Bea huffs. “You’re so infuriating.”

She turns around, sliding her keycard into the door and pushing it open. Niall grabs her suitcase again and passes it to her as she goes into the room. She flips on a lightswitch, illuminating the space behind her, but Niall doesn’t pay any attention. He’s too fixated on Bea’s face.

She has light brown eyes, the color so diluted that he wonders if they might actually be green, or maybe blue. And the sweep of her nose, the pout on her lips as she frowns at him—God, she’s beautiful. She’s the kind of beautiful where it’s not the first thing you notice about her, but once you notice it, you can never stop seeing it. From now on, she’ll be beautiful every time Niall looks at her, every minute he thinks about her, every second he spends looking at her from the backseat of the rental car.

“Thanks for the help, I guess,” she says to him now, one hand on the door handle.

“You’re welcome,” he says. He steps forward without thinking, needing to be closer to her. “I can let you handle your own suitcase next time, though.”

“Thanks for that, too. But I meant, thanks for being here, for helping with Gran. This is really important to her, and I’m grateful to you for taking her seriously and respecting what she wants.”

“Of course,” Niall says. “She’s wonderful. And this is such a great story. Why wouldn’t I want to help her find Alessandro?”

“I don’t know. Because I’m not sure I do, maybe.” Bea looks over his shoulder, not meeting his gaze. This is hard for her to talk about, and it’s probably even harder for her to talk to him about it. “She loved my granddad, I know she did. If she finds Alessandro again, will her love for him cancel out her love for my granddad? And where does that leave me?”

“The same place you’ve always been.”

Bea’s eyes meet his; she’s startled, surprised that he answered her questions. Or maybe surprised that she was speaking out loud in the first place.

“Your gran loves you the same no matter what,” Niall continues. “I can see that every time she looks at you. That’s not going to change, no matter what happens with Alessandro. And her love for Alessandro won’t change how she loved your granddad. Someone can have two great loves in their life, don’t you think?”

It takes Bea a few seconds to respond, like she’s catching up with what he just said. “I don’t know. If that’s true, then what are all the stories and poems about? What’s Romeo and Juliet about?”

Niall asked himself that question days ago, looking up at Juliet’s balcony just like Romeo, except in his reality there was no beautiful young girl standing there, ready to throw away her life of privilege to be with him. Now, looking at Bea, he feels differently.

“That is what it’s about,” he says. “Those questions. How do you know when someone loves you? How do you know you’re worthy of their love, or that their love is going to last? How do you know when to risk your heart?

“Hmm.” Bea’s eyes drop to her shoes. “Sometimes I think it’s better not to try. Too much risk.”

“You know what they say. No risk, no reward.”

Bea goes quiet, and Niall doesn’t know what to say next. So he waits, waits for her to fill the silence. He finds himself reluctant to remove himself from her doorstep, reluctant to go to end this conversation and go to his room and be alone with his thoughts when he could be here, sharing them with her.

“Right,” Bea says abruptly. “As nice as it was talking to you, Niall”—he can tell from her tone that she doesn’t think it was nice at all—“I think it’s time for me to go to bed. We’ve got an early start in the morning.”

“Right.”

“Goodnight, then,” she says.

“Goodnight.”

It’s baffling, really, how quickly his feelings toward her changed, Niall thinks as he looks at her looking at him. Maybe it happened this afternoon, as Bea comforted her disappointed grandmother over and over again. Or maybe it happened even earlier, on their way out of Verona this morning, when she cursed at a taxi driver under her breath.

She’s beautiful, still. Beautiful, again. Beautiful, always.

Damn, this is not what he thought would happen when he agreed to help an old woman track down the man she loved half a century ago.

“Goodnight, Niall,” Bea repeats, staring at him.

“Goodnight,” he says again, but he doesn’t move. His eyes are glued to her face, and he can’t look away. It’s probably starting to get a little bit creepy, but she’s a mystery, and maybe if he looks long enough, he’ll be able to discern some tiny clue.

“You’re blocking my door,” she says, looking, as per usual, less than pleased with him.

Niall practically jumps backwards in an attempt to make space for her. “Right, of course! Sorry about that.”

There’s enough clearance to close the door now, but Bea freezes for a moment, hand on the doorknob, eyes locked on Niall’s.

“Bea?”

“What?” Bea shakes her head, blinking, as if coming out of a daze. “Right. Sorry. Goodnight, Niall.”

Then she shuts the door, leaving Niall standing there, wondering if he’ll ever have words enough to describe her beauty. And how utterly confused she leaves him.

Nine - Bea

In the morning, Bea wakes up itchy. At first she thinks it’s bedbugs, because that’s what every traveler thinks when they wake up itchy, but this hotel that Gran is paying for is much too nice for bedbugs. They left chocolate on her pillow last night and there are enough towels in the bathroom tokeep her in baths for years to come. Too bad they’re only staying two nights.

Maybe it’s a sunburn, she thinks, trudging to the bathroom and craning her neck to examine her back in the mirror. It’s a bit pink, but certainly not burnt enough to cause the kind of itching she’s feeling. The straps of the tank top she wore yesterday aren’t even outlined.

Something else, then. Maybe she ate something that triggered an allergy. Bea muses on that thought as she brushes her teeth with one hand and scratches her thigh with the other. What’d she eat yesterday? Spaghetti, gelato, a panini, and lots and lots of bread. Nothing too out of the ordinary, no shellfish or undercooked meat or questionable cheese.

Maybe it’s a rogue clothing tag. She slides her pajama shorts off and turns them inside out, hunting for a tiny piece of plastic that might’ve been left behind when she snipped off the price tag. Nothing. There isn’t even a tag with laundry instructions. There’s absolutely nothing there that could be causing that infernal crawling sensation Bea’s feeling all over both legs.

And her back, not to mention her back, where a million tiny spiders are tap-dancing in flip flops, tickling all of her nerve endings and driving her batty.

Bea tosses her toothbrush on the counter and moves to turn on the shower, imagining all of the spiders washing away down the drain. What a way to wake up: in a beautiful hotel room in the beautiful countryside of Italy, itching all over. She hasn’t been itchy like this in years, not since she told her best mate, Theresa, that the boy she liked didn’t like her back, even though he did. Bea liked him too and didn’t want to watch him date her best friend. Rosie saw straight through her lie, as best mates often do, and turned all of their friends against Bea. That was the last time Bea ever got involved in someone else’s romantic life.

Oh, crud. The only thing that makes Bea itchy like this is romance. And, well, lying.

But, lying. She hasn’t told any lies lately, has she? She hasn’t tricked Gran or tried to lure her away from the Alessandro hunt. And she hasn’t lied to Niall about how much she dislikes him or—

Oh, crud. She doesn’t dislike him, does she?

Last night, when Niall walked her to her door and stood there for what felt like hours, staring at her with his piercing blue eyes, there had been a moment, the briefest of seconds, when Bea wondered if he was going to kiss her, and thought that she might like him to. She’d stood there in the open doorway of her hotel room and considered that it might be nice to kiss the cute Irishman who’d given up his vacation to help her gran search for her lost love. In that moment, that brief, endless moment, he’d seemed sweet, genuine, likable, handsome, and exactly the kind of person whom one enjoys kissing.

But then the moment had passed, Bea had shaken herself out of it, and she closed the door on him and his tempting lips and intriguing eyes. Niall is engaged, and, regardless, he’s not the kind of person one has those thoughts about.

Bea’s brain still seems confused about that, though, as it wonders, will his lips look as tempting and his eyes as intriguing at breakfast this morning?

Oh, crud. Bea scratches at her elbow.

The itchiness abates during her shower but then comes back full-force when she meets Gran and Niall at breakfast. She sees them before they see her so she takes a moment to observe before she approaches. They’re seated at a table on the terrace outside the hotel’s restaurant, and Gran’s laughing at something Niall said, her head thrown back and joy clear on her face. Bea longs to hear the joke herself, longs to know this side of Niall, when his humor’s not at her expense, when he’s not teasing her or sending her funny looks via the rearview mirror.

Jesus H. Christ, Bea thinks, shaking herself out of it and approaching the table. Grams barely has time to look up before a waiter appears and pours her a cup of coffee.

“Good morning, Beatrix,” Gran says. Bea doesn’t miss Gran’s raised eyebrow over the rim of her own mug. Earl Grey for Gran in the mornings, always.

“Morning, Gran,” Bea says once she’s gulped down a mouthful of coffee. It’s scalding hot and not particularly good, which is a disappointment, but not one worth dwelling on when one is as itchy as Bea is. “Morning, Niall.”

“Bea,” he says, nodding at her. There’s a slight twinkle in his eye and Bea imagines it saying, I know you wanted me to kiss you last night. It makes her right knee itch. The fact that that’s the closest knee to Niall is of no consequence.

She looks away from him and grabs a menu, flipping it open. The entire thing is in Italian, which is fine for a dinner menu but a lot more complicated for breakfast. “I think I’d like an omelette today. Do they have omelettes in Italy? What’s the Italian word for egg?”

Neither Niall nor Gran answer right away, so Bea keeps on. “Pane, that’s bread, right? I know that word. What’s the Italian for bacon?”

“It’s bacon,” Niall says. When Bea meets his gaze, he’s smiling at her, a hint of a laugh lingering on the corner of his mouth. Gran is smiling, too.

“What?” Bea asks, looking from one to the other. “Do I have toothpaste on my face?”

Niall drops his eyes to his plate, but Gran doesn’t look away, so Bea narrows in on her. Gran has never been able to keep anything from her—except Alessandro, of course, but Bea doesn’t want to think about that right now—so Bea knows that if she stares long enough, Gran will buckle.

It doesn’t seem to work this time though, as Gran drops the smile into a concerned frown. “No, dear,” she says. “But I’m glad to hear you brushed your teeth.”

Niall snickers, and suddenly Bea hates him again, but her right wrist won’t stop itching.

Why was it that she liked him? All the reasons have disappeared as she finishes her breakfast and listens as Gran and Niall go over their agenda for the day. There are four Alessandros on today’s list and a short lunch break scheduled for the afternoon.

In the car, Bea takes the wheel again, Gran in the passenger’s seat and Niall in the back. Once they’re out on the main road, Alessandro’s address plugged into Apple Maps, Niall pulls out his notebook and begins scribbling away.

The back of Bea’s neck itches as she wonders what he’s writing. Is it a personal journal entry in which he’s describing how he almost kissed her last night? Or is it a draft of a novel, the story of lovers separated by centuries only to find themselves together again? If it’s the latter, she’s not sure how Gran would feel about becoming the heroine of a novel. Niall definitely should’ve asked first.

She’s still annoyed at him over that possibility when she finally asks, several ,minutes later, “What are you writing?”

It takes a minute for Niall to look up and meet her gaze in the rearview mirror. “It’s not done yet,” he says with a shrug.

“Okay, but what’s it about?” Bea presses. “Is it nonfiction? Fiction? Are you writing poetry?”

There’s a gleam in Niall’s eyes as he mimes zipping his lips and throwing an invisible key over his shoulder.

Bea huffs and turns her focus back to the road. On either side of the road are endless vineyards stretching as far as the eye can see. Every once in a while, there’s a barn or a house or a man on horseback, a copse of trees, a hill, but it’s mostly vine after vine after vine. Finally, finally, they turn onto a side road and head toward the residence of the first Alessandro.

Let this one be him, Bea prays. Let this one be him, and let him be married, so I can go back to my life as it was and forget any of this ever happened.

But then, what about Gran? Bea considers the ideal outcome for Gran. Maybe Alessandro is a widower, living alone on his vineyards, waiting for his lost love to return to him. He and Gran will marry and she’ll stay in Italy forever, leaving Bea to take care of her big house in London. Or maybe Alessandro will be dead. That’s preferable, Bea thinks, to him being married to another woman.

At least that’s what Bea thinks, until the man who answers the door proclaims himself to be Alessandro’s son.

“My father died last year,” he says, and Bea hears Gran gasp behind her. She tightens her grip on Gran’s hand. “I’m sorry, you say you knew him?”

Bea can’t see Gran’s face, but she can imagine the look on it. When her parents died, she felt as though the floor had dropped out from underneath her and she was clinging to the edge by her nails, waiting for someone to pull her back up. It had been Gran who had come to her aid.

That’s not something Bea likes to think about very often, but now, just for a moment, she’s glad she experienced it. Maybe now she can be here for Gran, as Gran was for her. She’s never had the opportunity to step up in that way before now.

Niall looks at Bea for a second before answering the man’s question. “No, I didn’t. This is Caro. Carolyn. She knew him, years ago. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Bea thinks she should echo the expression, but she can’t find her voice. This is too much of a shock: they came all this way for Alessandro, and though Bea had considered the possibility that he might be dead, she really didn’t expect it to be the case. What kind of ending is this?

The man, Alessandro’s son, looks at each of their faces, at their expressions. “And I, for yours. Would you like to come in?”

“Let’s go,” Gran whispers, tugging on Bea’s hand, pulling her back toward the car, but Bea steps forward. Maybe she can help Gran get the closure she needs. She clears her throat.

“Yes, please. We’d love to.”

The man nods, opening the door wider and allowing the three of them to follow him inside and into a small sitting room. Niall introduces Bea and himself, but she’s too distracted to be polite. The man’s house is small but well-kept. The tile floors are swept, books fill the shelves in the sitting room, and there is a piano with a row of picture frames on the top. Bea wanders over, looking at the photos and imagining this other life Gran might have lived.

In the first, their host, aged 9 or 10, stands with his parents in front of, what else, a vineyard. He wears overalls and his mother squints at the camera. The photo is in black and white even though it was taken, Bea guesses, sometime in the late 70s. There are balloons in the background, evidence of a party.

“Are these your parents?” Bea asks, carrying the frame over to the man. The man nods, taking it from her hands. “When was this photo taken?”

“I was 10 years old, if I remember correctly,” the man says. He lifts a pair of eyeglasses from his neck and slides them on. “My father had just returned from the army, his last tour. We were celebrating his retirement.”

“Alessandro was in the army?” Bea turns to Gran, who has settled on the couch, Niall standing awkwardly by her side, looking down on her as if worried she’s going to faint.

The man nods. “Yes, for many years. He enlisted as soon as he was old enough, in 1963, and was only home for a short time in 1968, when he met and married my mother. They had a whirlwind courtship, as you say.”

“1963,” Bea repeats. Something doesn’t fit, but she’s not sure what.

Niall is, though. “Caro met Alessandro in 1965,” he says. “Where was your father in 1965?”

The man scratches his head and takes so long to answer that Bea wants to grab him by the shoulders and give him a good shake.

“Somewhere abroad,” he says finally. “North Africa, possibly.”

Bea’s face mirrors the look of shock on Niall’s. She takes the frame from the man and walks it to the couch. “Is this him, Gran? Is this your Alessandro?”

Gran leans forward, looking at the picture for an endless minute. “No,” she says quietly, fingers playing with the gold chain around her neck. “No, that’s not him.”

Bea feels a wave of emotion crash over her, pushing her down onto the couch next to Gran. “That’s not him,” she repeats.

“That’s not him,” Niall echoes.

Bea sits quietly as Niall makes their excuses, apologizing for the intrusion and giving their condolences. He ushers them out the door and back towards the car, where he grabs Bea’s arm before she can open the driver’s side door.

“Do you want me to drive?” he says quietly. “You seem shaky.”

Bea rolls her shoulders back. She’s not shaky, she’s fine. So what if Alessandro was dead and then alive again in the span of five minutes? She’s fine.

“I’m fine,” she snaps. “Don’t you want to journal about this?”

Niall steps away from her, hands up, and gets in the car before she can apologize for being rude.

It’s just as well, she supposes. It’s not as if she likes him anyway.

Ten - Niall

The next day is much like the prior one, with visits to multiple Alessandro’s who may or may not be Gran’s lost love. At least none of them are dead. Yesterday’s first stop was so rough that Niall considered proposing to the ladies that they cut their losses and head back to the hotel, but Bea looked determined to press on.

This morning, though, her energy level seems lower, so on the way to the car, he offers to drive.

“Are you sure?” Bea asks, raising an eyebrow. “Have you ever driven in a foreign country?”

Niall raises an eyebrow in return, which makes Bea blush. He ignores the way his stomach flips at the redness in her cheeks. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve even driven in foreign cities. Like Verona.”

She blushes even darker as she no doubt recalls her terrible driving as they left the city a few days ago. “All right, then,” she says, passing over the keys. “But don’t kill us. My Gran is precious cargo.”

Niall nods. He doesn’t need to be told. Caro is one of the most wonderful people he’s ever met, aside from his own grandmother, who is back home in Ireland and whom he never gets to see. Growing up, his parents were always traveling for business, working late, making him feel forgotten, and it was his grandmother who remembered him. She took him on day trips to carnivals and national parks, attended all of his school plays, and helped him with his homework when he struggled. Leaving her behind to move to London was one of the hardest things he’s ever done, so it’s nice to spend time with Caro. She’s an excellent listener, and she gives even better advice.

Yesterday morning over breakfast, before Bea had shown up, Caro had asked him about his life, about what brought him to Italy, and he talked about Rhiannon in a way that he never had before.

“I thought I loved her once,” he’d said, stirring cream into coffee that he knew he wouldn’t drink.“But I know now that I didn’t. I just wanted to be in love so badly that I settled for her.”

Caro had nodded like she understood. “Or maybe you wanted to be loved. It’s okay to want that.” Then she’d paused, taken a sip of her tea, swallowed. “You like my granddaughter.”

She said it bluntly, like it was a fact, and Niall had been surprised, in that moment, to hear something he’d only felt sound so permanent, so real. But it was true, so he nodded.

“I do,” he said, and he had imagined, for the briefest of seconds, being loved by someone who stood her ground and said what she want, someone who cared about her family enough to drive through endless wine country with them, someone like Bea—and then he forced the thought out and away. It wasn’t an appropriate thing to be thinking while conversing with Bea’s grandmother.

But now that it’s a day later and he’s driving the car and Bea’s asleep in the backseat, mouth slack as she rests her head on her hand, elbow propped against the window, he has free reign to think whatever he wants. Which, try as he might to want something else, is Bea. Bea and her reluctant laugh. Bea and the fire in her eyes.

“Stubborn, isn’t she?” Caro says after a while, her voice so quiet that Niall wonders if he imagined it. Wonders if she was reading his mind. “My granddaughter. Stubborn as her gran.”

“Hmm.” Niall smiles softly at her, unsure what to say in response.

“I raised her, you know,” Caro says, glancing sideways at him before looking back at the road. “Her parents died when she was young, and ever since, she’s been this wild thing, but stubborn, practical. Always looking for evidence, for proof. But for some things, there is no proof.”

“What things?” Niall asks.

“Love, the most obvious. Faith. Hope. Dreams, especially dreams. Bea has rarely allowed herself dreams. Only when she’s asleep does she dream.”

Niall pictures her asleep, pictures her in bed beside him, rising from a nightmare and seeking his comfort. The image warms him. Now he has something else to think about: Bea and her forgotten dreams—for she must’ve had them, once.

“I dream enough for the both of us, don’t I?” Caro continues. Her voice turns serious. “We haven’t discussed this, but I know we can’t search for Alessandro forever.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” Niall says, but it isn’t exactly true. He has to go back to London at some point. He wishes he didn’t, though. He wishes he could stay here forever, traveling the countryside with Caro and Bea.

“Your time is better spent on other endeavors,” Caro says, looking over her shoulder at Bea, who’s still asleep. Then she looks pointedly back to Niall. “You should tell her how you feel.”

Niall doesn’t answer. Bea is hot and cold—two nights ago, they’d almost kissed outside her door, but since then she’s barely spoken to him, barely looked at him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he finally says. Even if she likes him, even if she’d kiss him back—it doesn’t matter. “Like you said, we can’t search for Alessandro forever.”

“We can’t, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” She pauses. Then: “Another day or two, I think. These old bones grow wary of sitting in cars.”

“Maybe we’ll find him today,” Niall says, offering her a smile.

They don’t, though. They visit two Alessandro’s before lunch, one too old and one two young, and in the afternoon, travel to an address that doesn’t exist. Before dinner, they check into another hotel just outside Sienna, all three of them exhausted. Niall can feel his bones creaking at all the joints, a physical manifestation of his mental exhaustion.

As he waits in the lobby for the ladies to come down for dinner, he scratches off several Alessandro’s from his list. There are a lot left, but, as Caro said this morning, she isn’t willing to search forever. Another day or two, she’d said. So he looks at the list now and tries to derive, as if by magic, which ones are most likely to be the one they’re searching for. It’s no use, but he stares at the page anyway, stares so long that “Alessandro” no longer looks like a word, just a random arrangement of letters.

Energy levels remains low at dinner, and not even gelato can seem to cheer anyone up. Niall bids Caro and Bea goodnight and goes to his room, where he pulls out his notebook and stares at a blank page before finally giving up and going to sleep.

Tomorrow will be a better day, he thinks as he drifts off.

Eleven - Bea

The next morning, Niall knocks on Bea’s door before she’s had a chance to leave for breakfast. She’s braiding her hair over her shoulder when she pulls open the door and greets him.

“Hi?” she says.

“Good morning,” he says. He looks good this morning, dressed in shorts and a short sleeve button up. His sneakers are bright white. She wonders if he bleaches them.

“Good morning,” she says. “What’s going on? Is Gran alright?”

“She’s fine,” he says. “Bit tired. She said she wants to take the day off from driving today and hang about the pool. You could join her if you want, or…”

“Or?” She notices the backpack swung over his shoulder. “Are you going somewhere?”

He nods. “Sienna. I figured, since we’re here, I’d like to see it. And maybe you’d like to come.”

Her first instinct is to say no, because this is Niall and she absolutely does not like him, but then she changes her mind. What if she’s never in Italy again? What if they find Alessandro tomorrow and she’s on an immediate flight back home? What if this is her only chance to see Sienna?

“Okay,” she says. “I’d like to come.”

Ten minutes later, they’re in the car and she’s looking at his hands on the steering wheel. When he’d offered to drive, she’d accepted without hesitation, eager to spend the drive looking out the windows. As endless as the vines seem, they’re beautiful, and a bit otherworldly, as if England is more than a few hours’ flight away.

“Have you ever been to Italy before?” she asks Niall.

“No,” he says, glancing sideways at her. He’s an excellent driver, so careful, and she’s never felt safer in a car—a feat for her, because her parents died in one. “I’ve never made much time for travel. I regret that, I think. There are so many places to see that I haven’t seen.”

“There’s so much future for that,” Bea says. “So much forever. You can fill all of it with travel.”

“Maybe. Where would you like to go?”

Bea smiles, softly. She never lets her think about these things, about all the things she can’t have or will never do, but she indulges herself for a second. “Prague. Tokyo. Rio de Janeiro. New York City.”

“I’ve been to New York City,” Niall interjects. “It’s loud.”

“London is loud.”

“New York is louder.”

“Fine,” Bea rolls her eyes. “Where would you go?”

Niall shrugs, the fabric of his shirt rustling against the leather of the car seat. “Prague, Tokyo, Rio. I want to go everywhere.”

Bea doesn’t respond, and they fall into a surprisingly comfortable silence, during which they drive into Sienna and she thinks about how big Niall’s hands look on the steering wheel and how small hers feel resting on her thighs. She feels safe with Niall, not just when he’s driving, but maybe that’s not real. Maybe she’s transferring her feelings about his driving skills to the rest of him.

Or maybe, she considers, that she really does like Niall, just as she was thinking a few mornings ago, before the disaster with the undead Alessandro and the following day filled with disappointments. She scratches her knee.

“Bug bite?”

“Huh?” She looks over at Niall, who’s grinning at her. “Oh, yeah, I guess.”

“That’s rough,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says, but looking at Niall, nothing feels rough. Everything feels easy, smooth sailing, like she could sit beside him in a car forever.

Oh, crud.

In Sienna, Niall parallel parks easily near the city center and they wander through the streets, in and out of a museum, around and around the cathedral. Inside, Bea stands transfixed by the height of the ceilings and the intricacy of the design, horizontal lines spiraling around her, making her dizzy.

“This is the ugliest church I’ve ever seen,” Niall says quietly into her ear, making her laugh. She covers it up with a cough—it’s rude to laugh in a church, she’s pretty sure—before she responds.

“You can’t say that,” she whispers. “God can hear you.”

“God didn’t build it,” Niall whispers back. “And I’m sure he’s well aware.”

At lunch, they talk easily about their lives back in London, their favorite places to visit and their favorite places to avoid. They both hate Covent Garden and both love the South Bank despite the crowds of tourists outside the Globe.

“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you there,” Niall says.

“London’s a huge city,” Bea says. “Over 8 million people live there.”

“Maybe. But only one Beatrix Mason.”

That makes her blush, and the awareness that she’s blushing makes her blush more. He grins at her, and she smiles back, and if she could make a snow globe out of any moment, it would be this one. This perfect day in Sienna with a perfect man whose beautiful eyes look into her own like they can see all her secrets and aren’t judging her for them.

She thinks of Juliet then, of her decision to marry Romeo after only knowing him for a few days, and in that moment, it doesn’t seem crazy. It seems like the most sensible thing in the world.

In the late afternoon, they drive back to the hotel to meet Gran for dinner, but she’s already eaten, so they get a table in the hotel restaurant without her. Niall smiles and Bea smiles and something’s changed, she thinks. Today he cracked open a little bit and made a little bit more sense, and she wants to keep digging, she thinks.

He’s engaged, she knows that—he’s engaged, but tomorrow will be their last day together, and she can have one more day, can’t she? One more day with Niall, and then she’ll let him go.

“Come for a walk with me,” she says when they’re done eating.

They wander into the hills around the hotel, climbing to the top of one to look at the stars.

“Do you know the names?” Niall asks.

“No,” Bea says, which is a lie, but she’s hoping he’ll impress her. She’s hoping he wants to impress her.

“Me either,” he says. She laughs.

They lie on the ground like that for a while, watching stars shoot across the sky. Niall’s hand finds hers in the grass and holds on tight. The air tingles between them. A summer night, alive.

When he leans over and kisses her, it’s surprising at first and then the most natural thing in the world. She kisses him back, enjoying the weight of him over her, the brush of his hair in his eyes, the softness of his lips. And then she remembers.

She pushes him back, and it takes a second before he goes. He smiles at her, but she doesn’t smile back.

“Bea,” he says, reaching a hand down to brush some hair out of her face. It’s too much, and almost enough to get her to kiss him again. But he’s engaged.

She rolls away from him and springs to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she stammers. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

Niall follows, going after her as she crosses the lawn. “Why not?”

Bea looks over her shoulder. “You’re engaged. Aren’t you engaged?”

Niall shakes his head, but doesn’t respond. He looks like he’s fed up with her, which is just as well, because she’s fed up with him too. Why is he like this, hot one second, confusing the next? Why is she like this, attracted to such a man?

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Bea, I like you, and—”

“How can you say it doesn’t matter? Your fiancée doesn’t matter?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I—”

“Look, we’re almost through the list,” Bea says, taking another step away from him. He needs to stop looking at her like that, with those glowing blue eyes, or she can’t be held responsible for her actions. The more space she can put between them now, the better. “If we don’t find Alessandro tomorrow, that’s it. Gran and I are going home, and you’re going back to your fiancée, and we can pretend that none of this ever happened.”

Niall steps closer to her, into the space she put between them. “I don’t want to pretend that none of this ever happened.”

“But you’re engaged,” she reminds him again. Why can’t he seem to remember that? “To someone else. To someone who I’m sure is very kind and very much in love with you and would not be pleased to find out that you’ve been kissing another girl on a hillside in the country.”

The corner of Niall’s mouth lifts, almost like—is he laughing? He’s definitely laughing. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

“What?” Bea’s jaw drops open. “That’s an awful thing to say. You’re disgusting. I can’t believe I just kissed you.” And I can’t believe I want to do it again.

Now he’s frowning. “Bea—”

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t want to hear it. I’m going to bed, and we’re going to forget this ever happened, and we’re never going to talk about it again.”

Niall looks like he wants to say something, but he holds it back. Good.

“Goodnight,” she says, turning on her heel and marching away from him.

She can’t resist turning back, though, where he’s still standing on the hill, hand raised to his mouth, gazing after her. She spins away before he can catch her looking.

Twelve - Niall

In the car the next morning, they don’t speak of the kiss. Bea won’t even look at him, and Niall supposes he deserves it. She thought he was engaged, after all. But he isn’t. He isn’t engaged, and the only thing he wants is to kiss Bea again, and again, and again.

That doesn’t seem likely to happen, though, at least not if this morning is an indication.They sit silently in the car, all three of them off in their own worlds. Bea had said last night that today would be their last day—if they don’t find Alessandro today, this is it. They’ll return to their lives, story unfinished.

Niall wouldn’t put money on that, though. He’s a writer, and he knows that a story’s not a story if it doesn’t have an ending. And this one, the story of Alessandro Bianchi and Carolyn Mason—it’s going to have a marvelous ending.

Hopefully the story of Niall Horan and Beatrix Mason will have a marvelous ending, too. He won’t leave Italy without one.

The morning’s Alessandro is a bust, and after a roadside picnic, they hit the road again, driving east to the next one on the list. Niall picked today’s names, perhaps the final ones, at random, and he both hopes and doesn’t hope that one of them is the one.

They’re a few minutes out from the turn indicated on the map when Caro gasps in the passenger’s seat. Niall leans forward to see if she’s okay, meeting Bea’s eyes for a precious second before she looks away, refocusing her attention on her grandmother.

“Pull over,” Caro says, her hand already reaching for the door.

“What?” Bea says. “Are you okay?”

“Pull over,” Caro repeats, so Bea does, flipping on the turn signal and guiding the car off the road. Caro gets out and steps toward the road, staring across at a man standing in the vineyard. Bea follows, and so does Niall.

“Gran? What is it?” Bea asks.

Caro raises her arm and points. “That’s him. That’s Alessandro.”

Niall squints at the man across the road. He’s young, much too young to be Alessandro—he’s not much older than Bea. But Caro seems so sure, her gaze fixed, so Niall crosses the road to ask.

“Niall, wait,” Bea calls after him, and though it’s the first time she’s acknowledged him all day, he doesn’t turn around.

“Scusi,” he says to the man. “We’re looking for Alessandro Bianchi.”

“That’s me,” the man says. “I am Alessandro Bianchi. And my father, he is Alessandro Bianchi as well.”

“Your father,” Niall repeats. “Your father, where is he?”

“Out for a ride,” the man says, his gaze drifting across the road, where Bea and Caro still stand. “He will be back soon. I can take you up to the house, if you’d like.”

Niall nods. “Let me get my friends.”

He crosses the road back to Caro and Bea, who are staring at him with wide eyes. “It’s him,” Niall says. “Well, not him, but Alessandro is his father and he’s just out for a ride and he’ll be back soon.”

“He’ll be back soon,” Bea repeats, processing. Then, more eagerly: “Gran, he’ll be back soon!”

“Oh,” Caro says, looking off into the distance. “Maybe it’s not really him. We ought to go before he comes.”

“Nonsense, Gran,” Bea says. She tucks a lock of Caro’s hair behind her ear. “You look beautiful, just as you did 55 years ago. He’s going to be so excited to see you.”

Caro sighs. “I don’t know, Bea bug. It’s been so long, so many years. Maybe this box is best left shut.”

“Gran—” Bea starts, but the sound of a galloping horse interrupts her. The three of them turn as a horse emerges from the vineyards across the road, coming to a stop beside Alessandro Jr. They watch with bated breath as he converses with his son, both of them looking across the road, and then, still on his horse, he crosses.

“Carolina,” he says, drawing his horse to a stop a few feet from them. He climbs down and drops the reins, the horse forgotten as he approaches. “My Carolina, is that you?”

Caro steps forward. “Alessandro. It’s me.”

“After so many years,” he says. “Impossible.”

“Not impossible,” she says.

Niall can’t believe it. He truly can’t believe it, but it’s true. It’s him, after all this time, after all the places they’ve stopped, after all the ways he’s twisted himself into knots over Bea—there he is. Alessandro. Caro’s Alessandro.

Niall drifts backwards as they embrace, coming to stand behind Bea. She looks uncomfortable as well, her gaze drifting off into the endless rows of grapevines beside the road.

Niall puts a hand lightly on her back. “Should we—”

“I think—”

Niall laughs, which makes Bea blush his favorite blush. “You go ahead,” he says.

She bites her lip, and he can tell she’s trying not to smile. After everything, she doesn’t want to smile at him, but this moment, it’s special. “I was going to say, I think we should give them a few minutes.”

“I was going to say the same thing.” Niall grins. He can’t help it. They found Alessandro—they found Alessandro!—and he’s here, with Bea. There’s nothing better than this, nowhere he’d rather be.

“Let’s go,” Bea says, leading him through the vineyard.

They walk in step silently for a while, Bea ignoring him and Niall wondering what he should say.The vineyards wrap around them, pushing them closer together, but Bea avoids bumping shoulders with him. He can tell that she wanted to give her gran privacy, but, unlike him, she’d rather be anywhere than here with him.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, breaking the silence.

“Good,” she says. “You should be.”

Niall doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know how to explain to her what she means to him—how, in such a short time, she’s come to mean everything. He thinks, hopes, prays, that maybe she feels the same way.

“I think you should leave.”

“What?” he says. She doesn’t feel the same way, and it hits him like a brick to his gut. After everything.

“We found Alessandro, so there’s no reason for you to stay. You should leave now, go back to Verona, back to your fiancée and your life. I’ll find someone to drive you to the train station. I’m sure Alessandro’s son Alessandro would be willing.”

“You won’t drive me yourself?” he asks, annoyed now, frustrated, exhausted. What an emotional roller coaster this week has been.

“No, Niall,” she says, looking at him now, meeting his gaze, and in it he can see every emotion he’s feeling too—exhaustion and confusion and excitement and sadness and loneliness. But that clarifies nothing. “I won’t drive you, and I don’t want to see you again. This week was nice, but it was just that—a week. It’s over now, and we are too.”

She turns her back on him, walking away, so she doesn’t hear what he says to her retreating form:

“We barely began.”

Thirteen - Bea

Gran has never looked so happy as she does at dinner with Alessandro and all of his family—children and grandchildren and even a great-grandchild or two. This is the massive family gathering that Gran never got, everyone who loves each other gathered in one place, smiling, laughing. It’s bliss.

Except it’s not, because seated to Bea’s right is Niall. Niall, who’s engaged and kissed her anyway. Niall, who she can’t stop thinking about, who she won’t stop thinking about even when he’s gone. Niall, who she can barely look at. Niall, who she’s sending away.

It’s the right thing to do, she knows, but it feels so wrong, and she hasn’t even done it yet.

She barely pays attention to Alessandro’s relatives as they riddle her with questions, some of which Niall answers for her—making her feel safe even when she doesn’t want him to. Making her feel cared for, even though she asked him not to.

After dinner, Bea approaches Gran and Alessandro beside the table, where they are surrounded by a cluster of Alessandro’s grandkids and great-grands. Niall follows behind—Bea can feel him there, but she doesn’t turn around to look. Looking at him hurts.

She can’t believe that 24 hours ago she thought she’d be able to spend just these days with him and then let him go, and be okay with it. This isn’t okay. This isn’t okay at all.

Best to rip off the band-aid. Bea puts a hand on Gran’s arm.

“Niall is leaving,” she says when Gran turns to face her.

Gran looks at Niall. “Oh, no, please, Niall, you don’t have to.”

Alessandro echoes the sentiment. “Please, stay. You are welcome here.”

Niall looks at her then, looks for some kind of confirmation that he can stay, that she wants him here, but Bea doesn’t give it to him. She looks at the ground and doesn’t meet his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes burning a hole in Bea’s cheek. “I have to be getting back to Verona.”

Bea feels more eyes on her—Gran, this time. She meets her eyes and gives a quick nod, as if to say, I want him gone. Gran frowns, but doesn’t object.

“My son will drive you to the station,” Alessandro says, waving his son over.

Five minutes later, Bea stands back as Gran says goodbye to Niall at the car, hugs him and kisses his cheek and makes him promise to call. He won’t, though, Bea knows that. When Niall leaves, she will never see him again. She hurt him when she told him to go as they stood in the vineyards, surrounded by unborn wine. She hurt him, and there’s no taking that back.

He looks at her through the window as the car drives away, his face expressionless, his eyes bright blue even through the glass. He looks at her until he’s too far away to keep looking.

The moment the car turns at the end of the drive, disappearing from view, Bea can feel in her stomach that she made a mistake. It feels like a storm is broiling, rolling and twisting and throwing her dinner around like it’s lawn furniture. But it’s too late.

“Oh, Beatrix,” Gran says from behind her. “Why did you do that? Don’t you have feelings for him?”

“He’s engaged,” Bea says without turning around. Maybe if she keeps her eyes locked on the setting sun, she’ll be able to disappear alongside it. “It doesn’t matter what I feel.”

“Pish posh,” Gran says. She slips her hand into Bea’s and squeezes. “That boy is not engaged. He and his fiancée broke up months ago.”

What? He’s not engaged?

“That can’t be right,” Bea says. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“I don’t know,” Gran says. “And you’ll never find out, if you let him go like that.”

Bea shakes her head. “It’s too late,” she says. “He’s gone, and I made him leave. It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late,” Gran says. “I found Alessandro after all these years, did I not? How many Nialls do you think are on this planet? Don’t wait 55 years like I did.”

Bea looks at her grandmother now, looks at the wrinkles by her bright eyes, brighter than they’ve been in a long time. Alessandro has brought the light back to her gran’s eyes.

“Thank you for helping me find Alessandro,” Gran says. “Now, go find Niall.”

She presses the car keys into Bea’s palm.

“I—” Bea begins.

“Go,” Gran instructs.

So she does.

Fourteen - Niall

“Niall!”

Niall turns at the sound of his name, but he can’t see who’s yelling at him, so he keeps going, cutting through the crowd with his bag pulled tight against his side.

“Niall, you jerk! Stop right there!”

Is that—it can’t be. He comes to a stop and turns, and there she is.

“Bea? What are you doing here?”

She’s wearing cutoff shorts and running shoes and her purse bounces on her hip. She stops in front of him, a few feet away, and glares.

God, he missed that glare. It’s only been a few hours since he saw it last, but damn, he missed it. He missed the fire in her eyes and the sharpness of her nose and the way she looks at him like he’s the only thing worth looking at.

“I’m here because you’re awful,” she says, breathing hard. “I had to tell you.”

“You ran after me in the train station to tell me I’m awful?” he repeats, confused. “I’m leaving, just like you asked, Bea. You didn’t need to come here and make things worse.”

“No, you idiot,” she says, taking a step closer to him. “That’s not what I want.”

“Then what do you want?” he asks.

He knows what he wants. He wants to pull her tight against his chest and kiss her for at least the next five minutes and then for the rest of time. He wants to run through vineyards with her and stomp buckets of grapes and get wine drunk under hot the Italian sun. He wants to rub aloe on her sunburn and kiss it as it heals. And he wants to know what she wants.

But she ignores the question.

“My Gran, she said that you’re not really engaged,” Bea says, lunging forward to punch him in the shoulder. It barely hurts, but he rubs at the spot anyway. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought I did,” Niall says, running through their previous conversations in his mind. Hadn’t he, the other night just after their kiss? “I swear I did.”

Bea’s fist comes at him again, softer this time. “You didn’t, you idiot. That’s why I made you leave.”

Niall tilts his head. He understands now, why she’s here, what she wants. His heartbeat speeds up. “Because I didn’t tell you I wasn’t engaged?”

“Yes!”

“Why do you care if I’m engaged or not?” Niall asks, even though the answer is obvious. He wants to hear her say it.

Bea huffs. As she grows more frustrated, her cheeks get redder and redder. “Because you can’t go around kissing people when you’re engaged!”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s rude!”

Her fist flies again, but Niall grabs it and opens it in his hand. He weaves his fingers with hers and pulls her forward. “Why?” he asks.

“Because,” she says, cheeks blazing. She’s so close to him now, close enough to kiss, but Niall holds off. He wants to see if she’ll say it. “Because it’s rude!”

“You already said that.” Niall can’t resist the loose strand of hair blowing in front of her eyes; he tucks it safely behind her ear.

Bea’s eyes follow the moment of his hand. “Right. What was the question again?”

“Why is it rude to kiss someone when you’re engaged?”

“Oh, right,” Bea says, her voice so low it’s almost a whisper. “It’s rude because… because you might kiss somebody so well that they want to kiss you again, but they can’t, because you’re engaged!”

“I’m not engaged.”

“You’re not…” Bea repeats, her eyes drifting down and landing on his lips. “You’re not engaged.”

“Right.”

“You’re not engaged,” she says again, the edges of her mouth lifting in a smile She lifts her arms from where he’d trapped them on his chest and wraps them around his neck. “So why aren’t you kissing me right now?”

“That’s a good que—” Niall starts, but Bea cuts him off before he can finish, pressing her lips to his. He runs his fingers along her cheekbone and pulls her close her, feeling her chest press against his, her warmth mingling with his. He can smell her sweat, can feel her bare legs against his.

There’s a fire in this kiss that wasn’t there the other night, an urgency. After a minute, he pulls back, resting his hand on her cheek. “What’s with the hurry?”

Bea blinks up at him, eyelashes batting at her cheeks. “I don’t want you to leave,” she says. “I had to stop you from leaving.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispers against her mouth. “Staying right here.”

When he kisses her again, he hopes she can feel what he does: that he found what he was searching for—not Alessandro, but Bea. The girl with fire in her eyes and a stubborn spirit and the potential, he thinks, to love him forever.

There’s so much forever, Bea had said to him the other day. In the moment, it had sounded terrifying, but now he knows there’s nothing as good as forever when it has Beatrix Madison in it.

Afterward

Verona, 2020

Dear Juliet,

We both used to think you were a load of nonsense, but that was before we met each other, right here, just below your balcony. We’re not saying we believe in fate now, but it’s not totally off the table.

Love’s not totally off the table anymore, either. Neither of us believed in it before, but now we know a bit better. We know that you can love somebody for the way they blush and how much they love their grandmother and how terrible their driving is. And we know that you can love somebody for their bright blue eyes and the way they tease you and how safely they drive. We know that love, the way it’s supposed to be, makes you happy in all the best ways.

So, thanks, Juliet. We’re sorry you couldn’t get the ending we’re getting.

Love (the real kind),

Niall and Bea

#1dff #movies challenge #niall

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nedcanquen · 5 years

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Chapter 10: Mr 7th Floor

When I posted Chapter 9 I mentioned that I applied to grad school. Well the good news is...I GOT IN! I had to once again move to a different country (in a different part of the world) and start my Masters. I’ve enjoyed it, but it was a huge adjustment for me, hence the long delay. Thank you so much to anyone still reading this and following this story. <3

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Tags: Slow Burn (like…really slow burn) - endgame is NedCan but they don’t get there directly, Single POV, Yep, Canada will date other people before endgame because he’s very desirable even if he doesn’t always know it, Audit firm AU, Office AU, some angst…

Pairings: NedCan (endgame), NorCan, implied NedDen, DenNor, implied Spamano, France/Jeanne d’Arc, GerIta

Matthew is about ready to stop fucking crying already. But it’s therapy, so all he gets is a break until the next session, he supposes. Dr Laurinaithis is not fussed, he must have a closet full of tissue boxes in this job, and seen a few swimming pools worth of tears. Matthew doesn’t know how he feels about that, but he does feel like going through two boxes of tissue papers is too much, no matter how kind Dr. Laurinaithis is about it.

It's a relief to leave the building, though he wishes that the lightness he’s supposed to feel after a huge cry was actually there. It’s not. Because he’s forced to talk about things out loud that he usually tries to hide from himself, he’s feeling raw. It occurs to him that he may need emotional support to even get through therapy. His mind jumps to Lukas, just because it had been his idea in the first place, and immediately dismisses it.

Sometimes the hard thing about a breakup wasn’t the breakup itself, but breaking the habits that had been formed before it. Matthew and Lukas had moved slow, but he had always been aware of him in a strong sense, and knew that Lukas was a reliable man and a good listener. Maybe that was why Lukas was the first person he had called when he panicked about Arthur. He feels embarrassed about that now, Arthur is a grown man who doesn’t need anyone to be regulating his drinking, and when did Matthew care about drinking this much? It wasn’t the drinking he had responded to, he knows that now, it was the realization of the loneliness Arthur would have had to have been experiencing to over-rely on a bottle. If Arthur were still his direct Manager, Matthew would have found him and kept him company. As it was, not he never really knew where Arthur was in the world at any point of time, or if he would be welcome, or if Arthur the Partner would have any time for him, so he tried to get other people to make sure that Arthur was cared for. It’s a strange thing, Matthew doesn’t even do this for his own father, and his mother has never needed help. He’s always felt like the soft and vulnerable one in his family, but Arthur respected that, somehow teaching him how to succeed in this firm despite wanting to hide from the world sometimes.

Maybe it’s time to visit Mom. Except he feels bad for burdening her with his insecurities, and moving to the city and thriving here is supposed to be proof that he’s grown up now, all her hard work was worth it. She would see right through him the moment he walked through the door.

As he climbs into his car he looks at his now terrible reflection in the mirror. Not good, Arthur's farewell do is in a couple of hours. He really didn't plan this out very well, but Dr Laurinaithis‘ first available appointment had been today and sometimes Matthew was a little too efficient with getting through his to do list. He pulls out the wet wipes he keeps in the glove compartment and runs it over his face, hoping the cool and damp cloth will do something about the obvious swelling around his eyes and nose.

He can blame it on allergies. Yeah why not. They were going to a park after all.

But first, time to pick up Shell.

He knows the way to her place so he drives there almost on autopilot. She wouldn't be fooled by the “allergies”excuse, so he'll probably have to come clean to her about therapy. The idea makes his stomach clench, he knows objectively that Michelle wouldn;t judge him, but therapy is still something intensely personal. But still, shouldn’t he give her a chance? Friendship was also about vulnerability. Then again, she was also a colleague, and he doesn’t want their friendship to make her work more difficult. She just saved him from a terrible meeting earlier in the week, and now he wonders if she'll question his ability to work and lead, if his lack of promotion somehow pushed him off an edge.

Matthew takes a deep breath and decides to get on with it. She’ll notice or she won’t.

He drives up and sees her standing in front of her apartment, grinning at him in a light blue dress, and waving excitedly at his car. He cracks a smile at that. He's just thrown on an old red t-shirt and a pair of jeans, it's a barbecue after all and he'd rather not have his better clothes stained with fat and smoke.

The moment she gets in the car, her face drops. Yep, no fooling Shell. He opens his mouth to try to explain but finds he can't really.

Michelle squeezes his shoulder. “Matt… are you…” but maybe because he couldn't say anything, she opts not to either, and just leans in to hug him.

There's a moment of guilt where Matthew feels terrible for bringing her mood down, guilt that he can't admit something that is nothing to be ashamed of, but he appreciates the hug and leans into it all the same. Somehow it’s a little better.

“Sorry to worry you Shell, I just had a rough morning, I'll be fine.” Her hair smells like coconuts and there’s some part of him that thinks of warm island breezes and white sands, far away from his problems here.

When they pull back, she tilts her head, pondering. “Matt I didn’t want to bring it up earlier because I wasn’t sure if it would help and you didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and I’ve always looked up to you. But I feel like I have to say something. You’ve been through a lot lately, and you've been holding it together really well. Sometimes I don't know why you're still even in the team instead of running off to a well deserved island break. Francis would deserve it. And Lukas I mean… have you had a chance to talk about Lukas? And you invited him today so...Look Matt, no one will think less of you if you’re selfish for-.”

“I don't want to talk about it right now Shell.” He’s exhausted, he's talked all morning. “Thanks, really. It’s just that… trust me I'm talking a lot.”

She doesn’t press, and Matthew is glad, but she does pat his arm. “That’s great, but...I’m here too if you need me you know. Also, I would totally make up a good excuse for you if you decide you need to leave early today. You’re the one who told me that rest doesn’t mean weakness, it’s just strength in the long run.”

How did he come up with these things? “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” He repeats out loud, but in his head he hears Arthur say it, because that’s who he had learned it from. Sure, Arthur wasn’t great at living by the occasional wisdom he managed to say out loud (and read in a book somewhere), but that didn’t mean it wasn’t wisdom. It was Arthur who showed him that you trudged on, no matter the difficulty or tears. He’s seen Arthur fight through insecurity and frustration with little to no guidance to rise on his own.. It’s another reason why Matthew has to turn up, has to celebrate his day with everyone. Arthur was the first person whom he felt had really seen the value in him and invested time into him. He’s a big reason why Matthew is the professional he is today.

“Yeah.” Michelle replies with a worried smile.

First they stop off at the florist to collect the flowers that Michelle had ordered. Gardening was one of Arthur’s passions, though Matthew wasn’t sure how many people remembered that anymore. These flowers wouldn’t imitate a garden, but they would be the closest they could get to recreating a happy space for Arthur.

Under Michelle’s guidance they had outdone themselves. Somehow, Michelle had secured two barbecue pits in the park. Jack and Gerard from Daan and Arthur’s team were cooking up a storm, and as far as Matthew could figure out - took barbecues very very seriously. But it’s exactly what Matthew had previously envisioned - children ran around on the green, playing with each other. The open air and casual atmosphere made everyone relax, the flowers they were setting up made everything look that much more festive. Although, the lack of beer at a barbecue was perhaps a little obvious and noticeable.

“Juice?” Ha strolls up with a grin, holding two cartons of orange juice in hand.

Oh man...they’re never going to hear the end of this.

“Or…” Ha grins “Are we holding out for the sparkling juice?” The alcohol-free ‘champagne’ - still get the pop, but no kick. For the purposes of the day, Michelle branded it “child’s wine.”

Matthew grins, “No reason not to have both.”

All the Partners are late, which doesn’t surprise anyone. It seemed to be a regular code of conduct to allow the rest of the staff to enjoy each other’s company before the bosses came in. What was surprising however, was who arrived next.

“How come there’s no music at this party?” Mathias grins as he walks in with Emil, rolling in a cart of danishes and other delicious foods. Just how much were they going to eat today?

“Mathias? Hi.” Matthew waves. Why was he here? Was it weird to feel like he and Mathias were kinda friends? Even though they didn’t know each other very well and had met under very convoluted circumstances. “Oh wow these kids are going to be on a sugar high all day today.” He doesn’t know how Arthur will feel about rowdy children - he knows the man loves kids but generally in an unrealistic way.

“That’s the plan!” Michelle laughs.

Matthew nods and walks around, greeting everyone but ultimately he’s just looking for a bench to sit on while everyone else is occupied. He lets the sound of happy children trill behind him as he takes in the view of people simply enjoying their lives on the green. He breathes in deeply, and lets his breath out, calming his mind and thinking about nothing in particular. When he finds his empty bench, he sits and muses a little. He realizes that he’s not changed as much as he thinks - he’s generally known who he is. But at the same time, he feels born anew, like he’s stumbling to figure out the world all over again for the first time. He thought he had it figured out, he’s been doing what some invisible societal book out there tells him he has to do, that Arthur had mastered, and the book wasn’t wrong per se, but it was wrong to deny him himself. As Dr Laurinaithis (Toris, he had told him to call him Toris - Matthew can only imagine how he must have butchered the man’s name) gently told him this morning - it’s about learning to rephrase, to be present, to be conscious and aware. Matthew is focused on what he hasn’t achieved, and not so much on what he has.

Easier said than done really. It’s one thing to understand the logic of doing that, it’s another to be personally sold on it. So he’ll start with baby steps - if he doesn’t feel comfortable with something, he won’t just push down that feeling, he’ll process it. Maybe Shell is right, maybe he needs a trip…

“Didn’t think you’d be the one to judge a party without alcohol.”

Matthew is jarred out of his thoughts by a somewhat concerned looking Daan, who’s holding a cup of orange juice in his hand.

Daan looks like he’s about to say something with his trademark dryness but stops. His expression shifts from glib to concerned. “Hey…” He doesn’t finish his thought though, Daan casts a nervous look behind at the party for a moment, then looks down with a sigh. He silently comes over to sit next to Matthew on the bench.

Matthew tries to saw something to dismiss the concern, some greeting, to steel himself to stand and join the party. But he’s just too tired. Instead he asks “I look that bad huh?” It’s not much of a question.

Daan doesn’t bother to voice the obvious, and offers the orange juice instead. “I haven’t had any.”

“No thanks.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and Matthew is glad. He’s glad he doesn’t have to explain himself, but he’s not happy that Daan has seen him like this. There’s nowhere to escape in a park though, so he may as well just sit here. Anyway, Daan’s presence has its advantages, like giving him a further excuse not to go back to the party. And now that he’s free to just return to his silence, Matthew finds himself observing Daan when the other leans over, resting his arms on his knees, sipping from his cup. He remembers what Lukas said, about Daan having to give away a project, about Daan going through a weird transition right now.

He can’t see a shred of evidence of it anywhere.

Matthew takes a breath “How do you do it?”

“Hmm?”

“Arthur drinks, I...well I work out and occasionally go hiking, but I’m obviously not dealing with my troubles well because you took one look at my face and decided it’s better not to drag me back to the party. But you, you’ve never looked weak, no one would look at you and go ‘hey...maybe I shouldn’t promote him, I don’t want to be guilty of manslaughter.’”

Daan let’s out an annoyed huff. Matthew observes him as Daan sits up and straightens himself. “I’m pretty sure you saw me during a pretty rough patch at least once. Like that night you brought Emil to Mathias’ cafe. Man...that was a really shitty time. I was doing a pretty good job at denying just how shitty it was just two days before that, but there’s nothing quite like enforced quiet solitude on a 24-hour flight to make you realize how much you’re not going to be able to lie to yourself about this one.”

Daan’s voice is filled with so much...regret? Matthew doesn’t realize he’s reached out until he’s squeezing Daan’s arm in reassurance. They both tense with the contact, and Matthew quickly withdraws his hand. Stupid stupid stupid. “Sorry.” He mumbles, though he’s not sure what exactly he’s sorry for.

Daan doesn’t move, he just stares at the grass. “I trust my people.”

Matthew screws up his face in confusion. What did Daan’s team have to do with anything?

“Arthur drinks; you work out and hike; I have pets, a sister who can’t ever stop mocking me to remind me that I’m not that great, a baby brother who somehow looks up to me enough that it balances out her mocking, a friend who makes sure I’m fed and will drag me out of my door kicking and screaming if needs be to just...cycle somewhere, a…” Daan stops suddenly and frowns, squeezing the bridge of his nose and taking a deep breath, which he lets out. “You get the idea. I have people that I trust, to see me like that, like this - the way you saw me when I forgot my keys. I didn’t always have them, I didn’t always appreciate them, but I get by because I have them. I’m not a particularly social man, but I have a community that’s mine. That’s how I do it.” Daan stands from the bench and Matthew’s eyes can’t help but follow him, looking up and Daan turns. “You do too. And so does Arthur to be honest, neither of you are the lone wolves you try to be.”

Matthew laughs. “Lone wolf? Me?”

Daan shrugs. “We never really knew each other until recently, but I remember seeing you around before. Always in a group with other associates, usually with either Michelle or Ha, or…well, leaving birthday cupcakes on Arthur’s desk in the early hours of morning...”

Matthew’s eyes widen, Daan had seen that?

“Made me jealous to be honest,” Daan continues. “No one’s ever left me cupcakes.”

Matthew laughs. “Your housemate makes damn good danishes.”

“Well yes, but let’s be honest here, he’s never really made them for me, I just happened to be around. Besides, is a danish a cupcake?”

Matthew shakes his head and rolls his eyes fondly. Honestly.

“My point is,” Daan adds pointedly. “You have a community. Let them help you. Not saying hiking isn’t a good coping mechanism though.”

Matthew finds himself feeling a little lighter, and able to stand to return to the party. He looks up at Daan’s concerned face and smiles. “Thanks for the pep talk.” Daan is really really good at his job - who knew that this guy could give good talks like this? No wonder his team did so well.

Daan nods and looks behind him. “You want to join the party? Or should I make up an excuse?”

Matthew turns and observes the party too. It’s happy, pleasant and perfect - Michelle’s magic in full displace. “I don’t want to ruin it by bringing down the mood, Shell worked so hard. But I haven’t quite reached the point where it’s polite to leave yet. I should at least speak to Arthur. It’s crazy, I haven’t really talked to him at all lately.”

Daan’s tapping his fingers on the back of the bench, and Matthew doesn’t look at him, expecting him to leave at any moment. But instead, Daan surprises him.

“Want company or to be alone? Lukas will text me when they’re about to arrive, no one’s going to hold it against you if you sit out here. You’ve already greeted everyone.”

“I…” Both? Matthew wants Daan right next to him, a solid presence on a day when Matthew feels cast out at sea, riding on tumultuous waves of his stamped down emotions. He also doesn’t want to be a burden.

“Right, don’t worry. Take your time.”

“Wait!”

Daan pauses in his stride surprised. He must have presumed that Matthew’s reluctance to speak was out of politeness, not indecision.

“I don’t mind company I’m just not great company myself right now so, it’s really up to you. I’m sure you have schmoozing to do.”

Daan casts a skeptical look at the party. “I see them practically everyday. I don’t mind some quiet. They’re all in love with Mathias anyway, I’ll give him a chance to keep charming his regulars, uninterrupted.”

Matthew can’t help but laugh. “So he knows everyone?”

Daan shrugs. “Well whenever we have a party we tend to buy food from him, so by now, yeah.”

“I distinctly remember him telling you that night at the cafe, that PKDE was your life, not his.”

Daan lets out a snort and a little laugh. Matthew likes that little laugh, a little too much. He churns inside because no.

No. No. No.

Nononononononono…

“Sometimes when I piss him off he says things yeah, but he’s such a softy now you have no idea.”

For lack of anything else to say (because he’s afraid to say anything), Matthew just replies, “Tell me.”

So Daan does, and Matthew looks down at the grass seeing nothing because he knows he’s gone and done something even more irrevocably stupid. It was inevitable really, just a matter of time, and he had been in so much denial because he hadn’t wanted to stop himself. But was there really any other way that this was going to go for him? He can’t even hide it from himself anymore.

He’s in love.

#nedcan #APH Canada #aph netherlands #fic: Mr 7th floor

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alicedopey · 5 years

Text

A Birthday Encounter

Paring: Halfdan x OC (Gaby)

Genre: Romance

Warnings: None

Wors Numbers: 2406

A/N: Well.... this is for my love’s birthday @naaladareia I hope you will like it. Best wishes, my love.

Halfdan pulled the door of the bar with a groan. The day has been long. Too long for his liking as a matter of fact. First day in this country and he already felt irritated and alone. He should not have let his brother persuade him to go to Germany to expand their empire.

“We have to beat those damn Ragnarssons.” It was a mantra for Harald. An obsession. He wanted to be the greatest in the industry....well, greater than Ragnar and his sons. His new idea ? Making his brother travel through Europe because Ragnar had only stayed focused on Scandinavia. The idea was good but the problem was that Harald wished to stay in Norway now that he finally got a loving wife and these long desired children. He knew he was the only one Harald could trust. Halfdan did not really want to do it but he was always willing to please his brother. So, he went: Paris, London, Madrid, Rome....and now Berlin.

He was exhausted and he needed a good drink. When he spotted the facade of the “Monkey Bar”, he smiled and came in. A warm and cozy atmosphere greeted him. The place was not too much crowded, which was perfect. The last thing he wanted was some awfully noisy place after the day he had to endure. He made his way to the counter where a smiling barmaid was waiting for him.

“Good evening”

He saw her acknowledging the fact that a foreigner was standing in front of her.

“Good evening, Sir”. She answered with a strong German accent. “Would you like a drink ?”

“Yes, please. I'm sure you can give me a strong nice beer.” He offered her his most dazzling smile.

“Right away, Sir.” She turned around to fix his drink and gave it back to him a few seconds later.

He took his drink and winked at her. Her cheeks slightly reddened. Not really his type....too young, too bubbly but he could use a nice fuck to relax.

Another patron called for her attention and she left him alone with his thoughts.

Scanning the room, he observed the different groups of people in the bar. There were mostly students or young couples enjoying a Thursday night.....except for the lady on his left, brooding over a glass of red wine.

She looked lonely and upset. His eyes roamed over her body: dark blonde hair caught in a messy bun, some body hidden under a casual outfit ….which was a pity if you asked him since she appeared to possess attractive curves. Her presence here was definitely not planned. Bad breakup maybe ?

He walked towards her softly and cleared his throat to make his presence known. She turned her head and squinted her eyes at him - soft brown eyes mirroring his. He could tell she was a little bit older than him. He didn't mind at all. He always had a tendency to be more into experienced women. And this one had no cause to be envious of the young ladies around her, quite the contrary.

“Speak English ?” He asked tentatively and she nodded. “Can I buy you another drink ?”

“I'm not going to sleep with you if that's what you want.”

Halfdan laughed. “Straight to the point, I like that.” Her eyes were telling him otherwise though.

Having always been the one to read people easily, he knew she was attracted to him as he was attracted to her.

“I thought about it to be honest but here's what I'm suggesting. Nothing will happen unless you ask me to.”

The ghost of a smile appeared on her face. “That's a little bit cocky, don't you think ?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “What do you say ?”

He saw her internal battle but the way her eyes were boring into his let him know he had won. She nodded and he waved his hand to ask the barmaid for another glass. The latter gave it to him with a disappointed frown on her face.

“Shall we ?” He pointed a secluded area with comfortable armchairs.

She took the glass from his hands and lead him to it. “I'm Gaby, by the way.” She added, sitting down.

“Halfdan.”

She tilted her head to the side. “That sounds very Nordish.”

“It is ! I'm from Norway.”

Her eyes widened. He sensed he had awakened her curiosity. “You're interested ?”

She cleared her throat, blushing in the sweetest way possible. “I am. Scandinavia is actually one of my dream destinations.”

“It would certainly give you a good excuse to visit me.” She rolled her eyes at him. “I'm in Oslo most of the time but I have a beach house in Bergen. I think you would like that.”

“Maybe....I like walking on the beach, putting my toes in the warm sand. I find it comforting....” She blushed again, realizing she had confessed some intimate things about her to a complete stranger.

He simply winked at her. “The sand won’t be the only comforting one in there, believe me.”

If she was shocked, she did not show it. Looks like she was getting used to his blunt comments. Most women would have run away or slapped him....or maybe offered themselves.

But this Gaby looked special. He liked that. A lot.

“So...” He took a sip of his refreshing beer. “Not to be rude or anything but you're not dressed to go on a date. How did you end up here ?”

She smiled at his bluntness. So she was not touchy either. Good.“I was supposed to meet a friend for my birthday.”

“Oh...happy birthday, then.” He raised his glass. “Don't worry, I won't ask how old you are turning...”

“And I won't answer.” She raised her glass in response; “Anyways, she had a family emergency so she canceled. I would have liked her to tell me before I drove six hours from home to get there.” She finished her drink in one gulp and Halfdan ordered another. “My weekend is ruined and I just have to go back home.”

“Depends...you could spend the night with me at the hotel. I have a nice room at the Mariott. Then, tomorrow, you could be my guide through Berlin.”

She smiled. “That's very nice of you but I have my own place in Berlin. Besides, I'm sure someone as important as you doesn't have time for tourism.”

“How do you know I'm important ?”

“The suit. The Mariott....always wondered how nice and classy it could be.”

“You could.” He smirked as she chose to ignore it. “You are quite right though. I'm the CEO of the company I own with my brother.” But he did not want to talk about that right now, he was curious about something else. “What were you supposed to do with your friend ?”

She seemed to hesitate. “I'm sure you can't do worse than me disguised as a giant dinosaur for my nephew's birthday party.”

“That, I would pay to see.” She giggled, a nice little sound he would pay to hear again. “All right... I was supposed to go to a Renaissance Fair. My friend and I used to do that a lot in the past. We miss it. My birthday was the perfect occasion to go again.”

“And you thought I would laugh at you ? Trust me, I've taken part in historical guilds as well. I still do, actually. My brother and I love dressing up as our Viking ancestors.”

A nice sparkle appeared in Gaby's eyes, the same Halfdan had seen when he had mentioned he was from Norway. So she liked Vikings...

A chill ran down his spine, picturing the two of them all dressed up and ready for a wild night. He as a Viking and she, in a beautiful outfit that would leave enough cleavage for him to fall into. Maybe he could be the ruthless and bloody Viking abducting a sweet princess, rebellious but so willing to get perverted.

“You and your brother seem pretty close ?”

He shook his head and frowned, trying to focus on her words. Down, boy. You won't get any tonight.

“Yeah, we are. We lost our parents when we were young. We rely on each other even though he is a pain in the ass.” He smiled at that. “Got any siblings?”

“No, never got the chance......it is just me and my mother, now.” Her eyes reflected sadness and resignation as she drank her second glass. Halfdan chose not to push her and tried to lighten the mood, ordering again for both of them.

“Even though my brother is a pain, my nephews aren't !”

“I'm sure of that.” She smirked. “I mean, you wouldn't play dinosaur for a little brat.”

He laughed out loud at her comment. Halfdan was really appreciating her more and more. “I guess not....you have children, yourself ?”

She shook her head. “You ?”

“Nah... I don't really think it's for me to be honest. Don't get me wrong, I love my nephews and I'm already in love with my little niece on the way but I don't feel the desire of having children of my own. My brother does and I'm so happy he finally found the one after so many heartbreaks but.... I guess, we just have different expectations from life. I want someone I feel close to, have fun with her, share some things, travel. It might be crazy but...”

“It's not....” His eyes rose up to hers. He felt a connection. Right there. She felt it as well and he knew it. Was it love at first sight ? Maybe not.... but still, he wanted to know her better, to do things with her (and not only the naughty ones).

One drink after another, he learned a lot of things about her. She was living in a town called Leverkusen (Bless you !), she was an assistant tax consultant, pasta was one of her favorite meals – along with cheese and chocolate, she loved some pretty good medieval music and she used to have cats.

All through the night, he sensed she was trying to keep her hands to herself – and he had some trouble doing it as well) but with the alcohol in her system, he felt her relax and she leaned closer, her hot breath tickling his facial hair, her fingers lightly touching his shoulder or stroking his arm when she laughed. By the Gods, he loved that laugh. He could not resist, then. He tucked one of her hair that had fallen from her messy bun behind her ear and let his finger slide along her cheek.

She shivered and she bit her lip, straightening herself in her seat and getting away from his touch.

“It's getting quite late. I'd better go....” She took her purse and her eyes scanned the room to spot the waiter.

“Drinks are on me.” She opened her mouth to protest but he would have none of that. “It's your birthday after all.” He added, winking.

Her lips stretched in a tiny smile. “Thank you.” She stood up and he made his way to the counter to pay. From the corner of his eye, he saw the barmaid from earlier brooding in a corner and he couldn't help smiling. Too bad for her but he had found his gem. He paid and joined her outside.

She was looking at the sky and enjoying the fresh air of a March night here. Gaby turned her head towards him as she heard the noise from the bar when he opened the door.

She smiled wickedly at him. “Thought I left ?”

He chuckled. “Did not cross my mind.” He walked towards her lazily until he could almost touch her. He heard her sharp intake of breath as he leaned over her. He remembered his promise though and waited with belated breath for her to make the first move.

She finally closed the distance between them, her delicate hands against his chest. She grazed her lips over his tentatively. Once, twice...and really kissed him. He groaned against her mouth and did his best no to touch her. She deepened the kiss, her tongue crossing the barrier of his teeth. She put his arms on her hips and he was too glad to be able to embrace her at last.

They exchanged a few more kisses before somebody whistled at them. Their lips broke apart and he smiled at her. Her cheeks were rosy, her breath had quickened. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“You sure you don't wanna come with me to the hotel ?”

She slapped his chest and laughed lightly. “Don’t dream, mister. Not on the first date.”

He arched an eyebrow. “You count this as a date?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “We talked, we drank, we kissed....what else do you want to call it?”

“Fair enough.” He let got of her to search something in the pockets of his pants and retrieved a card and a pen from it. “This is my professional card but I'm giving you my personal number.. just in case.”

He held it out to her and Gaby took it, to put it in her purse.

“I might call you tomorrow morning....if you're still up for a little tour of Berlin.”

Of course, he was ! “I would love that.”

“Perfect.” She pecked his lips and stepped backwards before he could initiate another steamy kiss in the middle of the streets.

“You're sure you don't want me to walk you home ?”

“No, thanks. It's not that far away from here. I'm a big tough girl, don't worry”. She smiled. “Goodnight, Halfdan”.

“Goodnight Gaby.” He answered softly. “Happy birthday once again.”

She smiled again and turned around. He watched her until she had disappeared into the darkness of the night. He could not wait for tomorrow. Germany was not so bad after all....

Tagging: Please tell me if you want to be added or removed ; )

@naaladareia @therealcalicali @tephi101 @peaceisadirtyword @mblaqgi @ilooklikeididyesterday @thevikingsheaux @ivarslittlebadgirl @ivarswickedqueen @akamaiden

#vikings #fanfic #halfdan the black #halfdan x oc #halfdan vikings #romance #fluff #naaladalareia

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theonewiththefanfics · 6 years

Text

At Arm’s Length (Part 4)

Part 1- Modern!AU

Part 2

Part 3

Pairing: CEO!Bucky x Reader

Genre: angst

Warnings: swearing

Word count: 1597

In the end, Y/N had to switch her phone off, the incessant ringing driving the girl mad. She didn't know what to do. On the one hand, her heart was doing summersaults from happiness, on the other, she just wanted to cry her eyes out at the simple thought of the many miles between her and Bucky. He’d done a thing neither could reverse that easily. And Y/N had enabled his actions, so she had to take at least half the blame. If the woman hadn’t agreed to the announcement party, if she hadn’t allowed him to kiss her cheek, maybe things would’ve gone differently. My Chemical Romance’s ‘Dead!’ started to blast through the little portable speaker and she could only wish to be six feet under. How Y/N was going to deal with the fallout of this situation was beyond her.

Meanwhile, Bucky was not fairing any better. He’d just confessed his love for a girl on live TV even though for the past two months she had been pushing him as far away as possible. But the guy was done. Done with running from his feelings, done with his one true love fleeing, done with being unhappy. Steve patted Bucky on the shoulder bringing the co-owner of ‘Barnes and Rogers’ back to the reality of brightly flashing lights, fancy suits and dress gowns. “That was a bold move, punk. You sure Y/N isn’t gonna come back just to rip your head off?” “Well if she does then phase one is complete- get her back to New York.” A smirk was plastered on his face while his heart stuttered. What if confessing wasn’t enough? What if any grand gesture would always be too little? Bucky was sure he’d wait forever for the Y/E/C eyed beauty, but at the same time, it didn’t mean he would simply give up in the meantime. “And what is phase two?” came the voice of Tony Stark as she sauntered up to the two men, giving the photographers a dazzling smile, proudly having linked his elbow with Pepper. “That… that I’ll figure out…” Tony hummed, extending an arm as a signal for the four to move further down the carpet. “She called me, you know.” Bucky’s head turned so fast he almost got whiplash. “And?” “And she was on the verge of a panic attack. Told her to contact you as soon as possible. So once she calms down, and hopefully gets her three brain cells working, she’ll drop a message. Heaven knows that the girl has never taken her happiness into account. Maybe this was the push she needed.” As the night went by Bucky felt his insides twist more and more with each passing moment. Y/N hadn’t called him nor sent a text message and it made him jittery. Tony, Steve and him announced the merge of ‘Stark Industries’ with ‘Barnes and Rogers’, bringing their focus on the development of prosthetics and artificial limbs. Champagne had flown, merry chatter had flittered through the air, yet all the brown-haired man could feel was nervousness, rather than the joy of this momentous occasion. “What if I totally pushed her away?” he turned to Steve, a glass of white wine sitting on a small table in front of them. “What is she just completely blocks me and never wants to see me again?” The blond sighed, chugging down the last drops of his own alcohol before meeting the gaze onto his best friend. “Listen, you just dropped an atomic bomb on a girl, who without a question is completely head over heels for you. Yet you did it on live TV, while she is away in a different country let alone a continent. You can’t expect Y/N to be completely collected after something like that.” A smaller hand rested atop his. Looking to his left he saw Natasha. The redhead was clad in a deep burgundy cocktail dress, her hair straight and framing the beauty’s face in the most complimentary way. “You did the right thing, Mister Barnes. Y/N… she didn’t even tell me or Wanda that she was moving away. And we were very close. So I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to even think about explaining this situation to her childhood friends, let alone the man she's in love with. Give her a little bit of time. If by the end of the night there is nothing, I promise to fly over there and beat some sense into that head of hers.” Bucky smiled, squeezing Nat’s hand in his bigger one as a silent thank you. But unbeknownst to everybody in the room, silent clicks of cameras immortalised the moment forever.

***

He didn’t stay at the event for much longer, the anticipation of a call or any sort of message from Y/N had become almost physically painful. And as much as he wanted to be the one to contact her first, Bucky knew he had to let the woman process what had just happened. If someone had done it to him, the man was sure, he would’ve passed out. Bucky loosened up the little black bowtie before it completely came off, the small piece of fabric discard somewhere on his beige sofa. He was just about to make himself a drink when his computer lit up, the unmistakable sound of a Skype call shattering the quiet of his house. Immediately he was by the desk, sitting in the armrest and pressing answer. There could only be one person who would wish to communicate with him during such late hours and through Skype. Y/N’s face lit up the screen and Bucky swore he felt his heart melt. It had only been a little over a week since he hadn’t seen her, yet nothing had changed. The woman’s Y/E/C eyes sparkled just as brightly, her Y/H/C hair looked just as soft and her features were just as beautiful as ever. “Doll,” he breathed out, a wide smile splitting up his face. But her reaction was completely opposite of his. “Why would you do something like that?” She sounded so small, broken even and only then did Bucky notice how there were tear streaks marking a way down her cheekbones. “Because I love you. And I’m not going to run anymore. Nor will I let you do it.” Y/N hung her head, the man’s words stinging more than they would’ve if they hadn’t been so painfully true. “You do realise what kind of a problem you just created?” “A problem? Y/N, I just said what my heart felt. I’m in love. And I simply told who I love. Is there anything wrong about it.” “No…” she huffed looking around her new room. Bucky saw a picture of him, Steve and the girl herself, set up on a nightstand, instantly wishing he was actually there with her. “Then what’s so bad about me confessing?” “Because you did it on live TV in front of millions. My phone is unusable because it keeps blowing up. You are my new boss thanks to the merging of yours and Stark's companies, and to top it all off- I’m thousands of miles away! I told you it would never work and now you’ve made a whole nation believe in this Cinderella story but Bucky… I’m not coming back… This is a permanent move. Yes, maybe I’ll have to fly over for some meetings and work stuff, but other than that…” His heart was breaking with every uttered syllable. “Buck, I’m trying to start a new life here. And unfortunately leaving you behind is a thing I have to do. Otherwise, I won’t be able to move on.” “Then you shouldn’t!” Bucky was almost shouting, angry tears rolled down his own face. “Tell me one good reason why” Y/N sat there, eyes boring into her opponent's cerulean gaze. “Because you love me.” The girl hung her head. It was a simple answer. And it was completely and utterly accurate, that is why the clenching in her heart became almost unbearable. With tears in her Y/E/C she looked up at the man. “Well, sometimes that is not enough.” “No,” Bucky shook his head. “It is enough. You’re just scared. And I get it, I completely do. I’m terrified myself, but, fuck… just give us a chance… just one chance.” He saw the conflict raging inside Y/N. It hurt him to see the woman he was utterly infatuated with, in such turmoil and pain, but maybe that is what she needed to allow them to try at least. Yet her response obliterated every piece of hope. “I’m sorry.” The call disconnected leaving Bucky to stare at the black screen of his computer and with a broken heart, thudding harshly in his chest. Instinctively he pressed the little green icon to make a call, but it didn't go through. He tried again and again, but Y/N wouldn’t pick up nor would she respond to any of the messages he sent. It was almost midnight by the time Bucky gave up, a whiskey glass clutched tightly in his palm. Blue orbs scanned the twinkling lights of New York City. He hadn’t even bothered to switch out from the suit, his expensive Calvin Klein button shirt and Hugo Boss pants still adorning the businessman’s body. Bucky ran a palm through his hair, pulling at the dark locks before abruptly he stood up, determination rushing through his body. “That's it,” Bucky placed the empty glass on the marble countertop as he moved to pack a suitcase. “I’m going to Barcelona.”

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A/N: A little bit shorter, but still :) I’m so super stressed about everything that I had an absolute meltdown last Saturday like it was bad. And I still don’t feel on the top of everything, so I know, I’m already very inconsistent, but this is a really big problem, like I’ve never felt this bad, so I might actually go and find someone to talk to, like a professional, because I’m practically to tears every night and even during the day.

P.S. tell me what you thought :)

P.S.S. if you have a request or wanna be tagged in future stories, drop a message :)

P.S.S.S. please, don’t repost without credit :)

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on-my-way-to-asgard-blog · 6 years

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I Put Your Picture Away

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Bucky and Y/N were in a loving relationship, it was the type of relationship that everyone was jealous of. They loved each other with all of their being, but what happens when their picture perfect relationship falls apart? How do they survive the aftermath?

Warnings: mentions of drug use, and alcohol abuse, Bucky being a fuck boy, angst, mentions religion, fluff if you squint

A/N Hi! I’m trying something different with this fic, I based it off the song “Picture” by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. I really liked writing this one, and I hope that you all enjoy it as much as I did! (If you want to listen to the song, be warned it is a country song)

Living my life in a slow hell Different girl every night at the hotel I ain't seen the sunshine in three damn days

Bucky was off the rails, she was the only one who kept him sane, and now because he fucked up, she's gone. Just like that the only person who held him together was out of his life in a blink of an eye. To some how try to keep himself from falling off the deep end, Bucky distracted himself in every way possible. He tried exercising, like Steve suggested, but that didn't help at all; every mile he ran more and more memories of Y/N piled in his head. Then it was onto writing his feelings on paper, as suggested by Vision, which didn't help either, he would always end up writing about the time he spent with her. He only found relief in complete and utter distraction, and that came in the form of sexual pleasure. Bucky has always been a ladies man, so finding ones that were willing to have no stings attached sex wasn't hard; he rented a hotel room out of town, away from Y/N, and women became his objects of attention. As bad as it sounds it's true, he could care less about the woman in his bed, all he cared about was the one that got away, Y/N. He could feel himself slipping into a hellish darkness, one in which Y/N could only guide him out of.

Been fueling up on Cocaine and Whiskey Wish I had a good girl to miss me Lord I wonder I'll ever change my ways

Along with women, Bucky had turned to drugs and alcohol to cloud her face from his mind. Before she left, he would have never even touched drugs, he was in the Army, he is an Avenger for crying out loud, his best friend does anti-drug PSAs in schools. That's how bad Y/N messed him up, he was willing to throw everything that he has worked for down the drain just to get her out of his head. She probably doesn't even miss him, she was everything to him, and the thought that she is completely fine kills him. He had to do the one thing that she asked him not to huh? Why was he so stubborn?

I put your picture away Sat down and cried today I can't look at you while I'm laying next to her

This was a rare occasion that Bucky had anytime to himself when he's at home. Usually when he's in New York, he's with the team on a mission, but it's been a slow week. For most people having days off would be a blessing, but not for Bucky, to him days off are curses. They give him too many situations where his mind can wander, wander to her; her smile, her laugh, the smell of her hair, and how after a long mission she would wrap her arms around him, clinging to him happy because he's back home. He shakes his head, he can't let himself do this. Picking up his phone, he calls one of his regular hook ups, Rachel. "Hey Buck,"she says pick up on the first ring. "Are you in Manhattan,"the super soldier asks bouncing his leg up and down nervously. "Yeah, actually I am. Why? Do you want me to meet you at the hotel?" "How fast can you get to the tower?" "In about ten minutes." "I'll see you then." He lets her up and leads her onto the floor he shares with Steve. Thankfully, he and Sam were up state at the Avengers compound, so he didn't have to hear the riot act from him, about what he's doing is wrong and blah blah blah. It works. Everything was going fine, until Rachel knocks a picture off the dresser, breaking it. Apologizing profusely, she picks it up, and a funny look appears on her face. "What is it Doll,"Bucky asks walking over. "Who is she,"Rachel asks showing him a picture of him with his arms wrapped around Y/N's shoulders. That was the happiest that either of them were in their lives,"Listen I know that you and I are just hooking up for fun, but you two look happy in this picture. What did she do to you?" "I think you should go,"he says looking at the ground. "Buck, I didn't mean to-" "I said go." She gathers her clothes and scurries out of his room, and he could care less. He picks up the broken frame and looks at the happy couple in the picture, oh how he would give up his right arm to go back to that moment. He feels a tear roll down his cheek, then another, and many more follow. He is the Winter Fucking Soldier! He should not be crying over a girl! But he lets the tears fall, until he can't cry anymore. He throws the picture, broken glass and all, in the back of his closet, trying to forget it forever. Bucky reaches for his box where he keeps his stash, and opens it, but doesn't take anything out. He can't bring himself to chase the high anymore.

I caught you last night in the hotel Everyone knows but they won't tell But their half-hearted smiles tell me something just ain't right

Y/N had been moping for weeks now, ever since she and Buck got into that fight, the same night he walked out of her life, and he hasn't came back. She has completely barricaded herself in her apartment, and has surrounded herself with the memories of what once was. Natasha and Wanda finally convinced her to go out to let loose, and try to get Bucky out of her head. "Can we go somewhere outside of Manhattan,"Y/N asks, not wanting to be somewhere where there is any possibility of seeing him. Y/N decides on a hotel just outside of the city, who's bar has really good reviews. "Are you sure you don't want to go to the club,"the red head asks. "No I don't even want the possible chance of seeing him." The two female Avengers give their friend small sympathetic smiles. Y/N's first and only drink of the night was a glass of white wine, and she barely gets it in her hand when she sees a very familiar glint of silver. The glass falls to the ground shattering into a million pieces (along with her heart), there he is right here. Apparently they had the same idea, great minds do indeed think alike huh? And to push the knife deeper into her heart, she spies a scandalously dressed woman on his arm. It looks like James Barnes didn't have any problem moving on did he?

I've been waiting on you for a long time Fueling up on heart aches and cheap wine I ain't heard from you in three damn nights

Y/N pours herself another glass of wine, and settles in for another lonely night, with a mind filled with memories of Bucky. Maybe, she shouldn't have gotten mad at him for taking the mission. Maybe she should have let him live his own life, how he wanted to. But maybe, she was rightfully mad, he knew how she felt about him posing as the old Winter Soldier on missions. It's not like he was just using the name, as a means to strike fear in to the targets in the mission; no what he did was pose as the ACTUAL Winter Soldier, like speaking Russian and everything. He KNEW that that was the only thing that made Y/N scared and worried about Bucky. And it wasn't like Nat couldn't do it, he took the mission on his own accord, which sent her over the edge. When he go home a week later, Tony had told her what Bucky had done, and she was livid, one thing led to another, and next thing they both knew was that Bucky was walking out the door with a bag of clothes in his hand. Running a hand through her hair, Y/N shakes the thought out of her head. Bucky is the one who took the mission, he's the one who walked out on what they had. He hasn't even tried to call her, nothing, the longest that she has gone with out talking to him, was three days. Even on missions he would call her and tell her that he's okay. She gets her phone out, and calls one of her friends from work, Mark, hoping for a little distraction, James Barnes style.

I put your picture away I wonder where you've been I can't look at you while I'm laying next to him

"Yeah I'll be there in about fifteen minutes Y/N." "Okay see you then," the woman says hanging up her phone. If Bucky can sleep with every girl who crosses his path, so can she. Y/N has never done anything like this, ever, she had only had a handful of boyfriends before Bucky, and he's the only one that she slept with. She walks into the bath room to freshen up, she washes her face, looks at herself in the mirror. Same h/c hair, same e/c eyes, same freckles, it should be the same woman right? One would think that, but Y/N is not the same person that she was when she was with Bucky. She was happier, her eyes had a sparkle in them that only he can put there; taking a deep breath she opens her medicine cabinet and pulls out a small picture. It is a photo that Steve took at a Yankees game, Bucky has his arm around Y/N shoulders, and she is leaning her head on him. Wearing old ball caps, they are both looking at the fireworks going off in the distance, the sparkles in the sky, perfecting mirroring the glitter in both of their eyes. She doesn't let the tears roll down her cheek, no matter how bad she wants to, so instead she sticks the picture in a travel bag and throws in under the sink, forgetting about it. There's a knock at the door, she looks at herself in the mirror one last time, and lets Mark in to distract her.

I saw you yesterday with an old friend

Walking down the street, Y/N sees the same glint of silver like she did that night all those weeks before, and then she hears Steve's infectious laugh. Taking a deep breath she mentally prepares herself for the impending encounter with what once were her two favorite super soldiers. She rounds the corner, only to be greeted by a,"Hey Y/N,"from Steve. "Hi Steve,"she says not making eye contact with Bucky.

It was the same old same how have you been

There she was, walking down the street, looking as beautiful as ever. Bucky and Steve were out running errands when he saw her; Steve had been bugging him for two weeks to call her and apologize for being stupid. He almost did, but he knows that both him and Y/N are too stubborn to go back to each other. "Hey Y/N,"Steve says as she rounds the corner where they are standing. "Hi Steve,"the woman answers, averting her eyes from Bucky, and he is tempted to do the same, but instead a,"Hey Y/N," came out of the soldier's mouth. "Hey Buck,"Y/N says quietly. "How have you been?" "I've been fine thank you, and what about you?" "I've been okay." And with that she walks away, but she seated herself firmly in Bucky's mind.

Since you've been gone my world's been dark and gray You reminded me of brighter days

That little interaction with Steve had reminded them of the people both of them used to be when they were with one another. He was so much more open than he used to be, she brought him out of the shell that HYDRA forced him into. And she was so much more confident about herself when she was with Bucky, before Y/N was very shy and kept to herself a lot, he showed her what she was capable of. They brought out the best in each other.

I hoped you were coming home to stay I was headed to church

Seeing James brought up feelings inside Y/N that she hadn't tried to think about in a while. A little part of her wanted to ask him to come back, and apologize for what happened. But the other part of her, the part that's too stubborn for her own good, knew that if she did that, he would do the same thing. It wasn't often that she consulted a higher power in situations like this, and she wasn't even sure she even believed in one, but Y/N went to church anyway. She was not only desperate for guidance and answers, but something to take her away from Bucky.

I was off to drink you away

Seeing Y/N again, got under Bucky's skin, he finally thought that he was getting over her, but no. She had to come back and not even do a single fucking thing, just seeing her made him feel like a teenager with a broken heart. Walking into the nearest bar, he crawled inside of a whiskey bottle, in hopes of forgetting her face.

I thought about you for a long time Can't seem to get you off my mind I can't understand why we're living life this way

They both know that they were happier with each other, they both know that they were perfect for each other, they both know that they only reason that they are putting themselves through all of this is that they are both too stubborn. Then why don't they both just apologize? Which is what each of them have been think about for weeks. Bucky knows that if he promises that he won't pull a Winter Soldier stunt again, she will let him come back. And Y/N knows that if she doesn't over react as much, and she talks to him instead of blowing up, he would come back.

I found your picture today I swear I'll change my ways I just called to say I want you to come back home

Bucky was cleaning out his closet. Y/N was packing for a much needed vacation. When he grabs a piece of glass with his flesh hand. When she sees piece of paper sticking out of her travel bag. He follows the trail of broken shards, and is greeted by the picture he threw in there so many weeks ago. She grabs a corner and pulls out the picture of her and Bucky at the baseball game. He smiles to himself, and grabs his phone, it's time to done being stubborn. She rushes to her phone, she can't live with out him anymore, but before she can dial his number, his face pops up on the screen. "Hello?" "Y/N?" "James?" "I found a picture of us, the one from Steve's birthday,"she knows the picture,"and it made me realize that we need to get over our stubbornness. Because I can't live with out you, and these past few months have been hell for me with out you." "Oh my gosh,"Y/N breathes out. "I'm sorry. I should probably stop talking now huh?" "No, Bucky I was about to call you and tell you the same thing." "Great minds think alike huh?"

I just called to say I love you Come back home

"Bucky?" "Yes?" "If you want, you could come back home. I miss you so much, the apartment seems so empty with only one person living in it." There's silence on the other line, but then a knock on the door. Y/N opens it revealing James Barnes,"I was really hoping that you would say that, or else this would be awkward." They laugh, and he pulls her into his arms, a feeling that they have missed immensely. "I love you so much,"he says kissing the top of her head.

#bucky barnes #winter soldier #bucky barnes imagine #avengers #avengers imagines #music #sebastain stan #sebastian stan imagine

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johnboothus · 3 years

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Wine 101: Sulfites

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by E & J Gallo Winery. At Gallo, we exist to serve enjoyment in moments that matter. The hallmark of our company has always been an unwavering commitment to making quality wine and spirits. Whether it’s getting Barefoot and having a great time, making every day sparkle with La Marca Prosecco, or continuing our legacy with Louis Martini in Napa, we want to welcome new friends to wine and share in all of life’s moments. Interested in trying some of the wine brands discussed on “Wine 101”? Follow the link in each episode description to purchase featured wines or browse our full portfolio at TheBarrelRoom.com. Cheers, and all the best.

Click the link below to discover and purchase wine brands discussed on the “Wine 101” podcast series. Get 15% OFF of your purchase of $75 or more when you use the coupon code “wine15″ at checkout. https://www.thebarrelroom.com/discover.html?src=vinepair

In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses how sulfites affect wine. Sulfites are arguably the most important element of the wine fermentation process, besides grapes. Sulfur dioxide, otherwise known as SO2, has been used to preserve wine and food storage for centuries — with mentions of the element showing up in Sanskrit writings and even the Bible.

In addition, listeners will learn about the two types of SO2 — bound and free — and how they affect wine differently. Finally, Beavers explain why sulfur dioxide can create a rotten scent.

Tune in to learn more about sulfites.

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Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and aren’t we all, deep down inside, no matter how old we are, a Steely Dan fan?

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 23 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast, Season 2. My name is Keith Beavers. I am the tastings director of VinePair. And yeah, how are you doing?

This is sulfites, wine lovers. This is sulfites. We got to clear the air with sulfites. Are you ready? Sit down. We got this. Let’s get some science going on.

When you have a glass of wine in your hand and you haven’t even smelled it yet, you haven’t even tasted it yet, you are anticipating it. Oh my gosh, I’m about to enjoy a glass of wine. When you put your nose in that glass, you’re going to get a bunch of information that you will interpret as certain aromas that you may have experienced in your life. If you haven’t or you can’t find it, someone will tell you something. However, what you’re expecting is a journey through this glass or through this bottle.

There are certain grapes and blends that have certain characteristics in the aroma profiles that are standard. Cabernet Sauvignon has a certain standard profile. Nebbiolo has a certain standard profile. When you’re smelling a Cabernet Sauvignon, or even a Cabernet Sauvignon blended with Merlot, Barbera, or a Chardonnay, you’re anticipating the aromas that are often associated with that wine. Then, you’re anticipating the additional layers of aromas that are brought about by the winemaking process. The initial aromas that you smell usually are called precursors, which are just the inherent aromas that are inside the grape that come out through the fermentation process and aging. Then, there are the aromas that come from oak or from stainless steel, which is not really a thing. Also, concrete, which is another weird thing. Yet, there are other aging aromas that will develop.

A wine will get more delicate, or you have a young wine that’s not meant to age. Still with that, you are anticipating something. You know that a red blend is going to smell like all the berries and vanilla. It’s going to be soft but it’s going to be pleasant. You know you’re about to experience that pleasant stuff. This experience with wine is only possible because of nature’s ability to combat elements in nature that can compromise that experience. In the next episode, we’re going to talk about some of those things that can compromise your wine experience.

Today, I want to talk about the thing that can protect the wine from some of these things that nature wants to throw at it. That thing is called sulfur, a natural element that takes up 0.5 percent of the weight of the Earth’s crust. You can go on Amazon and just type elemental sulfur. You can buy sulfur from Amazon. It’s a yellowish, pale yellow, brittle, solid substance. When it’s burned in the air, it creates a gas called sulfur dioxide, otherwise known as SO2. It’s in this form as a chemical compound that it’s most widely used by winemakers.

It is one of the most important elements of winemaking besides the actual grapes in the fermentation process. Sulfur dioxide has been used since antiquity to preserve wine and food storage. From ancient Sanskrit speakers, it was called “sulvere.” In the Bible and the Book of Genesis, they call sulfur “brimstone.” In the 15th century, where German winemakers would burn wood shavings, they would use sulfur and herbs inside barrels to prepare them to put the wine in. Finally, in the 18th century, some of the most prestigious Bordeaux chateaux learned from the Dutch to do the same thing to their barrels. Today, SO2 (sulfur dioxide) is used in pretty much all winemaking.

It makes sense because of its protective qualities. To understand this wine protector and what it does for wine, it does two main things. Number one, it’s a minor antimicrobial agent. It sounds pretty cool, right? And number two, it helps to prevent oxidation. It helps to prevent browning agents from browning a wine. Now in the vineyard, remember how I said it takes up some of the Earth’s crust? Well, naturally, there is sulfur in vineyards, and often there’s enough in the soil mix to help prevent whatever is happening out in the vineyard. However, there are certain fungi like powdery mildew, which is a very tough fungus to get rid of. The wineries will sometimes spray sulfur on their vineyards to make sure that powdery mildew does not infect their vines.

Remember in the first couple episodes of the first season, I talked about the challenges that a winemaker has out in the vineyards and how nature is just out there and you have to navigate it? The same thing happens when wine comes into the winery. Once you crush grapes and start the wine process, that grape juice is vulnerable to all kinds of bacteria and oxygen ready to destroy it. Not destroy it, but break it down into something else. It’s nature.

If you were to take an apple, slice it open, and just leave it on the counter, then come back in an hour or so, you’ll notice that oxygen has been soaking into the apple. The apple is browning. That is nature oxidizing and breaking down matter. If you taste that apple, you’ll notice that it’s not as sweet as you expect because the browning agents are starting to take hold and reduce the apple. If you were to shock that apple with SO2, that would protect the apple from browning. If you ever had dried fruit, dried fruit is shot with a ton of sulfur or SO2. A ton, so much more than wine ever gets.

In your typical glass of wine, there are about 0.005 to 0.010 grams of sulfites in your glass. In dried fruit, there’s 10 to 20 times that amount. In wine, we’re just trying to prevent a couple of things from happening, but in food, they’re trying to saturate the whole thing. I find this exceptionally fascinating. I love this stuff. I think science, nature, and chemicals are so amazing. When we understand it and we can harness it, it’s even better.

Now, what happens here is when they shock the must with SO2, two things are going to happen. Number one, during the fermentation process, the SO2 is going to soak into the grape juice. It’s going to bind itself with some of the constituents in the grape juice like sugar and pigment. What that does is it maintains the color and maintains that sugar content. Once the SO2 has saturated as much as it can into the must, there is often still SO2 available that has not binded to the wine. The SO2 that soaked in and did that work is called bound SO2 because it bound itself with constituents in the wine. The SO2 left over from that is called free SO2. That free sulfur dioxide is the sulfur dioxide that does the work of rendering browning agents impotent — not allowing the wine to break down so we can enjoy the things that the wine and the winemakers want us to enjoy.

With all that work being done, there’s going to be some residual sulfites in the resulting wine. There is a very small percentage of the population of humans out there that have a problem metabolizing these sulfites. And because of that, they can have an allergic reaction. It’s very rare, but it happened enough that the TTB, which regulates alcohol in our country, regulated that wine labels need to say, somewhere, “contains sulfites” as a warning. The term “contains sulfites” is the total of the bound and free sulfites together. It’s called the total sulfites. How is your brain doing? Is it a little science-y right now?

It’s a lot, but the thing is, these are things that winemakers have to talk about. What’s really interesting about this whole SO2 addition is it’s going to happen to every wine. It just depends on how much they want to add. It’s really a case-by-case basis. Winemakers are trying to make good wine, and they know that SO2 will protect the wine. They know that if they don’t add enough, something bad is going to happen. If they add too much, something bad is going to happen. If they do that, something may or may not happen on those ends of the spectrum. However, right in the middle, there’s a really good chance that the wine will be sound. It makes sense.

Now that you think about it, if you don’t add enough SO2, more of it is going to bind than be free, or maybe there’s not even enough to bind and be free. Then, you’re letting things in like browning agents and spoilage yeasts. What’s going to happen is that stuff is going to take over the wine. This extreme, no-addition stuff is what people are calling “natural wine” or “low-intervention.” I’m not going to talk about those terms because they have no definition. They’re not really even real. I can’t educate you on things that have no definition. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in the next episode.

If you add too much SO2, you’re overprotecting the wine. When a wine is opened and you pour it into the glass, it wants to breathe. It needs oxygen to open up. Isn’t it crazy how oxygen is the enemy and the friend of wine? Once the wine is poured into a glass, you want oxygen to start opening it up and do the work of all the aromas and stuff coming out. If you over-shock with SO2, the oxygen can’t do enough work, and it makes the wine a little bit flabby.

I was talking to Scott Kozel, who I interviewed for the oenology episode, and he told me that this is really the only tool in the toolbox winemakers have to stem out oxidation. What’s cool is that it is a natural element. It is not a manufactured thing. A little side note: Scott Kozel wrote his thesis on sulfites when he was in school. And because of that, we had another mind-blowing conversation that confirmed a lot of the research I did for this episode. He said some interesting stuff. One thing was that winemakers are more concerned about free SO2 than they are about bound SO2 because those browning agents are a big deal. They don’t want those to take over.

Then I asked him, what is it about the sulfur in nature or the residual sulfur that is used to spread in the vineyard? Does that make it into the winery? And then how does that work? What’s interesting is he said that the sulfur that comes in from the winery often gets converted into what’s called hydrogen sulfide. (Sulfide with a D, not with a T). This is the form of sulfur that smells like rotten eggs. Actually, elemental sulfur also smells like rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide, when fully converted, really has a stank on it. If a winery isn’t practicing good hygiene, then that stink will sometimes make it into the wine. That’s why sometimes when you open a wine, it stinks a little bit. Just let it blow off because it’s residual hydrogen sulfide from the winemaking process, and it was a little dirty.

He also said something that was fascinating. In the early days of canned wine, it showed that SO2 has a reaction to aluminum, which produces hydrogen sulfide. Back in the early days of canned wine, if you were to open a canned wine, it would smell rotten, but it would blow off. That’s basically what was going on. Nowadays, he said that the industry is catching up with that and they’re making more sound wine in cans by limiting the amount of sulfites in the cans so that it doesn’t have enough of a reaction with the aluminum. Interestingly enough, canned wine is low-sulfite wine. Woah. Not only that, but if a winemaker has a lineup of wines, they usually bottle. Then, if they want to add a line of cans to their brand, they really have to make two different wines. That’s crazy.

There you have it: A nice, general rundown of the sulfite thing. I wanted this to be an episode because there is a time in the industry where the idea of sulfites was a hotly debated subject with allergies. Now, sulfites are in a new realm of debate about additions, whether to even add any. I just wanted you guys to know the science behind it so you can make your own decisions based on what people tell you about sulfites. These are the hard scientific facts of what this will do. You may have heard or may be in the middle of a debate about the whole sulfite thing with somebody, but just know that it’s the decisions that people make that define the resulting wine. Science is there. Nature is there. It’s going to do whatever it does.

Winemakers have tools that they use, naturally, that help a wine become something wonderful. SO2 is one of the most important things they have to protect wine, but it comes down to what the winemaker cares about and what they want. Do they want nature to run rampant? Do they want to have control over it? Or do they want to overdo it? It’s a big world out there of wine. All three of those things happen, so this is what sulfites do for wine.

And I know I mentioned some things in this episode that you may not recognize, but just know that in the next episode when we talk about wine flaws, I’ll go into a little more detail about this. I’ll mention sulfites again, but we’re going to talk about what slips through the cracks when SO2 is not there to protect the wine. And things can get iffy. We’ll talk next week.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: Sulfites appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-sulfites/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-sulfites

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lairofsentinel · 6 years

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Questions for the mun

Tagged by @dark-rose89

Copy this and fill in your own answers. Then tag some people to learn more about them.

• Favorite smell – A lot of them. Petrichor. Some people's personal scent. Incense. A lot of perfumes. Jasmines.

• First Job – at 16 y/o, giving private lessons of Maths and Physics. Primary and Secondary level. In that time I also worked as a “kind of computer technician”. I don't know how to call it. Some people had problems with their computer software, so I fix it for them. As all in this country, works are always precarious things. They are ok for a short time. Then you need to switch to another thing.

• Zodiac sign - Taurus

• Favorite pizza – Napolitan one: with 4 cheeses and tomato. Maybe with some broccoli too. And a lot of Garlic, please.

• Favorite dog – Bull Terrier, even though I never had breed dogs. My favourite dogs are the beautiful mongrels I always have :D

• Favorite foot attire – uh… not much into the aesthetic of it. Any black tennis is ok. Or maybe black boots, nothing special?.

• Favorite Roller Coaster – I've never ride one. I will never do. Fear of heights.

• Favorite candy – Chocolate and ice cream.

• Favorite ice cream – Turkish chocolate (it has some alcoholic beverage and grapes, I’m not sure why they called it Turkish here...) and mint.

• Pet peeves – Wait a moment, I will bring my enormous book of pet peeves, Vol I (because I have volumes!)…. But the first one I can think of, is when people stop short in middle of the street to check their damned smartphone, and you, who never has time for anything, bump them. And sometimes they are the ones offended. And you are like “the hell, you can't check your fucking shit in a corner? Close to the wall? Not in the middle of the fucking street? There are people who has no fucking time and has to run-walk not to miss the fucking buses that have no fucking timetables!”. Ah… the grumpiness. My old, eternal friend.

• What are you listening to right now – Silence.I’m in my office, drinking caffe because I’m dying without any sleep.

• Color of your vehicle - I don’t have a car.

• Color of eyes – Brown. Nothing in particular.

• Favorite Holiday – All of them. The longer the better. As long as I don’t have to burn my existence in an endless waste of hours commuting, I'm ok. I even don’t care if they are Christian ones.

• Night owl or day person - Night owl by nature, day person forced by work. Result?: I never sleep. This will have horrible consequences eventually :/. I'm worried about it.

• Fave day of week – Friday. At the end. Like, that small sparkle of life you think you have in your chest, that says “hey, next 2 days, you won't commute, you will be a little free, a little owner of your stupid, meaningless life. You can do something productive. Not sleeping and wasting all that precious time as you always do, fucker.”

• Tattoos – None. I would like to, but…. I don't know. I want some design that follows the muscles, but never saw any decent.

• Like to cook – No, I hate cooking. But I do every fucking day. T_T I need to eat… If only….

• Beer or wine or neither – Water. I stay away from alcohol due to a horrible family linage. I don't want to know if there is some gene in that.

• Can you drive a manual transmissions – what?.

• Favorite color – black.

• Do you like vegetables – Absolutely.

• Do you wear glasses – Kind of yes. Sometimes. When there is too much light in my office I wear sunglasses (because the other people in the office don’t like to read in darkness. Weak ones. XD

• Favorite season – Autumn (right now. Wonderful temperature)

#clearly it was done a monday #my level of grumpiness is so high right now... like... seriously...#it's monday and i didnt sleep and I have ton of shit to do and none will to do so #t.t #someone kill me #i need death to rest a bit

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imminentinertia · 7 years

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Tiny guide to Oslo and Norwegian stuff for SKAM writers

I’m Norwegian and live in Oslo, and this is my attempt to give SKAM writers from other countries a tiny reference work. SKAM is a very realistic show and many writers would like to give their fic a realistic feel, but research isn’t easy! Especially not when it comes to all the little details that are so very culture/area specific and that you never even think about..

Fellow Norwegians and others knowing Oslo well: please feel free to comment on things you disagree with or would like to add!

General tip: avoid mentioning specific brands if you can. Chances are that whatever product in particular you’re mentioning is available in Norway, but it’s not a given, and it may be that there are brands specific to Norway/Scandinavia that are preferred here.

Locations

Here is a map showing the schools and where the characters live. That is, the lower secondary schools the characters went to are marked. The characters who live with their parents will be living near those schools.

For instance, if Jonas and Eva decide to hang out outside their homes, they won’t arrange to meet at Nissen - it’s far from where they both live.

Transport

Oslo has a metro, trams and buses (also trains, but you mostly use them for trips out of the city). Isak runs into Even on a tram in Mekke øl - not a bus, not a train. That tram line (no. 12) will conveniently take you to Nissen, Isak’s flatshare and the homes of Even, Magnus, Jonas and Eva (I don’t know why Magnus and Jonas don’t get on it in Mekke øl…).

William and Penetrator Chris have the use of cars, but I don’t know if they own them (have been given them by their parents) or if they’re borrowing them from their parents. It’s unlikely that the other characters drive anywhere, it’s very common to use public transport or bikes.

You have to be 18 to get a driving licence, and it’s pretty expensive. Getting one is fairly common in Oslo, but more common elsewhere in Norway where the public transport isn’t as good.

Food and drink

Coffee shops

Sorry, but the barista won’t find out the cute customer’s name by the “need your name to write on the cup” trick - we don’t do that in Norway. What you do when you’re getting coffee is order and pay, and then lurk near the counter until the barista calls out the order, not a name.

There are a couple of Starbucks in Oslo, and they are the only coffee shops where you tell the barista your name. The baristas at Kaffebrenneriet (a popular coffee shop chain, mentioned several times in SKAM and where Isak and Even meet up before going to the hotel) will certainly never ask.

Alcohol

You can’t buy alcohol in a store in Norway after 20:00 (18:00 on Saturdays). No, I don’t understand it either, but there you are. Actually you can only buy beer, cider and alcopops in regular food stores, but not wine (except maybe for a couple of weak and horrible sorts) or spirits. You go to Vinmonopolet for wine, spirits and strong beer.

You have to be 18 to buy wine, beer, cider and alcopops, and 20 to buy spirits. This also means that you have to be 20 to go to bars and clubs where spirits are sold, by the way.

You can’t buy kegs of beer in Norway, so keg parties are not a thing here. You bring your own beer/wine/etc. to parties.

Bottled water

If you’re out somewhere and get thirsty you might buy a bottle of still or sparkling water. In a private home you’ll almost never be offered a bottle of water, you will be drinking glasses of (completely safe) tap water. In coffee shops, cafés and restaurants you may order bottled still or sparkling water, but tap water will always be available to the guests.

Cardamom on cheese

There is no cardamom on the horrible cheese toasties in season 3. Isak and Even joke about how that is the problem. It’s not a Norwegian delicacy.

(Sour cream in scrambled eggs is delicious though.)

Language and swearing

Names

It has to be mentioned that not all canon SKAM character names are entirely plausible, or even exist in Norway. Valtersen, for instance, probably isn’t in use at all. If you do a name search you’ll only find out that there are four or fewer persons in Norway with that name, because the official name search doesn’t narrow it down further than that.

That name search is a great help though, because while rare/non-existent canon names in SKAM sound pretty plausibly Norwegian, that is probably not something you as a foreigner will achieve. Look up the names you’d like to use in your fic, and if you can’t find them or get a very low number of people with those names, consider ditching them. Remember that baby name sites often list utterly outlandish first names suggestions, so don’t take all names on Norwegian baby name sites as perfectly good to use.

Local colour

Quite a few non-Norwegian SKAM fic writers like to use a few Norwegian words and phrases, which in my opinion isn’t necessary to get a feel of where and who they are. It’s difficult to get it right when you don’t speak the language.

I’m not going to compile a full SKAM dictionary, just list a few examples I’ve seen several times in fic, and let’s start with the worst of the worst (which isn’t your fault at all, dear writers): “Knulle deg” - well fuck you, Google Translate. The phrase “fuck you” may translate word by word into “knulle deg” (or “pule deg”, which Google translate doesn’t suggest), but this machine translation is just horrible. The phrase you’re looking for is “faen ta deg”.

“Faen ta deg” means “may the devil take you”. A lot of swearing in Norwegian is based on religion, not all that much on sex.

“Kollektivet” - this is pretty iconic, and it’s understandable that writers want to refer to the roommates as kollektivet to keep a sense of the Norwegian-ness, but it’s a definite noun phrase. Writing “the kollektivet” is like writing “the the flatshare”. “The kollektiv” is better.

“Drittsekk”/”drittsekken” - a mild insult, almost invariably used jarringly in SKAM fic. It may be used jokingly as an endearment, but very very carefully and the ways Noora use it as she progresses with William are very subtle, so frankly you’re better off just avoiding it. “Asshole” is not as mild, but perhaps the closest you get in English.

“Halla” - a slang pronunciation of “hallo”. Many people, including myself (I’m a bit older than the SKAM characters), use it lots. It’s become quite iconic in fandom because of Even, so I see the appeal. It’s really informal, use it like you would use “hi”.

“Ja”/”nei” - well, it’s “yes”/”no”. Not too difficult, fic writers rarely get it wrong. It’s possible to mess up “ja” because Norwegian also has “jo”, which works as “yes” in some circumstances, but that is really technical and nitpicky.

“Ferdi” - is an intentionally wrong slang spelling of “ferdig”, and means finished, done, full stop, end of.

“Forelskelse”/”å være forelsket” - the state of being in love/to be in love. Just use English instead. Using iconic phrases like “halla” and “ferdi” may add a little something to your fic, but “forelskelse”/”å være forelsket” are difficult to insert in a way that doesn’t look very off.

Please don’t use Google Translate. It’s completely, utterly, eye-searingly rubbish at translating into Norwegian. It may seem like a nice touch to use Norwegian for things like texts between the characters, but the readers who know Norwegian will wince when (not if) Google Translate gets it wrong and the other readers won’t be able to read it.

Mr/Mrs

Norwegians don't address people very formally at all. School children are usually on a first name basis with their teachers, older school kids and students are often on a first name basis with their teachers, grown-ups are usually on a first name basis with their bosses. Kids never address their friends' parents as Mr/Mrs. Very occasionally you use people's last name, but as a general rule, assume that Norwegians only go by their first names all the time.

English as a not so foreign language

Norwegians mix a lot of English, particularly US English, into informal speech. “Whaaat?” is common, for instance. The English words are often Norwegianised in pronunciation and/or spelling, for instance “å bænge” (“to bang”) or “plis” (“please”). This means that some English puns work perfectly fine when Norwegians are talking. Besides, when you write in English (or whichever language), use that language and its possibilities and limitations, don’t worry about making it all look Norwegian-ish.

Schools and education

Wikipedia is pretty good on education in Norway.

In Norway, you normally go to the primary/lower secondary school closest to where you live, but at least in Oslo, when you start upper secondary school, you may choose a school elsewhere in the municipality, which is why the SKAM characters go to a school which isn’t close to where most of them live.

Hartvig Nissens skole - “Nissen”

It’s named after a guy whose first name was Hartvig and his surname was Nissen. It’s a good and popular upper secondary school, and their music/dance/drama studies branch is especially popular. You need reasonably good grades from lower secondary school to go to Nissen.

Elvebakken videregående skole - “Bakka”

Also an upper secondary school. You need seriously good grades from lower secondary school to get in. It’s very good and very popular.

Please also note that a Bakka party doesn’t mean a party at Elvebakken, it means a party hosted by an Elvebakken student.

Revue

Lots of schools in Norway do a student revue, for students in all three years or just third year. It depends whether it’s the cool kids or the nerds who participate, though, subtle teenage social structures are at play. The revue is a satirical show, consisting of short sketches and musical acts that are more or less related to a theme for the revue. For instance, if the theme is SKAM, at least some of the sketches would be parodies of scenes from the show, or perhaps piss-takes of fans lurking around Nissen hoping to get a selfie with Tarjei Sandvik Moe…

Kosegruppa

Kos is pretty much untranslatable. Making things cosy, maybe? The kos group is one of the revue groups, and their job is pretty much cooking for the others working on the revue and trying to make everybody in the revue be happy and have a good time. It’s not something Vilde comes up with, it’s an established concept and not unique to Nissen, for that matter. In fact, it’s not entirely plausible that three second year nobodies like Vilde, Eva and Sana, who weren’t even in any revue groups in first year, would get to lead the kos group.

Note that “Kosegruppa” is a definite noun phrase, it means “the kos group”. “The Kosegruppa” is like writing “the the kos group”. “The Kosegruppe” is better.

Russ

The Wikipedia article about russefeiring is decent enough, but this Tumblr post is more to the point. You may also note that while William and his friends allow first years to come along and party in their russ bus, and this is a familiar concept to the SKAM girls, russ may regard not-russ tagging along as intolerable.

Higher education

Very roughly: in Norwegian universities, you are admitted to a bachelor’s programme and may choose to apply for a master’s programme after that. The term “majoring” is not used. Summary of how bachelor’s programmes work in general: each semester you take three 10-credit courses (or some 5-credit or 20-credit courses), most are programme specific and if you’re writing a bachelor thesis it makes up for some of the credits you need to get your degree. One of the courses is examen philosophicum, which is a mandatory course in science philosophy and ethics. Another may be examen facultatum, which is more of a field-specific method course, it’s required for some programmes. You’re encouraged to study abroad for a semester or two. In most programmes you may also take some unrelated courses, but you’ll want those to be relevant to your field.

Study in Norway is a good starting point for information about higher education here. You will also find some general practical information for foreign students about living in Norway there.

Healthcare

This is information for immigrants about healthcare in Norway. It’s pretty lengthy and detailed, so I’ve tried to summarise: while there are privately owned clinics in Norway where you can pay the full cost for your treatment if you want to, most healthcare is government funded and you’re only charged a small sum for consultations (about $18/£14,50/€17 now).

You also pay a bit for lab tests and X-rays and the like, but not the full cost. You normally pay in full for your medicines (unless your illness is chronic, Even would pay much less than full cost if he’s on meds. Let’s say the full cost of his pills is 400 kroner for a pack, he would pay about 150 kroner) and your dental care.

Every Norwegian has the right to be registered with a primary general practitioner. Note that SKAM’s Dr Skrulle (not a real name, Noora gives her a nickname and it means crazy woman) reveals that she’s not really a doctor. She’s probably the school nurse.

School nurses in Norway aren’t necessarily present all day or week, but all schools have one, and students can see their school nurse as well as their primary GP about their health.

There is one pharmacy in Oslo which is open 24/7. There are lots of pharmacies, their opening hours vary.

Various everyday things

Money

The currency is krone (plural kroner).

It’s pretty suspicious that Even “forgets” his ID, because it’s likely to be his debit card (which usually doubles as a photo ID in Norway), and Norwegians rarely use cash and rarely go anywhere without our debit cards. However, debit cards as photo IDs are being phased out as national ID cards will be introduced soon. It may be that Even’s debit card is a new one, without photo ID, and if so his ID would be his driving licence (if he has one) or his passport (which most Norwegians do have).

Isak uses cash once, perhaps that’s easier in the Nissen cafeteria. We never ever use cheques. It’s also strange that Eva’s mum leaves cash for her one time, instead of just transferring the money to Eva’s account, but perhaps Eva’s mum wanted it to be more like a present.

By the way, both Noora and Isak ought to be receiving a government stipend when being in school but not living with their parents. I imagine Noora would know about that and have applied for it, at least. It’s only about 4000 kroner a month, so it would just cover the rent (which is cheap for Oslo!), and they would still have to rely on other income.

Bedding

Isak does not have blankets on his bed. He has a duvet.

You put a sheet on the mattress, you put the pillows in pillow cases and you put the duvet in a duvet cover. You sleep between the sheet and the duvet cover. No top sheet.

You’ll wash the sheet, the pillow cases and the duvet cover regularly. It’s not entirely uncommon to only use one set of bed linen, wash and tumble dry it in one day and put it back on before bed time - which may explain why Isak’s bedding doesn’t change during season 3. Or he may be a horrible slob who doesn’t wash his bedding at all for over two months.

Sometimes people put a sort of ornamental blanket on top of the duvet to cover up the bed in daytime, those blankets are removed when you go to bed. Some Norwegians also like to use warm blankets in addition to the duvet, but the duvet is invariably present.

Contraceptives/STD protection

The condom brand RFSU is what you buy in supermarkets, pharmacies, small snacks and tobacco shops (called kiosks), petrol stations etc. Sex shops have more brands, maybe Trojan too, but that isn’t the everyday condom brand in Norway.

Lots of girls are on the pill (sometimes in order to regulate menstruation), have contraceptive implants or use vaginal rings. The morning after pill is well known.

The age of consent is 16 in Norway, by the way.

Dating

Nah, we don’t go on dates, really. Especially not teens. They just hang out.

Craigslist

It exists in Norway, but just barely, and virtually nobody uses it. You use finn.no and various other (usually short lived) apps and web services to buy and sell stuff and find flats or houses for rent or sale, and you use Tinder/Grindr/various web services to find people to hook up with.

And finally…

Well that didn’t get long AT ALL.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know about Norway and Oslo, go ahead and ask me! I’ll be happy to help you if I can.

Many many thanks to @towonderland72, who acted as non-Norwegian test driver of this mini primer.

UPDATE: there is now a part II of the tiny guide.

#skam #skam fic #meta #norwegian #norway #oslo #tiny primer for skam writers

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passionate-hedgehog · 7 years

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Wine pt.3

A/N: At this point, I’m so in love with this story, I have zero cares about how many people like it. It’s that important to me. If you have been reading the installments, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I had these big plans for this story but as I watched the season I just finished, I discovered the writer’s thought nearly the same thing. Some things will seem familiar but I’m still going with my original plans, but I digress.

If you want to be tagged in these installments, please let me know. I’ll be more than happy to include you!

Tagline: @reiding-and-writing @sassygeek77

Enjoy!!

“Thank you so much for doing this, Hannah. I know it was super last minute, but I’m incredibly grateful that you agreed.” A brunette woman around Hannah’s age held eye contact with her dear friend. She was overly stressed, but she had to let the other woman know she owed Hannah her life.

“Honestly, Mel, it’s no biggie. I’m happy to help out. You’re the bride. You shouldn’t have to worry about keeping the kids busy during the reception. It was a brilliant idea, though. To have something for them to keep them occupied.” Hannah and Mel were tying ribbons around groups of crayons and binding hand-made coloring books.

“It is a biggie. I’ve had this idea longer than I’ve known Justin. It was something that I’ve always known I wanted during my reception.”

Between tying the crayons and assembling the books, the two women enjoyed flutes of non-alcoholic sparkling beverages. They were lounging on the floor of Mel’s apartment. It was the night before the rehearsal dinner, and everything was down to the wire. Hannah had agreed to help Mel out to ease her frustrations. The bride-to-be had almost an arsenal of people behind her, but she was glad Hannah was the one with her that evening. It was some good quality time that they just didn’t seem to get anymore.

“Well, whatever the matter, I’m glad we’re getting this time together. I haven’t really seen you since...well since you started seeing Justin way back when. Not that I’ve been all that available either.”

“Speaking of Chloe...”

“We weren’t really speaking of Chloe, but okay...”

“And speaking of your new beau...”

“Okay.” Hannah set her crayons and ribbon on the floor and gave Mel her full attention. “Where are you going with this?”

“Cutting to the chase, have you decided on your plus one?”

“Chloe wants to go. You know that.” Hannah resumed her job with the crayons.

“Fair. Fair.” Mel fiddled with a ribbon. “But she doesn’t count.”

“Wait, did you call Spencer my ‘new beau’? Really, Mel?”

“Are you bringing him?”

Hannah paused before giving her reply. “Is this why I’m really here? So you can question me?”

“Will you stop evading my questions? It’s my wedding.” Mel watched as Hannah stood up. “Where are you going?”

“I want more fake champagne. I want to pretend it’s real and full of tequila instead.”

Mel stood up and followed her friend out into the kitchen. “Come on, Hannah. Even if you’re not bringing him, is it serious?”

Hannah’s hand froze on the door to the fridge. “Mel!”

“I just want to be sure that you’re happy. I know you perfectly capable of being without a man, but I just want to know that you’re okay. And that Chloe is okay. The two of you deserve nothing but the best.”

The woman in question couldn’t look her friend in the eyes. She hummed quietly as she opened the fridge and stared off into space. Chloe does deserve the best, but is that Spencer? Is he what’s best for her? “He doesn’t even know her.”

“What was that?”

Hannah closed the fridge and looked at her friend. “Spencer has never met Chloe. He doesn’t even know she exists.”

“He doesn’t know you have a kid?! Hannah!”

“I know! I know it’s not good, okay? This isn’t something I should keep from him, but I-I don’t know what else to do. I can’t just tell him.”

“And why the heck not? ‘Hey Spencer, I have a daughter. I didn’t tell you before because I had to put her and her safety first.’ Seems easy to me.”

“It’s not. I mean it is but...It’s not. I can’t just...” Hannah ran her hand through her hair. “It’s so complicated.”

“Okay...tell me about him, about Spencer. What’s he like?” The two women sat at the kitchen table, their drinks being completely forgotten.

“He’s smart. Like high IQ smart. He works for the government but not as some highbrow...rich...narcissist that sells out for the next big paycheck. He likes to read, and he can read many words very fast. He’s taller than me which is a feat all on its own. He’s gentle and thoughtful…. He wants to be more than friends, but he respects my desire for space. He doesn’t ask abrasive questions, and he’s caring. He checks in with me every day, even when his job takes him across the country.”

“How does he look at you?”

“I dunno. Like people look at people?”

“No, silly. I mean, how does Spencer look at the woman he wants to be more than friends with?”

“With his eyes. Mel, I don’t know.”

Mel rolled her eyes. “Mkay, Little Miss. Let’s go finish the coloring books.” - - -

Hours before the wedding ceremony, Chloe developed a fever. Hannah hadn’t been sure what she was going to do. She couldn’t miss the wedding, but she couldn’t just leave her daughter in the hands of a caretaker while she went out to have a good time. When she checked her daughter’s temperature an hour and a half before she had to be at the church, it was the same.

“Chloe, Baby, how are you feeling?” Hannah sat next to her daughter in the bed and swept the hair from the child’s face.

“My head hurts, Mommy.”

“I think you have an ear infection, Sweetie. Maybe we should stay in and cuddle today. How does that sound?”

“But Auntie Mel’s s’posed to get married today! We were going to wear pretty dresses and look like princesses! Mommy!”

“I know, but you’re sick and wouldn’t you rather stay in and watch Frozen? We can watch Mulan and Hercules, too.” The mother tucked the blankets tighter around her daughter, trying to coax her into being relaxed.

“Okay. Can I just sleep?”

“Of course, Baby. Sleep as much as you want.”

“Night night, Mommy.”

Hannah kissed her daughter on the forehead and slid off of the bed before leaving the bedroom. She pulled out her phone to text Mel’s younger sister about the situation but stopped when she discovered a text from Spencer.

I got home earlier than expected. Thank goodness.

Hannah swiped at her screen before sending a text to Millie, Mel’s sister and then one to Spencer.

Chloe has an ear infection. We’ll be staying in today. Give Mel my love!/ I bet that feels nice, getting relaxation time!

The replies came in almost simultaneously. Hannah went into her living room and sat herself on the couch to type out her responses to each.

At least you get a small break from being at the office or in an office in a different state. / Thanks, Millie. Chloe was devastated about missing the wedding. She wanted to wear the dress she picked out for today. But I got a lot of inner ear infections at this age. I should have seen it coming. Like mother, like daughter.

The responses didn’t come back as fast, and Hannah took the time to close her eyes. She’d have to run to the store to get children’s Tylenol and Gatorade, but she couldn’t take Chloe with her. She was weighing her options when the text tone chimed from her cell phone.

What office? What small break?

Hannah looked at the text and then at the sender. Millie. Wait, if Millie got the text about the office, then that means the one about Chloe went to… She scrolled through her phone. The text about Chloe’s ear infection went to Spencer. Oh, no.

The brunette sent a text to Millie apologizing about the mix-up and tried to send a text to Spencer to explain the mix up to him, but she couldn’t. What was she supposed to say? What could she say? She tried so hard to keep her daughter and her love life separate, and there was a good chance it went out the window.

When Spencer didn’t reply after twenty minutes, and then almost an hour, Hannah assumed he got busy and just hadn’t been able to read it yet. Maybe she wouldn’t have to explain anything to him. Maybe he didn’t- Her thoughts were cut off by the doorbell ringing.

When Hannah opened the door, what she saw was not what she was expecting. Spencer stood in her doorway. With a CVS bag in his left hand and a book in his right, the agent gave a small smile and mumbled a greeting.

“Can I come in?”

“Uh. Sure?” Hannah held the door all the way open so the man could walk inside. “What brings you by on your unexpected day off?”

He held up the CVS bag. “I bought children’s Tylenol and Gatorade. “

“Oh. And the book?” Hannah asked in a soft voice.

“These are little stories I tell my godson when he’s sick. In case his mom is unavailable, and his dad is at work. I thought Chloe might like it if you read them to her? If she likes to be read to.” He didn’t sound confident, and he wouldn’t look at her face.

“She does. Thank you, Spencer. You didn’t have to do this. It means a lot to me. Especially since I didn’t know how I was going to get to the store myself.” Hannah took the bag he had offered to her.

“It’s no problem. I wasn’t sure if you had anything. It’s never a bad thing to be prepared. Acute otitis media is common in children, especially if their parents were prone to it when they were kids.”

“Acute otit…? She has been getting a lot of them this spring. I don’t remember getting this many in such a short amount of time. I’m kinda worried.”

Spencer laid a gentle hand on her arm. “It could be allergies. It could be something totally every day. I wouldn’t be too worried. I’m a doctor.”

“You have a doctorate. You’re not my pediatrician. But good try, Hun.”

Hannah invited Spencer into the living room, and to have a seat. She set the bag on the coffee table and took out the children’s Tylenol. Her nerves were wracked, but she couldn’t focus on anything other than getting Chloe her medicine.

“I’m going to go run this to Chloe, don’t move. I’ll be right back.” She left the room and walked down the hall to her daughter’s room. “Chloe, Sweetie, I have some stuff to make you feel better.

Walking into the room, the mother sat on the bed next to her child and poured some of the medicine into the proffered cup on the cap of the bottle. She handed it to her not yet sleeping child. Chloe took it and drank it, not before making a face at it.

“Mommy, I don’t like it.”

“I know, but I’m really happy that you took it.” She kissed her child on the forehead. “Chlobug, do you want to stay up for a little bit and come out into the living room? We can snuggle under the blanket and watch movies.”

Giving a nod, Chloe grabbed her stuffed Panda and wordlessly asked to be picked up.

“I got you, Love. Let’s go.” Hannah lifted the three-year-old and her stuffed panda up and carried her into the living room. “I have a friend that’s visiting. Do you want to meet him?”

“Is he your boyfriend, Mommy?” Chloe asked with her face in her mommy’s neck.

Hannah looked at Spencer knowing he heard the question. “Well, why don’t we just see how awesome he is first. I think you’ll like him. He even brought you something.”

“For me? “

“Uh huh.” Hannah sat on the couch next to Spencer. “Chloe, this is Spencer.”

“Hi, Chloe.” The man called softly. “How are you?”

The child shrugged, still hidden in her mom’s arms.

“I brought something I thought might make you feel better. My nephew likes it when he’s sick. Can I show you?”

Chloe nodded and turned in her spot to face him. “What is it?”

Spencer pulled the book from the other side of his cushion and showed it to the little girl. “Do you like to read?”

“I like it when Mommy reads to me. She can say the big words really good.” Chloe eyed the cover of the book, with its dragons and fairies. “Are there princesses?”

“Do fairy princesses count?”

Chloe nodded.

“Then yes. There’s a princess in here. Her name is Ileana. She actually saves a kingdom.”

The little girl crawled out of her mother’s arms and leaned against Spencer’s to see the book better.

“Oh, you’ve done it now. She loves princesses. Especially the kind that save the kingdom.” Hannah watched her child move into Spencer’s personal space while shaking her head.

“Like Anna!” Chloe squealed.

“Like Anna.”

“Anna?” Spencer asked, not sure who they were talking about.

“You’ve never seen Frozen?” Mother and daughter called in unison. Chloe nearly screamed the question while Hannah raised an eyebrow.

“No. Was it a fairy tale first? I would know it by that.”

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think you just lost some points with Little Miss over here.”

“Mommy, can we show ‘Pencer Anna and Elsa?”

“Maybe later. I thought you wanted him to read this story to you?”

“Oh yeah! ‘Pencer, can you read this to me, please? Maybe I can tell you about Anna and Elsa later.” Chloe was still leaning against the man’s arm but used her hand to hold her mother’s, as if to subconsciously make sure she was included.

“I’d like that, Chloe.”

Spencer opened the book and began to tell the story about a Princess from far off who tried to save a kingdom whether or not the king, her dad, wanted her to. Chloe, who had officially snuggled deep into Spencer’s side, had her eyes trained on the pages of the book the whole time. The man could tell she was absorbing everything that he was saying. When they finished the story, both heads turned towards Hannah who had been silent since the start. She was curled up against the other corner of the couch, her eyes closed.

“’Pencer, I’m hungry. Can I have some cereal?”

“Uh.” The man in question thought it through and didn’t see the harm in her having a small bowl.” Sure. Can you show me where the stuff is?”

“Uh huh!” In her excitement, Chloe jumped off the couch and pulled Spencer with her into the kitchen. “It’s in that cupboard up there.”

Spencer followed the direction her finger was pointing in and opened the door. “We have Fruity Pebbles and Frosted Flakes. Which one is yours?”

“Pebbles! Fruity Pebbles!” The girl called from Spencer’s side. “The bowl is in that other cupboard.”

The federal agent moved to the other cabinet and opened the doors to that one, too. He saw a dishware collection of white plates and white bowls. He saw, however, a small bowl with horses on it and what looked like a forest.

“Is this your bowl?”

“Uh huh. It’s my cereal bowl. It’s only for my cereal. But I think Mommy uses it sometimes. Don’t tell her I know. I don’t want her to think I’m upset.”

Spencer went to the fridge to find the milk while Chloe sat at the table. She had to explain to him that the chocolate milk was for her cereal and she never ever ate regular milk with it. The man was beginning to learn that the little girl had certain things exactly how she wanted them. He didn’t dare upset the way things were.

“You can have some too. Just don’t tell Mommy I shared with you. It’s a secret.”

Spencer grabbed a bowl and sat at the table with Chloe. “Why is it a secret?”

“I don’t want her to know.”

“Why?”

“Because then things would change, duh. But you don’t have any cereal here, and I want to share with you.” Chloe continued to eat her cereal.

Spencer mulled her words in her mind. Wouldn’t he be a change, then? Upsetting the balance that’s so precious to the little girl.

“Am I a change? Is it okay if I’m Mommy’s friend?” He suddenly felt afraid of how she saw him. He thought he was getting close to Hannah, in the beginning, but now Spencer knew he had to impress Chloe first.

“No, you have to be Mommy’s friend.”

“I have to? Why?”

Chloe didn’t seem like she wanted to answer the question. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Why would you get in trouble?”

The little girl still didn’t seem to like the conversation. “Because Mommy told me not to listen to adult conversations.”

Had Hannah been talking about him? “Okay. If you don’t feel like you can tell me, then that’s alright. I don’t want you to get in trouble. I’m sure Mommy would forgive you, though.”

“She really likes you. And she’s really happy after she talks to you on the phone.”

That made Spencer smile. “She makes me happy, too. I’m glad that you approve of me.”

At that, Chloe looked at him with a confused look on her face. “What does ‘aproof’ mean?”

"To 'approve of me' means that you're okay with me being Mommy's friend. And that I can still spend time with her. Is that okay?" Spencer didn't realize how much he wanted to be a part of Hannah's life until the relationship depended on what Chloe felt.

The little girl smiled through her cereal, her cheeks puffing out like she was a chipmunk.

"Well well well. Look who's cool enough to get the Fruity Pebbles and the chocolate milk." Hannah called from the doorway. She leaned against the frame with her arms crossed.

"Whoops. We didn't hide that very well, did we, Chloe?"

"I wanted to be a good girl and share. Is that okay, Mommy?"

Hannah walked into the kitchen and kissed the top of her daughter's head. "Of course it's okay, Sweetie. It's always nice to share."

"Thank you for sharing with me, Chloe. I liked the cereal very much."

The little blonde girl smiled up at her mom's friend and finished chewing her mouthful. "Can I show 'Pencer Frozen now?"

"Sure, Chlobug. Why don't you go get the DVD and I set it up." Hannah watched her daughter jump off the chair and run into the other room, leaving the two adults alone.

Spencer stood up from where he was sitting at the table and grabbed his dirty dishes. "Do you have a dishwasher or should I do them by hand before the movie?"

"Just put them in the sink. Don't worry about them. If you miss the movie, you'll have one devastated little girl. You don't want that, trust me."

"She's different than what I expected."

"Yeah?" Hannah asked. "I'd ask, but we should get moving before she sends in the masses. She has quite a stuffed bear collection."

"Sounds dangerous."

"Oh," Hannah gave a semi-serious glare. "It is. They can be terrifying. Especially Mr. Scissors. He's not someone to mess around with."

"Mr. Scissors?"

"Let's go. You're in for an awakening. Never watched Frozen...pfft."

The three were sitting on the couch, Hannah next to Spencer and Chloe in Hannah's lap. It had started getting dark out, but Chloe's attention to Anna and Elsa could not be broken. Not a single word had been spoken through the movie, and that had been hard for Spencer. He wanted to ask questions, but he knew the little blonde girl really wanted to see her favorite princesses on the tv. He gave a soft smile, and his eyes lit up when she started to sing along with the characters.

By the time Anna punched Hans into the water, Chloe had made her way out of her mom's arms and into Spencer's. She was curled into his side with his arm holding her to him. Her eyes were drooping, and her face was a little bit red.

Spencer caught Hannah's eye and gave a pointed look to the child.

"Chloe, Baby, are you feeling alright?"

The little girl shook her head and gave a small shrug. "My head hurts again."

"Aw, Sweet Pea. Let's get you some more Tylenol, and you can go lay down. It's getting late anyway. We had a fun day, though, right?" The woman stood up and lifted her daughter into her arms.

"I had fun. Thank you for reading to me earlier, 'Pencer."

"Thank you for showing me your favorite movie."

"Alright, you little Gremlin. Let's get you settled in for the night." Hannah gave her daughter a soft kiss on the cheek. "I'll be right back, Spencer."

Minutes went by, and Hannah found herself back in the living room with her friend. She plopped down onto the couch next to him and gave a deep sigh of relief. She ran her fingers through her hair and leaned her head back.

"Is she all settled in for the night?"

"Mhmm."

"Good." Spencer stood up and pulled out a mp3 player. "Because I think you had planned earlier today that you couldn't fulfill."

At that, Hannah opened her eyes. "What? Do you even own a mp3 player?"

"No." He messed with some buttons until a familiar tune could be heard. When he was done fiddling with the technology, he offered her his hand. "But I know you missed out on a dance or two tonight."

"Baptists don't dance."

"But it's a wedding reception. It's a thing."

"Baptists not dancing is a thing. And it was a Baptist wedding. So there's that."

Spencer wracked his brain for a reason to get her to stand up. "May I have this dance, even though they didn't dance at the reception?"

Smiling, Hannah took the proffered hand and joined him. Chopin's Spring Waltz played from the mp3. Spencer pulled Hannah to him. He placed one hand on her lower back and used the other hand to hold one of her own. She wound her free hand around the man, and the two swayed in tune.

"This is nice, Spencer. Thank you. You're just full of surprises today."

"Hmm. I'm not the only one. You're just pulling kids out of nowhere."

Hannah gave a chuckle. "Oh, she came from somewhere. Twelve hours of labor are proof to that."

"You did good work."

"Thank you. I like to think so. You did a good job, too, today." Hannah licked her lips as if she didn't want to continue with her train of thought.

"I don't want to say good-bye. Hannah, please don't-"

"Spencer." She cut off his words. "We can't...I can't..."

"If there was a part of today that didn't go well, then tell me what it was. I want to prove to you that I'm able to do this."

"You did great. Especially since the way it came out was less than desirable. I couldn't be more grateful with who I'm friends with right now. You're more than I could have asked for."

Spencer and Hannah paused their movements but kept their hands in their respective positions. "What can I do?"

"Just give it time. I've never even told Chloe about you. I probably went about this the wrong way, but I need to keep her first. She's more important than any relationship I could ever have." The mother of one looked him in the eyes. "I think that right now, time and space would be best. If after some deep-thinking you decide that this is something that you want, then we'll talk. But you need to process all of this and if we were to continue this right now and you wanted to leave...that could destroy Chloe. I can't do that."

Spencer licked his lips and leaned into Hannah. Wordlessly, he pressed his lips to hers and pulled away after a moment. He withdrew from her personal space and grabbed his mp3 player.

"I'm ready whenever you are. I don't want to let you go. I'll be waiting."

Hannah watched, silently, as Spencer grabbed his things, slipped on his shoes, and walked out the door. She was doing what was best, right? She hoped with all of her heart that she didn't just make the biggest mistake. Chloe was her focal point, but Spencer had grown to be important, too. All she knew, was that the brief amount of time they shared altogether gave her hope and a want for a future she never knew was possible.

#spencer reid fanfiction #dr spencer reid #spencer reid #criminal minds #Criminal Minds Fanfiction #Matthew Gray Gubler #mgg #sr.imagines

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thefaeriereview · 4 years

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Tour: Serial Investigations

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SERIES REVIEW TOUR

Serial Investigations by Rhiannon D’Averc

Serial Investigations follows a private detective duo, Will and Ram, through tricky cases, mortal danger, and the horror of (maybe) unrequited love for your best friend – with plenty of demons to battle along the way.

The stories need to be read in order.

Overall Heat Rating for the series: 2 flames

Goodreads Series Link

Warning: All books contain depictions of alcoholism, anorexia, and violent crime/murder.

BOOK 1

Book Title: Bloodless

Length: 70 000 words/ 240 pages

Release Date: April 29, 2019

Genre/s: M/M Crime/thriller

Trope/s: Slow burn friends to lovers

Themes: Identity struggle, murder, unrequited love

Goodreads

Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited

How do you solve a murder…

… When you’re the prime suspect?

Blurb A body cut up into pieces and left in Highgate Wood. It sounds like the most exciting case that private detectives Ram and Will have had to deal with since leaving their FBI training and returning to London. As each new body is piled up amongst the trees, the stakes get higher – and Serial Investigations London embraces their first real challenge. But Ram’s lifestyle – staying out all days of the week, drinking too much, and having sex with a different man every night – soon catches up with him when the police realise there’s just one link that connects the bodies. And it’s him. Will faces a battle around the clock to prevent his best friend from being put away for life – and while the two of them face their own demons, there’s a secret hanging over their heads that might just bring it all crashing down. If you’re a fan of BBC’s Luther, Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole, or sharply witty gay men, you’ll love Serial Investigations. Jump into the action from the very beginning with Bloodless, the first book in a series you won’t dare to put down.

BOOK 2

Book Title: Blood Evidence

Length: 63 000 words/ 200 pages

Release Date: August 15, 2019

Genre/s: M/M Crime/thriller

Trope/s: Slow burn friends to lovers

Themes: Coming out, murder, unrequited love

Goodreads

Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited

A missing person’s case…

… A murder investigation?

Blurb Private detectives Ram and Will got their name in the news by catching a high-profile serial killer, and now they’re getting more clients. When they’re hired to find a missing person, all they’re worried about is having to spend a night away from home. They go to check his last known sighting in Kent, staying in a quaint country inn. Little do they expect that Serial Investigations London are about to get thrust into a new murder investigation – one that happens right under their noses. A confession seems to solve the case, but is it genuine? With suspicions running high, the duo still have to find time to sniff out the whereabouts of their client – and avoid getting arrested themselves. With Ram hitting the bottle harder than ever and Will fighting to stay in control, they might be about to lose more than just the case.

BOOK 3

Book Title: Blood Alcohol

Length: 60 000 words/ 173 pages

Release Date: November 30, 2019

Genre/s: M/M Crime/thriller

Trope/s: Slow burn friends to lovers

Themes: Coming out, murder, inner demons

Goodreads

Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited

A horrific torture case with a ticking clock.

All he can see is the bottle.

Blurb Private detectives Ram and Will thought they’d wrapped everything up when they found Ray Riley’s body in Sevenoaks. But it turns out that things aren’t what they seemed – and Riley may be the latest victim of a torture-happy murderous duo. For the second time, Serial Investigations London are called in to assist as civilian consultants with DI Alex Heath’s team at the Met – but they have their own personal problems getting in the way of clear thinking. Will has something to get off his chest, and it’s related to that kiss they shared – the one they both tried to forget. But Ram can’t stop drinking to push away the confusion, and this time he’s going to land himself in more trouble than ever before. Can they get over their issues for long enough to stop another murder – or even keep themselves alive?

BOOK 4

Book Title: Blood Sucker

Length: 65 000 words/ 191 pages

Release Date: March 28, 2020

Genre/s: M/M Crime/thriller

Trope/s: Slow burn friends to lovers/misunderstandings

Themes: Conflict, murder, trust and loyalty

Goodreads

Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited

A dead body posted on social media.

A vampire stalking the streets of London?

Blurb Will and Ram’s private detective partnership seems to be unravelling. After they ended up sleeping together, the tension between them is at an all-time high – and the unsolved Simon Shystone case is haunting them and their police contacts. DI Alex Heath normally wants their help, but when a murderer posts images of his victim on social media, the chase is on to trace his digital footprint. With his superiors breathing down his neck, he might not be able to bring Serial Investigations London in on one of the biggest cases of their career. They should be focusing on the artist who seems to have disappeared without a trace from his home studio. Could his latest commission have something to do with it? And will they be able to handle finding another client turned up dead? Things are spiralling out of control for Will and Ram – and this time, they might not have each other to rely on.

BOOK 5

Book Title: Blood Sport

Length: 164 pages

Release Date: June 30, 2020

Genre/s: M/M Crime/thriller

Trope/s: Slow burn friends to lovers/misunderstandings resolved

Themes: Murder, kidnap, vanquishing the big bad

Goodreads

Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited

A copycat killer who knows every detail. A locked room with no escape.

Blurb Serial Investigations London is officially closed for business – with private detectives Will and Ram still not talking to one another after an explosive argument. Even when a copycat killer springs up, seemingly targeting only their own cases, they can’t see eye to eye. Little wonder, given that they both have something more important on their minds. Someone knows about San Francisco – about the man who died on a rooftop at their feet. Who has discovered their deepest secret? And what will they do to keep it buried? That’s when another mystery piles up on top of the rest: a traditional trope that every seasoned detective must face, the locked room. But this one has a deadly twist, and if they don’t come to terms with their differences and work together, one of them might not live to regret it. Will and Ram face the most pressing and personal danger yet – but the question is, who’s behind it? And will they realise they’ve been set against one another before it’s too late? If you’re a fan of BBC’s Luther, Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole, or sharply witty gay men, you’ll love Serial Investigations. The story continues with Blood Sport, a nail-biting series of twists and turns that will have you questioning how they’ll ever survive. Click 'Buy Now' to enter the minds of troubled yet brilliant detectives as they struggle inside an interconnected web of lies – and the spider is getting hungry… Praise for Serial Investigations: “The front cover didn't lie; Bloodless is exciting and thrilling.” “Sets up a really great atmosphere right from the start and constantly leaves you wanting to find out what happens next.” “A punchy storyline makes it difficult to put down and leaves you wanting more.” “Just the right amount of action, plenty of intriguing deception and detective work.” “Love the plot twists! Can’t wait for the next book to see what happens next to Will and Ram.”

Excerpt Bloodless – Chapter One Unlocking the door to your new home for the first time is supposed to be exciting. I guess it was the jet-lag, but I couldn’t even force myself to smile as we walked in. Not even for Ram’s sake. We crashed in hungover and out of it, the sparkling wine and whisky of the plane no longer seeming like such a good idea. I chose a bedroom and dragged my suitcases inside. It felt good to no longer have all of my worldly possessions attached to my person. Without the weight of my backpack on my shoulders, I could feel just how much strain the muscles had been under. I found Ram still standing at the wide windows of the living room. He was looking out of the clean, fresh glass into the grey and drizzling London of December. It felt like a jolt to look out and see not palm trees, but old Victorian factories and blocks of flats as far as the eye could see. But then again, no one has ever mistaken Whitechapel for California. It was always going to be a bit of a culture shock, coming back home again. I shook him by the shoulder, trying to ignore the pit in my own stomach. Maybe if I could get him to snap out of this weary daze we had both fallen into, he would be able to wake me up in return. “Ram?” I asked, after a moment. He simply swayed under the movement of my hand, like a doll. I wasn’t even sure he was actually looking out at anything. He turned and looked at me when he heard his name. It was like he was looking at someone he didn’t recognise from a long distance away. If I had felt uneasy before, that expression made my scalp itch with worry. Of the two of us, Ram is the calm and centred one. Even when he’s so drunk he can barely walk, he doesn’t lose it. Not like me. But I’ve never seen him like this before. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said, after a moment, seeming to rouse. He shrugged off my hand and walked away, leaving me stood watching the place where he had been stood watching. I felt like a sentinel. Something had left us behind and we were plunging into a bowl of cold water, too confused to even try to hold onto the side. I wondered if it would even wash away what we had on our hands. I was alone, without the option of distracting myself by looking at him. The only thing I could do was to keep moving. I heard the sound of the shower turn on, and I guided my weary feet into my new room. It felt like midnight, but the sun wasn’t even at its midday apex. I went from task to task, like an automaton, letting the cogs turn by themselves to keep my mind empty. Suitcase unzipped; clothes pulled out; find hangers; one by one, up on the rail. Knick-knacks. Decorations. Picture frame. The flat came furnished, but now I realised that on our hasty flight out of San Francisco we forgot to take a few things into account. The beds had mattresses, but no pillows or sheets. The drawers in the kitchen held no cutlery, crockery, or mugs for tea. Even if they did, there was no kettle, no bags of tea, no instant coffee machine. I ran out of things to do but I had to find something. I stalked from room to room, tablet in hand, stabbing the pages of an online shopping site. Kettle — black, chrome, retro. Tea bags — Earl Grey, Caramel Rooibos, Herbal Blend. Bed set — plain blue, reverse check, king size. Next. Ram’s room. Suitcases still locked, black leather bag slung onto bare mattress, leather jacket discarded next to it. He wouldn’t mind. It’s not like we have any secrets from each other. Or many, at least. Open the suitcase (correctly guess the code on the lock). Take out clothes, one by one, to string them up on hangers and leave them waiting for him. Personal items. Books stacked by the bed. Jewellery case. Boots on the floor by the door. Leather jacket hung up last, finally, the only thing left untouched. I wondered how long it must have been now. A long time, surely, but all I could hear still was the water hitting the shower tray. Over and over, the same hiss in the same tone. A long time for Ram to be in there, on his own, with those thoughts swirling around in his head. With razors and scissors and other sharp things. “Ram?” I shouted, pounding on the locked bathroom door. Nothing but the sibilant hiss of the water. I threw my shoulder into the door, felt it bounce back against me, sending a shockwave through from the impact. Again. The door rattled, the lock unable to give. Again. Again. As many times as it took, again, ignoring the flower of pain blooming out across my shoulder and back. Once more, and I was stumbling forward into the room, momentarily disorientated as the momentum carried me onwards. The glass of the shower door was all steam, except for a patch near the bottom where the spray of the water was heavy enough to keep it clear. I saw his legs, sprawled across the floor, and I could barely breathe for the fear that I had realised too late. I wrenched open the door and saw him, and for a moment I understood nothing. He was whole — yes. No blood. But he was lying naked under the water, letting it hit his face and open eyes without blinking, not even reacting to my appearance. “Ram?” I said again, but his eyes didn’t even flicker in response. I reached in and grabbed his shoulder, ignoring the water. It quickly drenched my shirt through to the skin, spreading up over my chest and into my eyes as I shook him. Slowly, like he was caught in a time lapse, his face swivelled around. His eyes looked at me, but they were empty. I don’t think he even saw me. “Everything’s going to be alright,” I said, reaching up and turning the shower off. I didn’t know if it was the truth, but he was alive. For the time being, that was enough. He stirred a little when the water stopped hitting him, but only for a moment. His shoulders slumped back down and he rested, resigned, still looking fixedly at nothing. I grabbed a towel from my bathroom, thankfully one of the few things I did remember to bring with me. I ran back to find him still sitting in the same place. It was like there was no one left inside to notice that he must be cold and uncomfortable. I pulled him out of the shower and into my waiting arms. He came willingly, falling against me like a doll. I towelled him dry as best I could and held him tight, like we were kids again, trying to take some small comfort from one another. His head slotted under my chin, and it felt right but so wrong, because Ram is supposed to be the strong one. “Everything’s going to be fine, Ram, I promise,” I said, closing my eyes and praying that I was telling the truth.

About the Author

Rhiannon D'Averc is a crime writer based in the UK. She works as a ghostwriter and author under her own name as well as under pseudonyms. As a professional writer for over a decade, she also keeps herself busy as Chief Editor of London Runway, an indie fashion magazine. Her short stories have been published in Litro, Devolution-Z, Storgy, Literati, and more.

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quenchmagazine · 7 years

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Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, food editor and restaurant critic Peter Hum declared that wine and food pairing has “had its day.” “Surely,” Hum snarked, “when every food has been paired with every wine many times over, it’s time to give the thing a rest.”

So RIP wine and food pairing. Thanks for humouring me.

Admittedly, I tend to echo Hum’s sentiments. Don’t get me wrong; I think there are some truly specific — and truly fantastic — wine and food matches (goat cheese and Sauvignon Blanc, Chablis and oysters, Sauternes and foie gras, Port and stilton, Champagne and more Champagne, etc.). Some couplings complement each other like nuts complement bolts. Some offer surprising contrasts, with distinctly different flavour profiles melding together to dance a delicious taste tango. I agree with Hum, however, that things can get out of hand. Either matchings get precise to the point of near impossibility (freshly caught Niagara River rainbow trout must be poached in unoaked Chardonnay from the Niagara River VQA sub-appellation and served with same, with the age of the fish matching within a year of the vintage of the wine), or broad to the point of, well, what’s the point?

While “red wine with red meat and white wine with white meat and fish” is probably one of the oldest culinary rules of thumb, it still might be the most generally reliable. Try that rare grilled steak with a Muscadet or that oyster with some Barolo and you’ll easily understand the merits of “red with red; white with white.” It’s also true that, for the most part, local wines tend to pair with local foods (Crottin de Chavignol and Sancerre, for example). “What grows together, goes together.” (Another handy little saying.)

Where things get tricky is when you try to pair wines to foods coming from countries with no real history of wine production or that use ingredients not typically fused into the gastronomy of wine-producing countries or regions. Pairing wine with Asian cuisine presents one such challenge. The best advice in such a situation might be, “Don’t do it.” But I love a challenge.

While wine production in China dates back almost 5,000 years, most Asian countries have pretty much zilch in the way of a wine industry (snake wine being exempt as it stretches the boundaries of what we might call “table wine” a bit too far). And in case it needs to be emphasized again, sake is technically a beer, so it doesn’t count. It’s true that importing top-flight wines has become something of a big deal in China, but the jury’s still out as to whether these wines are being enjoyed with meals, displayed as status symbols or mixed with pop. In any case, the lack of an Asian “wine culture” isn’t the main reason matching wine with indigenous dishes is a tricky undertaking, but rather, the flavour components themselves.

When it comes to Asian dishes, beverage matching gets challenging simply due to the ingredients being used. Fermented sauces and pastes typically introduce high salinity. Then there’s the (occasionally lip-numbing) spice, and the sweet/sour yin-yang. Combined, they can create some palate histrionics that will send the flavour of almost any wine cowering.

With the possible exception of sushi and sashimi, which tend to be fairly delicate (assuming you haven’t doused it to the point where the dominant flavours come via the salt from soy sauce and sinus-clearing wasabi), most Asian dishes probably play the nicest with beer. But (I know, I know), you’re not big on beer. Fine. Let’s see what we can do.

First things first, as with any cuisine, “Asian food” is not a single dish, so there won’t be a single “go-to” wine (though there might be a go-to style — we’ll get to that). Chinese food itself includes Henan, which differs from Yunnan, which differs from Shanghainese, which differs from Taiwanese and so on. And authentic Chinese doesn’t include chicken balls dipped in a day-glo sweet sauce with the consistency of glue. Japanese, Thai, and Korean cuisine each present more options (and more sub regional variations).

So what will ultimately determine your wine choice will have a bit to do with the actual base ingredient, (e.g., meat or fish) and a lot to do with what that base is being gussied up with (those spices, fruits, fermented pastes, etc.). This isn’t a real radical departure from the usual. A simple grilled chicken breast is indeed white meat, which might prompt you to reach for a white wine. But serve it as Chicken Parmesan, with loads of tomato sauce and grated cheese and you’re likely reaching for vino rosso.

As well, different cooking techniques will open up (or limit, depending on how you look at it) your wine landscape. Wines that work with raw, steamed or poached dishes might not show as well with fried and fatty food. Are you ready for that beer yet?

A quick tour of the Internet (search: Asian+food+wine+helpmeoutwiththis) yielded predictable results, with a zillion sommeliers offering two zillion possibilities. I figured it was time to get a bit systematic, if not scientific, with things. If there were as many Asian wine and food possibilities as there was tea in China (sorry, that was a bit clunky), could I at least isolate some of the most popular Asian dishes and nail at least one popular wine (or wine style) to match, singularly and definitively, with each individual food item? Would one work pretty much with all the edibles?

As much as I was dying to find out, a few roadblocks stood in the way. First, finding authentic Asian cuisine would be a problem. Not so much because there wasn’t any to be had in Toronto, but mostly because I wouldn’t have much of a clue as to what dishes to order (my knowledge of Asian specialties beyond the basics being somewhat — read: completely — lacking). Second, even if I managed to find a resto serving the real deal, the chances of it having much of a wine list would be iffy at best (see my note re: Asian wine culture above). Maybe they’d be authorized for BYOB. Right. A lot of these places don’t even have liquor licenses. Smuggle my own in and hope I don’t get caught? Not out of the realm of the possible. How about just do take out/delivery? This would seem to be the most sensible route. I could pick my own wines and mix and match to my leisure. But nothing’s ever easy, is it?

The wines were no issue. I picked out four based on the Asian food elements I mentioned earlier.

With those criteria in mind, I chose a sparkling Vouvray (the always reliable Chenin Blanc-based Château Moncontour “Cuvée Prédilection” 2011 from the Loire Valley; palate-cleansing bubbles and a hint of sweetness); my “go to” house wine, Cono Sur Bicicleta Viognier 2014 from Chile (exotic and fragrant); a very popular German Riesling (I know, German and popular in the same sentence?), Schmitt Söhne’s Relax Riesling 2013, a Q.bA Mosel that’s light, low alcohol, and off-dry; and a token red, the Nobilo Icon Pinot Noir 2013 from Marlborough, New Zealand (mainly because of the meat dishes). So far, so good. But I still needed guidance when it came to the food to order. Luckily, help was on hand in the form of one of Quench’s contributors, Silvana Lau.

Chinese by descent, she knows her way around Asian cuisine and Toronto’s Asian food floggers. And she’s got pretty much a pro palate to boot. Having called one of the city’s better Thai joints the night before to confirm it delivered, a slight note of panic crept into her voice as we attempted to place an order we had spent a good 20 minutes assembling.

“But you told me yesterday that you did and it says you do on your website!” she countered when told delivery wasn’t an option (throwing me a WTF? look). “Try our second location,” was the helpful suggestion from the disembodied voice on the other end. “I did and I got a voice message about holiday hours — and this is February — can’t you guys just do a delivery?” Lau strained to interpret the Asian/Anglo banter being exchanged in the restaurant. “You will? Great! … What? … Over two hours? … You’re four blocks away! What? You can’t deliver tonight after all?” Bear in mind, this was a Wednesday, hardly a prime delivery demand day.

Long story short, we finally got delivery from another purveyor, a delivery that included: green papaya salad (Thai spicy), Tom Yum chicken soup, green coconut curry chicken (every time we tried to order seafood we were assured the chicken was the better choice; this did not assure us in any way) and Spicy Beef Noodles. We also nabbed a sushi/sashimi platter from a place a couple doors down (not exactly high-end exotic, but beggars, etc.). So, time to get busy. (As an amusing aside, the first place that wouldn’t/couldn’t deliver was suggested as a great Valentine’s Day Thai delivery option in the following day’s NOW magazine. This must have tested a few lovebirds’ patience, if not the strength of their relationship.)

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Observations on the outcome: nothing really worked well with the sushi/sashimi. The bubbly offered indifference (but sort of at least cast a glance at the vegetable maki). The Riesling was too sweet. The Viognier kind of worked, but only to the extent that it didn’t clobber/get clobbered by the food. We had hopes for the tuna/Pinot Noir combo but the raw fish was too delicate. Tuna charred quickly on a grill might have been a good match but as good as the Pinot was, raw tuna was not its pal.

I’ve paired Sauvignon Blanc-based wines to sushi with some success (the herbal/citrus notes seem to mesh for whatever reason). Tonight’s combos, however, while not epic fails, did not inspire. On to the louder, more aggressive, Thai offerings.

The green papaya salad, with its incendiary spice level, not only obliterated the taste of each wine, but damn near cauterized my palate as well. The Riesling put up a fight but, in the end, it went down in flames. What did work well (no surprise here) was a mouthful of cold, hoppy, Total Domination IPA from Oregon’s Ninkasi Brewing Company. The combination of cold/bitter/bubbles and moderate alcohol zapped numbed taste buds back to life. In fact, the beer was the best match for everything … but back to wine.

The Viognier arm-wrestled the spicy/sweet Tom Yum soup into something akin to submission, with the Riesling doing so in a slightly lesser way. The same tag-team countered green coconut curry chicken respectably, but it was a match with not a lot of real excitement, just a kind of grudging agreement by each party not to kill each other.

Spicy beef noodles, on the other hand, killed all the wines dead. Again, the humble IPA took the dish on with easy grace.

Dejected, but not willing to quit, we sealed up the wines and, a couple days later, got out our chopsticks for Round Two: some traditional Korean and Chinese morsels. Thankfully, things gelled much better this time around, largely because the food in general was less spicy. There were still some sweet elements and the heat was there if you wanted it (by way of addition rather than being part of the dish itself), but overall the intensity level was more manageable than the Thai inferno.

Chinese roast pork belly showed well with pretty much every wine, the nod going to the Pinot (though the Riesling was a strong contender — especially when the sweet, sticky hoisin sauce was added to the mix). Succulent roast duck, with its fatty/crispy skin, also took a shine to the Pinot, with the Vouvray working nicely as well (the bubbles washed away the fattiness and cleansed the palate). A very pure and authentic shrimp wonton soup worked nicely the bubbly as well, though the moderate sweetness of the Riesling did an admirable job of cutting through the saltiness of the broth. Beef Lo Mein, a meat/noodle/broth take out staple (though authentic Chinese), also got along well with the Pinot.

Korean dishes including bibimbap (a traditional dish that includes rice, noodles, vegetables, a fried egg, beef, chili pepper paste, and soy sauce) and a kimchi seafood pancake (see Culture Club on page XX for more info on kimchi) also turned out to be surprisingly grape-friendly. The former dish’s mélange of flavours, textures and mild heat provided a perfect playground for the mildly earthy, sparkling Vouvray. The latter intermingled nicely with both the Pinot and the Viognier, with the tangy kimchi weaving exotic flavour tendrils around the fruit core and acidity of each wine (another one of those food “rules:” acidic foods and slightly acidic wines get along — the acids tend to soften, rather than build, on each other).

Verdict: Thai food’s best friend is cold, crisp, hoppy beer. In general, there’s too much heat and too much going on to work with most wines. Go delicate with Japanese sushi and sashimi — light, white and crisp. Chinese and Korean foods seem to be the most wine-friendly, with flavour combinations that are a bit less busy than Thai, and not as volcanic.

Wine and food pairing dead? Nah. It can be a lot of fun to experiment. It’s also a great excuse for exploring ingredients and food preparation techniques that might not normally pop up on your epicurean radar … and washing the results down with a good glass of grape (or three).

Everything you need to know about what to pair with Asian cuisine Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, food editor and restaurant critic Peter Hum declared that wine and food pairing has “had its day.” “Surely,” Hum snarked, “when every food has been paired with every wine many times over, it’s time to give the thing a rest.”

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