Chapter 196
When we get to the top of the hill I grimace a little because… Frankie’s description of the place as “gone a bit to crap” is one hell of an understatement. We stop in front of the gorgeous old villa at the top of the hill, both of us hesitating as we look at the slumped and broken porch, the crumpled pergola, the weeds peeking through every piece of brick and stonework on the place.
“Is there…anyone here?” I whisper, squeezing Frankie’s hand.
He opens his mouth to respond but suddenly a woman appears in the door, old and bent, frowning at us. She stares for a moment and then begins to shout at us in Portuguese, waving a white napkin in our direction. And even if we don’t understand her words, her instructions are perfectly clear: get the hell off my property.
I take a step back, eager to comply with her demands, but suddenly another man – much younger – appears at her side. He frowns at us too and then calls first in Portuguese, and then in English.
“What do you want?”
Frankie steps forward, taking me with him, handling the conversation. He quickly explains that we’re looking for work and the neighbor told us he might be looking.
The man whispers something to the woman – clearly his mother – and then comes across the porch and down to us, clearly watching his steps so as not to fall through the rotted wood. When he comes close he peers at us carefully, his hands on his hips.
“Where are you from?”
“Canada,” Frankie answers, his face perfectly calm.
“Do you have papers?”
Still calm, Frankie shakes his head no. I look anxiously between the two.
The man laughs, derisive. “I can’t pay you if you don’t have papers.”
Frankie just shrugs like the answer is the simplest thing in the world. “Then don’t pay us.”
The conversation goes quickly then as Frankie and the man quickly negotiate, the man starting to smirk a little as he reads through Frankie’s bland answers and sees that we’re two people who are a bit on the run for some reason, that we don’t want trouble.
“Do you work hard?” the man asks, looking hard at Frank now. “Reliable, no drugs?”
“No trouble,” Frankie says, his face completely honest. And I nod eagerly at his side, my eyes wide, desperate to be believed. Because honestly, the more I look around this sad, slightly dilapidated place – the more I love it. The vines out in the field, and then beautiful stone house that can clearly sleep…twenty or more? God…there’s just…so much beauty here. So much potential.
The man looks to me and smirks, then starts to laugh, I think finally convinced by my wide-eyed eagerness. He looks back at Frankie. “Can she cook?”
“Oh,” Frankie says, laughing a little as he looks to me with a smile, squeezing my hand. “She can cook.”
Life falls quickly into a new rhythm at the villa, and I love every moment. I mean, nothing about it is easy – the days are long and there’s a great deal of work to do. But it’s work that sings to me, every part of it something I love.
Every morning Frankie and I wake up in our funny little attic room, which the Boss gave us together, assuming we were a couple. We didn’t say anything to correct him, and we haven’t really said anything to each other, even if we wake up on different sides of the same bed every morning.
Still, even if it is a little…strange to wake up in bed with a man who is not my husband, a man who has made absolutely no romantic move on me since the day we ran away from the Romano house, it is in no way bad. Every morning Frankie gathers me up in a warm hug to say good morning before the sun even rises, and then I leave him to sleep for thirty or so more minutes as I rush down to the kitchen.
There I meet Matilde, the woman who yelled at us to go away that first day, and she gives me a little nod before we begin. We brew coffee, and cook eggs and potatoes with a great deal of rich butter, and then we serve all of that to the field workers – my Frankie included – as they filter in for their breakfast.
Frankie gives me my habitual kiss on the cheek every morning before he goes out to work on the vineyard with the two dozen or so other workers. The farmer who drove us here was right – the Boss, Matilde’s son, really is quite ambitious, and he pushes his workers hard to get the grapes ready for harvest. While they do that, he and some other men work elsewhere on the vineyard, rebuilding the house and preparing all the infrastructure necessary to turn it into a true working villa – one that can take guests eager to see some of Portugal’s wine country as well as turn a profit by crafting its own wine.
My heart fills with excitement the day, about three weeks in, when the Boss tells me his entire plans for the villa - to make it a true bed-and-breakfast resort spot within Portugal’s wine country. He laughs when he’s finished, when he sees the way my eyes shine, how I clasp my hands under my chin with excitement.
“What, you like that idea, ‘Ambi?” he had said, grinning at me, I think seeing a dreamer whose spirit for this sort of work matches his own.
“Yes,” I replied, a little breathless, nodding eagerly. “That’s – that’s the sort of place I’ve always dreamed of working.”
“Well, you’re a good worker,” he says, nodding into the kitchen, “and mother likes you, even if she can’t talk to you yet. And your Francisco,” he says, nodding out the door towards the fields, “is good. And funny. You two keep up the hard work,” he continues, giving me a shrug and a smile, “and we will…see if we have a place for you here.”
“We will,” I say, laughing with my excitement.
“You learn some Portuguese,” he says, pointing into my face with a smirk as he walks towards the door of the house.
“I’ll do my best,” I say, giving him a wink and a salute. He smiles fondly at me as I hurry into the kitchen, impulsively giving Matilde a big hug that she laughingly returns only for a moment before swatting my butt and pushing me towards a sink full of potatoes.
And just like that, Frankie and I fall into the routines of the place, becoming more central to it as the weeks pass, and then a month, and then nearly two. Matilde and the Boss come to like us, and then to rely on us, and then even to ask questions of what we think would be best as they proceed with the project.
Frankie surprises us all by not only being a good worker in the field, but further by knowing his way around some basic carpentry and house repair. I’m always shocked when I find him doing something new – up a ladder repairing some eaves, working with other men laying out new slats for the repaired pergola, or building us a set of shelves in our little room for our growing set of possessions.
But when he looks up at me with that smile, on that beautiful face that gets tanner as the days pass, I forget to be surprised. And instead I’m just…swept away.
“What do you think, Bambs,” Frankie says about two months in, yawning as he lays across from me on our little bed, reaching a hand across the mattress to take mine where it sits in the moonlight that streams through our little window. “Do you like it here?”
“I love it here,” I whisper, beaming at him. “Sometimes I think we’re dreaming. It’s…just so perfect. The kind of life I’ve always wanted.”
He nods to me, staring in the moonlight. “Boss asked me,” he says softly after a moment. “If we want to stay. Permanently – even get paid.” We both laugh at that idea, because we haven’t been paid a dime yet – except in good food, and housing, and discretion. Honestly, money is the furthest thing from our minds now that we’re safe, and warm, and happy. “What do you think of that?”
Happiness wells in me from my toes all the way up to the full smile that crinkles my eyes. “I think I want to if you want to,” I whisper, and he grins right back at me. “I think…maybe we found that somewhere beautiful we were looking for.”
“Yeah,” he whispers, blinking at me in the moonlight. “Yeah, Bambi. I think we did.”
Frankie squeezes my hand once before he drops it and reaches for me for the first time, tugging me closer across the bed. He looks down into my face for a moment as he lays his body close to me, as my breath starts to come short because…
This is a line we haven’t crossed yet.
And I desperately, desperately want him to cross it.
“I love you so much, Iris,” he whispers, lowering his face to mine, softly nudging my nose with his. “It has been…the great joy of my life to see you this happy.”
“I love you too, Frank,” I whisper back. Then I lift a hand to wrap soft around the back of his neck and tug him incrementally closer, lifting my chin.
Frankie kisses me, exhaling deeply as he does, like he’s been holding his breath waiting for it for years. His lips are soft against mine at first as he wraps me up tight in his arms, but then he gives into it as I do and his fingers press hard into my skin, letting me know how badly he wants me – how badly he’s wanted me for a long, long time. Frank kisses me breathless, kisses me like he’s waited a thousand years to do it.
And I kiss him right back – because even if it took forever for us to get here, every inch of it was worth the wait.
