Benjamin
Your breath isn’t any worse than usual.
Ben woke before Angelina the morning after their engagement. As Angelina slept alongside him, he remembered the events of the previous day. Did it really happen? It felt like a dream.
Ben had begun All Saints’ Day 2017 in Geneva, before returning to Rimini and to Angelina, the woman he loved. Ben had ended the day engaged to her, which was, while ahead of his intended schedule, a welcome yet not complete surprise. He’d also finished the day a father-to-be, an unexpected and most welcome surprise. Ben had learned that Valentina, Angelina’s godmother, with whom he’d struggled to form a trusted relationship, was his surrogate future mother-in-law.
Or is she my father-in-law? Ben didn’t fully understand Valentina’s relationship with Angelina’s late mother, Isabella.
I can’t believe it’s only been five months since Angelina began scolding me on the train from Como.
After that emotion-laden first encounter, he would not have predicted what had followed. It was the most eventful day in his thirty-seven years—at least, until the Valentina’s Date Massacre. That was how Ben referred to the events that had followed their first romantic date back in September.
Ben experienced severe time distortion remembering their first date. The two months since that evening had carried them along like an express train. Yet at times it felt as if he and Angelina had been on that train for years. They went on a date that started out not as a date, where they both were surprised to learn of the other’s love. Angelina fell into the harbor near the Rockisland club while celebrating, and Ben jumped into the dark waters to retrieve her. The next morning, Valentina misinterpreted events in Angelina’s bedroom and assaulted Ben in a misguided rescue attempt before Angelina intervened.
I don’t care what the women say, it was a massacre. Ben winced in reflex at the memory. He scanned the room before settling his gaze on the chair near the door. That’s where I first slept with Angelina. He smiled at his silly joke, and the reflexive pain dissipated.
His encounters with Valentina were the stuff of legend—at least to me, he thought. The night they first met, the day he triggered traumatic memories in Angelina concerning children, the massacre, and, of course, last night when she shared her love for Angelina’s mother with them.
After Angelina told him she was unexpectedly expecting, he’d felt compelled to propose on the spot. It was something he’d planned to do, just not at that moment. Ben found it ironic that his proposal would have been symbolic because he lacked a ring, itself symbolic of the commitment. Valentina rescued him when she presented the engagement and wedding rings that had belonged to Angelina’s mother.
The more Ben learned about Valentina, the more Olympian she became to him. He’d known polymaths and philomaths; she was both. I have known no one so informed or self-assured.
At first, he’d taken offense at her characterization of his Italian language skills as “terrible.” In retrospect, he realized how much better he now spoke Italian, thanks to her insistence that he only speak Italian around her.
Ben wasn’t sure of the exact moment she changed her opinion, but after the massacre, she no longer treated him as a threat to Angelina. For Ben, the emotional capstone to last night was when Valentina welcomed him into her family and called him her son. That was overwhelming.
Ben exited the bathroom and gazed at Angelina, still asleep… truly, an angel. My angel. Her—no, now their—dog, Mondo, gazed up at him from the floor alongside the bed. Part mastiff, he was a devoted guardian of Angelina. Ben had always gotten along well with dogs, but to Valentina’s surprise, he and Mondo hit it off the first time they met. Ben believed had they not, he and Angelina would never had developed a relationship. Angelina said Ben was the only man Mondo had ever liked, although he seemed to get along with Ben’s musician friend Luca.
Ben began humming the song to which they’d first danced at Rockisland, “Pretty Eyes” by Alex Goot. Ben never remembered song lyrics, but he remembered the chorus: “Cause you and your pretty eyes, you keep me alive, keep me alive.”
Angelina opened those pretty eyes—her pretty amber eyes—and smiled at Ben as she clasped her hands and stretched her arms above her head.
Ben said, “Buongiorno, Lina,” as he sat on the bed next to her before leaning over and kissing her, just a soft caress. He watched as she closed her eyes. When they did not open, he wondered if she had fallen back asleep. Ben arose and headed for the bathroom.
As he returned, she startled him when she shrieked and covered her face with a pillow. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Angelina nodded. “Just happy, sorry to worry you.”
“Don’t apologize. I like your happy shrieks.”
“Not that kind of happy, silly. Mother-to-be, wife-to-be, in-love-with-my-soul-mate happy.”
“Oh, that’s good too.” He ducked under the flying pillow. “You missed.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to hurt the father of my child.”
As he attempted a more passionate second kiss, Angelina objected. “No, per favore, il mio alito cattivo!”
“Your breath isn’t any worse than usual.”
Ben ducked as a second pillow missed and then was shoved out of the way by Angelina as she headed to the bathroom. He was unsurprised but still appreciative that she was giggling as she left the room.
Looking down at Mondo, Ben said, “Why does her strength still surprise me?” Mondo didn’t answer. Ben smiled, as did Mondo, but Mondo always smiled.
