Eating With the Angels by Sarah-Kate Lynch Page B

slobbering males like a circus clown, and did. I was full of admiration for her in this respect, but I used to worry that what with dating six men at once and all, she would never find anyone (one being the operative word) special, a husband of her own. I knew she wanted children. But after a few years it occurred to me that this girl was having so much fun on the single circuit, why would she swap it for sitting at home in front of
Friends
re-runs sucking on a Bud, no coterie of ardent admirers swooning at her feet, a clutch of snot-nosed brats clawing at her hem? She’d probably die of boredom the first night.
    Not that Tom and I sat at home watching
Friends
re-runs sucking on Buds — we both worked nights so that was out of thequestion — no, we had a much better life than that. But still, without him, I would not have had a tiny little fraction of the fun that Fleur had without a significant other.
    I had been crossing back over the Rialto Bridge when this thought hit me and it stopped me in my tracks, whammo. I
was
without Tom. I
had
no significant other. There
would
be no fun. A little bit of the devastation that had been missing hit me right in the stomach then. I was stupid to think I could have avoided it and it hurt, it hurt like hell, in a rock-bottom-here-I-come sort of a way.
    I looked up as a well-dressed couple about my own age but more grown up walked up the steps of the bridge towards me. The woman would not be the type to haggle over a rip-off LV handbag; she was wearing a big scarf over her shoulders, the way Italian women can, and everything about her screamed style and money. The man, in blue blazer and impeccable shoes, was appreciatively eyeing a curvy Swedish-looking backpacker in front of me. When she passed him by, his eyes moved on to me and kept moving. They just slid right over me to someone behind. If I hadn’t actually stepped out of his way, he would have walked right over me. I was invisible.
    On my list of bad moments, this was a biggie. Right up there with Woody’s pretzel, although of course I didn’t know about Woody’s pretzel then.
    Here was clearly a ladies’ man, a sophisticate with a built-in radar for the feminine, a man who probably couldn’t cross a hallway without getting a hard-on for the cleaning woman, and I had not even registered as a blip. This, I thought miserably, was going to be my life without Tom: playing a microbe in the mating game.
    I wheeled around, my hand over my mouth, some inexplicable emotion crushing my lungs, and banged, literally, straight into the absurdly fragrant chest of my strapping gondolier.
    ‘
Finalmente
,’ he said. ‘Finally.’

Three
    I know it’s ridiculous, trust me, I know. I mean the whole stupid being-on-second-honeymoon-in-Venice-on-my-own thing had crappy romantic comedy written all over it. You think I couldn’t see that? And while I knew that some people really have those things happen to them — they meet the love of their lives reaching for the last chocolate-chip cookie in the jar or marry the muscle-bound surfer who saved them from drowning on a Caribbean beach holiday — I was not that sort of person. I was a meet-your-husband-to-be- at-four -years-of-age-and-get-married-because-your-mom-is-pissed-off type of person.
    Yet there I was, standing on the Rialto Bridge staring into the amused almond eyes of an exceptionally good-looking gondolier who was holding my elbow and saying, ‘Finally,’ in that overpowering voice that had sucked the breath clear out of my lungs over by the fish market.
    ‘Finally what, exactly?’ I had the gumption to ask eventually, sounding squeaky and small and foreign.
    ‘Finally I’ve found you,’ he said, his voice suddenly seeming quite normal. ‘
Ti ho cercato dovunque
. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
    Up close he was even better-looking than from afar. He had thechiselled looks of a Calvin Klein model, the type of man I would normally consider — if I had ever been