‘OK, baby. I can’t wait to see you again.’
‘Bye.’
I sat there long after he’d hung up, clutching the phone to my ear and staring into the darkness.
Nick smirked when I joined him in the breakfast room early the next morning. ‘You look like you slept on your face.’
I scowled at him. ‘I didn’t sleep very well.’
‘Too busy thinking about me naked?’ he quipped.
Now I was thinking about him naked, which seemed doubly inappropriate after last night’s conversation. ‘I spoke to James.’
His smirk faded. For the first time it seemed he didn’t know what to say.
‘What happened with you guys, anyway?’ he asked eventually. ‘I mean, you were the most boring couple on the face of the earth. You must have really fucked up to chase him away like that.’
I flinched as he voiced my own fears. ‘I didn’t chase him away. He ran away like a coward.’ Despite my determination to remain calm, my voice took on a hysterical pitch as I finally asked him the question I’d been dying to know. ‘What did he tell you?’
‘Nothing. I’ve only spoken to him once, just after he lost his job, but he hasn’t returned any of my calls since.’
‘Wait, you knew he lost his job? Why didn’t you tell me?’
He looked surprised. ‘He didn’t tell you? Wow. I didn’t see that coming.’
‘You and me both, dude.’
His face twisted a little. ‘So why’d he call after all this time?’
I hesitated. ‘He wants to come back.’
There was another period of silence. I chewed on a stale croissant, absorbed with thoughts of James.
‘If you’re getting back together, why do you look so miserable about it?’
His question caught me off guard.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I guess I’m not really sure what I want anymore.’ The words spilled out of me without premeditation, but now that I’d said it, now that it was out there, I wished I could take it back. What was I talking about? Of course I wanted to get back together with James! I’d spent the last three months pining over him, hadn’t I?
‘Really?’ Nick sounded as surprised as I felt.
I stood up, cursing myself for revealing too much, for giving him more ammunition with which to torment me.
‘I’m going to the front desk to find out how to get to Testaccio.’ I walked out without waiting for an answer.
The woman at reception told me which bus we needed to catch and gave me a large map of Rome, but I barely registered her words.
I sat in one of the chairs in the lobby and stared down, unseeing, at the map on my lap.
‘You’re one fucked up chick, you know that?’ Nick was standing in front of me.
‘What?’
‘It’s gonna be even harder to get this story if you keep storming off every time you don’t like something I say. Which seems to be pretty much every five minutes.’
I snorted. ‘You’re lecturing me about appropriate behaviour? You’re the one who’s been picking up women left, right and centre.’
Nick laughed. ‘One woman, Burrowes. One. And I didn’t pick her up, anyway. We had a drink, we chatted and then we called it a night.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘What’s it to you, anyway? Aren’t you going back to James as soon as we get home?’
‘I’m not going to discuss my relationship with you, Nick. You have the emotional maturity of a clothes hanger.’
Nick tipped his head back and groaned. ‘You’re determined to argue with me no matter what, aren’t you? I’m just surprised you’re having doubts, that’s all. I may not be the authority on romantic relationships, but any idiot could see you made him happy. I’m going to have a shower.’
He headed across the lobby towards the lifts, leaving me gaping after him. After all our arguments, I certainly hadn’t expected that response. He glanced back at me once before he got into the lift and one corner of his mouth twitched upwards in a crooked smile. My loins gave an involuntary twitch of appreciation and a hot flush began to spread through my body.
Jesus Christ. He was right. I was fucked up.
I’d studiously ignored Nick’s smug look as I checked out with nothing but my satchel. The hotel staff had agreed to hold my suitcase until we knew what our plans were, so I’d stuffed the laptop, my dictaphone and a couple of spare changes of clothes into the satchel.
The bus took us a roundabout way through the streets of Rome, and I gaped like an idiot as we passed sites I’d only ever seen on postcards: the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, numerous ancient and beautiful buildings. If I’d thought Barcelona looked old, this was another thing altogether. Ancient walls draped in ivy sat alongside modern office buildings, and cobbled streets threaded off the main roads. Drivers seemed to take traffic lights as suggestions rather than law, and the cacophony of car horns, shouts and screeching tyres filtered through the closed windows of the bus. It was like watching an action movie, and I found myself wishing the bus ride would never end.
‘Anyone would think you’d never seen any tourist sites before,’ Nick mocked.
His remark made me feel like an idiot, and I snapped back at him, ‘Before yesterday the oldest building I’d seen was Melbourne Town Hall. Can you just let me enjoy it for the ten minutes I’m not failing at getting this story?’
‘Sorry.’ He went quiet, and didn’t speak again until we got off the bus. A few minutes’ walk and we reached the Mercato di Testaccio, a surprisingly modern, arty building that was nevertheless marred by graffiti. Recalling Ford’s words about the food market, I crossed the road and entered the huge, covered pavilion. I drank in the chaotic, colourful scene and the competing sounds that greeted us: grey-haired women argued over the price of vegetables; stall vendors shouted enthusiastically to be heard over one another as they competed to sell their wares; and
