Chapter 3: Stay Calm, We're in Class
Teo Marini ended up staying at Luca's flat for two nights.
By Monday morning they were walking to school together through the same narrow street Luca took every day, past the low benches, the parked scooters, and the cluster of women who treated the front of the apartment complex like their private viewing lounge. The moment Luca came into sight, several pairs of eyes lit up with the same greedy delight people wore when a tray of fresh pastries arrived at a café.
Luca saw them, as he always did, and lowered his head on instinct.
In this world, men learned early that being stared at was not always harmless. The papers carried stories often enough. A pretty schoolboy followed home by a taller woman. A young man dragged into an alley behind a row of shops. A shaken statement taken afterward, if anyone bothered taking it seriously at all. Men were told to be careful outside, to mind the streets, to stay alert, because if they were not, sooner or later they would become something chewed over in women's mouths.
One of the older women clicked her tongue as they passed.
"There goes that Valenti boy again. Look at that skin. Look at those arms. If someone like that had crossed my path when I was younger, I might have become a very different woman."
The woman beside her fanned herself with a grocery flyer and snorted. "With your face? Please. You'd reach for his hand and he'd probably file a complaint."
Another laughed. "My granddaughter would suit him better. Same age, at least."
"Your granddaughter pulls those ugly little flirting faces at anything that moves," someone else cut in. "If she were a match for that boy, even the stray dogs would die laughing."
A fourth woman, louder than the rest, said, "You're all talking nonsense. If you have money, what man can't you get? Young, old, whatever. Take him first, discuss morality later."
That got a round of ugly laughter.
"They're not wrong," one of them added with complete shamelessness. "The minute a handsome boy walks by, everyone wants to try her luck herself. We all know what everyone else is thinking."
Teo swung his head around with open disgust.
"Why don't you all take a proper look at yourselves before talking like that?" he snapped. "You're old enough to know better and still standing around fantasizing about ruining teenagers. It's revolting."
The laughter thinned.
One woman rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath, but Teo was already glaring hard enough to make the point. Luca grabbed him by the shoulder before he could say anything worse and kept walking.
Only when they were half a block away did Teo let out a furious breath.
"You're too calm about it," he said. "You always act like it doesn't matter, but I know the kind of filth they say once you're out of earshot. If they talked about me like that, I'd want to swing at someone."
"They're talking to entertain themselves," Luca said. "That's all it is."
"That's not comforting."
"No," Luca admitted. "It isn't."
Still, he was used to it in the way people got used to bad weather. He hated the staring, the whispers, the little speculative smiles, but if he stopped every time a woman said something gross about him, he would never make it to school on time.
By the time they reached the building, the bell had not rung yet, and the corridor outside their classroom was still noisy. The moment they stepped through the back door, both of them saw the homeroom teacher standing there with her arms folded and an expression that promised punishment to whoever had earned it.
Teo froze.
"Hell," he muttered. "That nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought we were late."
Luca dropped his bag by his desk. The tension around the room told the rest of the story quickly enough. Someone had been caught copying homework again, and their homeroom teacher was in exactly the kind of mood that made the air feel heavier.
If Chiara had not messaged him the night before to warn him not to expect a chance to copy in the morning, Teo would almost certainly have been marched outside within minutes.
As though summoned by the thought, Chiara Venturi came over in her uniform with a stack of books already in her arms. She was taller than many of the girls in class, slim rather than curvy, neat in a way that never looked accidental. Nothing about her was loud. The clean lines of her face and the controlled way she carried herself made her stand out more effectively than flashier girls ever did.
She stopped beside Luca's desk.
"You're here," she said. "Let me see your homework."
Teo gave a wounded scoff from the next desk over.
"We're in the same group. How come you never come over looking for mine? Why are you always hovering around his desk?"
Chiara barely glanced at him.
"You?" she said. "Luca actually does the work. Are you capable of handing in anything that wasn't copied off him?"
Teo clicked his tongue and turned away with a dark mutter.
Luca, who had in fact helped save Teo from disaster more than once, kept his face carefully neutral and handed over his exercise book without comment.
Chiara took it at once. She did not have to ask twice. That was one of the small advantages Luca enjoyed in class. Teachers liked him because he was polite and did his work. Chiara liked him for reasons she was not stupid enough to say aloud. Both kinds of approval made school life easier.
Teo, unfortunately, received neither.
Chiara flipped open Luca's work and scanned the pages with practiced speed. His handwriting was as clean as the rest of him, straight and elegant without looking forced, the pen strokes firm and tidy across the page. She set his exercise book at the top of her stack rather than wedging it in the middle where it might get bent.
Then she turned back to Teo.
"Yours. Bring it over."
Teo stared at her in disbelief. "You took his without asking him to move and now I have to walk mine over to you myself?"
"Yes," Chiara said.
"That's outrageous."
"That's life."
Grumbling, he dragged his own notebook over.
Chiara accepted it without thanks. As she moved on to the next row, she let herself glance once toward Luca's seat. He was already digging through his bag for the textbook, completely unaware that she had looked back.
It was their last term. She knew that better than anyone. The calendar only seemed to speed up the more she stared at it. Final exams were coming, graduation was coming, and after that the class would scatter. She had no intention of letting the last stretch pass without doing something about the boy who had occupied far too much of her mind for far too long.
When first period began, the teacher announced a practical exercise and assigned partners for the lab work. Whether by luck or fate, Luca and Chiara ended up together.
Several girls in short-sleeved uniform blouses, the sort who liked to push the rules until the fabric was nearly transparent in the sun, drifted over at once with smiles that were not really smiles.
"Chiara, you're so lucky," one of them said. "You got paired with the prettiest boy in class. Swap with us."
"Yes," another chimed in. "We won't even complain. Think of it as generosity."
Chiara kept her expression smooth.
"That won't work," she said. "The groups are assigned. Follow the rules."
What she did not say was that she knew exactly what those girls wanted.
They did not like Luca. They liked the idea of him. Beautiful face, shy manner, those impossibly beautiful eyes, that way he sometimes smiled without realizing what it did to the room. To them, he was a thrill waiting to happen, something soft to chase down, tease, corner, and brag about afterward. They called that interest. Chiara did not.
Desire was not the same thing as affection, even if she was hardly innocent herself. Her thoughts were not cleaner than theirs. She wanted things too. She wanted Luca's attention, his trust, the right to stand close without anyone questioning it. She wanted him looking for her first in a room. She wanted to make him happy. What came after that could come later.
The girls left reluctantly when the teacher called everyone into place.
The practical involved a burner and heated glassware, simple enough in theory, but Luca was distracted, moving too quickly at one point as he adjusted the setup. The flame jumped higher than he expected.
Chiara caught his wrist before he reached fully into the wrong angle.
"You're holding it wrong," she said sharply. "You'll burn your hand."
Luca blinked and stopped at once.
"What? I didn't even notice."
"I can see that."
Her grip was firm and cool through the sleeve of his shirt. She released him as soon as the point was made, then stepped into his place and went through the sequence herself, slower this time, showing him exactly how the equipment should be handled. The classroom noise faded a little in her ears as she worked. She could feel his attention on her, steady and direct.
If only he would keep looking at her like that outside class too, she thought before she could stop herself.
"There," she said when she finished. "That's the full process. Now you try again, and I'll watch."
Luca did, more carefully this time. When he set the apparatus down without incident, he turned to her with a smile that landed on her like sunlight through a window.
"Thanks," he said. "You saved me just now."
The late morning sun was already slanting across the room. It struck him from the side, catching in his hair and along the edge of his cheek, and for one ridiculous second Chiara could only stare. There was a softness to him that never read as weakness, only invitation. Something about the line of his mouth and the warmth in his eyes made her chest tighten painfully.
She wanted, with sudden humiliating intensity, to put a hand around his waist, pull him close, and kiss him until that smile changed shape under her mouth.
She took one step toward him before her mind finally slammed the brakes on.
Absolutely not.
This was class. There were thirty people in the room. The teacher was ten meters away. Her pulse was suddenly racing as if she had committed the act already.
"Helping each other is normal," she said, and nearly hated the stiffness of her own voice.
She turned before he could study her too closely and went back to her seat under the excuse of getting water. At her desk she lifted the bottle with both hands and drank until the coolness calmed her. Her face felt hot enough that she worried the redness would be obvious.
He didn't see that, did he, she thought. He couldn't have.
She sat down again, forced her breathing back into order, and watched Luca run through the steps once more from across the room. It was just as well they had been paired together. If those hungry girls in the back had seen him smile like that up close, one of them would probably have found an excuse to put hands on him before the lesson ended.
Her fingers curled against the edge of the desk.
When she had grabbed his wrist, she had felt how narrow it was even through the fabric. Luca really ought to eat more. Men in this world needed stamina too, even if no one ever said so in respectable company.
By the time the bell rang, Chiara had herself under control again.
Luca and Teo left the room together, weaving through the corridor crowd while students spilled toward the stairs and the courtyard. Teo nudged him in the ribs with the sort of grin that meant trouble.
"So," he said, "what was it like being paired with Chiara Venturi?"
Luca adjusted the strap of his bag.
"She was helpful. I nearly burned myself, and she caught it before I did."
Teo made a low, knowing sound.
"That's all it took for you to reach a verdict? Don't forget, I told you she has hidden motives."
Luca gave him an exasperated look.
"You say that about every woman who speaks to me for more than ten seconds."
"And I am often correct."
"You are often loud."
Teo clutched his chest as if wounded, then recovered at once.
"Fine. Since you refuse to respect intuition, I'll show you evidence."
He stopped walking, dug into his notebook, and pulled out a sheet of paper dotted all over with small red marks.
Then he handed it to Luca.