3.
In the end, the preparation needed was fairly minimal. The family went out mid-afternoon to look around the local village. Leonardo didn’t have a shift tonight, which could be either an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how things played out. He had to make up an excuse about staying because he wanted to avoid his landlord, but the place had always been fairly relaxed, with people hanging around outside of hours, so no one paid him any mind. The actual planning stage only took him ten minutes and, since he didn’t much fancy running into the village, was built around only items that could be easily pilfered from the hotel. Once his shift officially ended, he grabbed a book from the guest library and grabbed a seat outside in the afternoon sun to wait for their return. Life was good, he reflected.
The family returned from their outing about half past nine just as it was starting to get dark. Leandro was lucky enough to be in earshot. As he had hoped, they were indeed planning an early night, with the girl announcing that she would watch some television before bed, if the Italian stations had anything good on which they probably wouldn’t, of course.
This was helpful for Leandro. The last detail of his plan, the one that he couldn’t decide on until he saw how things lay, was exactly when to launch the operation. Go in too early and he risked a parent knocking on the door at the worst possible moment. Go in too late and she’d be asleep. A freshly woken woman in a hotel bathrobe, one groggy and with bed hair, was much harder to hit on than one that was full dressed. They were naturally in defence mode. The right moment could be quite hard to judge.
In the end he went in earlier than he would have liked because of the technicality. It was a stupid technicality, but one that he was certain his friends would bring up if he tried to tell the resulting story over a few drinks. Ideally the deed would have to start before midnight otherwise it wouldn’t still be her eighteenth birthday. Sure, if the courtship lasted a bit longer than that, he could still spin it as the evening of her eighteenth birthday. He could even bullshit a bit about how her being born in a different timezone gave him six hours’ leeway. But these were the sort of details that dragged a good anecdote down; the things your guy friends give you shit about for ages in order to just take the wind out of your sales mid brag. So, it would be best if were done cleanly and unambiguously, which would still be a rush even if he took the absolutely earliest opportunity that could reasonably been deemed ‘safe’.
He knocked on her door at a quarter past ten.
4.
Gabby Reinhart was sitting cross-legged on the bed watching an old episode of Friends. In fairness, Italian television hadn’t been quite as bad as she’d assumed, the hotel seemed to have a pretty full cable package on offer, but nor was she in the mood to settle on anything more substantial to watch. She’d tried some of the local channels for amusement for about fifteen minutes, but, apart from some of the female presenters being very noticeably better endowed that their US counterparts, it hadn’t seemed that different from the rubbish she was used to, just in spoken in an incomprehensible language.
This holiday had been a drag. Italy was objectively a lovely country even she had to admit; she just wasn’t in the mood for it. Her parents had kept telling her how wonderful it was, telling her why Italian pizza was so much more authentic than Dominoes’, or how historically important this or that dank, depressing cathedral was, or which Ninja Turtle had painted this or that famous religious painting. She was, no doubt, just about as fed up of seeing Jesus on the cross as he was of being crucified. At least he had been allowed permitted to die after three days. There seemed no end to her suffering.
She knew that she had been rough on a parents. It wasn’t really their fault. They didn’t know that she had promised herself to Jason Roe on her eighteen birthday. If they had, they still wouldn’t have appreciated that if you didn’t keep your promise to guys like Jason, there were lots of other girls who were only too willing to keep it for you. It was a good promise, a fair promise. Her parents wouldn’t understand how hard she had had to work to get Jason to buy into this promise, especially when there were dozens of girls who were willing to make far bigger promises, that offered more and ask for far less in return.
It was all very well for her parents to try to explain why this was the only time that both of them could get leave for work and how they needed to have this European holiday before Simon started middle school. This holiday had wrecked her whole life, her whole future. Of course, if she told her mom (there was no way she could tell her mom), her mom would just say, “If he’s not prepared to wait, he’s not the one.” That was the kind of limp-noodled thinking that had landed her with Gabby’s father. No, Jason wasn’t the one because of any ordained soulmate baloney, Jason was the one because she’d damn well made sure he was. Or rather, she’d been this close to damn well making sure.
She could have slept with him before they left for Europe, of course, but that wouldn’t have been special; she wouldn’t have been special. It’s would just have been another two underage teenagers slipping out of whoever’s crummy party to lose their squishy innocence. Virginity was a precious commodity – a weapon that, being deployable only once, needed to be used at the right moment. The eighteenth birthday was a holy day in a girls life. Arranging matters such that it was known on the grapevine that Jason had agreed not to sleep with anyone else beforehand, and then, to very visibly be new couple at her own incredibly party, would have marked her territory very nicely. It would have stopped those feral bitches from sniffing around, at least for a while.
Well, the best laid plans of mice and men often get truly fucked over.
Jason hadn’t taken to the delay well. He’d accused her of stringing her along and had even said that the holiday was ‘mighty convenient’ even when it should have been clear to any idiot that it was the exact opposite of convenient. She’d asked him to come to the airport with him and he’d refused. He’d answered some of her messages, and he hadn’t exactly broken up with her, but she’d never been able to get more than four words of tepid response on any given day. Then her best friend, Leslie Potts, had messaged her a couple of days ago to say, while nothing was absolutely confirmed, Sadie Crickshaw was loudly and proudly claiming Jason as her latest notch after the Jason had scored the winning touchdown at the weekend. According to the numbers crunched by the local rumour mill Sadie had at least five guys since her own eighteenth birthday eight months ago and, depending on who you believed, one or more abortions. Everybody knew Sadie was a lying bitch, but then everybody also knew she was total slut, so who even knew, right? The best that could be said about the situation was that things might not be quite not as bad as they initially seemed.