The tutoring took on a rhythm—three times a week, like bells or laundry day. After the third session a folded sheet slipped from my textbook: Isabella, in an elegant hand that made my heartbeat feel extremely seen.
I read it on my dorm bed, shoes still on.
Isabella, teaching you is a pleasure. Your comprehension is unusually clear; your questions refine mine. I hope you feel a similar intellectual accord. —L.F.
Only academic praise. Ordinary. Yet the sentences were padded with something softer, like a chair you could fall asleep in if you weren’t careful. I meant to show Luisa. I meant to tell Papa. Instead I slid it into my journal “for notes,” which felt a lot like hiding.
By morning I’d decided to reply—properly, not plainly.
Dear L.F.,
Your note surprised me. Your words stay with me long after our meetings end; they keep me awake. I look forward to seeing whether the ideas that kept me awake will do the same to you.
Yours, Isabella
Entirely respectable. Also not.
I set the envelope on his desk before our next meeting, hands shaking with the thrill of starting something I could still pretend was only about books.
My phone lit: Matteo. “Ciao,” he breathed, relief warm as August. “Mi manchi.”
“I’m okay. I miss you too.” The truth, though a smaller one. He told me about the vines—airflow, clean spurs, how tendrils find support if you give them something honest. We said goodnight. I stared at the ceiling, divided: warm-loved Bella and bright-new Roman Bella.
Notes began to appear with a routine of their own—cafeteria tray, desk corner, once tucked into a library book like a dare. At first: reading lists, pointed questions, tiny assignments.
Then: What do you want that your father cannot imagine for you?
Then: Tell me about your mother as you remember her, not as others speak of her.
Then: Being overprotected can feel like safety until it interrupts breath.
I told him what I’d never written down: my mother, the actress who left Hollywood for love; how she promised herself classrooms instead of cameras and never reached them because a stranger’s knife chose otherwise. The page steadied me.
His reply came folded twice, careful:
Grief changes the geometry of a life; we begin to plan around a hole. My sister died young—an arrhythmia no one found until it was an obituary. I tell you this so you know I don’t handle your pain as theory.
And: I take the shelter’s greyhound home on weekends when the kennels are full. He reminds me to eat and go outside. He hates thunder; I sit with him until it passes. —L.F.
A man who could hold a trembling dog through a storm made a sudden, impossible soft place in me.
Sessions shifted. He still spoke in precise currents—attachment, affect regulation, construct validity—but now I sat beside him. Twice he tapped a line in my notes, sleeve brushing my arm. “You see around corners,” he remarked. “Most students need scaffolding. You… climb.”
“Grazie,” I murmured, newly aware I possessed shoulders.
“It isn’t only your mind,” he added, gaze steady, maddeningly professional. “It’s the way you notice. Many nineteen-year-olds rush past their noticing.”
I glowed, carefully.
Luisa saw me smiling at paper and marched me out for “gelato and perspective.” We looped the Colosseum at blue hour. “Mentorships don’t usually come with calligraphy,” she deadpanned, pistachio in hand. “Does your father know?”
“There’s nothing to tell him,” I answered too quickly.
“Then why haven’t you?” She bumped my shoulder. “Glow, but keep your eyes open while you glow.”
By week four, my replies weren’t only about neurons.
You’ve made me curious about everything. I admire how calm and controlled you are—it’s almost unfair. I believe in small risks, the kind you can keep an eye on. I just wanted to say that. —I.
I should have drawn a line. I underlined sentences instead.
After a focused session he said, “There’s a cloister garden behind the archives. Would you like to walk?”
“Va bene,” I heard myself say.
Jasmine on walls, a fountain the size of a sigh. We sat. My heart turned into percussion.
“Isabella,” he began, voice low but formal, “whatever this is, it’s atypical. We proceed with care. Roles matter.” His hand hovered, measuring distance. “Do you understand?”
“I do.” I leaned closer anyway—slow, deliberate—and rose that last inch to kiss him first. Brief: a question shaped like a mouth. He went still, uncertainty flickering like a shutter. “Bella—” he warned, not moving away.
“I’m not confused,” I breathed, and kissed him again, firmer. The Professor seemed to answering despite himself, a careful shift, the restraint of a man testing ice. Heat rushed; the world narrowed to breath, pulse, the catch of his coat at my wrist.
He ended it, palms steady at my shoulders. “This isn’t a campus for that.”
“Then where?”
“My apartment,” he said. “Friday. We talk. Precisely. Alone.”
I nodded before my conscience caught up. Rules exist; mouths erase.
That night Matteo called. “Your dad asked if you’re eating,” he joked gently. “You sound different.”
“Just tired from prep,” I lied for the first time to him; the stair under my foot felt hollow. “How are the vines?”
“They’re listening,” he said. “You can tell when they do—the tendrils point the right way. I keep the air moving, Bella. I don’t crowd them. It’s easy to smother a good thing if you love it wrong.”
“You’ve never loved anything wrong,” I whispered.
A beat. “I’m trying not to start.”
After we hung up, Rome hummed; Luisa breathed steadily across the room. My screen glowed: an email from Ferraro with an attachment—his greyhound asleep on a pile of papers, captioned He prefers psychoanalysis to behaviorism. I laughed into my blanket. Immediately after, a voice note from Matteo: Dimmi che stai bene. I miss your laugh in the evenings.
I typed and deleted a reply to Ferraro. I held my phone and didn’t answer Matteo. I whispered to the dark, “If this is a test, I’ll ace it.” Then, to no one and both, “But I won’t be extra credit.”
Friday pulsed closer. Guilt and electricity shared a room. I felt like a vine that wanted both the trellis and the wild air.
What am I becoming? I don’t know yet.
I only know that when I finally slept, I dreamed of two pairs of hands: one steady with pruning shears that never nick the wrong spur, one steady with questions that cut fog. In the dream I whispered stop and go at the same time—and woke with my heart hammering and my mouth remembering a kiss.