Page 67 of Elevate With Me

“After all, you’re perfect, Luca.”

I shook my head. “I’m far from perfect.”

“But we will make it work,” she whispered my own words back to me. “Right?”

“Yes, we will.”

Knuckles and pain

“WHAT DOESfagiolomean?” ?I asked as we sat down to eat our hard-earned meal. Four hours was way too long to be in the kitchen, no matter what the Ombrello family said about the best things needing time. Our argument didn’t help, of course.

I wasn’t quite over being mad at Luke about leaving so suddenly, but there was nothing I could do about it just then. Or at all, really. He’d clearly shown that his offered ‘anything’ did not apply to that situation. I either trusted that he meant it when he said he loved me or prepared for my stupid lovestruck heart to get hurt. I couldn’t quite make myself rush out of his flat when he begged me to stay so here we were.

“Ahh,” Luke chuckled. “It means ‘bean’.”

I attempted to raise my eyebrow at him but didn’t quite succeed. He laughed, reaching out to rub his thumb over the back of my hand, before he settled back in his stool.

“There’s a story for it, of course.”

I stabbed my fork into the meat roll before looking at him again. “Will you tell me, bean-boy?”

He laughed again, harder this time. “God, I love you, Haylee.”

Every time he said it my heart tried to sprout wings and flap around like a bird. My stomach tickled with butterflies. Everything else stopped as if needing me to hyper-focus on the words and the way his expression softened as he pronounced them. The more he said it, the easier it was for me to believe it.

The first time, it had come out rasped, then desperate. He’d said it softly. He’d whispered it in my ear. He’d given those three words depth each and every time as if the emotion itself was carried in his voice. I believed him because I wanted to. I believed because I needed to. Because if it wasn’t true, I would not come back from this unscathed.

“I was ten when the nickname stuck,” Luke said, bringing me out of my reverie. “We were makingPasta e Fagioli, a bean and pasta soup. It’s an easy recipe and usually doesn’t take too long to make.”

Which in Luke’s dictionary meant it wasn’t a three-hour cooking party, but likely still took longer than the thirty minutes I tended to dedicate to meal making.

“Nonnisent me to grab the beans from the pantry while she prepared the vegetables. Neither of us realised that the bag of beans was on the higher shelf, and while I was tall for my age, I couldn’t quite reach them without climbing on the lower two shelves and balancing on my tiptoes. Even then, I barely grazed the sack with my fingers. The act of even trying dipped the entire shelving unit, and it fell over with the beans scattering all over the floor. I was lucky to not get crushed under the weight. While we cleaned up most of the mess, we kept finding beans in the pantry, and some even around the house for weeks afterwards. The nickname never went away after that. Haven’t managed to outlive it since.”

I bit at my lower lip, trying to contain my smile. “So, would you say you are full of beans?”

Luke raised an eyebrow. “How long were you waiting to say that one?”