Eva fell in love with Federico like you would climb down stairs. With Gio, it was more of a slap in the face kind of realization, in a ‘you’re in love with your friend’s boyfriend, nice job, enjoy the pain’ way. But not this time. She is aware of it. She climbs down the steps one after the other, falls in love a little bit more at each, sometimes she even trips down a couple at a time.
It doesn’t mean it’s not still scary as fuck from time to time. It is. It really is.
Sometimes, when she goes to his place in Milan for a weekend, she finds herself staring at his sleeping face for hours and wonder what the hell she’s doing. Or when she is at school or at a party, people around her begin to whisper how can she be so stupid, does she really think he is not having sex with every girl he can find. She could punch every single one of their stupid faces. She doesn’t want to worry about her relationship with Federico, about his womanizer tendencies, about what’s going to happen next.
She doesn’t want to worry about something so easy, because it’s easy to be in love with Federico.
When they’re calling and texting each other about the smallest things, when he suddenly comes back for the weekend and asks her if she wants to go for an adventure. When he grumbles that he misses Edo looking embarrassed by the admission. When he doesn’t back down from a very awkward meeting with her parents and presents himself like everything is fine, when he grumbles against his dumbasses of friends and that it’s sucks because now Edoardo, their ‘brain’, is in America, there is no one to stop them from doing really stupid things When he hugs her and kissed her hair, when he draws a trail of kisses down her stomach and cheekily looks up to her, when they hang out together and try to forget the exams season is coming. And it makes her feel euphoric.
Eva doesn’t say ‘I love you’. She tells him that he has a nice face, which is a good thing if he fails uni. That he should never enter a kitchen ever again because no one should be allowed to fail pasta. She tells him she would gladly skip school if he skips with her. She tells him about the comments she gets at school and how she would have transferred two years ago if it didn’t mean leaving the girls and Martino behind. She tells him about Eleonora’s sad face when someone talks about her boyfriend and if he thinks it would make her happy if they buy her a plane ticket for Christmas or if Edoardo thinks of coming back for the holidays. She tells him about the morning bus that always leaves without her.
But Eva doesn’t say ‘I love you’. Because she doesn’t know if he does love her back, or if he’s going to say it back without meaning it and she doesn’t want to worry about that. She doesn’t want things to change. So instead, she smiles against his skin and laughs at her phone and her heart expands in her chest.
