Sand Castle: Chapter 22

When we got out of the plane, I looked around, and I had no clue where we were. Tom didn't let me watch through the window during the flight. He was afraid if I looked, I'd find out where he was taking me. At our new destination, we arrived on a private plane, and the flight lasted around an hour. That makes me think that we were still somewhere in Croatia, probably in Dubrovnik or Split. All the time, Tom hears my stories about how beautiful the Croatian seacoast is, and I guess he wants to see it for himself.

Tom took my hand, and he led me to the car that was waiting for us. The driver said, "Hello", he took our luggage, and he put it in the car. While we were driving in the car, I was looking at the landscape, and everything looked familiar to me. I know that I have been here before, but still, I couldn't tell where we were for sure. When we passed by the first houses and I saw the names of the shops in Italian, I realized that we were in Italy.

"Tom, are we in Rimini?"

"Yes, we are," he smiled, and he kissed my forehead.

After we passed "our restaurant", the car stopped a hundred meters away. We were standing in front of the hotel, where Tom and I had spent our first night together.

"You've got me really surprised, Tom! I'm speechless!"

"I'm sorry if I disappointed you with my choice of a hotel, Nina. You deserve a much better accommodation..."

"No, this place is perfect! Everything is perfect!"

Tom has planned everything to the tiniest detail. Besides the same hotel, we were also staying in the same room. The room looked the same. It had the same white curtains with purple flowers, the same little table and two chairs, the nightstands, and only the bed was new.

"In the following months, I'll be extremely busy with the promotion of my new album, you know, the interviews, the concerts, and all the madness, and I'll have no time for a vacation. I wanted to take you here last month for our anniversary, but I couldn't get a week off. While we were in Croatia, I said to myself, we are so close to Italy, why not go to Rimini now? I'm sorry because we had to leave Croatia earlier than we planned. I know that you wanted to stay in Zagreb with your family..."

"No, this is so much better! I must call my parents to tell them where we are."

"They already know."

"You've told them, and you didn't want to tell me?"

"I had to tell them because it wasn't polite to leave their home two days earlier. I was afraid that they might think I didn't enjoy their hospitality. They accepted me as their son, and they let us sleep in the same room. I don't know many fathers who would allow that, but your parents are very cool and liberal."

"Trust me, since now, I didn't know how cool they are."

"We have only two days and one night in Rimini, so let's enjoy as we did six years ago."

"This time we'll enjoy more. This time, we are sure about our love."

"You are right, Nina."

Tom and I didn't stay for long in our room. We left our luggage unpacked, and we left the hotel. We agreed that we must go to the beach, we must have dinner in our favorite restaurant, we must visit as many as possible places where we were the last time, and we must visit Mrs. Sofia.

We didn't have a particular plan for where we'd go first, but accidentally, we found ourselves on the street with the music shop where the last time I bought thirteen music albums, just because Tom told me that I had to have them.

"Let's go in! Maybe there is a new album you'll recommend me to buy."

"I hope so. Since we are living together, you have been listening to nothing else but my music, and you have made me start to hate my songs."

"Stop hoping that I'll ever find a music album that I'll like more than yours. That will never happen."

"In that case, I will be very grateful to you if, in the future, you'll listen to my songs when I'm not at home."

The music shop is small, but they have thousands of albums of all genres. I went to the section with pop-rock albums, which is my favorite genre of music these days, and I found Tom's album.

"Hey, look! What have I told you? One day, in this shop they will sell your album, and I was right," I said, and I showed him his first solo album.

"Sir, excuse me to bother you. Will you please be kind to sign a few of your albums?" the young boy from the shop asked Tom.

"Yeah, sure! It will be my pleasure!" Tom said with a smile.

"Thank you! Can I please take a picture of you in our shop, to prove to our customers that you have been here?" the salesman asked Tom.

"Yeah!"

"No, wait! I'll take a picture of you both. That's how everyone will believe you," I suggested it.

"A great idea! Thanks, Nina!" Tom said.

"Nina? Like Nina from your hit song?" the boy asked, surprised.

"Yeah, exactly! And let me tell you a little secret, I met my Nina here, in Rimini, six years ago."

"But your song is very sad, and it's about unreturned love..." the boy said, confused.

"In life, I had more luck. Nina has returned my love, and I hope our story will have a happy ending."

We were walking hand in hand on the streets of Rimini all day. The city hasn't changed much in the past six years. Almost everything was as we knew it, and almost everything looked the same, as in the photographs we kept from the last time.

"Do you remember the clock tower, Nina? The first day, you were waiting for me right there, for twenty-two minutes," Tom said when we arrived at our favorite square, The Piazza Tre Martiri.

"Wait a minute! How do you know how long I was waiting for you when I have never told you that before?"

"I know because I arrived a long time before you, and I was waiting for you to come on that corner. When you came, I got panicked. I didn't know where to take you and what to talk about with you. You know me, a man with no self-confidence."

"Why you've never told me this before?"

"Well, I'm telling you now."

"I had the same fears too."

"Really?"

"Yes. I couldn't sleep the night before. I was afraid that you wouldn't show up because on the beach I was acting like a total idiot, and I didn't know what to wear..."

"No, I don't believe you. You're saying that just to make me feel better," Tom said, and he kissed me in the middle of the square.

A visit to Rimini for Tom and me would not be complete if we didn't go to the beach where we met. Our visit to Rimini was spontaneous, and we were not prepared for the beach. We didn't take our bathing suits, so we didn't have much of a choice but to spend the rest of the day sitting on the sand and talking.

"It's such a shame because we can't go swimming," Tom said.

"Yes, the weather in August is perfect for swimming. We should have followed your rule about going on a vacation."

"My rule?"

"Take all your clothes with you, everywhere you'll go, and be prepared for all weather conditions," I said, and he began to laugh.

We were impatient all day, and we couldn't wait for dinner time to come, to go to our favorite restaurant. We love that place, not just for the amazing pizza they make, but because we had our first official date at that restaurant. When we walked in, we walked into a completely new place, but the smell of the delicious food told us that we were in the right place. The restaurant was renovated and they've changed everything, except their old good recipe for making pizza.

After the dinner, we went straight to our hotel room. We were lucky because our hotel was close to the restaurant. Tom and I were exhausted from walking all day, and we didn't have much straight to walk some more. We are not much out goers, anyway. We are two quiet people who enjoy quiet evenings.

"I have never been this tired in my life before," Tom said, and he lay on the bed.

"What do you want to do for the rest of the evening?"

"Let's see what is on television."

"We don't have a cable. All the programs are in Italian."

"I'm not worried much about that when I have you to translate me. You were attending an Italian language course six years ago, and by now, you must be speaking Italian like a native language," he joked with me.

"You are so mean," I said, and I hit him with the pillow.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to," he apologized, and he put his hand on my knee.

"Instead of learning Italian, I was improving my English with a young American boy I met that summer."

"Is that all that you have been doing with him? Improving your English?"

"No, we were doing a lot of other things together. If you were not tired, with enormous pleasure, I would show you in the new bed what I enjoyed the most."

"Excellent idea, Nina!"

"But you said that you are tired."

"Well, I'm not that tired."

The next day, we bought a big bouquet of beautiful pink roses and a box of the most expensive chocolates we could find, and we went to visit Mrs. Sofia. When we arrived in front of her home, we found the big green gate locked. The house and the garden looked like nobody had lived there for years. We asked one of her neighbors, who was passing at that moment by her house, where we could find Mrs. Sofia, but his answer broke our hearts.

"Mrs. Sofia passed away four years ago," he said.

From her home, we went to the cemetery, but her neighbor gave us the wrong instruction. He meant his left, but we turned to our left, and we got lost. After two hours of searching, we found her grave.

"Look, Tom, she was only sixty-seven when she died. She wasn't old. That is only five years more than my father has."

"Yeah. Losing dear people is a part of our lives, and there is nothing we can do about it."

"She was an extraordinary woman."

"Yes, she was."

We wish we hadn't gone to Mrs. Sofia's house and never found out that she was gone. Tom and I had a feeling that we had lost someone very close, a member of our family. We didn't know Mrs. Sofia for a long time, but we own her so much. She was with us at the most important time in our lives: when we were falling in love. I couldn't tell my parents about Tom, but I could tell her. She became my best friend after Tom left home. If she were alive, today she would be truly happy for both of us.

We left Rimini partly happy, partly sad, and we went to Rome, from where we went home to New York. In just two days, we couldn't visit all the places we keep in our memories. We were sure that there would be a next time soon, and the next time, we wouldn't stay for just two days. Rimini is the place where our love story began, and we will always come back to that city.