We filled the week touring the surrounding countryside on the Bandit. Our nights
were packed with wedding festivities at local restaurants, followed by talks
lasting late into the night over glasses of the Zingale vineyard’s own red wine. When the week was over, he took me to the train station in Florence and we
shared a tearful good-bye. We had made no plans to see each other again: I left
for Switzerland to visit a friend, and he was heading north back to Germany. The
next night during dinner—less than 24 hours later—my friend’s phone rang. It was
Marcus. “I’m at a fork in the road,” he said. I interrupted him, squealing,
“You’re coming here!” My friend smiled when I hung up. “There is no fork in the
road,” she said. He showed up an hour later, cold and tired, and we fed him a plate of pasta. “It
was lonely riding without you,” he said. “That’s never happened to me before.” Three years later we are married and living in Stuttgart, the friends who were
married in Italy just had a baby, and the Suzuki Bandit was recently traded in
for a Ducati ST4S. To this day I wonder if things might have turned out
differently had he picked me up in a car.
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