Backflash: Nicola (part I)

When I was a teenager, I used to spend most of the summer in the UK, at some family’s friends on the south-western coast.
I was pretty much of a rebel, back at that time, and I had endless arguments with the Panther. Summers in the UK were the things that made life valuable, from my silly teen-ager point of view (no offense to teenager readers, it was just that I was a troublemaker, at that time of my life).

Although my writing isn’t perfect, at the time I sounded like a British native. Add blond hair and blue eyes, and no one ever guessed I had Italian origins. So, these are the premises.

It all started a few days before my seventeenth birthday, while I was traveling to get there with a friend of mine. At the railway station where we changed our train, two guys approached us and asked in awful English: “Excuse? These train… [town next to our destination]? Pleeese?”
Without thinking too much I said “Yeah, it’s the right one, it’s the stop right after ours so you’ll know when you’re arrived”. The guy stared at me blankly, and I realized he did not get a word, so I just said “Yes”. He smiled, and than headed to the coffee stand with his friend. Right then, he told, in Italian: “What a hottie!”
I suddenly turned and repeated in Italian what I had just said about the train. He blushed a bit, and immediately recovered, introducing himself and telling us girls he worked at a pizza parlor next to the town biggest club, and inviting us over for any time we wanted to eat something. That’s how I met Nicola.

It would have ended there, hadn’t we met him on his way to work three days later, while we were out to party for my birthday. He found this out and immediately lead us to the pizza place, where he made us funny little pizzas shaped in hearts, rabbits and clovers. His friends and he, although they spoke little English, knew loads of people in town, and they made us promise we would stop by at the end of their shift. We agreed, and they took us to the fanciest club of the town, and we loved the night!

What I haven’t mentioned so far, is that, while I was 17, he was 28. Soon I found myself spending most of afternoons with him, hanging around, playing darts, showing him the region, drinking Guinness, or just taking naps in his bed.
After a while, he found me a part-time job at bar-tending, so I could spend the whole summer in England.