I gawked for a second. “I’m not getting on that,” I said.

Valerio frowned. “Come on, it is safe! I have been riding it since I was your age.”

“So you’ve been riding it for two years. Nuh-uh. I’m not getting on a motorcycle.”

“It is a scooter.”

“When you said you’d pick me up, I thought you meant by foot, or maybe, at best, with a car . . .”

“I did not specify what kind of ride,” he said, smiling. I don’t know if he meant it that way, but I couldn’t help thinking about that line sexually. What kind of ride. And that was all it took for me to get on his motorcycle-scooter thing. God, I’m easy.

Valerio gestured at the handlebars below the passenger seat. “You can hold tight to these handles down here, or you can hold tight to me.”

“Well, that’s one way to make a move,” I said.

I strapped on my helmet. Valerio accelerated smoothly down the street. My nerves calmed; this didn’t feel so different from driving a car. Until, whoa, the first turn felt like we were karate chopping through the air. So I gripped his waist tighter.

We sliced through the highway. Every time we hit a bump, I gripped my fingers tighter around Valerio’s waist, and he laughed. The wind whipped my T-shirt. “I hope that thing doesn’t fly off,” Valerio said. He was talking! Like it was a normal car ride and we were just two normal passengers.

Valerio parked the motorcycle—I mean, scooter—and I dismounted awkwardly, one leg stuck in the air like I was contemplating a drop kick. My legs were shaking as they touched the ground.

I took off the helmet, and Valerio laughed. “You were supposed to buckle up,” he said.

“What? There was no seat belt,” I said, pointing at the seat. “I thought you were my seat belt.”

“I mean the helmet,” he said. “You never buckled it. I was going slowly, so it stayed on your head. But if I had gone any faster, it would have definitely flown off.”

I had a hard time believing that that was slow, but I smiled at the possibility of maybe someday going faster with Valerio.

Valerio took me to an outdoor restaurant in Garbatella, a sort of quaint Italian neighborhood not too far from bustling Trastevere. There were actual houses there—not unlike the colonial homes in Maryland, where I grew up—with yards and front doors and mailboxes. They were more colorful, though. Less brick, more color. That’s how I would sum up Roman architecture, if I had to.

He ordered for us as soon as we sat down, a long string of Italian peppered with words I recognized like “spaghetti” and “bruschetta” and “tiramisu.” I asked Valerio if this was where he brought all the American boys he picked up at two in the morning. That led to him telling me about his first and only relationship, with an upperclassman he had met his third week of college.