June 29th, 1892 — Florence, Italy

After departing England several days ago with Dash, Francesca, and Madam Rose Hart, Ozymandias had now found himself drinking wine on a villa in Florence. In the first hotel they'd arrived at, Oz had booked two rooms, as any gentleman would have: one for himself and one for the lady. Bafflingly, they were still occupying separate rooms. In Ozy's mind the nature of their relationship as it pertained to this trip was transactional, and he had expected a woman like Mrs. Hart to be wise enough in the ways of the world to intuit that. He'd expected her to make some effort on the first day or night to seduce him, after which they could dispense with the pretext of separate rooms at any of their future stops. Instead, she seemed to have taken his words in the invitational letter at face value. She didn't really think he'd paid her way to the continent just to have someone to discuss fine wines with, did she?

And yet: here they were, sitting on a patio discussing wines. They had played out this bizarre game of chicken for days. Oz didn't know if she was waiting for him to make the first move or whether she was trying to freeload off of him as long as she could before following through on 'her part' of their arrangement. While being taken advantage of financially might have hurt his pride, he had determined it would hurt his pride less than sleeping with someone who had no actual desire to be with him... so chicken it was. He wasn't going to be the first to bring it up.

"If you were to send a bottle home, would you choose this or the chianti?" he asked, raising the glass of red wine in his hand up enough to see how the sunlight changed the color of the liquid.

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