Stuck with You: A fun, feisty romance

By Anna Premoli

A smart, romantic comedy about how finding The One doesn't always have to be love at first sight...

Lavinia Ferrari is in her fifth year at Bocconi University where she studies Economics when she is introduced to a new project that will guarantee her extra credits. She's intrigued... but it means the class must team up with students from the Computer Engineering course. Lavinia has absolutely no interest in the project, and to top things off, she's paired with Seb Marconi who is less than enthusiastic.

When the work begins, her friends seem to be making great progress with their partners, but Lavinia isn't having the same luck... Seb is making it quite clear that he's not interested in the project, or Lavinia, fuelling her frustration.

She has no choice – they're stuck in this, and besides, she won't receive her extra credits unless they work together. Lavinia must come up with a way to convince the guy who drives her crazy to put the work in... but how?

From the author of LOVE TO HATE YOU, YOU DRIVE ME CRAZY and UNTIL LOVE DO US PART.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788541862

Anna Premoli

Anna Premoli is a bestselling author in Italy. She began writing to relieve stress while working as a financial consultant for a private bank. Her novel, Love to Hate You won the Bancarella prize in 2013.

Book preview

Prologue

He didn’t cry out. He fell gently, the way a tree falls. There wasn’t even a sound, because of the sand.

It is curious how the human mind can remember precisely those few moments of its own past that were decisive. For better or for worse. The real problem is that while you’re experiencing them, you are completely unaware of the consequences they are going to end up dragging behind them. Though at the end of the day, maybe that’s a blessing.

The day my future took an unexpected turn I was in fact sitting in the kitchen, with absolutely no idea at all about the importance of the moment, busy blissfully eating one of those yogurts that claim to be so healthy they can improve the fortunes of your whole digestive system and probably that of the person sitting next to you to boot. If the words ‘yogurt’ and ‘blissfully’ can actually be juxtaposed in the same sentence, that is.

I had just got back from the Christmas holidays and was firmly convinced of the need to purify myself, hence the penance of high-fibre yogurt. Only someone very gullible, who feels guilty and is all set to start on the self–flagellation can seriously imagine that there’s any point at all having something like that for dinner – oh, you clever little advertising goblins, how well you know me!

"Well, if you will always go over the top with the mascarpone cream, Lavinia…" said my mother, wasting no opportunity to tell me off. Then, like now, the woman was on a diet – she’s always on a diet, even though she’s practically transparent – so I wasn’t absolutely sure how she had the nerve to criticise me. I mean, why ridicule my attempt to purify myself when she had made it so much of a purpose in life that it was practically a religion?

I licked my spoon carefully before answering.

I like mascarpone cream. I think it would be silly to deprive myself.

Yes, well, just wait until you’re my age and have given birth to two children and then we’ll talk about how good too much sugar is for you. She shuddered at the thought. If I hadn’t been careful about what I eat since I was a young girl, I would never have managed to get to fifty with a figure like this, she said, gesturing to her, admittedly, very slim waist.

I stared at her doubtfully – so fasting was considered a form of power nowadays, was it? I barely managed to hold back a laugh. My mother had never had the slightest sense of humour, or talent for self-criticism.

Oh, leave her alone, my father interjected unexpectedly, who although physically present in the kitchen, was as always with his head elsewhere, busily responding to one email after another on his Blackberry. In his case, I think that rather than it just being work, it’s more like an addiction: he needs to feel more important and irreplaceable than anyone else.

To be fair, my dad is one of the top executives of a multinational, but to hear him talk you’d think that he had more on his plate than the president of the USA. I don’t really understand what it is he actually does, apart from ranting away on the phone even when he’s at home and frowning with annoyance every time he opens an email. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t be able to handle a job that puts me in a bad mood pretty much around the clock. But my father has a very profound and, at this point, smoothly functioning relationship with being angry – one which definitely goes much deeper than the relationship he enjoys with his daughters. Not to mention the one he enjoys with his wife. She’s a chapter all to herself.

I only told her she should be careful, my mother replied with a deadly serious expression. She’s eighteen. If she gets fat now, that’ll be it.

Of course – in my mum’s vision of the world, me and perdition always walk hand in hand.

As a reply, my dad gave a sort of disparaging grunt and looked back down at the little screen on his phone. He’s not a person I would ever define as being good company, but having spent all those years with a woman perennially on the verge of anorexia has probably played its part in making his character even worse.

Instead of wasting time talking about nonsense like food, why don’t we discuss the question of what Lavinia’s going to do at university for a moment? he suggested.

I was so taken aback by his words that I just stood there blinking. The truth was that my ideas on the issue were still pretty confused, and I had been hoping to have a bit more time to think about them – like, all the rest of my life.

Ok, not the rest of my life, maybe, but at least a few months. Less than half of my classmates had the faintest idea ​​what faculty they were going to choose, so in a way I felt like part of a reassuringly large group of the chronically undecided. Sort of, ‘it’s not just us, it’s our whole generation that hasn’t got a clue what to do’, if you know what I mean.

Oh yes, chirped my mother in agreement. And the fact that they were agreeing on something gave me a strange feeling of panic. It happened so rarely that until pretty recently my sister Francesca and I used to make a note of it on the calendar. Until Francesca had walked out of the house, slamming the door behind her, that is. That had only happened recently, and it was totally taboo to talk about it. My parents were still expecting her to come crawling back, begging them for forgiveness – and even though they didn’t let on, they were very shaken by the fact that she still hadn’t.

The way I saw it, right from the off, there was no way on Earth that Francesca would be coming back. When she’d said I’d rather sleep under a bridge she hadn’t just been talking. You don’t drop out of university and tell your pain-in-the-neck parents to go to hell if you’re planning on letting yourself come back under their control, now, do you?

Never having been particularly good observers of human nature, they still hadn’t realised it, but Francesca wasn’t going to be coming back. Of that, I was already quite certain.

Of course, her escape had been a traumatic event for me because I had suddenly become the only focal point of all their infinite psychoses. And unlike my sister, I didn’t have a personality that allowed me quite naturally to tell my parents to get off my back. Unfortunately, I had been born with a serious congenital defect – an almost pathological need to please everyone.

So, Lavinia, have you made a decision about what you intend to do with your life? asked my father portentously as he placed his phone on the table and turned his eyes upon me.

In my ears, warning sirens started going off. Anti-aircraft ones – the really deafening kind.

Errrrrr… I’m not sure, I said vaguely. If I’d known we were going to end up talking about my future, I would have eaten the whole jar of Nutella I’ve got hidden in the bottom of my wardrobe and to hell with the diet. It’s a well-known fact that there are some issues you shouldn’t even start talking about if you haven’t got a decent dose of sugar in your bloodstream.

I cannot believe you don’t have the slightest idea, chipped in my mother, appearing from behind me. So it was a full-blown ambush, then.

"I’m still confused. I mean, if I really have to tell you what I see myself doing in ten years’ time… well, I think I see myself teaching," I said with feigned casualness.

For a moment neither of them reacted. There was just a rather overwhelming dead silence, to be honest. But then first one and then another began to breathe in a somewhat agitated way. I immediately realised that it was not a good sign.

What kind of teacher? my father demanded to know, as if I had just announced my intention of becoming a drug dealer or professional assassin. Now that I think about it, at the time he probably thought that being an assassin was the most respectable of the three professions: I mean, if nothing else, at least it foresaw the possibility of professional growth.

"An… Italian teacher?" I mumbled quietly. But the quietness of my voice didn’t contribute in any way to sweetening my dad’s reaction. His blue eyes – which in theory look exactly like mine – opened up like the pop-up headlights on an Aston Martin and I almost thought I could see smoke coming out of his nostrils. Definitely not a good sign.

… Lavinia, my mother snapped in her signature angry voice, which was capable of completely mortifying you with only three syllables. She’s got a real gift for it.

Let’s not talk nonsense, please! said my dad. Don’t you realise that teachers have practically no job security nowadays? No career, no nothing! They just get shifted round randomly from one place to another, treated like dirt…

I just sat there immobile in my chair, staring fixedly at my empty yogurt pot while my father reeled off his incontrovertible truth.

"What an absolutely stupid idea," agreed my mother.

"A teacher! roared my father. Well, I can tell you now that I certainly have no intention of paying for you to throw your life away!"

I inhaled deeply and quickly took stock of the hand of cards I found myself with. The bottom line was that I didn’t really have any idea what to do with my life. I had a passion for books and literature, but I wasn’t sure that I was cut out for teaching. A good teacher needs to have empathy with her students and to be skilled in engaging their interest. And my innate common sense reminded me that at the end of the day, I wasn’t my sister and had no chance of getting by without their support, both moral and economic, so perhaps it was worth taking their point of view into account. After all, parents should know better than anyone else what their kids would be good at, right?

Okay, not teaching, then, I agreed gloomily. "So, have you got any suggestions about what I should do?"

My mother opened her mouth to say God-knows-what, but was cut off by my father.

"Economics. Yes, I reckon that business studies would be perfect for you," he said with conviction, after thinking for about half a second.

I remember staring at him for a while in sincere surprise. In all honesty, I had never imagined myself at the Faculty of Economics. But in that moment, without my sister – who had spent the last eighteen years defending me, I felt outnumbered and outgunned. And at the same time, the seed that they had planted in my mind had germinated into a flesh-eating plant. For a moment, the proposal seemed almost sensible. I mean, they could have demanded that I become a lawyer. Or a doctor. And if there was one thing I was sure about, it was my total inability to argue with people or to stand the sight of blood. All in all, Economics didn’t seem like such a terrible choice after all.

"Do you really think I’ll like it at the Faculty of Economics?" I asked, looking up at them. I desperately needed them to convince me for once – to turn a pathological ditherer like me into somebody who was certain of their choices.

Absolutely. It’ll be the best decision of your life, said my father, as if in answer to my prayers.

And I even smiled, lulled by the sheer exhilaration that, at least, I wouldn’t be letting everyone down. It was, if nothing else, a beginning.

Chapter 1

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful.

Four years and nine months later

Sometimes I’m almost afraid that I’m going to get lost in the maze of buildings that makes up the campus of the Bocconi university, despite the fact that my time here is almost up. I’m in the last year of my master’s degree – the fifth year I’ve spent in these corridors, together with students coming from all over the world. They say that the place didn’t use to be like this – once upon a time there was only one building and that was pretty much it.

Finally I find the right corridor and set off at a gallop in the direction of the lecture hall, where Giada is waiting for me. Her punctuality is almost legendary and, as always, she has managed to grab a tactical central position. She gives me a big smile and shows me the empty seat next to her, moving aside her large bag to let me sit down.

You almost arrived late on the first day. That’s not like you, she tells me off good-naturedly.

I take a deep breath before answering. "The key word there is ‘almost’. I almost got here late, but Alessandra is definitely going to get here late," I say with a smile.

Giada brushes a thick lock of Titian-red hair from her face and laughs. It’s nice that there are still some certainties, don’t you think?

My friend is a very special girl: if there were a prize for changing the colour of your hair the greatest number of times over the duration of a degree course, Giada would win it hands down. I long ago stopped trying to keep count of the number of colours she’s tried out and the looks she’s experimented with, completely indifferent to the reactions of everyone. And to make matters worse, she also has a split personality: at university she tries to blend into the crowd by wearing very dowdy clothes while in the evening she turns into a mysterious creature with piercings in her tongue and navel, dressed exclusively in black and covered in studs like the perfect punk. I still have to work out which of the two Giadas I know is the real one.

At that very moment, the lecturer enters the classroom and behind him I see the silhouette of our friend Alessandra. What a shame! A few seconds earlier and she’d have been on time. But at least she’s beaten her previous record.

We watch as she embarrassedly babbles some excuse to the teacher and then makes her way between the other students to get to us.

"Did you have to sit right in the middle of the row? she asks grumpily after forcing a lot of people to stand up to let her pass. Giada gives her a stern look. This is the best place best to take notes. Look, you can see the board perfectly from here."

Oh forget it… says Alessandra resignedly, finally managing to take her seat before asking quietly, Anyway, what kind of course is this?

Giada looks at her in disbelief. You mean you just signed up for courses at random?

Strange that someone who’s so fickle about hair colour should be so deadly serious when it comes to her college career. She’s a peculiar mix of determination and carelessness and the fact that it’s impossible to tell which will prevail only adds to her charm. To male eyes as well as to female ones.

Of course I didn’t! responds Alessandra resentfully. I just lost the lesson prospectus. And if it hadn’t been for Lavinia, I wouldn’t have even known where to go, she confesses.

Giada shakes her head. You should have just left her wandering around campus, Vinny.

This is the last year of the master’s I reply with a smile. I wanted her to at least have a chance…

"Never mind a chance, Alessandra’s going to need a miracle," mutters Giada as she watches the planning and budgeting lecturer switch on his laptop, connect it to an overhead projector and set off at full speed.

The last year.

I take a deep breath and try to banish the terror that washes over me every time I think about it. When I get out of here, I will have devoted five years of my life to getting a degree in Economics and Business Legislation, but in a way I’ll still be right back where I was when I started. A part of me still doesn’t know what I want to do when I grow up. Unlike Giada, who’s aiming to become a specialised foreign tax consultancy chartered accountant, and Alessandra, who dreams of getting one of those fantastic company jobs, maybe with a multinational, where you can hide among all the other employees. My friends might know the road they want to take and why they want to take it but I’m trying with all my strength not to think about the future and hoping like mad that no forks in the road appear in front of me, because I really wouldn’t know which way to choose.

I mean, economics is not actually that bad. The university is full of interesting people and there are plenty of opportunities out there. The problem isn’t the courses or the people. The problem is me, the girl who’s never quite sure what she wants and who can never quite summon up the nerve to admit it to others. At this point, pretending has become natural.

For the last four years I’ve been playing the girl with the perpetual smile and the most amiable disposition imaginable. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I actually manage to convince myself that I really have become that kind of person – the perfect daughter and manager, with a good head on her shoulders and her feet firmly on the ground, always ready to pitch in and help out. But then the dream fades and I find myself face to face with the real ‘me’ – the one I wish would disappear for good and let me go on living the way I have been for the past few years. The real me isn’t perfect at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’m so engrossed in my thoughts that it takes a powerful elbow from Giada to bring me back to reality. What’s the matter with you two today? she whispers. "Or actually, what’s the matter with you? Alessandra’s always got her head in the clouds, but you’re not usually up there with her."

It must be this final year making me nervous, I say, in an attempt to explain myself. After this, life’s going to change forever. We won’t be students any more…

Yeah, well in the meantime at least try to listen to the bomb that the prof is dropping on us.

When I focus my eyes on the slide I realise that it is dominated by the words ‘Co-operative project with Milan Polytechnic’. Next to the title, the magical promise of four additional credits. And if there’s one thing that any final year student would be willing to sell their mother, father, sister and grandmother for, it’s credits.

You’ll be the first to participate in what we hope will become a model for future co-operation between the two universities, explains the professor. The next semester, most of you will be engaged in an internship, but this will be another very good way of improving your ability to adapt. Another way of testing your capabilities, in short. What I particularly like about this project is the potential it offers for contact with people from very different academic backgrounds. As you know, engineers are a strange bunch…

The aim of his words is obviously to get a laugh, and they do, but not from me. I suspect that making us laugh by focusing on stereotypes about engineers is just a way to distract us from the real issue: us and the Polytechnic? Is he serious?

Planning and budgeting was supposed to be a perfectly straightforward course on advanced control systems – one of those that you pass with your eyes closed and where you hardly have to do any work. My feeling of unease grows dramatically – if there’s one thing I hate, it’s unnecessary complications.

"Oh God… Why the hell did we choose this course?" moans Alessandra, in her dark eyes an expression of the purest terror.

I don’t know. Let’s ask Giada, seeing as it was all her idea, I reply immediately, trying to hide my slightly accusatory tone.

Yes, it was her idea, but I went along with it. Much more than I want to admit to myself right now. It was common knowledge that the university had been showering us with easy extra credits all the time – could this suddenly become a course that was actually challenging? Right when it’s our turn to attend it?

Our friend raises her eyebrows and gives us both a dirty look. In theory, it was supposed to be an ordinary accounting course! she reminds us. Her voice is slightly louder than usual, so a series of ‘shush’es come in our direction.

Brown-nosers… says Giada, not at all intimidated. She never is, in fact. It’s usually other people who are scared of her. If she wasn’t my friend I think those penetrating green eyes of hers would scare me too.

The professor pretends not to notice the agitation in the classroom and quickly moves along to the second slide. Which is a good idea, because otherwise there’d probably be a popular uprising in the lecture hall.

The project will run from September to January. Shortly before the final exam you will also receive feedback on the project you’ve developed together with your business partner. Given that the digital economy is a tangible reality and computers are a part of every aspect of our lives, we thought it was a good idea to let you work with computer engineering students.

Please Lord, tell me that he’s joking… I hear Giada murmur in desperation.

Ah, so even the woman who is afraid of nothing is starting to worry, is she? If nothing else, her despair makes me feel better. I see that she has opened her eyes as wide as they will go and is just sitting there staring at the slide as though trying to incinerate it with her fiery gaze. I don’t believe in pyrokinesis, but as far as I’m concerned she’s quite welcome to keep trying. You never know, we might be lucky and a miracle might happen. And if there is someone capable of bending the laws of nature to her advantage, it’s definitely Giada.

Now that I notice it, my friend is not the only one showing obvious signs of anger: a strange negative energy has invaded the entire room, which previously was buzzing with background chatter.

"Excuse me, professor, but have I got this straight? Did you say computer engineering?" asks a guy in the front row who obviously has problems with his eyesight. I don’t know him, but I can’t really see how there can be a mistake when the projector continues to show the words ‘Department of Computer Engineering’ on the screen.

Yep, that’s exactly what I said, confirms Professor Danieli with a smirk on his face. He’s a kindly-looking man in his forties, perfectly elegant in his grey suit. Or rather, he looked kindly before he came out with this news. Now I’m not so sure…

Engineers and economists aren’t famed for getting on particularly well: all those age-old rivalries about the best way of approaching problems as well as about how to solve them. Is it possible that no one has ever mentioned that to him?

Computer engineers to boot… Come on, he must be joking. In the already unpleasant chart of the polytechnic’s specialist faculties, IT students are without a doubt the most extreme ‘social group’.

If they’d proposed cooperating with management engineers, that might even have worked, but what are business economics undergraduates like us supposed to do with a lot of nerdy programmers?

The professor raises his eyes to me and sees my bewildered expression.

Part of the aim, my dear students, is to learn to get along with people who have chosen a different path in their studies. In whatever companies you end up in the not-so-distant future, you’re going to have to meet many engineers, lawyers and so on and so forth. Knowing how to work productively with different personalities and skills will give you an enormous advantage and that’s why we decided to get this project running: we want you to learn to get along with people who have been trained to think in a different way and to learn to share ideas with people you haven’t studied with. To put it bluntly, we want to get you out of your comfort zone.

Well, if he thinks that a clichéd buzzword is going to be enough to shut down the objections, he’d better think again. And then think one more time, just to be sure.

Next to me, Alessandra swallows loudly. I know exactly how she’s feeling.

Since this is still a course of control systems, performance evaluation and incentives, the basic idea will be to develop a business plan for a company in the IT sector – a start-up, where your engineer partner’s task will be to look after the technical details and yours will be to develop suitable indicators to assess the economic viability of the project, highlighting critical issues, calculating how long you’ll need to reach break-even point and so on. In short, you have to imagine that you are equal partners in a new venture and find ways to make your start-up a smoothly functioning company.

The lecturer is now quickly skimming through the remaining slides – which in any case will already be online on the course website – pausing only at the end, when he gets to the crucial point.

You will be working with the students of the Economics of Networking Industries course. They’re in the final year of their degree course too and, like you, they will get extra credits for being involved. I’m sure there’s no need for me to tell you that it’s in everyone’s interest for this initiative to run as smoothly as clockwork. Our next lesson will thus be held in the Polytechnic’s Leonardo campus, where you will be teamed up with your partners and given more details about the project. From the third lesson on, we will go back to our usual time and to our own lecture hall. The two parts of the course – the theoretical part and the one linked to the project – will be complementary but separate. Once you’ve been introduced to your business partners, it will be up to you to organise the work in the way you think is best. Anyway, back to our course – what you’ve already seen will be posted online on the course noticeboard…

The professor carries on talking but we’re all still mulling over the news of the multidisciplinary project. The chatting gradually died down as we took in all the additional information and now most of the students are just sitting there with their mouths wide open and their eyes staring into space.

This is going to be a shitty year… says Giada finally. Well, I guess you could never accuse her of not speaking her mind.

A boy sitting in front row turns around, gives us a grim look and says, I get the feeling that you might be right…

Yep, a really shitty year.

*

Fortunately for us, there aren’t any good or bad surprises in the next lesson – financial intermediaries – so after it’s finished, we head over to the canteen with the backpacks on our shoulders.

They can’t force us to participate in a project like this, complains Alessandra, pushing a tray loaded with salad towards the till.

"And in fact they’re not forcing us to, notes Giada in a sombre voice. The key phrase is ‘additional credits’… You can pass the course without taking part in the project. In theory."

Maybe, but Professor Danieli seems to want us to do it, I can’t help pointing out as we shuffle forward in the queue.

Of course he does. He wants to make himself look good in front of the dean and show everyone that his stupid little project is a great idea, says Giada. "They all spend half their time making up rubbish like this to