Chapter Two
Less than a week later, I was in Italy with Adam.
We’d gone to the airport with the pretense of him taking me along on a business trip to San Francisco. It was completely in line with my husband’s style of being the surpriser while hating being the one surprised. One of the many strange dichotomies that seemed to exist in my husband’s psyche.
So far it had been a glorious ten days. We’d toured some of the major cities, stayed a few days in Tuscany and done some wine tasting while visiting the cutest little Italian hamlets. Then we’d finally ended up in glorious Venice for nearly an entire week.
Who’d’ve thunk it? That my workaholic husband, who was so very non-impulsive, would drop everything to whisk me away during the break between graduation and the start of my medical residency?
Truth be told, I hadn’t been harping on his work addiction lately. Because it seemed that I’d developed one of my own. So, to continue doing it seemed hypocritical. Instead, I’d been sure to stress how important work-life balance should be for both of us. And while the concept of work-life balance on the road to becoming a medical doctor was almost laughable, we somehow found a way, even if it was just in tiny doses for now.
And he was objectively improving. He put his phone away when I reminded him to, instead of just pretending to do it. And we both took steps to appreciate the present moment instead of worrying about the future or mulling over the past.
And presence was exactly what we were practicing in this deliriously romantic city as we, hand in hand, strolled the tiny alleyways, watched passersby, caught a water taxi to neighboring islands, casually window-shopped and stopped for gelato whenever we felt like it.
We’d already seen the major sites in the city during our first few days here, joining the madcap tourist crowds that would rival some major rock concerts in St. Marks’ square. We’d enjoyed a full tour of the lavish Doge’s palace and the glittering St. Mark’s Basilica standing right beside it. We’d walked the famous covered bridge that was the Ponte Rialto hand in hand, overlooking a canal teeming with motorboats and old-style traditional gondolas pushed along by gondoliers in black-and-white striped shirts.
But after that, instead of pushing for more touristic site-seeing, I’d asked him if we could slow down to just enjoy being in the city and soak up the ambiance. After the lion’s share of the tourists left in late afternoon, the city transformed into something otherworldly and quietly enchanting. We’d watch a gorgeous sunset—each one different—and stroll the twilight-cloaked walkways looking out over a twinkling lagoon toward the neighboring islands. I was completely in love with this place, the delicious food, the kind, if tourist-weary locals, and Veneto wine. I was also completely in love with the man walking beside me, who often wrapped an arm around my shoulders or waist.
This afternoon, we’d crossed our fourth consecutive bridge when Adam started complaining. “Jeez, these bridges are going to be the end of my knees. I have an old war injury, here.”
He rubbed his right knee. Last November, at the annual paintball war between Draco Multimedia and Blizzard Entertainment—or, as I liked to secretly deem it “Dick-Measuring 101: Battle of the Nerd Programmers”—Adam had sprained his knee when he’d missed his footing and tumbled most of the way down a steep hill.
When I’d first been notified that my husband was in the ER of the hospital, it had nearly taken a year off my life until I’d realized it hadn’t been serious. He’d been ordered to stay off of his knee as much as possible for the next three weeks. Guess which driven, workaholic CEO had ignored those doctor’s orders? Even when I had tried to enforce them, he’d found ways around it.
Now I observed his slight limp with a near-heartless eye. “Well, you’re in your dotage now, so I’ll be sure to slow down. Gotta make sure gramps can keep up with me.”
I liked milking the fact that Adam was now into his thirties.
“Very funny,” he said with a glare. “I guess that makes you my sugar baby. If you keep making me go over these damn bridges in this condition, I’m going to require some serious medical attention to help me through the rest of my day. And also, a very pleasurable way to get my mind off the pain.”
I grimaced. “Have I mentioned that you’re a dirty old man?”
He peered at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Only every damn day since I turned thirty. If I’m going to be an old man, then dirty is the only way to go.”
I laughed. And dirty was the way I liked him, too. It was weird how, at the end of each day of this trip, I found that my cheeks ached from smiling too much. I loved this man...not only was he devastatingly handsome and insanely smart, but he was also hilarious, kind and so into me he didn’t care about anyone else around us.
Our vacation became a string of moments where we enjoyed the sights, the tastes, the experiences, but no more than the mere opportunity to spend days, nights and long silent hours in each other’s presence, without the need to talk. Our vacation transformed into a dream, a snippet of time where he wasn’t being pulled in one direction and me in the other and barely having time to meet in the middle.
This was time for us. To rediscover who we were to each other. To breathe before we had to hit the rat race once more.
On this day, the late afternoon sun made our shadows stretch across the empty town piazzas as we emerged from the third small church we’d visited that day. We crossed the stretch of ancient stonework hand in hand.
Adam let out a long sigh. “I’ve seen more saints’ bones to fill the Ossuary of Time.” He wore a good-natured grin, running his free hand through his hair and rendering himself even more handsome than usual in the process.
I arched a brow and affected an instructional tone I knew would amuse him. “The Ossuary of Time only exists in Yondareth.”
“My dear, sweet wife, if you haven’t realized by now that Yondareth is my real life, then there is no help for you.”
I laughed. “I wish you were just joking, but I believe you. It’s your world—we players all just live in it, right?”
We walked on for a moment, turning a sharp corner as we wandered aimlessly into some residential district and passed some shops filled with Murano glass, Burano lace and other local items.
As he hadn’t replied to me, I glanced over at Adam. He had a wistful look on his face, as if deep in thought. A breeze rose up, stirring my skirt and the stray strands of his dark hair. I frowned. “What’s wrong? Your knee hurting still?”
He shook his head. “Nah, I’m fine. I’m just thinking a lot.”
“That happens when you don’t stare at your phone all the time. You’re forced to think.”
“Not sure I’m a fan,” he said with a grimace.
I stopped walking and turned to look directly into his face. “Adam...?”
He shrugged. A cluster of small children in the nearby square were playing some game with a ball that looked like a cross between soccer and dodgeball, shouting to each other in Italian and laughing, teasing. Seagulls called overhead.
He hesitated, then shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I dunno. I guess that sometimes I feel like real life is a dream. A fantasy. We’re so blessed that sometimes it feels like...” He shook his head, clearly not wanting to continue with the line of thought.
I shook my hand, that was still tightly entwined with his to urge him on. “Feels like what?”
He raised his solid shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Sometimes I get this dread in the pit of my stomach, like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
I blinked. Wow. I mean, my husband tended toward the dark and morose sometimes. It was just part of his nature. The events in his past and in his childhood hadn’t helped with what might have been a natural tendency to begin with. Something he clearly had found difficult to shake, even in the good times.
I moved up to him and pushed the errant dark lock of hair off his forehead, then caressed his cheek, his chiseled jaw while gazing into those dark, dark eyes. “Adam, don’t forget that we’ve been there, done that, got the fucking t-shirt. We’ve endured. We deserve this happiness. Let’s enjoy it. There’s a lot to be said about living in the now. We are here in this beautiful, ancient place. We are each other’s person. I love you more than I did the day I married you. Can you not sit back, soak up that happiness and enjoy it? Don’t mess up your head with dreading some mythical time when it might evaporate.”
He visibly swallowed, the bump in his throat bobbing. The expression on his face was deadly serious.
“Shit, you’re scaring me.” I searched his gaze.
“No, there’s nothing to be scared about. It’s just thisvague feeling that I should be moving on to the next step of something, and I don’t know what that is. Like we’ve now achieved these goals we’d worked so hard for in our twenties and now that we’re—”
“Hey! Speak for yourself. I’m still in my twenties for two and a half more years. You’re the only senior citizen here.”
He grimaced at me. “Gee, thanks.”
I raised my brows and gave him a cheeky smile. “It’s your fault for robbing the cradle.”
He smirked and then leered at me openly, reaching out to grab my butt. I let out a little yelp, and we both laughed. “I’m just a dirty old man, and it’s been a long time since you’ve been in the cradle, baby.”
After a delicious dinner at a small, out-of-the way restaurant that we’d wandered into, where we’d dined on the patio out under the stars and drank a full liter of sparkling local Rabosello wine, we stumbled home, both of us well past tipsy.
Fortunately, Adam wasn’t so far past tipsy as to be unable to perform once I’d ripped his clothes off. I think a few of the buttons on his shirt actually did go flying in my desperation to get him naked. It hadn’t been all that long since the last time—just two days ago—but we were on each other like it was a yearly conjugal visit and he was a prisoner serving a life sentence.
“Wow, my sugar baby is—”
“Don’t finish that sentence unless you want to immediately kill the mood, dude,” I muttered between frantic kisses and even more frantic unbuttoning—and unbelting. Without warning, he grabbed both my arms and fell backward onto the bed, pulling me down on top of him.
We both started laughing hysterically, like it was the funniest thing ever. Then he stopped with a long sigh. “That wine tasted like fizzy fruit juice, but I think a liter is way too much for the two of us.”
I divested him of the last scraps of his clothing and had him joyfully naked underneath me. I began trailing kisses across his delicious, hard chest. “Speak for yourself.”
“If I hadn’t had any, I think I’d be getting drunk just from the wine on your breath. Like when someone reeks of pot and you get a contact high just by breathing near them.”
I laughed. “You’ve been spending too much time in the Den with your game testers again.”
“Oh, hell no, I never go in there. Those kids are animals. Even Kat can’t keep them in line.”
“Less talking about work and more touching my boobs, okay?” I growled at him, grabbing his hands and putting them where I wanted them.
He grinned, palming them obediently. “You don’t have to tell me twice.” As he often did, his finger traced the tattoo I’d gotten last year—the one just over my lumpectomy scar that showed the constellation of Draco.
And soon we were all over each other, mouths and hands and legs interlocking.
It was fast and furious. We did what we do best—we improvised. When he finally rolled off me, we were both out of breath and way too sweaty. He flopped onto his back beside me.
I took a deep breath, staring at the ceiling. “Wasn’t I on top when we started?”
He sighed heavily. “There was a lot of rolling around. I lost track.”
I blinked, bringing up the edge of the fitted sheet that had once been nicely fastened to the mattress. “We tore the sheets off the bed.”
He laughed, running a hand through his thick, dark hair and leaving it standing straight up in the process. “That’s my horny little sugar baby.”
I rolled over onto my side and smoothed a hand over his disheveled hair. Then I leaned down and gave him a long kiss. “Hey,” I said. “I want to talk to you about something.”
His dark brows twitched up and his smile hesitated only a little. “Uh oh. Well, if it’s about my wife, she doesn’t know about us yet, and I—.”
I put a finger over his mouth to stop him. “I’m being serious, even though we had all that wine. Maybe it’s what’s giving me the courage to finally bring it up.”
His brows furrowed for a moment in concern, but he sobered and gave a slight nod, urging me to continue.
“I think it’s time....”
At my hesitation, he tilted his head. “Time for what?” he prompted.
“For us to start trying for a family.”
He licked his bottom lip and stared at me as if trying to focus his eyes. It was probably a mistake to bring this up when we were both most of the way to drunk.
“What is this really about?”
“You know, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I brought it up on our first anniversary. We tabled the discussion while you told me you needed to do some research on all the risks. I got distracted by my last year of med school. How is your research project coming along?”
His jaw bulged where it tensed and he turned to stare at the far wall, probably to avoid meeting my gaze.
“Is this about me, Adam?”
He frowned and turned back to me. “What? No. But we are both really busy. I just don’t see—”
“Or is it about you?”
He rolled his eyes exaggeratedly and suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, slipping into the bathroom.
I got up to follow him, and before I could needle him further, he turned to me. “We are way too drunk to be having this discussion right now.”
“On the contrary, maybe we need to be a little drunk to be honest about how we feel.”
He turned away from me, stepping into the large shower in our fancy accommodations, and turned on the faucet, holding out a hand to test the water.
“So, I’m not being honest?” he called over his shoulder.
“I didn’t say that.” After quickly using the toilet, I stepped into the shower behind him. He moved into the spray, clearly letting me know I wasn’t welcome to shower with him if I was pressing him on a subject he didn’t want to discuss.
Tough shit.
I held out my hand to test the water, and it was on the colder side of lukewarm. “What the fuck? Since when are you into taking cold showers? After sex? Isn’t that defeating the purpose?”
Despite the undesirable temperature of the water, he shoved his dark head under the spray. I glared at his muscular back.
“So that’s it?” I challenged. “You’re in full avoidance mode?”
“What? Can’t hear you,” he replied.
My eyes narrowed. “You’re shivering, and you look one step away from hypothermia.”
He turned to face me, still dominating the space directly under the spray so that I couldn’t get any. “It’s invigorating. I feel invigorated.”
“Your lips are turning blue. Be careful how much you expose yourself to that water. You’ll start getting shrinkage.”
We both glanced down at the body part in question at the same time and fortunately I had just enough wine in my system to be able to laugh at the situation. Because maybe the way he turned tail and ran like a coward the minute I said “start a family” might have made me cry instead—or at least shake my fist at the sky.