Page 200 of Dangerous Obsession
He’d made good on his tingling promise by making me tingle all over for hours and hours, but he was always ready for more. The man never tired.
“I need to use the bathroom, too.” I laughed too loud for the quiet night when he stuck his finger in my side and wiggled it. “Cease!” I shouted. “Cease!”
He stopped and kissed my neck. “Every second you are away from me, I will lose a pint of blood.”
“You are sodramatico,” I said just as dramatically as I finally shimmied free from his hold. I snatched my phone from the night table, slid my glasses on, headed for the bathroom. After I was done and washed up, I took it with me to the small office I’d claimed as mine.
I turned on the lamp and sat in my chair. My computer further lit the room as I looked through all the emails I’d sent to myself and all the documents I’d saved over the last couple of months. I couldn’t seem to find what I was looking for.
Then I remembered the quote that had kept me up.
“We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exist in our subconscious.”
Maybe the quote didn’t belong to Freud, but it belonged to someone, and after I’d read it, it had burrowed underneath my subconscious and sprouted up like a resilient flower in winter as my life up until that point came together as a story—from page to screen—playing out against the dark canvas of my mind with flickering light like Sonny’s old television.
I was sure the quote could be interpreted many ways, but to me, it meant that my love had always existed in my subconscious, and it had only been a matter of time before my passion—obsession—led me to him.
Meeting Nazzareno had never felt like a random meeting.
It had always felt like I had just arrived home—consciously knowing it was where I had belonged all along.
I opened the app on my phone and checked the lone picture and caption there. “Nooo,” my voice was a deep whisper in the night.
“Nooo,” another voice, a deeper and sexier one, mimicked mine, and I looked up to find my husband standing behind me.
I fell in love with him for the umpteenth time.
He set his arms on each side of me and met my eyes. “This does not sound good.”
“Actually,” I whispered. “It’s very good. That was a shocked reaction, not a bad one.”
He nodded to the screen. “A picture from our honeymoon in Cairo.”
“Right.” I forced my eyes away from…all that manly virility…and back to the screen. “I posted this on the plane to Rome, after we were married. I wrote a caption and decided on this picture and shared it and now…look at the hearts and comments! It went viral!”
He took my phone and read the caption. “Your words are beautiful, my ink bird. They do not sit on the page, they pound like a heart, and I feel the truth in every breath of them.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“You will do another.”
It didn’t sound like a question, but I nodded anyway. “Yeah, I think I will. Once we start traveling, this is what I’m going to do. It fulfills me.”
His eyes stilled for a second, before he said, “AF. Air Fausti, no?”
“Actually, it stands for Ava Fausti.”
Our eyes met, and a feeling passed between us. It was that feeling that all wrongs had led us to this life-changing right.
A right that would stay with us forever.
“I thought you’d stolen my heart, Nazzareno Fausti,” I whispered. “But all along, you had it, and it was tucked safely away in yours.”
He slid his knuckle down my face, kissed me softly, and then urged me up from the chair. I took a seat on his lap, and together, we wrote a new caption for our continuing story, and shared the picture of us in Rome that Beni had taken, the fire of the enteral sun—love—forever burning between us.
