Reverence - Book 2

- 29 -

"I don't think I can." 

I said, swallowing back a dry breath. Domingo's dark brow was arched over the wire frame of his glasses. 

"Well I'm not taking you back." 

He huffed, sliding the ray bans down his angular nose. 

"And you cannot live in my Range Rover so, really limited options here Yelena." 

"Who say's I can't" 

I said, clipped. My fingers dug into the sturdy leather beneath my bare thighs. 

"It's just simply not sanitary." 

He was turned in his seat completely. Those needful eyes coursed over my face, fine lines settling in the creases of his cheeks as he smirked at my timidness. 

"I have never known you to be scared." 

He whispered, sincerity cascading over me.

"That was then..." 

I glanced at the great maw of the home through the safety of black glass. 

"I can't face now." 

Careful finger tips brushed against my knee. 

"If it wasn't for then, there would be no now." 

He said softly. I shook away his buzzing touch. I wasn't scared of gracing through that great front door, nor seeing and smelling and breathing in the halls and life and evanescence. 

I wasn't scared of him. 

It was the chance that everything that I had known would suddenly become so different. I couldn't handle the difference. The fingers of another running through my home. 

I shook my head to banish the thought. 

His home. 

"Fuck it." 

I mouthed, hand shakily grasping the door handle. 

I pushed it open slowly, letting the white sunlight bathe over my skin. It was warm and cleansing, breathing life back into the cells of myself. 

Like a shadow, Domingo glide to the opening door, his hand reaching behind to usher me into the scalding unknown. 

"He's waiting inside, you know how these things work." 

I stifled the eye roll. So he remained unnoticed by the passage of time it appeared. 

I pushed past the fist clenching within my chest. I didn't want to feel disappointed that he wasn't eagerly hanging on the steps awaiting my arrival. 

I was always the one waiting. 

The offsetting clack of my heels on the cobble walk jabbed at my exasperated nerves, and the shake of my fingers radiated up my arms into my lungs, suffocating the breaths that struggled against my lips. 

The door was open, an outstretched hand beckoning me inside it's palm. There was a calming firmness of Domingo's hand against my back that pressed me over the threshold. I had no choice now, so I stepped. 

I wanted to feel the static of the air, the robust difference of the walls closing in on me. I needed this house to be an outsider, a mystic stranger that I was slightly apprehensive of. 

I didn't want to see the same crimson and gold Moroccan rug beneath the pointed toe of my Loubigirl pump. 

I didn't want to smell the dependent tickling air of salt and old money and dark wood. 

Why wasn't this house fucking different. 

The same glittering chandeliers hung above me, gilded frames holding invaluable Almaviva and Bernini. The smells and the fucking things should be different. 

They should be white and sterile and not Luca. 

The risky snaps of Domingo's impatient fingers brought me back to reality. It was just a rug. And they were just paintings. 

"They're in the garden." 

They.

I let my fingers trace down the stone walls of the halls, gliding timidly down the floor. I could see the opening of the sitting room, and beyond that the landing of the patio. I let my eyes flutter closed for a moment at the reminisce of breakfasts and quiet conversations had there. 

Down the well landscaped path off the patio I wandered, fingers grazing over fat rose heads and tickling grass. The same grass that tickled at the backs of my thighs and tail of my white linen shirt the first time I had wound down this walk. 

I stopped at the garden gate. I felt no strength to bluster past. I wanted to. I wanted to see the carefully kept flora that was tenderly loved upon by Imelda every day. I wanted to feel their curious fingers reaching out to me. 

I wanted so much that lie behind that gate. 

With a breath, I unhooked the latch and let it swing carelessly in front of me. 

"You made it this far." 

I thought. 

I wanted to be ready. 

But I was terrified. I found myself slipping a finger beneath the strap of my sandals, abandoning them beside the fence. I felt the sandy soil comfort my feet, and I felt a bloom inside my chest. 

I stepped inside the green walls, my breath held in expectation. 

There were no toppling bushes and waving tropical greenery, but just an endless rolling hill of;

White Tulips. 

A captivating sea of white waxy petals gently tethering against each other as the careful breeze bustled atop them. They swayed in a hypnotic rouse, seldom washes of green stem and leaf peeking through the clouds of white cream. 

I imagined the petals nervously kissing those beside it, like the gentle graze of finger tips on the back of my neck.