Six months have passed since Richard Armitage has presented Vivien to the world as his fiancée and now the two of them are going to spend their first Christmas night together; each one has prepared a really special gift for the other one, but in the...
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A Christmas Gift
Richard had spent most of the day, included lunch, at the London recreational centre for problematic children of an association he had become a supporter of since the year before, where he had read – or rather performed – fairy tales and poems and sung Christmas songs with the kids who frequented it. The association had asked its supporters – famous or not – if they wanted to cooperate for free and he had given his availability: he was always very sensitive to subjects involving juvenile needs and was happy to volunteer and give his help whenever he could. He hadn't received any economic reward, but the emotional one was thousand times more satisfying, made of amusement and sentiments.
He hurried out and got on the car, keen to go home and then go to Vivien to spend Christmas Eve with her. Since they got together, he felt almost lost without her; the feeling sometimes scared him, because he had never been so attached, so psychologically and sentimentally dependant on someone, not even with Belle (*), the only woman whom he thought to be enough in love with to go and live together. Maybe with the progressing age – after all, he was forty-four! – he became better at understanding whom he could trust and whom not, and he knew he could trust Vivien completely, at the point to deliver his heart over to her with no fear, sure that she would take care of it, as he was taking care of hers. It was this the way he conceived love and he knew that so it was for Vivien, too: the complete certainty that the other person would support you always and for all and therefore the consequent complete lack of worry to confide in her or he.
The intense London traffic annoyed him, but he tried to stay calm, because getting angry wouldn't solve anything; but he would have liked to have photon torpedoes available to clean up the way and arrive to Vivien at maximum speed. As he realized the way he had thought about it – photon torpedoes – he chuckled: she was a great fan of Star Trek, much more than him who loved it, too, and evidently she had influenced him enough to make him think thematically.
Laughing made him forget his irritability and allowed him to drive serenely to home. A collateral effect of his relationship with Vivien, he thought, amused: she did him good, in every sense.
When, six months earlier, he introduced her to the world as his fiancée, at the beginning Vivien had been a little hard hit by the very demanding female fans of the Armitage Army, as his supporters called themselves: they would have liked for him somebody more beautiful, richer, more famous, possibly an artist like him, singer, dancer, painter, writer. Little by little though, even thanks to some interviews they had both together and one or the other alone, they had accepted her: they understood that she made him happy because she loved him truly, and that she wasn't with him for opportunism or for money like someone had insinuated; on the contrary, a great number of the fans identified themselves with Vivien because she was one of them, an ordinary woman who had the immense luck to win her dream-man's love. Not that he thought to be a dream-man, he considered himself a normal man, excluding his profession: his natural modesty hindered him to see himself as the excellent person he was in reality.
