Had To Be You (Romance/Drama) [COMPLETED]

Chapter 9 - Curious

She had been unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Her dreams, or more accurately put, her nightmares, had kept her from sleeping for more than and hour at a time so that she was made to rest in sporadic intervals that gave her more exhaust than rest. It was at around six in the morning that Naomi relented, getting out of bed and thanking the heavens for the soft daylight that gave her room a steady glow.

She had made sure to drink herself two cups of strong, heavily creamed coffee, and a bowl of oatmeal that would give her enough energy to forget, if only for a few hours, that she had barely gotten more than ten hours of rest in two nights combined.

She swept the floors of the house after her breakfast, and mopped right after. Then she set about dusting every surface of her small cottage, lighting candles and setting oil burners for scent in every room. The laundry and changing of her bedsheets was the last of her cleaning duties.

Naomi took advantage of the still soft morning sun, and went outdoors to tend to her garden. The poppies were blooming sweetly, and she couldn't tend to her dahlias without sighing in pleasure. She felt wonderful, with her hands dug into the soil, and she only wished that she had more to garden, because it kept her mind at ease.

After a quick shower she took a cookie from yesterday's batch and started to eat it as she watched some television in the living room.

It was a good show that she was watching, one of those clever cop series that always had the mind on alert as it tried to guess the murderer, and she was well engrossed in it. She had gotten herself two more cookies to munch on as she watched the program, curled into her blanket on the small plush couch in front of the television. Her bones and muscles had settled down as she rested, and the slight ache in them was most rewarding.

But it was when she was idle that her body remembered it's sleep deprivation, and her eyes were growing heavy. She did her best to forget the throb behind her eyelids and ate the last of her cookie.

The murderer was closing in on its victim, a blade shining against her throat, when Naomi heard a vague rumble in the distance. Her head snapped to the side, and she stood to get a better look through the window, her imagination having rocketed as a product of the television thriller. Her eyes skimmed the beach, coming to a sleek white boat as it treaded over the waters. It suddenly sped away. Curiously Naomi walked outside and to the seashore, and that was when she caught his form as he sped the boat away over the water. His golden hair was moving with the wind at the nape of his neck, and the fabric of his t-shirt flapped at his back from the speed. She would know his form anywhere.

She couldn't stop herself from whispering his name anymore than she could stop herself from running over the sand, her heart alive in her chest, the pulse of her blood beating steadily in her throat.

She screamed his name into the air, knowing that it was hardly a chance that he would hear her.

But he did, or he felt her, because he brought the water vessel to a slow halt and turned his head to face her. She could see him breathing, his face set in an almost hard frown, before he closed his eyes and almost smiled.

He steered the boat around, and Naomi dealt with the singing sensation of her body as she stood still, on a high that she shouldn't feel. But she welcomed it anyway, because it was life that she felt coursing through her veins as they pumped blood throughout her. She had lost control the moment she saw his boat, leaving, and now she just wanted to see him; right before her eyes where she was certain he wasn't a figment of her imagination.

Luke docked the boat in her tiny dock, at the unoccupied side where her much smaller boat wouldn't be in the way, and Naomi slowly walked the way back to her property.