Defne & Ömer: What if we had met at an airport instead?

Chapter 5: Of mistakes and misunderstandings

Hello Everyone! 

First, I wanted to apologise for the delay in posting this part. Unfortunately real life has been hard and I wanted to do justice to this chapter and to you (thank you so much for reading!)

Second, I know a lot of you were upset with the revelation that Fikret is pregnant. While there is going to be some angst, I myself love happy stories and endings - so I promise lots of happiness for Emine, Omer and Defne. 

Third, unfortunately I'm still working on the four year interlude and building the foundation of the story (which will have lots of Defom - I promise), so you'll have to bear with them being apart for just a little while longer.

Happy reading! Looking forward to your comments on this extra-long chapter!

Omer:

(Three and a half years earlier)

After having landed in New York, an alien city where he knew no one and no one knew him, Omer spent nearly every day holed up in the Manhattan penthouse he had bought himself. The house was perfect in all respects with Fikret having gone out of her way to make sure the interiors of the house resembled his own back in Istanbul. She had even taken extra care to not add the flowers which had once adorned his gardens. He was immensely grateful to her but he still avoided meeting her if he could help it. It was always she who came in unannounced and unexpected bearing food, books and her designs for him to work around, it was she who did most of the talking while he occasionally nodded and smiled at her knowing she would think he was alright.

Omer, realizing that copious amounts of alcohol would lead him nowhere except to an early grave, spent his days in the workroom he had set up for himself. He sat at his desk seeking inspiration from the city stretching out below him, the people on the streets and his own thoughts while attempting to design shoes the way he once had. In spite of spending hours with sheets of paper and pencils, the designs never came. Instead he often found himself drawing a young woman in a white wedding gown, with her face turned away from him, her red hair falling down her back in cascading waves. When he tried drawing something else, he found on the sheets before him, sketches of three children all with red hair and black eyes.

Nearly a month after he first landed in New York, he finally told Fikret that he was unable to draw the way he once had. She was first concerned and then the worry turned to enthusiasm when she suggested they visit the best doctors and psychiatrists in the US. She, much like Iz once had, held his hand and tried to force it out of him to no avail.

Blank. They only drew a blank.

While she had gone on about taking him to places and countries to stoke the creativity in him once again, he realized that while designing and drawing had once been the center of his universe giving him the most peace and happiness in his otherwise empty life, it had all changed when Defne had stormed in, in all her red-haired glory, noisily and clumsily becoming the new center of his universe herself. In a short span of time, she became the source of his inspiration, his peace and joy with everything else including him and his thought revolving around her. With her no longer a part of his life, all the other parts of him were simply mechanically and aimlessly hanging in the air with no life force directing them anymore.

That was when it had started. The rational thoughts. The piecing together of the story, identifying the blanks, seeing past her fearful looks and stray comments, her fear that he would leave her, the attempts at revealing the truth and then running away. All of it was finally coming together like completed scenes of a movie. He had spent so much of his time in Rome pushing these thoughts aside beneath his rage but now armed with a clearer head and the will to understand, he spent nearly every waking minute going over everything they had lived together looking at the story with the lens of the truth.