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As Salvatore reachedout in the silence of the luxury car we were travelling in and took hold of my small hand with his much larger one, my body jolted in response. When he lifted my arm up to his mouth and placed a gentle kiss to the inside of my wrist, every nerve ending I owned awoke and I had to give myself a stern talking to.
Remember the pain he caused you.
I remembered, but my body knew him, it knew its place, it understood just where and who it was meant to be with. Years had gone by without feeling his touch, but still my soul recognised him and how good we were together.
My destiny.
What had I done that meant my fate in life was to be with a complex man such as Salvatore De Luca, I wasn’t sure but here I was?
Any normal person would have found him on the doorstop and sent him packing, but I’d realised long ago that the life I was born into meant I could never be accused of being normal. Maybe any other strong and independent woman wouldn’t have opened the door to him, but I knew I was stronger when I was beside him.
I’d missed him. Despite all the heartache I’d worked through, deep down I also knew I needed him.
It was a bitter pill to swallow.
I felt emotion begin to build behind my eyes and refusing to blink in case it started to run down my perfectly made-up face, I continued to stare hard out of the window.
I swallowed down what I knew would be, if released, a gut-wrenching sob as he rubbed his calloused thumb across my knuckles and over the wedding band he’d placed on my finger seven years before, moving it out of its indent on my finger. Swept along on the tide of emotions the brief connection summoned up, I sank further back into the now warm and comfortable leather beneath me, allowing my memories to consume me. Memories that when I’d first arrived back in London, I’d gone over and over in my head, hour upon hour, as I reminisced our two years together with all its highs and lows. They now reappeared, when I’d forbidden them to come in the daylight. For a few months after my banishment back to England, placed in the care of my mum’s family, the Thomases, I’d gone over everything I could. I coerced my brain to replay and analyse, time after time, every little detail it could recall, trying to find peace.
Peace that never came.
Four months later, I’d still had no word from Salvatore, when I’d been so convinced that he’d be back for me sooner rather than later. I was struggling and was no longer taking care of myself nor going outside. I’d been left fighting a constant wave of anxiety, struggling to eat, and refusing to take calls from my parents or siblings.
My Uncle Keith, acting on my absent parents’ behalf, had arrived at my flat and in no uncertain terms threatened to have me sectioned for my own good.
That afternoon, as his words of concern and threats finally broke through to me and the realisation that Salvatore wasn’t coming smacked me around the face, I swore to myself that I would never be so reliant on another human, apart from myself, ever again. With my uncle following my every crazed movement as at first I stood still, and then started to pace around my home to see just what my grieving state had subconsciously created in my nearly completed flat, I’d vowed never again to relive any memories of us during my waking hours.
My dreams of love, nights spent locked in each other’s arms and my nightmares of hurt and loss, with the man who held me forever captive, could only be revisited at night in the darkness where they belonged. And as the cold light of day hit my closed eyelids, I made myself relinquish the memories.
Rebuilding my life at nineteen years old hadn’t been easy, nor something I even wanted to do. I’d been made to leave the country I then thought of as home and my husband. I already knew I loved him when we’d married, but that feeling had grown stronger in the two years we spent together as man and wife. But to save myself, to begin again and to follow my original dream, I’d played a game of make believe and pretended those two almost perfect and unforgettable years had never happened.
As I slowly worked at becoming myself again, I’d demanded that my emotions listened to their English heritage, remaining unspoken and stifled.
Now with a simple brush of his thumb over the wedding ring I had never taken off, I was back down the rabbit hole I’d clawed myself out of, when I could still feel how uncomfortable the dirt had been under my fingernails.
‘It’s been a long time.’ I heard my statement fall from my mouth and closed my eyes as I lost the battle from within myself not to talk to him.
‘It’s been a fucking lifetime,’ Salvatore offered, as he flicked the switch to close the privacy screen between us and Aldo.
With us now alone, the atmosphere changed between us. My taut neck was beginning to hurt at the angle I was forcing it to stay in, but it was necessary. I supressed the hurt I’d been living with for the past few years of my life and focussed on the familiar buildings we travelled past. All the while, my Italian blood was roaring passionately around my body while it challenged me to scream at him why, why, why?
Why did you push me away?
Why did you make me leave you?
But I declined to ask. Refused to allow him in enough to see and feel the pain I’d been carrying around for as long as I could remember. Instead, I bit down onto my lip and stared pointedly out of the window, while I commanded my body not to react. But the silence inside the large car swept around us with the questions and memories that were becoming too strong to suppress.
Finally, as the car braked to a sudden stop over London bridge, I watched the Thames flow strongly underneath us, and I couldn’t hold the tsunami of pain inside me any longer.
‘Why now, Salvatore?’ The first question exploded from my mouth and the second arrived on a painful sigh. ‘Why today of all days?’
‘It’s a date close to my heart.’ His deep voice reverberated inside me.
At his admission, my body began to involuntarily tremble. I shook my head and looked down.
And mine.
The second my eyes had run over the stiff piece of card I’d pulled from the envelope inviting me to my own graduation, I’d read the date over and over, not wanting to believe it. I’d felt the pain of loss that the date brought with it. As I’d slid down the wall in the hallway, still clutching the embossed card in my hand, I’d allowed myself to remember what should have been on that date in July a few years previously, and I mourned him all over again, the same way I had in previous years, on my own.
