How many times had he been content just to hold her, straddling his lap, staring into those azure depths for hours on end? She’d been his first true love, and vice versa. What they’d shared had been scorching hot and unfettered by any restraint whatsoever. In the depths of the loneliness and isolation he’d felt since the death of his wife, perhaps she was an angel. Or a demon come to torment. Involuntarily, and hopelessly, his heart skipped a beat at first sight. A thousand fantasies ran laps around his brain and he reached out as if to pull her against him, just for the warmth of her. Just for the contact of a familiar body pressed against his in a moment of instinctive relief.
His first thought wasn’t that she was married but that the ring upon her fingers would shine and twinkle so beautifully in the subdued lighting of his bedroom, digits straining to encompass him and her palm sliding up and down his length as she’d used to. The diamond would shine as expectantly as her eyes, wanting, his greedy girl. Only she wasn’t, was she? Not anymore. She was someone else’s and that realization hit him like a truck. He nearly (though, unfortunately for the thief, not quite) staggered back, catching himself and only digging his shoe in further against the back of the criminal. “You … you’re married,” he murmured, still not quite comprehending even though his thumb rubbed against the finger where his own wedding band had once resided. “When?” The foiled robbery and everything else faded from view, his attention rapt on Ariadne and hanging on every word and expression from her. “Are you happy, blue eyes? God, I hope you are.”
Where did he come from? Why now? And, most importantly...why was he looking at her like that? Nostalgia, and pain, and pure, predatory want reflected through the endless abyss of his hues, gluing her feet on the spot as if no criminal was trapped between them, as if there were no years of absence and silence spanning through them. So many years, that now she was a little older than him when they’d first met. And he was...him. Still as gorgeous, intense and captivating as ever. Entering the personal space in her heart, no questions asked. He wasn’t supposed or allowed to ask her if she was happy, and he sure as hell wasn’t allowed to use his old nickname towards her to do so. Maybe it was the psychologist in her whose geers were running wild, but she couldn’t ignore the sense that he was asking her if she had moved on. Today, eleven years after his marriage to another woman.
“Aren’t you?” she shot back firmly, the calmness in her voice attempting to cloak the whirlwind rushing through her insides. That whirlwind, ought to die out, for she wasn’t allowed to let the way he was scanning through her affect her. She wasn’t allowed to think back to those times the very same pair had brought her to the highest of highs, before a golden ring around his finger trapped her in a future without him. Which made her wonder, where was that ring now? “Last time, a year ago. The first one, three years after.. after we parted.” Those questions were supposed to be the easy ones, and she still found answering them difficult. So, how the heck was she going to answer that last one? It was then that it hit her...she didn’t have to. Which was why, instead of answering him, she popped up another question. “Where’s your ring?”
Before a heartbeat passed, before he could atter a word, a siren echoed all around them as the police arrived, making her turn towards the car.
