She glowers at me. “That’s not fair. You know I don’t.”
If she thought long and hard about it, she would. It amazes me that she’s been with Bobby for so long. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t because Meirna isn’t needy and understands the hustle means sacrifice and limited time spent.
I guess I should be grateful for that.
“Nothing about me feels like home?” I hedge, genuinely curious to know. “Holding my hand. Listening to me speak. How I smell or even the way Ihold myself.”
She’s silent for a long minute while a violinist plays a merry Christmas song with a black bucket in front of him for tips.
“I think so,” she finally mutters. “It…feels like a blended blur, to be honest.”
I understand that.
She wasn’t expecting to organize moments in which one felt different than the other. It’s been two years since we first met and, for me, it feels like yesterday at times.
“You love me, Daydream. You just didn’t know my name.”
She openly gapes at me, implying that if I’m not on any kind of medication, I should probably go get checked out for some.
Thing is, I’m confident that Meirna’s most satisfied moments were with me. I normally only got an hour, two tops, with her.
And all she did was moan and smile.
You sure she never did that with Bobby and rode the high with him?
I fight back my own self-doubt in being able to pull this off with the woman at my side. I can woo her pants off, but it’s at the cost of dumping her ex-boyfriend because he’s a con and a cheater.
She’s still leading with the shock of it all—understandably—and trying to navigate where her life goes from here. If anything, I need to be patient as hell.
We pass the Church of Our Lady before Týn. A medieval-looking building with spiky towers that dominate the skyline. Meirna’s attention is locked on the architecture, pulling out her cell phone to snap a few shots while I wave down a vendor.
She steps away for a better angle, but she never pulls her hand from mine. I revel in that when I pay the young man with a warm smile for the white roses just in time for her to turn back to me.
“Pretty flowers for my beautiful wife.” I hand them to her, and she takes them immediately as if she can’t help herself.
Meirna stares at them as if they hold all the answers to questions she hasn’t thought of before, as I move us along. Ournext stop is the next bakery I see, so we can load her up on desserts and take them to the hotel.
“You bought the flowers, didn’t you?”
I push my lips out and reply, “With the note?”
“All of them.” Mindlessly, I stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Meirna turns to me and gets one of those answers I didn’t theorize she’d get based on random flowers. “It wasn’t Bobby’s assistant, slash his father’s assistant. He used to say she’d help pick them out.”
“She did help,” I mutter. “Me.”
Meirna frowns. “She’d help you pick them out?”
“No. She kept her mouth shut.”
I’m met with silence and more dissecting of my expression as though Meirna is going to get within my deepest, inner thoughts.
They’re not that complicated.
“Should we continue?” I suggest giving her a little tug, but her feet don’t move, and she doesn’t stop staring at me. “Are you trying out for one of the many statues here, Daydream? There shouldn’t be that much competition for them here, and it’s cold.”
“Tell me what else you did,” she breathes as if all the ideas in her head are suffocating her. “Christmas, birthdays, when else were you by me? How many moments did we share that I didn’t know about?”
“That’s it,” I reply. “Physically.”
