Sinnerman

Chapter 54 P.S. - I Love You

Let's some warm soothing silence take over the car. Let's the cool wind scrape through her scalp like raking cold fingers. Hair tossing. Watching sunshine bake onto the rustic red buildings. Yellow brick the colour of dandelion in the sun. Evie takes in deep the smells. The sounds. The noises. Her last snatching glimpse of Milan.

She's assuming wherever Kylo's taking her, can't be so far away. She lets it all slip past her eyes. Until eventually the city thins out. Balding into countryside. A single track road leading through groves, under glades and over shimmering wheat fields.

Rows of grape vines grow in neat stripes across some plains. Like a perfect green regiment. The hem of the landscape flat, until a mountain rips up into the sky in the distance. Long arrows of cypress trees swipe up along the edges of those fields.

They pass crumbling villas from centuries past. Clay barrel roof-tiles roll with the colour of sun and shade. Kylo winds the car through little pink starfish and sand coloured brick houses in unfathomably small towns. Carving around hairpin bends in the slate grey road. Tiny chapels bells toll and Evie likes seeing the countryside this way. This calm hidden Tuscany. Tucked away in rolling hills studded with grape vines.

She was a quiet country girl down to her bones. Cities were fun to explore. But after too much time enclosed in concrete walls and suffocating heat of too many bodies scrabbling about to get and be everywhere at once, she prefers the quiet.

One thing she loves about her home. If it gets too much, she can go and sit in her study. Open her windows over her desk. And just let nature of the woods be her soundtrack for a while.

Listens to swallows chirp and dip. The rustling hiss of wind ruffling leaves on the big oaks. She loves it most of a summer evening. When the muggy heat just starts to leave and cool night spills in. She can't think of any place more glorious to be, than sat at her desk, on a cooling midsummers eve, with a vase of fresh cut wildflowers perfuming the muggy air. Fresh picked violets and sweet peas and bluebells.

She remarks to herself how simple she is to please. How common her wishes and hopes and dreams were.

She's contented by much and asks for little in her small, valuable life.

She'll never be a woman who changes the world or stirs up tempests of revolution. She's ok with that. Because she can lead her cosy, pocket-sized life and be contented.

Never stressing for more. Or wishing she had better. She had a roof over her head. A soft wobbly body to rely on. The marvellous meat clockwork that made her up. Kept her healthy and ticking over. And a job she couldn't wait to get up and go to everyday-

Not to mention the love of a severely misunderstood man to look forward too, aswell.

She closes her eyes at night, excited to wake up and see Kylo slumbering on the pillow next to her own. The feel of his weight and his body-heat in the bedsheets next to her and she can never want for anything more- she's lucky. So lucky.

Tickled pink with it all, really.

She ruminates on all her luck as they continue their drive, burning white sun dead ahead in the centre of the cornflower sky. She closes her eyes. Feels nothing but the breeze ripping at her hair. The sun curling heat on her cheeks and brow. Feeling the glare of it seep into her skin. Smelling sun baked greenery of the grapes in the air.

Her hand warms up all the more, when Kylo leans a hand over the console and clutches hers. Content to rub his thumb over her knuckles. Almost as if he's acting the loving gesture without even thinking about it. Just likes to hold her hand. She always curls her palm into his. He seeks her touch. She'll never shrink from it.