Cookies
Part 1
So this was it.
She closed her eyes as the door shut quietly behind him, finding the sound oddly comforting. There was something to be said about coming full circle. There was something so liberating about discovering oneself in a land far from the one she'd grown up in. The thought gave her pause as she opened her eyes. No, that wasn't quite correct. She'd grown here too, or at least had finished growing. She'd finally finished baking. The corner of her mouth quirked up. Yes, as he walked out of the home they had shared for the past four years, she realized that she was finally ready to live. Her heart didn't break this time, even though she loved him, like it had split into a million pieces when she had said goodbye to her first lover a lifetime ago. If anything, her heart felt stronger, fuller, complete.
In all her life – her 28 years on earth – she had been with five men. Well – two men and three vampires. And with each she had found a piece of herself, she had discovered so many realities of life – and death – but she had never felt this contentment, this elation, this peace. She had truly loved only two of them, and only one would hold her heart forever. Only one of them was her life's mate. The corner of her mouth quirked further upward until she was smiling.
She walked around the cozy home she had shared with Roberto, her Italian lover, and her senses tingled as the last traces of his scent filled her nostrils. She still wasn't sure when she'd made the decision to end this relationship, but in all honesty every relationship she'd ever had (Roberto was the only normal one) was doomed from the beginning. Every relationship was always overshadowed by the fact that all roads eventually lead to him. And he had been haunting her dreams every night for the past year, and she felt that she was finally done baking. Every ingredient was in her now: she'd had her teenage angst, her first love and heartbreak, her semi-normal human boyfriend, the crazy passionate affair with a crazy vampire, the crazy affair with a sane vampire, and a normal relationship with a normal human as a normal woman (without worrying about demons or apocalypses – just the normal issues a normal couple had to deal with).
Truth be told, she didn't regret a single moment. Not even the years spent apart – so achingly far apart – from him, because all those years had finally brought her to this moment, to this one realization (previously it had been a teenage delusion, at best) that he was her only, her forever. She'd had her normal life with beautiful Roberto, but while it was everything a woman could ever dream of (a tiny villa on the Mediterranean in a discrete Italian town with a gorgeous Italian man who only had eyes for her – really, it was everything a woman could ever want), she wasn't that woman. She was his woman who'd blossomed from being his girl only because he'd done the most brave, knowing, selfless act, something she'd been too immature and short-sighted to do: he walked away. And somehow, miraculously, they had both survived without air (she was his air even though he didn't have breath) and had managed to save the world – multiple times – in the process. They had survived the impossible (because, really, how does a fish live without water?) because no matter how far the distance stretched between them, their souls were bound together eternally. Through all the changes in her life and within herself, there was always one common denominator: she was his, and that had proven to be more than enough. She'd always known it was more than enough, she'd just needed time to recall that rusty part of her certainty. It had taken him more than two centuries to find her, so surely neither of them could fault her for taking a just decade to find herself.
She needed that decade to grow. To grow as a slayer, and now she no longer carried that burden. She needed that decade to grow as a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a lover. But mostly – mostly she needed that decade to grow as a woman. He had been her first everything. So after she'd been with Riley – the human with an edge – she'd learned that her eternal love for him was not born out of the danger. After she'd been with Spike (who could fault her, really, for he was the craziest, most devilish, most adorable punk-rock Brit to walk the earth – and here she paused for a moment to pay respects to his undead life), she knew it wasn't the vampire, or the danger, or both, that had molded her soul to his. And then she had been with the Immortal (perhaps an indication that this slayer had a slight vamp fetish?), but that had only proven that her slaying days were over (there were some other good vamps out there after all), and she'd felt the fight (and vamp fetish) fizzle out of her – yet she still remained entirely his.
And then there had been Roberto, from the second year she'd been in Rome until about an hour ago – the impossibly charming, absolutely gorgeous, and entirely human love of her life. She'd lived like a normal woman, in love with a normal man, for four normal years (the last of which was haunted by dreams of him), until something had stirred and shifted within her about a week ago, and she knew. So she told her sweet, beloved Roberto that it was over between them and that she was leaving forever. When he asked her to look him in the eye and tell him she didn't love him, she couldn't do it. She did love him, but that too was slowly fizzling as the burning passion, the aching desire, and the undeniable need to be with him hummed throughout her veins.
"Ciao, mi amore,"she'd whispered as he shut the door. Hello, my forever, her heart hummed at the same instant, and she knew.
The only question was, did he?