SS:Piazza di Spagna - Part 12 Upd Aug 2nd - Page 20

Originally posted by: 6th.Element

Hmm! I thought I was only reasoning to why he rather have her spend her life with Dev...I don't think that is any indication of how the story is going to play out. Don't expect the expected for this one...

finally you r back here...😊 post the next part sooon hasini...😊

Exactly one month before you were going to send Maan to take shower, and I am still waiting .

He heard a shower running in the background, the whizz of the spray from the shower head strangely filling the air with an unexpected calm. Closing his eyes, he shook his head from side to side loosening the knots there, the tightness in the muscle - from the time he'd put up a flawless show of indifference and reigned in his senses from giving away how hard he'd had to work to keep up that feigned disinterest - released a mild ache traveling down his back. And then there was the badly bruised shoulder he couldn't bring himself to think about. Again, these were only the physical discomforts that he was enduring then, her presence in the building notwithstanding.

The steam began to spread and some of which condensed into a thin sheen over his jaw. When his towel was starting to slip over his other shoulder, he held it in place and turned around to come to a standstill and felt his ears ring with the sharp shrill of her shriek.

"What?..." He heard her voice crack from shock or embarrassment, he couldn't tell, "What are you doing here?" Her voice began to fade, as she added, "This is the women's bathroom"

There was no forgiving his heart of his that had skipped a beat only to sputter as loudly as a rust mobile lacking a silencer. Now, his pulse hit the roof from seeing her stripped down to nothing but a white towel, her skin glistening from the rivulets that was on a rampage to kiss every inch of her body. Whatever it was that he was showing in his face, dulled out to a bored annoyance, when it became that much more difficult to stay rooted to the floor watching a stray drop glide down her clavicle and venture south towards the heavy knot over her chest and disappear between her...

She caught her gaze travel down her neck and the next instant her eyes layered evenly with confusion made her rush behind a bath stall.

"Argh!" He groaned lolling his head back, his grunt sure to come across as if he detested everything down to her shadows and it eased his insides a bit when that was what he meant to convey. "Get out", he said taking a swift step towards her and hauled her out by her arm, "Being in the same room as you for the second time in a day...Now, I can't get that lucky twice in a row, can I? This is the men's hour for god sakes..."

Her alarm spread through the air and gnawed at his facade which asked of every live cell in his body to be put to work for keeping up appearances. Hell! he needn't be rude for all she had gone through and that resolve made him loosen his grip over her arm and he let her go by the bathroom door.

Convinced that he had no intentions to misbehave, he realized she'd found her voice again. Even better, he thought he could hear the nasty hint of sarcasm that had his wife written all over it.

"Gee...didn't you get the office memo?" She spoke clutching her arm where he'd gripped her, her voice low and yet in that unfailing sarcasm was also her disgust for him. "I'm a half psycho and full stalker who has a thing or two for you...desperate to have my hands all over you..."

She must have felt deeply offended by his earlier statement in the other room. He wanted to smile then, but instead forced himself to keep that same peevish look on his face. If only she know how precise she was that moment. Only she'd strangely come to describe his state of all those years he'd stayed away from her.

He continued to stand there and her eyes lowered, uncomfortable and vulnerable, while it wandered off to a distant spot on the floor, her one hand tight over her towel knot and the other shaky and unsure over her naked, wet shoulder.

"What are you waiting for?.. " He waved her off, but her eyes drifted to her clothes on the bench and he stalked back into the room before she could make a move to grab them.

"Surely, there must be a nano GPS chip or something, right?" She muttered, chewing her words as she let them out.

"Why do you ask?" He looked back over his shoulder as he picked up her pile.

"Tomorrow, you can slip that into my coffee and then perhaps you can put a good hundred miles between you and me all the time"

There was no telling how much stranger it could get for him when she was recreating their wedding night without her knowledge, in a directly opposing context. But this time it was antagonistic at best.

"Should I expect to find a tracking chip of some kind going up and down my bloodstream if I were to get into a scan or MRI?", She'd asked.

He'd wrapped his arms from behind and pressed his lips to the soft spot below her ear while crushing the lone orchid she'd kept tucked there. "No, I have other ways to track you down..."

They had never gotten to hearing the list in his head when she'd turned in his embrace and looked at him with virginal curiosity. "But that makes me wonder, why you thought I would ever want to run from you?"

Her question had rendered him speechless and he'd never been more unprepared not quite expecting to achieve any solidarity - which she unquestionably felt - in their relationship that early in their marriage. It had been the moment he'd truly come to believe that he was absolute to her. Not the man who didn't exist as per the government records, but the man whom she had known all of five months and never once questioned where he'd disappeared those long weeks he didn't come to visit her as promised and yet had agreed to elope when he'd said that that was the only way they could be together for life. She was his only chance left at being normal, he'd reckoned then. "Nothing, baby..." He'd said, taking longer than necessary to recover, "Nothing matters anymore..."

But everything mattered now. Her existence did and he wished it was he who was experiencing the memory loss and not her when he hadn't learnt to let go of her after all these years. Giovanna was playing a game, the consequence of which had everything to do with him and her.

His thumb brushed against the soft lace of her tank top and strangely he stuck clarity that he was again in those defining moments that could mark the end of his years of angst from having stayed far from her and the beginning of something else if she could welcome it. If nothing, she wouldn't have to marry Dev, but that wouldn't be fair to her, when he had no certainty of a future to further consider sharing a room with her, let alone his life.

The bushel of emotions that he went through - the anger, pain, regret, fear and the ever present tenderness for her weakened and hardened him at once; the myriad of transformations causing a pressure inside him enough to plop a vein open.

"Well, that is if you are still around until tomorrow..." He spoke as he made his way back to the bathroom entrance.

"Oh! From what I hear from your lady friend, I'm stuck here until this lockdown is resolved...Whatever that is..." She shrugged careless and it had him question the air of sudden ease she'd gained while still being half naked around him, who for all intents and purposes was very much a stranger to her. "You might want to double check on the locks of your chastity belt. Hey! You never know when I will corner you"

What had gotten into her? Riling up a man like that when she was practically naked and alone too if the camera inside the bathroom - the one that focused on the doorway - could be discounted.

Shit!

Indeed, nothing in his life ever went by without an audience. Someone was always watching.

Giovanna...He was going to kill her the next time he would lay eyes on her, but it was still Geet who was standing in front of him and at the receiving end. And so, without much ado, the clothes pile in his hand flew out the door.

"Hey!" She yelled, "Hey! That is no way to treat a lady only in her underpants and a towel" For some reason, he thought she didn't put everything she had into that bluster.

He closed his eyes for a brief instant as he dashed along the outer wall to the corner where the camera whirred and refocused as he walked the length. He was done being anyone's evening amusement.

Even as he heard her wet feet slap against the tiled floor behind him, he titled his head to the camera and gritted, "Cut it out..." He gestured with his hand - whipping his fingers horizontally over his neck twice or thrice, "I'm calling the shots now. Just cut it out"

Around the same instant, he heard a cry of metal scraping against something hard and his head flipped to the entrance to catch the bathroom door lock them in through the main controls - whom he knew was also shifting the camera zoom and angle as they moved. Shit! Now they had turned him into a lab rat, testing how malleable his convictions were to remain as a ghost of her past.

"Hey! What's your name again?" She poked a long finger nail into the flesh of his shoulder. However the small flutter of her finger on his skin had unleashed an avalanche of fury breaking the years of restraint he'd practiced around her. So much for being a L1 agent who couldn't shut his emotions out when needed.

"Would you just shut up, Geet?" His good hand pinned her to the wall. She winced, her eyes widening from the impact against the cold tiles while the tight clasp of his arm threatened to leave an imprint on her skin. His instincts kicked in and he was reading her like a book: her pupils were dilated; the goose bumps that had erupted on her arm; a slight shiver of her puckered lips and her incessant blinking were enough to drive him mad. Yes! Be very afraid, he'd wanted to tell, but then there was also the familiar scent of her skin, her wet lashes that framed the frenzy in her liquid green eyes, her small pulse that skittered below her jaw and the throbbing at the notch (The notch he'd taken to after reading the English patient on their honeymoon) that he could always behold at but never could get over watching for hours at the base of her throat.

Something must have changed then - the look in his eyes, perhaps - because her eyes grew wary and he sensed a recognition in her widening eyes, if that was even possible.

Her body was still, her breathing grew shallow as she spoke in a whisper. "You..." Her voice felt stuck in her throat as if she couldn't believe what she'd stumbled upon in that unsuspecting bathroom, a place she would not have entered if not for Giovanna, "I know you from before, don't I?"

If it had taken him an eternity to make believe he didn't exist, he was going to need another to wipe out the damage the last few seconds had brought about. Oh! Hell! Whatever...Truly, he didn't know about building Rome in a day, but now he was aware it sure could be destroyed in one.

"No..." He mustered a lie with a straight face, "I just knew someone who knew you"

After releasing his grip on her arm, he turned away from her as he sighed and rolled his eyes at the lies that came easy. "But he is no more..." He added for good measure when he went to sit by the bench and bury his face deep into the palm of his hands.

It took him a few breaths to realize her clothes were locked out. His head shot up as he understood the full extent of the unspoken danger in the room - he would have to spend the rest of his sentence with her parading the confined room in nothing but a towel. F**k! He was toast.

wow !!!!! finally an update...

awesome part hasini...what a lovely part after such a looong wait😊😊 thank you sooo much...now lets see how maan is going show his false hatred towards her, that too in a closed room😊 excited to read the next part

lt is pretty hard for Maan to control his emotions around Geet...me trying to understand what he may be going through...amazing part

clothes locked out

You forgot that he took off his shirt for examination and hasn't worn one ever since. 😉

But then you never know what else he grabbed apart from the towels when he opened his runner in the last update.

@ Jyoti: Yes all is well 😊...Tyro, eh? You are no novice to IF or writing, alright...