The Roman Thorn

Description

Epilogue

Two Years Later — October, Rome

Word Count: 487

The flight landed at 6:14 in the evening.

Sienna had not slept. She had spent the last two hours of the journey watching the Italian coastline appear below the clouds, the light turning amber as the sun dropped, and feeling something in her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with nerves.

She knew this feeling now. It was the city, pulling her back.

Fiumicino Airport was exactly as she remembered — loud, bright, smelling of espresso and jet fuel. She dragged her single carry-on through the arrivals hall and thought about a girl two years younger than her who had stood in this same space with two heavy suitcases and fury in her jaw.

She almost didn’t see him at first.

He was standing near the exit, not holding a sign, not checking his phone. Just standing, the way Luca always stood — still and unhurried, like someone who had decided exactly where he was going to be and had arrived there with time to spare.

He was early. Of course he was early.

She stopped walking.

He looked up — and there it was, the thing she had only ever caught in photographs: his face, unguarded, open, himself.

She crossed the arrivals hall and he met her halfway, and when he put his arms around her neither of them said anything for a long moment because some things didn’t need words, especially in a city that had been saying them in stone for two thousand years.

“You’re here,” he said finally, quietly, into her hair.

“I’m here,” she said.

He pulled back and looked at her the way he looked at buildings — like he was cataloguing something he intended to keep.

“You cut your hair.”

“Three months ago.”

“I like it.”

“I know, you said so on the call.”

“I wanted to say it in person.”

She laughed. He almost smiled. The arrivals hall moved around them, indifferent.

He took her bag without asking. She let him.

Outside, Rome was doing what Rome always did in October — turning golden and slightly melancholy and unbearably beautiful, the evening light lying across the old stones like something that had always been there and always would be.

“Where first?” he asked.

She already knew. She had known on the plane.

“The bridge,” she said.

He nodded, like he had expected nothing else.

They walked toward the car, and the city rose around them — its noise, its weight, its two thousand years of magnificent and terrible — and Sienna thought: I didn’t just fall in love with a person here. I fell in love with a place. And the extraordinary thing about both is that they waited.

Rome always waits.

~ The End ~