Monthly Bonus Content #4 — The Best Kind of Love Story… (Nat Summer Scenario)

“To think, so many stories found their origins from authors walking down these streets.” Nat draws her hand across the cream stone, spreading her fingers over the wall as though able to feel a pulse beneath the unyielding brick. “So many characters birthed from the landscape of these buildings.”

I glance up at the three-storey towering spread of building, the formation making up a curved arch, partly protected by newly-painted, glossy back iron railings. “I’ve never really thought of it that way before.”

She glances at me with wide eyes. “You haven’t?”

I shrug and motion at a nearby information board. “Most people focus on the history of this place. Not on the stories formed here.”

“History is…stark. Often dreary.”

I arch a brow and smirk. “I’m guessing you speak from experience. You know, having lived it.”

She chuckles, nodding as she reluctantly releases her touch from the ornate building to move back to my side. “True.”

“But stories,” she spreads her hands out to gesture around us, “those are the real truths. They show the lives people want to lead. Want to live. Where their hearts truly lie.” She smiles. “There is nothing more revealing and vulnerable than someone putting that to paper and sharing it with others.”

I stare at her for a while. Never have I met anyone with a way of viewing the world as Nat does. As though she’s determined to see it through a fog of romanticism than what it really has to offer.

Painting over reality isn’t exactly the best way to live life…but I don’t have the heart to break her from it.

I offer a bright smile, slipping my fingers into hers as we walk along the winding street together, passing through alleyways steeped in a warm gloom ripe for the start of some historical romance.

“What are you thinking, ya rouhi?” she asks.

I glance at her, her brown eyes gleaming like the depths of an autumn day. “Perhaps you should write your own stories. Have you ever considered that?”

She laughs softly, her gaze dropping as she shakes her head. “In this case, I believe it is a craft I can only appreciate with all my heart as an onlooker.”

“Have you ever tried?”

She winces.

My steps stumble to a stop as I stare at her. “Wait—you have?”

“It was atrocious, I assure you,” she states as she holds up a hand to stop my obvious barrage of questions.

I let them spill out of me anyway. “What was it about? What genre? When was it—”

“The only thing I will say is that I understand now why I couldn’t write the love in the story with the depth I was striving for,” she says, tugging me in closer and kissing my neck just beneath my jaw.

I sigh at the gently intimate gesture. “Why not?”

“Because only now, with you, do I realise how little I understood about it.” She looks at me intensely, my pulse stuttering at the strength of emotion behind that simple gaze. “I’ve never loved anyone, truly, in the way I do for you.”

My breath catches.

It doesn’t matter how much history lingers in this city, how many tales sprung from its streets, how many people gained their fame in building it…not when the best story of all is being written between us right now.

And I never want it to end.