Worry was rarely an emotion that Ramona had to sit with for long, but no matter how she tried to rationalize with her internal self, she still felt the flutters of anxiety when it came to seeing Luciano after months spent apart. She blamed it on jet lag, on the stubborn language barrier, and the fact that her hotel room had been bathed in so much sunlight that morning that she could hardly even consider sleeping in during her first, full day in France. In very classic Ramona fashion, the butterflies knocking around in her chest were everyone’s fault but her own. And, by extension of that, they were the cause for her twitching fingers against the cafe table top, digits meticulously folding and unfolding the edges of a napkin. There was a cup of steeping tea in front of Ramona as well, but she had yet to taste-test the rapidly cooling liquid. Instead, her brown-eyed gaze shifted around the outdoor cafe, listening in on only half-comprehensible conversations as she waited to spot a singular familiar face in a sea of unknowns. And, thankfully, before long, Ramona’s gaze landed on an approaching mop of dark hair that she knew all too well.
“I was starting to worry that you’d forgotten all about me,” she started once Luciano was near enough. “But then I realized that it would’ve been just as fun to hunt you down myself if you hadn’t shown.” A rare, warm smile took over Ramona’s sharp features as she shifted in her seat. Uncrossing and recrossing her legs, the brunette didn’t take her eyes off of her part-time lover, even as she crumpled the mangled napkin in her grip and pushed it aside to hide behind her mug of tea. “Would it be ridiculously impolite of me to say that we should skip all the smalltalk and pretend I’ve already been here a week?”
