After a morning spent in bed exploring one another intimately, you had walked along the River Arno, tried delicious gelato, visited more museums and monuments than you could count on one hand and eaten your weight worth in Italian bread. Another evening was spent out until the night grew old, and the sheets in your bed were ruined by the morning. It was constant heaven and when you got into a rented car to travel to Florence for the rest of your stay in Tuscany, you had believed there was a high possibility that you had already died and this was the afterlife.

It was all too magical to comprehend otherwise.

And even with all your mental preparation, as soon as you saw the Duomo in the distance, you were a lost cause. “Junmyeon, I’m sorry in advance if I cease any type of expected etiquette from here on out.”

“That overwhelmed?” he asked as you gripped onto your seatbelt, your eyes round as saucers and breathing became harder to do naturally.

“I don’t think I prepared you well enough for the history buff within me,” you explained and vaguely heard him chuckle.

You couldn’t explain it. Being in the city with so much rich history and architecture, the birthplace of the Renaissance art movement, and the place of your dreams since you were a teenager, left you utterly speechless. You didn’t know what to look at first or if your brain could even store as much as you were pleading with it to do. The hotel you stayed in held no effect on you once you found the windows, opening them up and staring out at your current world dreamily.

You flinched when Junmyeon reached around you to offer you a drink of water. It made you blink a few times before taking it. He grinned when you finally looked at him. “I should be offering you something with bubbles right now. It might calm your nerves.”

“I’m really here, aren’t I?”

He nodded, rubbing your upper arm repeatedly and you shivered. Junmyeon put his glass down on the small tabletop before encasing you in his arms.

For a moment, even with the dazzling world you wanted to memorise inch by inch, you sighed with comfort into his embrace. Since becoming intimate with him, there was no place you enjoyed more than being buried in his chest. He was always so warm and listening to his heart worked enough to bring peace to your erratic system.

You glanced up at him and shared a grateful expression and a kiss before looking back outside. “I’m glad I’m seeing all this with you, Junmyeon. My friends Kelsi and Ayla aren’t into history like I am. Which is fine, I was going to come here by myself when the time was right. But being with you makes it all that much more special.”

“You better stop with all these beautiful words you keep sharing on this trip or I might go ahead and ruin it,” he told you, blinking a few times and then looked outside, away from your sudden gaze on him.

“Ruin it how?”

“With some little words that shouldn’t come out too early,” he admitted and you smiled giddily.

“What if they come from me first?”

“I’ll call your bluff.”

You gaped at the man and pulled back to arm’s length to pout at him. “Hey!”

“Tell me when we’re back home. This place is our current paradise and it makes everything seem amazing to us right now. Those types of words need to wait until we’re back in reality.”

You thought over his reasoning and nodded. He was right, it would be all too easy with being caught up in the moment to rush ahead and say things that weren’t needed just yet. Two months could easily be enough time for someone to fall in love, and the romantic within you was certainly gearing up for it.

However, the whole reason you were hesitant to date in the first place was from those past experiences. Once you had confessed to love in the past, it crumbled away, the illusion of your adoration replaced with reality. There was no love at all, at least, not the kind you were searching to capture you for the rest of your life.

It could wait until you returned home. Until months had gone by and this dizzying honeymoon period had eased off. That was the most logical.

Your heart yearned for a little more magic, however.

By the third day in Florence, logic had all but left you. You were surrounded by a world you had travelled only through textbooks. It was right before your eyes, tantalising your senses everywhere you looked, listened and touched. When you thought you couldn’t be further impressed, you would enter another museum, exhibition or monument and fall further in love with Italy.

And with the man at your side.

As you walked around the Boboli Gardens listening to the guide over the Medici history, you found yourself thinking more about your return home than taking in everything around you. You wondered how much it would hurt to come back down to reality, to wake up in your bed back home and no longer at Junmyeon’s side. Would you be satisfied with sending him off to his dreams each night with a simple farewell over the phone instead of a kiss? Would you still see much of him once you were both back at work and pursuing the next big project? You knew he wasn’t going to just disappear from your world but you had gotten a taste of what it was like to spend time with him and you weren’t quite ready to stop doing just that.

Smiling to yourself, you decided you didn’t care how hard it would get at times; you would balance having a relationship with him. Yo