Long Time, No See - Levi x Reader (Modern!AU)

59 - Something of a Surprise

Whenever I talked to other wedded couples about their honeymoons and asked what they were like, I never quite believed them when they told me that they fell back in love with their partner. Not to say that they were not already in love with them, because that's why they got married in the first place. No, what they meant was that they fell in love with them in grand new ways, ways that perhaps they had not appreciated before.

I never really quite knew how to rationalize that in my brain - purely because I had no experienced it for myself - so I would just smile and nod and coo at how cute that was before asking something else.

There are some things that the human mind just has a hard time recognizing. It was just a simple fact of life, and it had everything to do with how simple everything was not. Something like this was a strange thing to think about, and it was certainly something as hard to fathom as the prospect of differentiating between two impossibly large numbers: one million and one billion, for example. They're just unfathomable to the human mind.

Of course, there was never truly a way to know an entire person. That's not to say that you don't know anyone, but you never quite ever get to know anyone quite as well as you know yourself, and some people don't learn who they are until late in their life. But still, falling in love with someone was all about learning who they are as a person, right?

Loving Levi, I learned all about who he was. What he liked, what he did not like, his most minute preferences for everything. I felt that I knew him more than most, and he would probably tell me that this was true with a certain level of playful chagrin.

But somewhere deep in my subconscious, I recognized this simple fact of life though I did not actively think of it... much like how you always know what your hand looks like, even if you don't always see it. All this to say, I knew that there would always be something new to learn. Something knew to discover. Something new to appreciate. And all about him.

The thought of experiencing it for myself never quite clicked in my brain until my own honeymoon, and I suddenly found that I agreed with everything those couples had told me. Did I already know and love Levi? Yes, of course. But seeing him like this... no work, no responsibilities, able for once in his life to truly relax... it was incredible.

We were able to, for once, just focus on each other. There was no work to unwind from, no work to prepare for. We didn't have to worry about what was happening so many miles away because for right now, it did not matter.

It was for this reason that we opted to leave for our honeymoon as soon as possible after our wedding. Some newlywed couples would wait a few days, even a few weeks to leave, perhaps for the optimal season of their destination or what have you, but not us. We planned it to run seamlessly right after our wedding, and I was so glad that we did.

Because somehow, in the most beautiful way... I fell in love with him more and more with each passing day.

I didn't know how it was possible, and yet I was so grateful for it.

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Levi's POV:

I leaned back on my hands, straightening my legs out in front of me across the blanket.

We were on a picnic.

On a scenic cliff overlooking the ocean, we'd laid out a red-checkered blanket and prepared a basket of sandwiches and snacks and this cheap bottle of wine from the resort. A steady breeze rolled in with the waves and the sun dipped in and out from behind clouds that looked too damn fluffy and picturesque to seem real.

The rocky bluff was tucked away from the main resort which was far closer to the beach. It was a bit of a trek to get here, and I'd told the stubborn idiot several times that we could have had it elsewhere, but she wouldn't listen. Because of course she didn't.