CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
“If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.”
~Emily Brontë
I have no excuse for myself. No justifications that don’t ring hollow.
I let him keep me there.
I could have escaped, could have fought him harder, could have easily talked Bastian into getting me away. It would have made the brothers come to blows, but it would have worked.
I didn’t do any of that.
This was the whole problem, the entire reason I was so stubbornly devoted to hating Dante’s guts.
Because when I didn’t, I was too weak to fight him. Just a few days in his proximity and I didn’t even have the will anymore.
Without the hate, I forfeited all of my power against him. I lost and he won.
Even knowing it was temporary, transient, even knowing it was all a lie, that when it finished I’d be in much, much worse shape than when we’d started, I let him keep me there for another day.
It’s no secret how we spent that day. We locked ourselves in my room and barely came out even to eat.
The day went too fast and the morning came too soon.
The sun rose and drama was not far behind it.
Something had happened between Bastian, Leo, and Adelaide in the middle of the night, the details of it shrouded in mystery, but word had it that Dante’s mother was throwing a fit to end all fits, so much so that the reading of the will was postponed.
I was in the kitchen pantry scraping together the ingredients to make crepes when Dante told me the news.
“God, she’s crazy. I can’t stay another day. I have work. I need to leave tonight.”
His answer was to grab me and kiss the breath out of me. “No,” he said simply.
I bit back a smile. “You know there’s a term for what you’re doing here, right?”
“Kidnapping,” he supplied without an ounce of shame or remorse.
But a few hours later he changed his mind completely, did an abrupt about face.
I was soaking my sore, overused body in the bath. He’d gone downstairs to grab some water, but I fully expected him to join me when he returned.
He burst in the door, looking agitated. “You need to get packed. You need to go. Now.”
I sat up, completely caught off guard. “What? Why?”
“It’s my mother. She’s gone crazy, and she’s on her way over. I don’t want you here when she gets here.”
I waved an unconcerned hand in the air. “Who cares? I can handle her.”
Because what could she even do to me at this point?
He set his jaw. “I’ll start packing for you, but you need to get ready fast.”
My dismay was turning to anger as he shuffled me out of Gram’s house like a bomb was about to go off.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked him as he peeled out of the driveway.
We were just pulling onto the main road when Dante’s mother passed us, careening around the corner like a maniac.
I watched her go by, staring at the strange tableau.
Tiffany was sitting in the passenger’s seat, and she stared right back.
“She won’t follow us. My dad’s still there, so she’ll go after him,” Dante reassured me.
“What the hell?”
“I don’t want her coming near you when she’s like this. She’s deranged right now. Capable of anything.”
We were silent for a long time. “Why are you always trying to protect me?” I finally asked him quietly.
He turned his head and looked at me, something bleeding out of his eyes, something intense and so tormented that I had to look away. “Because it’s my job.”
I didn’t say the thing I was thinking, but my thoughts felt so loud I knew they spoke to him without the aid of my voice.
Who’s going to protect me against you?
I thought he was taking me to the local airport, but as he drove for a while, I realized he was headed the opposite way, straight out of town.
“I know this is a silly thing to ask your kidnapper, but where are you taking me?”
His mouth twisted and his hand went to my leg, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Seattle. We’ll get a hotel there. I’ll let you fly out in the morning, but not yet.”
He glanced at me, his brilliant ocean eyes deeply unhappy. “I’m not ready yet,” he stated, squeezing my knee.
I wasn’t ready either, but I didn’t tell him that.
It was just over a two-hour drive, and we took it in silence.
I, for one, kept my piece because I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what subject could be broached that wouldn’t lead to something volatile or hurtful.
I didn’t feel like messing up the fragile, temporary truce we seemed to actually be succeeding at.
His motivations were a mystery to me, but whatever they were, he barely said a word, the only part of him communicating was his constant hand on my knee, and it spoke in a continual, soothing stroke and occasional tight squeezes.
I didn’t touch him back. I reclined my seat, brought my arms up to my chest, and stared straight up, wondering what to do with myself.
I wanted to turn my brain off. I wanted to be numb. I wanted to take back every inch I’d ceded to him in the last few days.
I wanted tomorrow to never come.
Dante wasn’t messing around. He checked us in to a Four Seasons, and I smirked when I realized he’d booked the Presidential suite.
“Doesn’t the waste of this make your frugal, little conservationist heart bleed a little?” I took the dig at him, voice mock sympathetic, as the bellhop situated my bags. The suite was spacious, beautiful, and had to cost a small fortune. It was very un-Dante to flaunt his wealth in such a way.
He just smiled ruefully, eyes aimed out the window at the spectacular harbor view. He waited for the bellhop to finish, handed him a bill, closed and bolted the door behind him, and dragged me to bed.
We didn’t leave the suite until morning.
Dante woke up early with me and while I packed and got ready, he just sat on the edge of the bed watching me, his unhappy eyes following everything I did with uncanny focus.
Finally I stopped, staring at him. “What? You’re making me nervous. Shouldn’t you be getting dressed?”
He was wearing nothing but his boxer briefs. He was leaning forward, the muscles of his torso bunching and flexing with his every breath.
Superficial creature that I am, it distracted me to an extreme degree. Contrary creature that I am, I was trying not to show it. “What?” I asked again.
He just kept staring.
With a huff, I went back to getting ready. The closer I got to actually being ready though, the way he was looking at me, the way his eyes were screaming at me, and the screaming was getting louder and louder, until they were trying to melt me from the inside out, became too much.
“Stop it,” I told him, zipping up my suitcase. “I need to leave soon, and you need to stop looking at me like that.”
But he didn’t stop. And it was too much.
I was stepping into my shoes when I said, “I’m ready.”
A desperate sound escaped him, and that was too much.
Too much. Too much. Too. Much.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he spoke, each word gutted. “If I could forgive you, could you forgive me?”
“What?” I could barely get my voice to work for that one word.
“For all of it. Everything. Every last horrible thing we’ve done to each other. I’m so tired of this war. I’m so done lashing out at you, and I’m ready now. Ready to forgive you. Even for the worst of it. Especially for that.”
I was shaking. “You’re ready to forgive me? Oh, that is rich.”
“Yes. I’m ready. I can forgive you. Can you forgive me?”
It was so completely out of left field that I had no response. The idea of him forgiving me was so implausible on its own.
And the idea of me forgiving him was so completely and wholly foreign that it had never even crossed my mind.
Could I forgive him?
I didn’t know. I’d never tried.
I’d just assumed it was an impossible task, and one he’d certainly never asked me for before this moment. “I think we’ve proven that what you’re asking is impossible,” I finally said, cutting each word out of myself in big gory chunks.
I’d backed so far away from him that my back was to the wall. My hands were in fists at my sides.
He stood up and my whole body jerked. I put my hands up as though to ward him off, but he didn’t take even one step forward, and when he spoke, he spoke passionately and to the ground at my feet. “All we are is proof that love can survive anything. You and I, we’re heavy hitters, but even at our worst, we still couldn’t break this bond. If you’re honest with yourself, we didn’t even come close.”
I was weakening, my mind trying to find a way to reconcile what he was saying, to accept it and believe it, though I’d never admit it aloud.
But I didn’t have to. That was the worst thing about Dante. He knew me too well. Every in and out of me. Every lie and truth. He and I alone held the keys to my destruction.
As I’ve said, lovers should have secrets.
I asked the one question that would put an end to this madness. “Will you ever tell me why?” I didn’t have to elaborate. He knew what I wanted to know.
Why did you throw me away?
And . . .
Why did you let me give you every part of myself just so you could toss it all back into the trashcan that it came from?
But particularly . . .
How? How could you break my heart?
“I can’t give you an excuse,” he said in a careful voice that trembled. “But I’m asking for forgiveness. Please. I don’t make sense without you and you don’t make sense without me and you know it. We only ever worked together. How long did you think it was going to last? Scarlett without Dante, Dante without Scarlett? You and I going about our lives as though the other doesn’t exist? Who are you kidding? Who are we without each other? Apart we’re not ourselves. And it’s been long enough. I’ve been punished long enough.”
Had he?
And—had I?
And—couldn’t he at least try to make up an excuse? Even if it was bullshit, even if it was a complete lie, couldn’t he at least try?
I didn’t know how to respond to him. I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t know what to think.
He had completely weakened me, utterly destroyed any resolve I thought I’d built against him, and when he started to move to me, I couldn’t find the strength to get away.
He crowded but barely touched, his hands going around me, under my hair, feeling at my nape.
Time froze as he unfastened one of the chains around my neck, took the ring off, and put it on my limp finger.
“I know this is sudden to you. I know it’s a shock. I’ll give you time. There’s no deadline on your answer, but it’s out there now, what I want, how I feel, though that was never much of a mystery if you were paying attention.”
“It doesn’t even make sense,” I pointed out tremulously. “We don’t live near each other, and you know damn well it can never work long distance between us.” We’d tried and failed it once. Some part of me blamed that distance for our downfall. It was my ego, I supposed, that was certain that he never would have turned to her if I hadn’t been so far away.
“I’ll move to L.A. If you say yes, that you can forgive me and give us another chance, I’ll move tomorrow.”
I was looking down at the diamond on my finger, Gram’s diamond, that she’d passed down to Dante, that he’d given to me once upon a time when I’d still believed in the conquer all power of love.
I couldn’t stop shaking.
“Don’t say no,” he pleaded. “Don’t say anything. Just think about it. I’ll wait for you. However much time you need, I’ll be here waiting.”
And then, he backed away.
We barely touched, barely said another word when he dropped me off at the airport.
I didn’t look back as I headed into the terminal, but that insidious thing inside of me was raging again, every step I took that led me away from him, it raged.
I was on the plane before I let myself cry. I pulled a blanket over my head, and God, did the tears fall.
I’d folded in on myself, my body failing under the weight of one simple realization: I needed to change. I couldn’t go on like this. Hatred alone was not enough to fuel a person through life. I needed to find some version of peace.
What could I forgive for the sake of love? What could I get past for the simple justification that I wanted to be happy again?
My answer stunned me. Rocked me down to my soul.
More than I’d ever thought I could.