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She knew I didn't. I could see it in the resigned eyes she turned on me.
Even she, the mother of all grudge-holders, could only hold a grudge for so long.
"I'm tired of hating you," she said quietly, a world of regret in it. "When all my heart has ever needed is to love you." Those words were so very hard for her, I could tell, and the next ones were harder. "For helping me survive for so long, for going through hell with me and getting me, somehow, to the other side of it intact, I will learn to forgive you. Even with all of the ways you've destroyed me, I could never forget all of the ways you've saved me, Dante."
"You saved me, too. Never forget that, either."
"And destroyed you," she said the words lightly, but they held all the weight in the world. For both of us.
I smiled and it was so bittersweet that she had to look away. "Yes. Broken. Destroyed. But now saved again. It's enough for me. You are. You always were. I have many demons. But only one angel."
Now the problem, of course, was that she had to learn to forgive herself.
We both did.
It was later. We were in bed and she was tucked securely against my chest.
When I spoke, it was a quiet whisper into the night. "You learn more about someone when you're fighting them than you do loving them. Things you can only learn from war. We know each other in ways we wouldn't have. Maybe it wasn't all in vain. I love you in more complex ways than I did before. I understand you more intimately."
"You're a fool," she said forlornly into my chest.
"I know, tiger. Believe me, I know."
"I love you for it."
"I know, angel. That, too."
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
"Terror made me cruel."
~Emily Brontë
PAST
SCARLETT
It was almost nonsense to me—what he was saying. I only caught snippets, broken off sentences, half-phrases, but my numb brain slowly put it together. He was ending things.
The conversation only lasted minutes, mere minutes to take everything I held sacred and tear it open, rip out the insides, and smash them under his heel.
When he was finished, I felt diminished. Like I was nothing. Like I always had been.
I should have not been so surprised. I should not have been surprised at all, really.
The only real mystery here was that he'd ever tried to love me in the first place.
Even so, my pain was breathtaking.
I was inconsolable, and he did not even try to console me. He said his piece and hung up the phone.
It was devastating. Life changing. When you have felt like nothing with that much certainty, you never come back from it. Even if you manage to piece yourself up, a part of you stays in the gutter where you were left. Always.
It was a live or die moment. A get yourself off the ground or stay down and let this end you event. Walk away and leave him behind, or stay and let this kill you, kill yourself just to see if he'll bleed out with you.
I always thought I was too strong to be broken by anything. I always told myself that, at least.
