She eyed him then, not quite certain of his tone. His gentleness. “Can’t it be both?”
His eyes met hers as he held out the cloth to Bacchus, who took it and then put an ice pack in Zervou’s hand. Zervou lifted it to her cheek.
“It would wreck me if you should actually hate me,glikí mou.”
She blinked once, winced a little at the pain there, even with the ice pack on it.Wreck.What a dramatic word. Perhaps she had a concussion. “Why are you here?” she asked him, about to lose the battle with tears.
“I went to see my mother. You were not wrong. I could only see your refusal as…refusal of everything I wanted to give. Because she has refused it all. I was wrong, to put that on you.”
The threat of tears didn’t stop, but an awful wriggle of hope bloomed in her chest. He was admitting he was wrong? Zervou?
“I want to make your life easy. I want to handle everything for you, because I love you.”
She sucked in a breath.Love.She had never believed in such a thing beyond the responsibility she felt for her mother. The symbiotic and somewhat tragically codependent relationship born of poverty, trauma and necessity.
Zervou had allowed her to believe in something else. And now he was saying he loved her.
But she couldn’t be certain he understood. If love was just a cage…
But before she could try to fight past the lump in her throat, he continued, “Ever since my father was killed, she chose her misery. And whether I was aware of it or not, I have spent all this time trying to take it away. Trying to take care of her. Because I love her as well. But she will not allow it. For so long, I internalized this as my failure.”
Ari was shaking her head before she even realized it.
“No, it is not mine,” he said, and she realized she was crying because with the hand that did not hold the ice pack, he wiped the moisture off her other cheek. “It took you… We have worked as partners to draw your father out. And look—we succeeded. Because I gave, and you took. Because I took when you gave, even if I did not recognize it at the time. I saw this one thing you refused as a failure, asmyfailure, and so I lashed out. And so I destroyed. But I was wrong, and I am sorry.”
Ari had long loved someone who had failed her, and the pain of that lived in her even as she strove to forgive her mother for a disease she could not control.
But Zervou had not failed her. “You made a mistake. An honest one, born of your issues. And now you seek to fix it. I would also like to fix my mistake.”
“Ari—”
“I do not wish for you to sponsor my boxing, because I wish that to be something I did on my own. Whether this is right or wrong, I do not know, but it is important to me. Almost as important as what I should have said before. I love you, Zervou. This thing between us has turned into something real and important. And I should very much like to marry you, to love you. To…work together, to help each other and to support each other when we need to do our own thing.”
His gaze met hers. Emotion swam there. Love swam there. That thing she had trouble identifying these past few weeks.
Love.
And it was funny how her father had been taken away, and Zervou would no doubt ensure he was jailed forever. But the satisfaction of that waned in comparison to the joy she felt when Zervou gently placed his lips to her throbbing ones.
“If that is a proposal,glikí mou, I accept.” He got to his feet and drew her up with him. “Come, Ari. Let me take care of you, and then we will celebrate.”
She leaned on him as he led her out of the locker room. “What will we be celebrating? My win? Erjon in jail?”
“Us,” he said emphatically.
Becauseuswas more important than everything else.
Epilogue
“Let me holdthe baby.”
Zervou handed off the squirming, whimpering almost one-year-old to Maria.
“There now, Grandma will make it all better,” she cooed at young Ioannis.
Normally Zervou preferred to ease his son’s frustrations himself, but his nerves couldn’t quite settle enough to do so.
“I still don’t know that a sporting arena is any place for a baby,” Maria muttered irritably. But she smoothed out her tone. “But you will see Mama win, won’t you?” She held Ioannis up so he put his weight on his pudgy little feet and bounced on her legs. This eased any complaints he’d had about being restrained.
