He glanced at me, and it was such a fleeting look, I couldn’t understand what it meant.
“My mother got an infection when I was still a little girl. It happened so swiftly. She was healthy and fine one day, and then the next, we were told she had hours, perhaps days, to live.”
He kept eating, not looking up. I couldn’t let that be the end of it, though.
“So, yes, I do sympathize with the stress and hardship of what you must be going through.”
“Sure, you are,” he replied tersely.
It was impossible to miss the mocking tone of his response. Like it was silly of me to share anything personal about my life to show that I understood firsthand what he was going through.
He didn’t speak again, eating and scowling, not making eye contact again.
With the icy barrier between us—a confusing change since he’d requested that I eat with him in the first place—I kept my head down and ate what I could. Nothing tasted good. All the flavors were too bland. Because with how he’d treated me in this conversation, I knew that I’d forgotten my place. Again.
I wasn’t here as a friend to hear him out on his worries.
I wasn’t here as a lover for him to gaze at with desire flashing in his eyes.
I was just a thing to own. A debt collected from my father’s mistake.
Finished with my lost appetite, I set my napkin over my plate to signal I was done with this quiet and awkward meal.
I felt humiliated with how he’d cut me down like that, like my past was insignificant to share in a hope of making him feel not alone in his woes.
But most of all, I hated that I could still cling to the idiotic fantasy of having something more than a kiss with him.
Keep dreaming, El. Keep. Dreaming.
11
ADRIK
For the second night in a row, I didn’t walk Elena home. There was no need to. It had become a habit, a routine, borne of my desire to spend as much time with her as I could. She hogged my thoughts, and I had assumed that being near her would help faze out the newness of having this good girl in my life.
I now realized that being close to her was more like feeding the beast. The beast of need. Every chance I had to watch her and be close, the more I wanted her.
I’d asked her to dinner on an impulse tonight. My mind hadn’t been in a good place all day, what with some leaders in the city talking crap about a deal Lev was trying to get going. And then more bad news from the doctor had me reconsidering whether it was humane to keep him alive on life support.
“His living will is ironclad,” a lawyer told me and Maksim in the afternoon after we’d talked to the doctor and gotten the update. “His wishes are, in a situation like this, to stay on life support until more criteria are met.”
In other words, if we defied his wishes, it’d be flat-out murder. Just like what Uncle Gregori had done to our grandparents. Being in the position to think about the end of my father’s life wore on me, and when I sat down to eat alone, when so often this room had hosted so many lively groups and family dinners, I couldn’t handle the silence.
Asking Elena to sit with me was a bigger mistake, though. Her scent, her presence, hell, her voice. They all got to me, making me want to fall to the temptation of feeling something good for a change.
I had been fine with merely sitting there, enduring the tension.
But then she had to speak up. Sweetly. Sincerely.
She’d been kind—which wasn’t a surprise at all—and she’d sympathized with me when I lightened up enough to admit that I wasn’t in a great mood because of my father nearing the end of his life.
It had beentoocomforting. She’d made me lower my guard too much.
Like this, patient and never pushy… I felt the allure of her like this. Accepting and loving. Sweet and generous. Willing to give and give and give.
But I knew that if or when I took that step and crossed the line to take, to reallytakewhat I wanted from her in the form of a conquest, there would be no going back.
That was why I was so cold with her, why I shut down that line of friendship that seemed to be growing between us.
