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She hates me, hates us. And she’s here to tell us we have to stop.
My throat feels like it’s closing up as she walks toward the house, out of view as she heads for the door. Tanker sprints through the cabin, making happy yapping noises, oblivious to the tension coursing through us, through the room, through the whole house.
Roman and I stare at each other.
His eyes are wide and bleak, as though he can sense how close this is to coming to an end as well. He can sense that it’s only a matter of minutes before we’re forced to make the most difficult decision of our lives.
Millie walks into the living room with Tanker in her arms. Her blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail, making her facial expression seem larger, more imposing. I barely dare to look at her, so fear-filled is my heart, dark and pulsing with a thousand unspoken things, all of them filled with the possibility of this going wrong.
“Okay,” she says, walking over to the armchair and sitting down, running her hand softly over Tanker’s fur. “I’m ready to discuss this now.”
I swallow as Roman and I walk over to the couch, sitting down opposite her. There’s something wrong about this arrangement, with how much space there is between us, but I know it’d feel even worse if I were to sit on Millie’s side of the coffee table, as though it was me and her against Roman.
I feel trapped in the middle, being pulled at from all directions, with no idea what I’m going to do when she drops the bomb – when she tells us we have to stop.
Will Roman even accept a decision like that?
He almost turned feral at the lake, staring down whatever was in the woods, the tendons in his neck tight like he was about to erupt with all the animalistic tension working its way through him.
But surely he’d have to side with his daughter. He’s an incredible father. Millie has told me many times how supportive he is of her, how loyal.
“Well?” I say, unable to hold back my eagerness to know our fate. “Don’t keep us in suspense, Millie.”
“Where have you been?” Roman asks.
“I was at the library,” she says, a musing tone to her voice. “In the poetry section. You know how poetry has always helped me to disappear or to feel like I’m disappearing. I can fade into the words where I don’t have to think about everything else… but then I went to the park, you know because not thinking about this problem is hardly going to solve it.”
A hammer blow slams into me when she describes what Roman and I have as a problem when truthfully it’s the solution I’ve been waiting my whole life for.
It’s the solution that was born in a storm, shattering in the lightning and the rain, the solution that made the storm bearable when it was anything but in the years before that.
Roman made the rain and the thunder and the memories drift away, replaced by the beautiful endless potential of the now, but Millie is describing it as a problem.
I feel like I might be sick, but then Millie smiles.
She smiles, and my whole world begins to reshape.
“Am I seeing things?” I can’t help but giggle. “Are you smiling, Millie?”
She laughs along with me, a sound I never thought I’d get to hear again. “Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s crazy. But I can’t help it. I mean… heck, look at you two.”
“What about us?” Roman asks.
Millie tilts her head in a come on gesture. “Are you kidding me? It’s like you can barely stop yourselves from looking at each other every second. I can see the effort. And both of you seem different, way more confident, way more comfortable in your own skin than you’ve ever been before.”
I nod, the truth of her words undeniable as I contemplate them. I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin.
But when I feel Roman’s hungry hands all over my body, moving up and down my legs, over my hips, my breasts, there’s no denying that I must be beautiful. I must be attractive.
At least to him, and that’s all that matters.
“I’d say that’s pretty much a fact,” I murmur, not daring to let myself hope.
“Yeah,” Roman says. “She’s changed me more than I ever thought a person could. I didn’t know I was capable of changing at my age. I thought I was always going to have this feeling inside of me, this hole, this emptiness, but Rayla has filled it.”
“He’s done the same for me,” I whisper, blinking away tears. “You know how I’ve always had this dorky fear of storms?”
Millie sighs, shaking her head. “I know you’ve had a fear of storms, yes, and you know how much I hate when you devalue it by making light of it.”
