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He was alone. And that stood out as stark as the fact that she was too.
And right then, as she walked down the aisle toward him, with no one forcing her or marching her in that direction, she suddenly saw all of those missing memories again. But she saw them differently.
She had walked toward him in the ruin. She had gone with him back to the tree house. When he had pounced, when he had kissed her, she had returned it. With just as much force and greed as he displayed.
And that made everything feel different.
Did a lamb return volley when the Tiger pounced?
No. And she knew it.
Only a tigress did that.
Only a tigress would ever stand against something quite so fearsome.
And she saw in that moment every responsibility that belonged to her.
She had wanted him, and she had had him. She hadn’t asked him to use protection. She hadn’t cared.
She had wanted him, and so she had taken him. She had wanted to leave her life behind, and she had allowed him to do that, she had allowed him to not share with her because she hadn’t wanted her fantasy disrupted.
And when he had sent her away, she’d been heartbroken, because she had allowed herself to see him with rose-colored glasses, and she had done it not out of innocence, and not out of a misunderstanding over the way that the world worked, but rather because she knew quite a bit too much about how people were. The abandonment of her own mother, of her father. She hadn’t wanted to lose him, and she hadn’t wanted to know that he might not be as wonderful as she had first thought him to be. No, she hadn’t thought him wonderful at first, she’d thought him dangerous.
She had just wanted him to be the fantasy, so she had willfully set out to make him into one, and she had broken her own heart. He had never made her a promise. Not ever.
She had hoped, because she was still optimistic despite whatever life had thrown at her. And she wondered if...
She wondered if what she had really wanted all this time was to have adventures but to be able to blame other people when they went wrong.
She might’ve been bitter at Jaia for the lack of planning on the trip, but she hadn’t contributed any planning to it. She had paid her own money and gone sailing off after her friend. Knowing that she was flaky.
And then she had gone off with Krav, with no more planning about where she would end up.
And so, every pitfall was someone else’s fault, wasn’t it?
But no. They were her choices. It was her heartbreak. She had chosen it.
Just as now she was choosing to walk down the aisle toward him while she told herself she hated him. And yes, he had put her in a difficult situation. He had put her in one with options she didn’t like.
But that was not the same as being forced. Even now, she was walking down the aisle toward him because part of her hoped.
Because whatever she said, whatever she told herself, she had not lost hope. Not entirely.
About what they can have. About who he could be. But she had to stop being passive. She had to stop fantasizing. And she had to be honest. She could not see herself merely as a victim. She had to see herself as an active participant in all of this.
And if she wanted more from him she had to demand it.
No. She had never done that. Instead, she had fallen desperately in love with him, with a facade, because she had allowed herself to fashion him into the image of something that she wanted him to be.
So maybe she needed to set about learning more about him. And see if she could fall in love with that man. The one that she had professed to hate.
He had hurt her. And yes, when she had woken up, she hadn’t remembered that he had done that. So what she had learned from that experience was that she would fall for him again every single time. Because there was something in him that was undeniably for her, no matter what. She could call it chemistry or sexual desire, and surely there was an element of that involved. But it also couldn’t be quite that simple. It couldn’t be quite that limited.
She thought of all that and realized her own power as she was walking down the aisle toward him.
It stunned her.
And as she stood before him, as he took her hand and brought her to that place in front of the priest, she was faced with the enormity of what she was doing.
