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“Yes,” he said, the word raw. It was destroying him. From the inside out. She was destroying him. He would gladly jump back into that car, and that twisted heap of metal, before facing this. But he had not been given a choice. It was killing him. Because there was nowhere to hide. There was no way to protect himself.
He had told himself, he had told her, that he needed nothing. That he did not care, that he did not love. Yes, he had told her that. And he had believed it. But here he was, confronted with the truth.
He had, all these years, wanted love more than he had ever wanted anyone other thing in all the world. He was broken with his need of it, and it was that which scared him above all else.
He’d had to close himself down to survive. And perhaps the thing that angered him most about his own part in Irina’s death was that he had not even given himself a chance to care for her. Because it was there. That ability.
It was only he refused to share it because he was small and mean and terrified, like the boy he had been out on the streets.
The boy who’d had to learn how to sell his body without selling his soul.
But you can have your soul back now. And you can give it to her. That’s what you want.
It was true. It was what he wanted more than anything.
And in the end of all things, if he did not do this, what did his life matter?
If he could love Athena, and she could love him in return, and he had survived that accident, and he had survived that childhood, and he had survived selling himself, over and over again, only to find the reality of intimacy and love and sex now, at thirty-eight years old, then if he turned it away, what was the point of surviving at all.
“I love you,” he said again.
But it wasn’t easy, and the words didn’t get any easier. He pulled her to him, her naked body against his, and he kissed her. Desperately. Deeply. All over. “I love you. I love you, dammit, Athena, and it hurts.”
“That’s okay,” she said, pushing his hair out of his face. “I don’t want an easy love. And I came to that conclusion all the way back when we were walking along the river in Paris. I watched all those people with their soft gazes, the way that they held each other, and I knew that for us it could never be that. I had an idea of romance. But this... This is real. Jagged and sometimes painful, but it’s worth fighting for. You and I... We are survivors. We are miraculous. But nobody ever said the miraculous was easy. In fact I think living miraculous is a very hard thing to do. And who else should be able to but us? Who else to try this wonderful, improbable love, except us?”
“I love you,” he said again. “I want you. I want this.”
“We can have it. Because I love you too. And this is where I choose to be. It’s where I want to be. With you.”
“Beauty and the beast indeed.”
“No. The goddess of war and the beast. We both set about conquering each other. And I feel we did a pretty good job. And that we will keep on doing so. For the rest of our lives.”
“Well that might really be how we live happily ever after,” he said.
“Yes, Cameron. I believe it will be.”
EPILOGUE
HEANDATHENAhad made good on the promises they’d given each other. Athena’s work helping trafficking victims, and his own helping children on the streets wove easily around each other, and their foundation—which provided education in technology and the chance at a new life, had helped save nearly five hundred children from life on the street or in captivity.
They were working hard to make sure that there weren’t children who felt discarded, abandoned or forgotten.
Cameron went from being a boy that nobody cared for, to a disfigured man living in isolation, to a husband, a brother-in-law, and honorary son, and a father in the space of less than a year. He could never have imagined such a thing.
As he sat in the expansive living area of the family estate in Massachusetts, and looked around at this newfound family, as he cradled his infant son in his arms, he knew one thing for certain. His own imagination had been terribly lacking. And it certainly never would have manufactured such a life of love for him. Simply because it had been too afraid.
But now he knew better. Now he knew that what lay ahead had the potential to be so much better than what was behind them. Now he knew that there was more to life than what he could see.
Now he knew Athena. He knew a goddess walking around on earth.
And so everything was possible.
With love, all things indeed, were possible.
