Chapter 6 #2
Can I let her do that? Find some crappy job with some mediocre symphony or end up giving cello lessons to kids? Rina just said it: less than one percent get into this school and she not only got in, she got a scholarship. She’s a savant. A once in a lifetime, if that, cellist.
And I’m headed back to Minnesota—my dream.
But… Raven is my dream too. Like she said.
Fuck. Just fuck.
What the hell am I going to do?
* * *
I knock on his door at three a.m., having paced my room for the last two hours. I dropped off Oliver, and Rina, then walked Raven home. I didn’t go inside as I always do with her. And I know she sensed something was off.
Landon opens his bedroom door, not surprised to find me on the other side. He steps back and I enter, immediately going for the couch by the window, opposite his bed. “I don’t know what to do,” I start without any preamble, my elbows on my parted thighs, my head in my hands.
Landon grabs his glasses from his nightstand and sits beside me, silently waiting for me to elaborate.
“She’s talking about walking away from London. I heard her tell Oliver and Rina. She wants to be with me and doesn’t believe that being long-distance will work.”
“Do you?”
I think of this. About the hours both she and I will be trying to keep up with—me with work, her with school. I think about the men in London, at bars and in her program. I’ll go out of my mind. “I don’t know how to be away from her, man. I don’t even know how the fuck it happened, but it’s there.”
“Because you like fucking her and are a caveman who doesn’t want anyone else to touch what you have or because you love her?”
“Both. I don’t want anyone to touch her. But I love her.” I sigh, feeling like I’m being held down by a three-hundred-pound weight. “I think I love her the way you loved Reese.”
Landon stiffens beside me at the mention of his wife. His dead wife. “You think?”
“I know. She’s it for me. My one.”
“Reese is dead because of me.”
I snarl, dropping my hands to glare at my twin. “Fuck you with that shit. She is not. It was an accident.”
He shakes his head, giving me a look that demands I shut up and listen.
“I got her pregnant when she was twenty. By twenty-one, she had a kid. She graduated from college, but then was home with our daughter. She never became a photojournalist. She never traveled the world taking photographs. Her life became about Stella and me since I was in med school. That was it, Luca. And that night, all she needed was a break. She kept saying ‘I need to feel human. I need to feel like me. Even just for a few hours.’”
Landon swallows hard, his eyes glassing up.
“I didn’t understand what she meant at the time.
I love Reese with all my heart, but I didn’t understand that, and it cost her her life.
I was pissed she felt like she needed a break when staying home with Stella felt a hell of a lot easier than going to medical school and studying for a genetics exam.
But I was wrong. She was not only losing sight of her dream, but she was also losing sight of herself beyond Stella.
Beyond being a mom and a wife. Never in my life will I regret anything more than my actions that night, but my ignorance was hubris and fatal. ”
“By following you and your dream, she gave up part of her identity?”
He slaps my shoulder as if to say bingo .
I sit in stunned silence. “I can’t let Raven do that.
She’s so fucking talented, brother, you have no idea.
But what am I supposed to do? I have three years left of my residency.
I can’t walk away from that. I’m so close to being done and I’ve worked so hard to get myself back to top physical form where I can do surgery again. That’s my dream.”
“She’d never let you give up your dream.”
“And I can’t let her give up hers. So where does that leave us?”
“How much do you love her?”
I blink at him, scared of where this is headed. “More than anything.”
“More than yourself?”
I lick my lips. “Yes.”
“Enough to let her go?”
My first reaction is no. I can’t do that. I can’t. These two months with her have been the best and worst of my life. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’ve dated women. A lot of women. And none of them have been her. She. Is. It.
But she’s only eighteen. So young, with so much ahead of her.
While I’ve dated a lot of women, Raven hasn’t dated a lot of men.
Just a couple guys in high school who didn’t amount to much.
So where she’s it for me, I might not be it for her.
As much as it makes me violent to even contemplate that, I have to admit, it’s a possibility.
That and she’s so insanely talented.
She deserves London. She deserves to play for the world. She deserves to see and experience everything this life has to offer her.
“I have to let her go.”
I fall back against the couch, covering my face with my hands, feeling so wrecked I can’t even take a deep breath. It hurts too damn much.
“Not forever. Just for a while.”
I bark out a sardonic laugh. “She’ll never let it happen, Landon. She’s stubborn. And she loves me. As much as I love her, she loves me, which is why she’s planning on following me.”
“You’ll have to make her listen then. Somehow.”
Make her listen. I nearly growl at that. I heard her tonight. My girl is determined. She had it all figured out. And if I let her do that, follow me, she’d grow to resent me over time. How could she not? We’d be doomed from the start.
Maybe we have been all along.
I think about Reese. About what Landon said about her.
I remember that. All of it. We were in medical school together at Harvard.
We were in school for absurdly long hours and if we weren’t in school, we were studying.
Reese had Stella in a morning program two days a week, but that was it.
And maybe she could have put her in day care, but photojournalists don’t exactly work regular hours or live regular lives and neither do medical students.
She chose Stella and my brother because she loved them and, in the process, sacrificed a big piece of herself. I won’t let that happen to Raven. I love her too much to allow that.
I blow out an uneven breath. Yoda was wrong when he said to train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. There is nothing worse than losing someone you love. Nothing.
“I’m marrying her for real one day.” Even if I have to break both our hearts now.