Chapter Ten
Thanasis didn’t want to fall asleep. He wanted to marinate in every moment—but he must have drifted off anyway. Because when he woke, Saskia was pressed against his side with one hand flat over his heart.
He was surprised she didn’t wake when he felt it kick. Hard.
But she kept sleeping.
And he stared up at the ceiling, the sweet weight of her nestled warm and tight beside him, and wondered what he had done.
When Saskia finally stirred, he operated purely on instinct and memory and pulled her into his arms. By the time he realized what he was doing, it was too late.
He was kissing the top of her head, then her sleepy mouth.
Then he carried her into the bathroom the way he’d always done in the past. He ran a bath and while it was filling, he brought her into the shower and rinsed her off thoroughly.
Only then did he settle her into the bath and climb in across from her, so they could both soak.
They had spent long hours here, their legs tangled together and their gazes hot and sleepy.
Sometimes the rain pattered against the window.
Sometimes they would fog it up with the bath’s heat.
Sometimes the light from outside filtered in, making them glow.
They would sit here in the warmth with the scent of lavender and sugar in the air and all around, and tell each other things that would have felt incidental or even pointless if they’d shared them over a meal.
Things that were so tiny that they hardly mattered, and yet he could remember each and every one of them now. All these years later.
Her feelings about bananas. Her least favorite pop song and, conversely, her secret, shameful favorite. Her deep suspicion of men in khaki trousers, particularly with American accents. Her aversion to the word moist .
Thanasis could remember all of it.
Sitting here with her felt so easy, so natural, that it was tempting to tell himself that they had erased that stretch of lost time. That they had simply glossed over it.
But he had lived through every ghastly moment of it. He remembered it entirely too well.
Now, finally, he had been with her again. And it had been glorious in every possible way, as always—save for the one, small detail of her lost memory.
Because he remembered everything, but she didn’t know who he was, no matter how many pictures of them were scattered about this flat. She didn’t know who they were. So this might have been fantastic sex for her—and he knew that it had been—but that wasn’t the same thing.
And he wasn’t sure how he could reconcile the fact that he felt as if his soul had been turned inside out, that he had felt that deep and intimate connection with his Saskia as if they were them again while she had simply…
Had sex.
It made him feel hollow.
Only darker.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him, tilting her head to one side as she regarded him.
Thanasis rose from the bath, because he couldn’t bear to lounge about in the relaxing hot water while this was happening, mimicking the relationship he’d once had with her and now likely never would again.
He got out and dried himself off, and she followed. Then they were out in the bedroom again and he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t…
Whatever this was. He didn’t know how to name it.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” he told her. More sternly than necessary.
She frowned. “I wanted it to happen.”
“You don’t know who you are.” That came out louder than he’d meant it to, but he didn’t take it back. On the contrary, it was as if saying it loosened something in him. “You don’t know who I am. This meant something to me and you don’t even know why.”
Saskia frowned at him. Then she looked away and he could have sworn that she looked something like guilty. But what could she have to feel guilty about?
“Thanasis…” she began, as if she was testing out his name in her mouth.
And he did not need to focus on that image.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying my very best to make certain that I am nothing like my father,” he told her, and now he did fight to keep his voice even—but it was a losing battle.
“The lengths I have gone to, in every regard, beggar belief. I have separated myself in every possible way I can. I go to that island as little as I can. I minimize all possible conversations, because I do not wish to entertain him and I am tired of running interference for him. Yet I am forever apologizing for him, cleaning up his messes, and soothing the feathers he ruffles all over Europe and beyond.”
She made as if to speak, but he shook his head. “All this to discover, in the end, that I am the same. I might as well not have bothered to distance myself from him at all, for it turns out that despite all these efforts, I am no different from him at all. Where it counts, I am the same monster.”
Saskia was frowning at him as if he’d lapsed off into Greek. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what sex between us is like, Saskia,” he belted out.
And he never lost his temper. He never lost his cool.
Never, that was, unless it was Saskia. The only person on earth who had ever managed to get under his skin since he was a child.
“I know exactly how it feels and what it does. And I know what it was like when we met, so I know exactly what you experienced tonight. But for me, it was so much more than that. And I knew it would be. I knew it, and I did it anyway . ”
“I don’t know what that means.”
But she did. He could see that she did.
“I knew what would happen,” Thanasis said, again, to make certain he was facing this.
That he was acknowledging what had happened here.
“And how is that fair? You were so determined to think the worst of me and then, given the opportunity, I lived down to every expectation. At the end of the day, I’m as much a monster as my father ever was. ”
And he didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t that flash that seemed to go through her like an electric shock. “You are nothing like your father,” she told him, her voice serious and her gaze grave. “Nothing at all.”
“You don’t know him either,” Thanasis said.
“I do know him,” Saskia retorted. She took a deep breath. Then another. “And more to the point, Thanasis, I…remember.”
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t let that word make sense. He couldn’t take it in.
Saskia gulped in more air. “I remember,” she said again, even more deliberately this time.
“I remember the stories you told about him back in the day. And so I remember how he treated you, now. And I know how he treated me, so you need to believe me when I tell you that you are not in the least bit like him. Not at all.”
“You remember?” Thanasis concentrated on the only part that mattered. “You remember…before?”
He was staring down at her with an expression on his face that he could feel , and was certain he had never worn before. He felt outside himself, and something like dizzy, and he could not have looked away from her if his life depended on it.
He didn’t try.
“I knew exactly who I was when I came back to London,” Saskia told him, her gaze still wide and glued to his.
And on the one hand, the confession was a relief.
Thanasis hadn’t been going mad, after all.
He had seen that recognition all over her and he’d been right, she had known him. She had known him.
And those moments in New York that could only have occurred between two people who’d loved each other for years were real. He hadn’t made that up, either.
He stared at her, and neither one of them had clothes on, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. He didn’t even realize he was stalking toward her until she made a small noise of surprise when her back hit the bed.
“You knew,” he said. “When you came back to London.”
Her eyes widened even more, but she didn’t look away. “Yes.”
“And might I be given some explanation as to why it is you felt the need to lie to me?” he asked her.
With a frigid courtesy that felt a lot like a weapon. When she winced, he imagined she felt it that way too.
And the Saskia he knew had always charged face-first into any confrontation, but she didn’t this time. She shook her head, a kind of anguish in her gaze. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I really don’t. I can’t defend it. I just… I felt that I had no choice but to do it.”
“Maybe you do remember, after all,” he suggested darkly, so close to her now but not touching her.
Not again. Not even though she was his once again, the Saskia he had mourned and grieved, lost and found.
“Maybe the monster is in the blood of the Zacharias family and that’s always been obvious to you.
Maybe you knew better than to throw yourself from the frying pan into the fire this time. ”
That anguish in her eyes faded, replaced by a spark he recognized.
It was her temper, kicking in the way it always had before, and he didn’t know whether to celebrate that or mourn it, too.
“Do you want to know why I remember anything?” she demanded, her voice hot.
“I’ll tell you. I found your father and his massage therapist. I think I told you that, though to be honest, it’s a blur.
And I’m not even sure that I would have cared about that as much as I should have, if there had been any repentance.
If he had promised me that I’d never see it again. ”
She made a face, and he had to wonder what was on his. Or maybe he had simply frozen solid at these details he certainly didn’t want to know. He hadn’t liked it when his father had regaled his mother with the squalid details of his trysts at the dinner table.
He certainly didn’t like imagining his Saskia subject to a similar fate.
It made him want to fly directly to that godforsaken villa and burn it down with a match from his own hand.