CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
L AST NIGHT HAD been transformative. Truly. Auggie was still pondering it the next day. She had been pondering it the entire time. Not only her changing feelings toward him, but the situation they found themselves in here. She knew that she needed to talk to him about... About potentially making a statement. But she hated the idea of bringing the outside in at all. It had been two weeks, and he wasn’t better. He was going to have to go see the neurologist, and even though there was still a lot of hope as far as restoring his sight, it was all... It was all converging. The need to handle the headlines, the need to make intervention with his health... All of it.
Your feelings.
True. But her feelings could wait.
She stared down at her hands, where she had them pressed to the top of the kitchen counter. Her feelings. Did she love him. What even was love? She had never been certain. Maybe that was why she had never really wanted it. Maybe it was why it was easy to avoid men and desire and all of those things because she couldn’t imagine love in a way that didn’t feel heavy.
And this did feel heavy, but it was different.
He made her feel supported. He made her feel like she mattered.
He listened to her. He was like a different person than the one that she had met initially. Not just because she had gotten to the bottom of that dark wound that existed beneath the playboy veneer. But she had also found parts of him that were less intense. Parts of him that were giving, rather than selfish. He was in fact a very deep thinker, which she had always known. But she realized it was why he committed so hard to the other version of himself.
Because his own deep thinking often hurt him.
His memories of his sister were still so vivid. His grief at losing her complex. It mirrored her own. She had never imagined that she would have something in common with him. She had more than something in common with him, in fact. She had a spirit that recognized his. A deep wound that saw his and recognized it. Deeper than empathy.
Or maybe this was just... Her wanting to keep on living in a fantasy. Maybe she was dangerously deluded. Maybe this was what everyone thought. That they had a unique connection with him. That he was most especially their brilliant and perfect lover. That while he might’ve touched other women it could never have been this.
Maybe that was an easy lie to tell herself.
She couldn’t be certain.
But when he came downstairs, maneuvering slowly on his own, she felt it burst inside of her like a firework. That certainty.
She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. It was now a clearer goal than anything else ever had been. It didn’t erase the other things that she wanted. It didn’t mean she no longer cared about her business, she did. It didn’t mean she no longer carried baggage from her childhood, or felt a strange amount of anxiety regarding any proximity to her childhood. She did.
But there was room for this. Room for him.
To want something more than success, to want something more than distance from her past. To want something more than to simply succeed on her own. That was what she had been chasing all this time, a sense that she would be okay on her own because the crushing feeling of being left to her own devices seemed inevitable. She had always known that her mother would die young. Ever since she could understand the implications of the kind of cancer she had, Auggie had understood that.
That isolation. She had seen that the potential for that existed. They had had an accident. He was mortal. He had been injured. There were complications from that injury and they might continue.
But that reality didn’t seem bigger than the hope that they could have something together.
She loved him.
She couldn’t say anything right now. She had to sit with it. Because Auggie was the sort of girl that needed a plan.
“I was thinking,” she said. “That since we have to go into the hospital to see the neurologist, it is probably time for you to put out a statement about your sister.”
He paused. “I thought you said it was better to not engage in PR.”
“What I think is better is maybe you saying something real about it. I don’t think you should go through your publicist. I think you should just tell the truth. No spin.”
“No spin?”
“Yes. What if you told the world the story of your sister. The way you told me. And maybe it’s messy and you’re not universally loved in the end.”
“I never cared about being universally loved.”
“Didn’t you?”
She wondered if maybe he had, in a way. If part of him had craved that because he had never gotten it anywhere else.
“I suppose it was better than being a disappointment. But that was never the goal.”
“No. It was to show your father that he was wrong in every way. But... Maybe the truth does that more effectively. You loved Seraphina. Flaws and all. You loved her even though it was difficult. You’re a better man than your father. It’s evident just in that.”
He tented his fingers beneath his chin. “I don’t know how to talk about my feelings.”
“We’ve been doing a lot of it since we’ve been here.”
“But this doesn’t count.” He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture, and she felt like he had taken all her chess pieces off the table in one fell swoop. Because he had just dismissed this entire experience. This experience that had been so profound to her.
He doesn’t mean it that way.
She bit her bottom lip. “Well, maybe it’ll count for something.”
“Once we leave here, Auggie, you’re not obligated to me. You never were.”
“Yes. I could’ve just left you blind and stumbling around.”
“You could have.”
She could have. It was a strange thing, actually, to really sit with that reality. There hadn’t been anything stopping her. She could have done that. She could have.
She could have.
That was actually true of her caring for her mother too. She felt like she had had no other choice. But she had.
But when things had gotten hard, that was how she had chosen to love her mother.
She felt like realization had just exploded within her.
She had chosen to do the hard thing because her love was strong.
She had seen herself as sort of a victim of it. Of her circumstances.
But he was right. She had chosen this.
“You’re right,” she said. “I could’ve walked away. But I didn’t. Because I... I care about you.”
He looked at her, even though he could not see her. Those dark eyes landed on her unerringly. “You shouldn’t.”
He said it so final. Heavy. Like he’d set a stone on her chest.
He didn’t want her to care.
This was how it was going to be. He was going to resist this. All the way.
No matter the conversations they’d had, no matter the way that she knew him. No matter that she had been trying to show him that he could have a life apart from pursuing revenge against his father, he was going to make this impossible.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“To?”
“The doctor. And the paparazzi might come after us. But I believe that my work wives have planted a story about us jetting off to St. Tropez. It is also entirely possible that your private jet is making a decoy flight there.”
“Genius,” he said.
“If nothing else it should get us out of here and to the hospital without being inundated. And then perhaps we can sneak back to your town house.”
“I had just learned how to live here.”
She felt that. All the way down to her bones.
She packed up anything important, the clothing that had been sent for her, and any remaining food, and put it in the back of the new car that had been delivered for them a few days earlier.
She was tasked with driving them back to the city. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with driving on the other side of the road, but she managed, and navigated them to the doctor.
They did a scan of his brain, and the neurologist explained that he still had fluid pushing against his optic nerves.
“The best thing to do would be to go in and drain it.”
“That sounds hideous,” she said.
“Whatever will work,” he said.
“We can do surgery tomorrow morning. Do you wish to stay here tonight?”
“No,” he said.
She tried not to put too much stock in that. That he had made the choice that would allow them to be together. That would allow them to be together this last night.
Last night? Nothing is going to happen to him.
Maybe not. But if this fixed his vision, he wouldn’t need her around anymore. It would be revenge, as usual. And his reputation... Well. It was going to take more than an engagement for her to fix it. It was going to take the truth. And he was going to have to find it in himself to be somewhat... Real. She knew he could do it. The question was, would he?
When they returned to his London home, he made love with her like the clock was ticking. It was. She understood that.
And then she couldn’t hold it any longer. She looked at him, watching her fingertips drift over his face. What a familiar sight he was to her. But she wouldn’t be to him.
“I love you, Matias.”
And then everything broke apart.