Chapter Eleven #4
“I know that she fell sick a month after your engagement. That she endured a long fight with cancer. That you stayed by her side for four hellish years. That you—” She faced him then. Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them back. “I’m so sorry that you lost her, Alessandro.”
Words escaped him as he beheld her. As she stared back at him, communicating all the pain she felt for him.
For the future he’d lost. For the woman he’d loved as if she were his own breath.
Acknowledgment of all he’d endured shimmered in her eyes.
And yet it felt like benediction, not pity.
Not comfort. Like acceptance without expectations that he move on, become normal again and be happy.
It felt like she was entering that space where he was most tormented and she was holding his hand through it. Telling him he wasn’t alone.
Emotions whipped him around like a leaf in a storm. It shook him again how this woman was so fragile and yet so strong, so stubborn about venturing where she knew she’d be hurt and still plod along anyway because that’s what life demanded.
“Then, you know everything, Sameera,” he said, in that forbidding tone she teased him about but couldn’t help.
“The thing is,” she said, her breath an audible hitch, “everyone talks about how you lost her. How you changed after she was gone. How her death changed the very course of your life and I…hate that.”
He felt as if one of Bruno’s fists had connected with his solar plexus, punching his very breath out of him. Stunning him, tilting the axis of his life yet again.
“I want to know what kind of a woman she was. Tell me what made her angry, what made her laugh. Tell me about what…made you fall in love with her. Tell me about her.”
“She was ambitious,” Alessandro said, words rushing to his lips like a torrent unlocked.
“She wanted to own the world as much as she wanted to change it. We were at school together. At eight or nine years old, she decided she wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to help people. She beat me at every competitive exam we took. She…called me on every bit of my arrogance.” Like you, he didn’t say.
A laugh burst out of him. “She was the life of the party. She was petty about small things, could hold a grudge like no one else and was generous where it mattered.”
“She sounds lovely,” Sam said, and he could tell it wasn’t a platitude.
“She was,” Alessandro said, as sudden darkness completely blanketed them.
Sameera shivered, and he gathered her to him, although it was for his own comfort. He swept his palms all over her—the bare midriff, the toned arms, the silky skin—and as he warmed her up, he told her all about Violetta.
He talked about things even he’d forgotten.
Things he’d buried so far deep in his heart that they had ceased to exist. Everything Violetta once had been came roaring back to life in his words.
Wrenched forth by this woman who was made of sunlight and laughter.
It was as if Sam had reintroduced Violetta back to him as something more than a dying woman.
When it got too cold, when his chest felt so light as if someone had shifted a heavy weight from his shoulders, he swept Sam into his arms and brought her inside.
Moonlight rendered her exquisite for him, just for him. He sat with her in his lap on the chaise, and he kissed her, the moment as fragile and tenuous as the joy in his heart.
And despite the fact that he was about to break his own rules, he made love to her. Uncaring that he was late. Uncaring that he’d look less than perfect. Uncaring that she had become a weakness that could and would shatter him soon.
He stripped her of every inch of clothing and hugged her trembling, silky form to him, pretending that she needed him as much as he did her.
He worshipped her with his mouth, his fingers, with everything in him. He wrenched an orgasm out of her, swallowing her cries and mewls, before he buried himself deep inside her. He drove into her like a possessed man seeking freedom, uncaring of her fragility.
The dark amplified her groans and his hunger. And yet, it was slow and lazy and soft when his own orgasm broke, a balm to his shattered heart.
He wrapped her up in a blanket and lay down with her on the chaise longue until she fell asleep. And then he kissed her temple, traced that scar that he knew better than his own hand now, listened to the steady beat of her heart and left for the banquet.
It wasn’t until hours later that Alessandro noticed a drop of dark red paint on the lapels of his pristine dress shirt. A bright pink streak on his neck. A yellow dot on his chest. She’d done it on purpose, he knew.
Rumpled him up. Splashed color onto the empty canvas of his life. Changed him, made him hers, even if for just a little.
He liked it. And for the first time in fifteen years, his heart didn’t feel heavy at the thought of Violetta.
For Sam had helped him remember all the glorious things about her. All the stubborn things. And more than anything, she’d helped him remember that Violetta had loved life. To the last moment. And that he wanted that for himself too.
Sam woke alone a few hours later, her skin cold, her limbs sort of frozen, and pulled the blanket Alessandro had wrapped around her tighter.
When she stretched her legs tentatively on the chaise longue, her core ached, instantly reminding her of how possessively he had taken her before he had left.
How reverentially he had kissed every inch of her skin. How his fingers had left brief divots in her flesh.
Her body ached and throbbed while her heart, her foolish heart, soared at yet another new experience. Uncaring of the crash it had signed up for.
She had fallen in love with him, with the man whose heart would always belong to a dead woman.
She knew it as well as the stuttered beat of her heart, her warm breath and her aching body.
Knew that this trip, this adventure that she had so desperately wanted, had changed her.
Irrevocably. More than anything ever could.
She also knew that she could not share this vast, brilliant truth with him, that Alessandro wouldn’t want it. That she wasn’t strong enough to face his gentle, polite but irrefutable rejection of her love. That she couldn’t bear to compete with Violetta’s memories.
She deserved better. She deserved him, fully, wholly, unconditionally. She deserved that deep, vast, kind heart of his that could feel so much.
Sighing, she untangled herself from the chaise and got to her feet. Her knees quaked, and a sob surged up through her chest, nearly breaking her. God, she loved him so much and she always would. One look at her and he would know, and the one thing she couldn’t bear to see was his pity.
He’d given her the taste of an entire lifetime in a few weeks, and that had to be enough.
She was gone.
Alessandro had known it even as he’d walked up the steps into the house, returning in the early hours of the morning after the charity banquet.
As strange as it sounded, he’d felt it from the moment he’d stepped out of the car in the courtyard and knew it with a certainty even before he reached the bedroom.
Their bedroom…
It was free of all the hundred things she’d scattered about. Now it looked sterile and empty, like a damned coffin for all he could breathe in there.
She’d left without good-bye. She’d left before her vacation was up. There was at least another week left. He knew, because he’d been counting the days like a lovesick fool.
He rushed to the studio, and that was as empty as his heart.
Matteo found him in the studio, the creek of the elevator doors and his wheelchair alerting Alessandro.
“She didn’t discuss this with you?” Uncharacteristic gravity filled his brother’s voice.
Alessandro shook his head. He doubted if he could form words even if he tried. His chest felt like it was collapsing on itself, an ocean of pain drowning him.
He’d imagined how it would feel once she left. He’d prepared himself for the sudden emptiness, for that stark silence of his life again. He’d get used to it, he told himself. He’d pick the pieces of his life back up again, like people did after a storm blew over.
But the reality was so much worse. Everything in him felt blank, silent, oppressively empty. As if she’d taken all of him with her. Given him back his ability to feel, such searing joy and crushing sorrow, and then taken it back.
The alternative was unthinkable. If he pursued a future with her, if he even indulged in the idea of it and then lost her…the pain would be unbearable. Worse than when he’d lost Violetta.
Because despite everything, he had barely been on the cusp of manhood when he’d lost her. He hadn’t known himself fully before he had become part of a couple, only to lose her. He’d been angry, resentful that the world didn’t bend and sway at his command, and he’d simply shut himself off.
This thing he felt for Sam…it defied definition. Refused to be caged into words. The love he felt in his heart was all encompassing, so vast that it turned all his assumptions into dust. It humbled him, restored his faith in everything around him.
Losing her was worse than any pain he had imagined from loving her and living with the fear that her heart might give out. Much worse.
But what did she feel for him?
Doubts unlike he’d ever known engulfed him.
Had it been easy for her to leave without saying good-bye? Had he truly been nothing but a part of her summer adventure?
“She said something’s up with her parents and she needed to be there. She also said…she did what she came to prove, to herself and her parents. That she was ready to leave, Alessandro. Nothing could’ve stopped her. She asked me if I could book her on an immediate flight. I didn’t know she hadn’t…”
Alessandro flicked a glance at his brother.
Whatever Matteo saw there, he swallowed and looked away. He wheeled closer to Alessandro. If not for the fact that his heart was shattering in his chest, Alessandro would’ve laughed at the role reversal.
His brother, it seemed, really had grown up. For he didn’t offer platitudes or suggestions. He simply stayed there in the darkness and kept him company as Alessandro fell apart silently.
He wanted that joy of laughing with her again, that glorious feeling of being alive when they fought, that sense of purpose he found when she let him look after her, that soul-deep connection when he slid into her welcoming heat.
He buried his head in his hands, feeling a desolation unlike he’d ever tasted.
How would he have borne seeing her walk away from him? How would he have felt knowing that she was moving on with her adventures, with her life, while he stayed stuck, standing still without her by his side?
Could he love her without suffocating her with his own fears? Without stifling her glorious spirit? Without making his love a shackle?
He wanted to love her for the rest of his life. And that meant being the bravest version of himself. For the woman he loved had the most courageous heart, and he wanted to be its equal.