Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 82893 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82893 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 414(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 276(@300wpm)
“Do I need to for you to know me?”
“You said you want me to go to New York with you. What would I be walking into?”
“You’d be walking into a fucking mess.”
“What does that mean?” I whisper, and his jaw gets tight. “You know everything about my life, Roman, and I hate that things, once again, feel lopsided with you.”
“Can we just enjoy this meal and the view?” he asks softly, and my ribs squeeze tight around my heart.
“Fine.” I drop my eyes from him, feeling beyond disappointed that he’s closing me out.
“Elora—”
“It’s okay. I’m not going to push you to tell me anything you don’t want to.” I pick up my sandwich with blackened chicken, mozzarella, tomatoes, and a pesto mayo sauce that I’m sure any other time would be delicious. But I taste nothing as I look out at the view, and the man across from me sits in silence. When I’m finished, I get up with a cookie and my glass and wander toward the edge of the cliff, leaving Roman behind, needing just a few minutes to myself to think.
As I look out over the canyon below, I think about Tyler—the only relationship I have to pull experience from. That experience is limited. Since I knew him my whole life, there were never any unknowns. He never had to tell me about his past, his family, or his friends. I knew everything there was to know before we even started dating.
Which makes me question if I should expect Roman to lay his entire past at my feet. I don’t know how much grace to give him or how much time needs to pass before I should expect him to open up. Heck, he didn’t even tell me that tomorrow is his birthday. I wouldn’t have known that if we didn’t have to pass over our driver’s licenses when we signed the consent forms to get on the helicopter and the girl making copies hadn’t told him a “happy early birthday.”
I come out of my head when he walks up behind me, and my muscles bunch when he wraps his arms around me.
“The night Val overdosed, the woman I dated off and on for years told him that she was pregnant.” My insides freeze, and I start to look at him, but his hold on me tightens. “The kid isn’t mine; she and I hadn’t been together for months, but Val didn’t know that. All he knew was that I’d find out he’d been sleeping with Molly behind my back.”
“Roman,” I whisper, my stomach churning.
“When Val wound up on life support, my sisters confronted the friends he’d been with the night he overdosed, looking for answers, because they knew, like we all did, that Val liked to party, but he was always careful. That’s when his friends told them about Molly being pregnant. When my family confronted Molly, she told them the same thing—that she was pregnant, and the kid was Val’s.
“Fast forward a few weeks to the doctors telling us there was no way Val would recover and me insisting he be taken off life support.” My eyes slide closed. “They all thought I was angry about what he had done, not that I knew with every fiber of my being that he would have fought to be set free if he’d been able to speak for himself.”
His chin comes to rest on the top of my head, and my eyes open as he says softly, “I wish he’d talked to me, that he trusted me. But more than anything, I wish I would have realized he’d been in love with her all along.”
“How could you know that?”
“Looking back, there were signs, but I was too self-centered to see them. And I know he never said anything because he didn’t want to cause a rift between us. He assumed, like everyone else, that I would marry her one day.”
“Was she in love with him?”
“I don’t know,” he replies quietly, and my heart hurts even more than it already did. It’s weird to hope she was in love with his brother, but I hope that she was. I hope he had that from her.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“No. She’s called a few times, but I have nothing to say to her.”
“It’s not her fault either, and I’m sure she’s wrapped in guilt over what happened,” I tell him quietly.
“It’s difficult not to lay some of that blame on her. She could have talked to me. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers, and she knew our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. If she told me that she wanted to date Val—”
“Just because you’re saying it doesn’t mean it would have been as easy as that,” I cut him off gently. “You’re looking at the situation after losing your brother, not him being alive and her telling you that she’s interested in him.”