Page 146 of Reckless
I tightened my grip on my coat.“Don’t say that.”
His eyes flashed.“Why.”
Because if you look at me like you understand, I might give you another chance before I know whether anything has actually changed.
Instead I said, “Because it makes it sound like it was one mistake.”
He went still and not angry.
“I didn’t mean, ” He stopped.Tried again.“I know it was more than one thing.”
The foyer around us remained politely alive.A couple leaving.The hostess returning to her stand.Some low jazz track moving through the speakers overhead.The world still functioning, indifferent to that mine had split open over a folder and a future that was almost, but not quite, the right one.
I put on my coat one sleeve at a time because I needed my hands busy.
Then I studied him.
“Yes,” he said.
I waited.
No more vague understanding.No more half-truths.If he understood, he could say it.
Xerses drew a breath.
“When you told me you wanted something real,” he said, voice low and controlled only by force, “I heard security.Structure.I heard that you needed proof that I meant it.”His jaw flexed.“I gave you what I know how to build.Something concrete.Expensive.Unignorable.”
I said nothing.
He kept going.
“And what you heard was that I still thought I could solve the emotional problem by changing the landscape around you instead of standing in front of it as myself.”
The truth of that landed so hard I almost lost my breath.
I looked down for one second because the force of my own feelings had become physically difficult to stand upright inside.
Then I looked back up and said quietly, “Yes.”
He opened his eyes again and found my face with a kind of harsh clarity I had only seen a few times before, the look he wore when something in him had stripped down past image and pride and left only the sharpest truth.
“I thought I was choosing you.”
That got me because it was the exact tragedy of him.He had thought that.
In his language, in his world, in the way money moved around him like weather and action always meant love more than words did, he had thought that what he was doing was choosing me in the most meaningful way he knew.
And still it had felt like being purchased.
I laughed softly because if I didn’t, I was going to cry in a restaurant foyer and that was not happening.
“I know,” I said.
The word came out gentler than I’d meant it to.
“I can choose you differently.”
I shook my head.“No.”
