“Oh no? Then what is it I’m doing, if you are suddenly the expert on healthy and unhealthy divisions of personalities.”
“You’ll do anything to avoid feeling an emotion,” she said. Like she was handing down judgment. “Anything and everything. Everybody knows men who sleep around like that don’t feel, so no one expects you might, do they? Boys will be boys and so on.” She shook her head. “And left to your own devices, you think... You really, truly believe that a lifetime spent in a sick pursuit of vengeance against a stepmother who never did anything to you except try to take care of you is love.”
He looked like he might explode. Or as if he had. As if this was the explosion. Maybe it had claimed them both already.
Molly realized she might not be able to tell.
“I just told you I loved you,” Constantine thundered at her. “Do you think that’s easy to say? Do you imagine that I’ve ever said it to another living human being? Because I haven’t. It’s only you, Molly. Don’t you understand that yet? Whatever you call it, however twisted it’s been, it’s only ever been you. I love you, whether you believe that or not.”
She didn’t know where her wineglass had gone. Molly surged toward him, stopping herself just before she made a critical error and threw herself at him.
Because she knew, somehow, that would not end the way she wanted it to. She would not pummel him the way she wanted. She would end up kissing him and if she did, she would lose this moment forever.
Molly knew she couldn’t allow that to happen.
“You need to feel all the parts of love, Constantine,” she threw at him. “And you don’t. You can’t. It’s not just sex. It’s not just connection to another person. As wonderful as those things are, they’re only one half of the whole. You have to feel its opposite.” When he gazed back at her without comprehension, she made a small sound of frustration. “You have to feel the bad as well as the good to get the whole. Like loss.”
He jolted as if she’d slapped him, with a wall or two in her hand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She moved closer to him, and she knew somehow, deep inside, that it was because she didn’t know how to stay away.
But that was future Molly’s problem.
“You loved your mother and you lost her,” she said, very intently. “And I’m not pretending that’s an easy thing. Or that I would know what to do if I lost my mother, because I know I wouldn’t.”
“My mother...” He shook his head. “I visited her just today. She—”
“You lost her,” Molly said again. Firmly. “As far as I can tell, you lost her again and again. And so you blamed my mother. Then you blamed me. And you arranged your entire life around revenge—on me, because I made you feel something when you thought only she could.”
“Not something,” he gritted out at her. “Love, Molly.”
“Have you ever stopped to take that in, Constantine?” she asked him then. “Have you ever allowed yourself a moment, just a single moment, to grieve?”
And she watched as that rocked over him. As he stood there before her, Constantine Skalas, rendered...not a devil. Not a scourge. Not the playboy or the reckoning.
He was no more and no less than a man.
At last.
My man, a voice in her said, with a kind of certainty that seemed to ring deep inside her, like a bell.
And she stayed where she was, holding her breath, as he visibly fought to accept what she’d said to him. While between them, all the fury and explosiveness seemed to ease, until it almost felt as if they were back in Greece. Where there was nothing but a breeze from the sea, faintly calling wind chimes, and the sunlight all over the both of them like a blessing.
He stood there like that for some time. And when he found her gaze again, she could have sworn there was a different man there behind those dark, rich eyes.
He reached over and ran a finger down one cheek, and her foolish heart lurched.
“Do you love me, Molly?” he asked her, his voice a rough scrape. “Can you love me?”
She might have fought on, had he thundered at her some more. Had there been more of that exploding, that heat.
Had he not touched her like that, as if checking to see if she was real.
Had he not...simply asked.
“I should hate you,” she whispered. “I want to hate you.”
He nodded at that, a sharp movement. As if he had already accepted how this was going to go. Not in his favor.
“You have every reason to hate me. I can’t blame you.” He blew out a breath. “In fact, I think I ought to encourage you to hate me as much as possible. It’s only what I deserve.”
Molly searched his face, his dark gaze. Did she want to be strong—or did she want to be happy?
She knew the answer even as she asked it.
Carefully, deliberately, she reached across that space between them to take one of his hard, magical hands in hers.
“I’ve been really, really bad at hating you, Constantine. For as long as I’ve known you. I’m afraid it just doesn’t stick.” She looked down at his hand, because there was too much emotion behind her eyes and thick in her throat. “If you want the truth, I’ve been in love with you since I was sixteen years old. And all these things you’ve done to me, I forgave a long time ago. I suppose that makes me as naive and stupid as I’ve ever been, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Even if it is naivete, well, I prefer it to the sad and jaded alternative.”
It seemed to her like an eternity, though likely no more than a second
