I feel this harsh pull in my chest, and I’m speaking before I can stop myself, “What are you doing here, Zeus?”
He stops and turns around to face me. “Making sure you got home okay. I figured Deputy Dick wouldn’t see you home unless he was getting something at the end of it.”
“I went in my own car.”
“He could have followed you home.”
“How do you know he didn’t?” I fire back.
He takes a step back and glances both ways down the empty street before giving me a pointed look. “Deputy Dick has a side job as the Invisible Man?”
“Fine,” I snap. “He didn’t see me home. But what does it matter to you?”
“You’re the mother of my child. I care about your safety.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “Just not for the last five years.”
His face darkens, and he walks back to me, his long legs quickly eating the space between us. He stops inches away, and I suck in a breath.
“I fucked up, Cam.” His voice is rough. “You think I don’t know this? I know. Jesus, do I know. But I’m trying here.” He scrubs a hand over his head. “I’ve made so many mistakes. But no more. I’m gonna do right by you and Gigi.”
“I don’t need you to do right by me. Only Gigi.”
Zeus stares at me, and the look in his eyes makes me start to tremble.
“I don’t think you understand, so I’m just going to make it plainly clear. I want you back.”
“You…what?”
“I want you back.”
He steps closer, and I instinctively step back, my heart rattling in my chest.
He frowns at my retreat but continues on, “I still love you, Cam. I never stopped.”
“No. No fucking way. You don’t get to come here and do this. We’re over, Zeus. We were over a long time ago.” The moment you stuck your dick in someone else. “The only thing between us now is that little girl sleeping upstairs.”
He slowly shakes his head, his eyes holding mine. “We’ve never been over. I never moved on, and neither have you.”
I grit my teeth, fury flooding in my veins. “I moved on a long time ago.”
“No, Dove, you didn’t. And you’re lying to yourself if you think otherwise.”
How dare he! How fucking dare he!
“You cheated on me!” I yell. “You slept with another woman behind my back, and then you told me over the phone when you were thousands of miles away! You broke my heart, Zeus! And I haven’t seen or heard from you in five years. Now that you’re back, you think you can just turn up here, saying these things, telling me you still love me? Well, you fucking can’t!”
“I didn’t cheat on you.”
I stop. “What did you say?”
His eyes hold mine as he gently shakes his head. “I didn’t cheat on you, Dove.”
“But you said—”
“I lied.”
Five Years Ago
After a long day of classes, I climb into bed after brushing my teeth. I check my cell for messages before turning off the lamp, but there aren’t any.
I was hoping to have a text from Zeus. I haven’t heard from him in a few days. I sent some texts, but he hasn’t replied to any of them. I know he’s busy with training for this fight he’s got coming up, and the time zone difference doesn’t help. But it’s not like him. He always makes contact with me every day when he’s away.
I have this feeling…like dread. I’ve been trying to ignore it along with the voice in my head that keeps saying he’s recently been pulling away from me.
But this is us.
Zeus and I are solid. We’re the real deal.
I’ve loved the guy since I was fifteen years old.
It’s just the long-distance thing. It’s rough. But it’ll get better. It has to.
I’ve just closed my eyes when my cell starts to ring.
My eyes flash open, and I grab my cell. My heart rate spikes at the sight of Zeus’s name on the caller display. Even now, after all these years, he still has that effect on me. I hope it lasts forever.
I connect the call. “Hey, handsome.” A yawn escapes me, and I cover my mouth with my hand.
“Are you in bed?” Zeus’s voice rumbles down the line.
“Yeah, but it’s fine.”
“I can call you tomorrow if that would be better.”
“Zeus, I haven’t talked to you in days. Now is better.”
“Okay,” he says.
“So, how’s training going?” I ask.
“Good. Look, Cam…”
He called me Cam. He rarely calls me Cam. Only when he’s pissed at me or he has something to tell me that I’m not going to like.
“Are you gonna be in England for longer than expected?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then, what?”
His silence down the line worries my insides.
“Zeus, what’s going on?” I swallow nervously.
He clears his throat. “I’ve been thinking…and…well…I think we should spend some time apart.”
“Spend time apart?” I echo.
“Yes.”
I start to worry my bottom lip with my teeth. “I don’t understand.”
“Space, Cam,” he snaps. “I need space.”
My stomach bottoms out, and panic clutches at my throat. “But I hardly ever see you.”
“Exactly. I just think it would be better for us if we took a break.”
A break.
I’ve seen Friends. “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break.” Ross screwed the copy machine girl in that episode.
I don’t want to take a break.
And the fact that he does is scaring the shit out of me.
“Zeus, are you…” I swallow what feels like a brick down my throat. “Are you breaking up with me?”
The silence that follows is agony.
“Yes.”
And the agony turns into a pain, the likes of which I’ve never known. I feel like my heart is being ripped in two.
Tears flood my eyes. I press the phone harder against my ear, needing to feel something, anything, but this agony he’s inflicting on me.
“Zeus, please…don’t do this. I know the long-distance thing has been hard—”
“We’ve seen each other three times in the last six months.”
“We saw each other last week!” I sob.
“For one night. That’s not a relationship.”
“Jesus, Zeus. Don’t do this. Please. I love you.” My pride has gone out the window.
This is Zeus. I’d do anything to keep him with me. He’s the love of my life. The only guy I’ve ever been with. A life without him just doesn’t seem feasible. In my mind, I’ve shaped my whole future around him.
Every single memory I’ve planned on making has him in it, and now, he’s telling me that he doesn’t want to be a part of that anymore.
He doesn’t want me anymore.
I can’t breathe. I feel like there’s a hand around my throat, choking me. His hand.
“Please, Zeus. We can make it work. I’ll fly out to England on the next flight. I’ve got some money on my credit card. We can talk and—”
“I don’t want you to come.”
It’s like he stuck a blade in my gut.
“You just want to throw the last four years away like they don’t matter?” I whisper, brushing tears from my cheeks.
Silence.
The only thing I can hear is his breathing down the phone.
“I’m not in love with you anymore, Cam. I’m sorry.”
The blade pulls out of my gut and sinks in my heart.
Don’t be sorry, I want to scream. Just fucking love me.
I start to choke on my tears. “You don’t mean that. We’ve just spent so much time apart that you’ve forgotten how good we are together. I’m gonna leave Juilliard and come to you—”
“No,” he says firmly.
I ignore him. I can’t hear him. I don’t
want to hear him.
“We can spend some time together, and we’ll be okay. You’ll see me and remember that you love me and—”
“I slept with someone else.”
If I thought hearing the other things hurt me, then I had no clue what real pain was.
I’ve never felt anything like what I’m feeling now. It’s like my heart turned into glass, and he just punched his fist through my chest, shattering it into a million pieces.
I go still. Numb. The tears falling down my cheeks are the only things I can feel.
“Cam…”
I disconnect the call and throw my cell at the wall. I hear it shatter, like my heart just did.
I stare into the darkness as fresh tears run down my face, dripping onto my nightshirt.
Zeus’s shirt. One of his old T-shirts that I stole to wear to bed.
He had sex with another woman.
He cheated on me.
Zeus. My Zeus.
But he’s not mine anymore.
A cry of raw agony rips from my lungs.
I pull his shirt from my body and hurl it across the room, needing anything of his far away from me.
I fall to the bed, curl up into a ball, and cry until there are no more tears left inside me.
A week later, I see Zeus pictured in the papers with another woman.
A month after that, I discover that I’m pregnant with his baby.
“You did what?” I gasp, stepping back from him.
Zeus at least has the decency to look guilty. “I lied. I never cheated on you.”
I feel winded. I know I should feel relieved, but I don’t. Everything I’ve believed for the last five years—that Zeus cheated on me, that he abandoned Gigi—none of it is true. And I don’t know how to feel right now.
“W-why did you do that?”
He sighs and drives a hand through his hair. “Because I knew it was the only way that you’d let me go.”
Jesus.
Tears burn the back of my throat. “You wanted to get rid of me so badly that you lied and told me you’d slept with another woman when you hadn’t?” My hands cover my chest, clutching at the pain there.
“I didn’t want to get rid of you, Cam. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”
“By lying to me?”
“It wasn’t like I’d planned on it. You started talking about leaving Juilliard again, and I panicked.”
“Again? That was the first time I even mentioned leaving Juilliard!”
He slowly shakes his head, holding my eyes. “You’d been hinting at it for months.”
Had I?
I loved being at Juilliard, but I loved Zeus more. Constantly being away from him was getting harder and harder, overshadowing my feelings toward everything else.
“It was hard, being away from you all the time,” I tell him my thoughts. “But I was willing to stick it out until we could get back to the way things had been. You were the one who walked away.”
“That’s just it. Things were never going to go back to the way they had been. Our lives had changed, and we were being pulled in two separate directions. I couldn’t let you give up Juilliard for me. Not when I couldn’t give you what you deserved—all of me. What with the constant training, fights, and strict regimes I was under, it just felt impossible. And Marcel was always on my back about you. Telling me that you were a distraction. Getting in my head, saying that, if I wanted to achieve anything, I needed one sole focus—boxing. After every single time I spoke to you on the phone, Marcel would say my head wasn’t in it. That I was distracted. And he was right. You remember how I got this?” He touches the scar on his eyebrow.
“Of course I remember.” My words are soft.
Zeus came to visit me on some downtime he had after his first big fight post-Olympics. We were out at a club. A guy was hitting on me. Zeus saw red. There was an argument. A fight broke out. The guy grabbed a beer bottle and hit Zeus with it. I’d never seen so much blood in all my life, and I’d been watching his fights since I was fifteen.
The doctor said he was lucky he didn’t lose his eye.
“Marcel wanted you gone then. That wasn’t your fault. I knew that. But he said it would never have happened if I hadn’t been with you. He said I was fucking up my career over you. That I had a chance to change my family’s life, but if I kept on as I was, that would never happen. I was going to screw everything up. He got in my head, and I let him.
“And I was just so fucking worried about you all the goddamn time because you were unhappy with our situation, and there was nothing I could do to fix it or change things. I could’ve stopped boxing and come home, but then what would I have done? Work in some shitty factory for the rest of my life? I needed money to support Ares, the twins, and my dad. I was trapped, Cam. And something had to give.
“And that something was me.”
I wrap my arms around myself.
“I thought you’d be better off without me,” he says quietly. “I thought, if I sacrificed my own happiness by letting you go, that I would be doing the right thing for my family. You’d get over me. You’d move on and have this amazing career as a dancer.
“But then, when I saw you in the club that night, dancing on that fucking podium, with that asshole trying to feel you up…” He breathes out heavily. “You were supposed to be onstage at the New York City Ballet, for fuck’s sake. Right there and then, I knew I’d screwed up.
“But, when I came here and found out about Gigi…Jesus.” He grabs the back of his neck, tipping his head back to the dark sky. “I’d given you up, and it was all for nothing. And, even worse, I’d missed out on four years of my daughter’s life.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. My mind is racing with everything he just told me.
“Cam…” he softly says my name, pulling my eyes to his.
What I see there halts all thought. He moves closer to me, leaving mere inches between us. I can feel the heat from his body. My pulse starts to race.
“Letting you go was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.” His voice is rough. “Harder than watching my mother’s body being lowered into that grave. I loved you so much, Dove. I still do. I’ve never stopped loving you. And I’ve spent the last five years missing you.”
His words touch all the bruised parts inside me, like a soothing balm. But I can’t let him get close. It’s too much.
All of it.
Panic grips my chest like a vise.
And, when he reaches a hand out to touch me, I move back, wrapping my arms around my chest.
“It’s too late, Zeus. We’re different people now. I’m different.”
He shakes his head. “You’re still the same. You’re still my little Dove.”
“I…you’re not being fair. You can’t say these things to me. And how am I supposed to believe a word you say? You admit that you lied to me about something so hurtful as cheating on me.”
“It’s the only time I’ve ever lied to you.”
“I honestly don’t know what to believe anymore. All you seem to do is throw bombs at me and then walk away, leaving me to clean up the mess.”
“Believe that I love you. I want you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
“Until you disappear to train for weeks on end for the Dimitrov fight.”
He erases the space I just put between us, and I find myself backed up to the front of the porch.
“I’m not leaving you or Gigi, Dove. I’m here to stay. Wherever my girls are, I’ll be. Port Washington is my home now. That’s why I left the hotel, and I’m renting an apartment.”
My heart lurches and reaches for him. He never once mentioned that he was looking for a place to rent. I just assumed he’d stay in the hotel until he had to start training for the Dimitrov fight.
He’s saying all the right things. Doing all the right things. Everything I wanted from him years ago. But, now…it’s too late.
I can’t risk my heart on Zeus again. I have Gigi
to think of now.
I steel myself, putting the walls back up, and slip out from between him and the porch.
His body follows me around.
“That’s really great. For Gigi’s sake. But don’t do anything with me in mind, Zeus. Because we’re not happening. I don’t trust you anymore.”
“I’ll earn it back,” he counters.
I shake my head. “It’s too late.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Don’t fool yourself into believing that.”
“I’m not giving up on you…on us.”
“Well then, you’ll be wasting your time. Put your focus on our daughter, Zeus. And forget about me.”
“I haven’t been able to forget about you in the last five years, so I can’t see it ever happening.”
I walk away from him, heading for the porch, so done with this conversation. “Go home, Zeus.”
I hear him sigh behind me.
“Before I do…in the bar, you said you wanted to talk to me in the morning. What’s it about?”
I turn to face him, standing on the porch steps. “I think we should tell Gigi who you really are. Tomorrow, after her ballet class.”
A multitude of emotions crosses over his face. All of them good. “You’re sure?” he checks.
I nod.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see how tomorrow goes first.” I walk to the door, rubbing my hands over my arms, warding off the chills I feel at the thought of the day to come and the night I’ve just had. The night I’m still having.
My thoughts have somewhat calmed, and I pause before opening the front door to ask him something.
Something that I need the answer to.
When I turn, I find him still standing on the driveway, eyes watching me.
“Zeus…” My voice suddenly sounds amplified in the silence. “If you hadn’t seen me in the club that night, would…you have ever come back for me?” I have to know this. It matters a lot.
His eyes lower to the ground. He pushes his hands into his pockets, the toe of his boot kicking at the gravel. “I don’t know.” His words are quiet. “I wanted to come back. God, I wanted to. I just…” He sighs and lifts his head, finally meeting my eyes. “I just didn’t know how to.”
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