by Olivia Gates
Crying out with the pain of it, she hugged him fiercely, withdrawing only to hold his face in trembling hands, rain kisses over his face, his name a ragged litany, a prayer on her lips.
After only moments, he pulled away, his hands clamping hers, taking them away from his face. Her heart twisted in her chest at his clear and unequivocal rejection.
“I’m not ready for this.”
This. Her nearness? Her emotions? What was...this?
She pried her hands from his warding grip, the sick electricity of misery that had become her usual state erratically zapping in her marrow. “Dr. Antonovich said you might suffer from some mood swings for a while.”
He heaved up to his feet. “I’m suffering from nothing.”
“This was a major trauma and surgery in your most vital organ. It’s only expected you won’t bounce back easily.”
“He gave me a clean bill of health. There’s nothing wrong with me. Just because I’m not up for sex doesn’t mean I’m malfunctioning.”
It felt like he’d backhanded her.
Was that how abused people felt? Would a physical blow have hurt more?
“I didn’t say that,” she choked. “And I’m not asking for sex or expecting it. I just want to...”
“You just want to touch me and kiss me. You want me to show you intimacy and emotion, what I showed you from the time I came back till the aneurysm ruptured.” His voice hardened. “I tried to show you that I don’t want any of that anymore, but you won’t take a hint.”
“It’s all right. I understand...”
“You don’t,” he bit off. “You don’t want to understand.”
She swallowed back the sobs, unable to bear his harshness, which she’d never before been exposed to.
Then she remembered. “Dr. Antonovich said there was a chance for some personality changes...”
“There are no changes. This is me. The real me.”
His growl fell on her like a wrecking ball. A lightning bolt of understanding.
“You mean it wasn’t the real you before? Since your accident? Since you came back?”
He made no answer. And that was the most eloquent one.
“You mean when you left me, it was because you wanted nothing more to do with me? Then you had the accident, and thinking you’d die any moment made you vulnerable, made you need intimacy, to reaffirm your life? Or even worse, that aneurysm was pressing on your brain, causing your radical personality change. And once it was treated, you reverted to your real self, the self that didn’t love me, that left me without a backward glance?”
The dismal darkness in his gaze said he hated hearing that. Because it was true. Because he felt terrible about it, but couldn’t change it. He couldn’t force himself to love her when he no longer felt anything.
His love for her had been injury induced. Now that he’d been fixed, he’d been cured of it.
She still had to hear him say it. “Do you want me to leave?”
His eyes were suddenly extinguished, as if everything inside him had just turned off, died. “I...think it would be best.”
She’d hoped...until the words had left his mouth.
Her whole being lurched with agony so acute she caved under its onslaught; her face, her insides, all of her felt like a piece of burned paper crumbling in a careless hand.
One thing was still left unsaid. Not that it would change anything. It just had to be said.
“I’m...pregnant.”
He nodded as if he, too, barely had enough life force to sustain him. “I know.”
So he knew. Nobody had noticed as she’d lost so much weight. But he knew her intimately...as he no longer wanted to know her. As he seemed unable to contemplate knowing her.
“What I told you over two years ago stands.”
About supporting her and his child. His children now.
She’d be a single parent now, not to one but two children. After she’d known what it was to share a child with him.
And she wailed, “Why did you ever come back? Why didn’t you just leave me in my ignorance of what it could be like?”
He wouldn’t look at her as he rasped, “I can’t change the past, but this is better for the future, Caliope. I know you don’t need anything, but you and...the children would still have everything that I have, and would have all my support in any way you’ll allow. If you still let me be Leo’s father, and the new baby’s when it’s born, you don’t have to see me, too. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”
And the heart that had already been shattered was pulverized. “Did you ever love me, Maksim?”
He sat down heavily in his chair, throwing his head back, squeezing his eyes. “Don’t dredge everything up, Caliope. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I have to. I must make sense of this or I’ll go insane.”
He opened his eyes, looked at her with a world of dejection and said nothing.
No. He’d never loved her.
There was nothing more to say. To feel. To hope for.
She turned and walked away.
At the door, she felt compelled to turn back.
Strange how he still looked like the man she loved. The man who’d loved her. When that man had never existed.
“Since you told me of your aneurysm, I lived in fear of losing you. Now that I have, I’m only glad I didn’t lose you to death. Even though I feel like a widow.”
And she said goodbye. To the man who never was. To happiness and love and everything hopeful and beautiful she’d never have again.
* * *
Back in her suite, she stepped into the shower cubicle and stood limply beneath the powerful spray as the water changed from punishingly cold to hot, shudders spreading from her depths outward.
She squeezed her eyes, needing tears to flow, to release some of the unbearable pressure. None came. She’d depleted every last one and would forever be deprived of their relief.
Waves of despair almost crushed her, shudders racking her so hard until she could no longer stand, and she sank in an uncoordinated heap to the cubicle’s marble floor.
She lay there for maybe hours.
At last she exited the shower, dressed, packed her bags, gathered a bewildered Leo and Rosa and swept them back to New York.
* * *
Eighteen hours later, she entered her old building’s elevator. She’d sent Leo with Rosa for the night.
She was...finished, didn’t want to expose her son to more of her anguish. He’d felt it all through the flight, had fussed and wailed most of it. He must have also felt she was taking him away from his daddy.
Not that she would. Maksim would come for Leo, and she’d let him see him every day if he wanted. Despite everything, one thing was undeniable: Maksim loved his son. It had nothing to do with whatever he felt...or rather, didn’t feel for her. That father/son bond hadn’t been the aneurysm’s doing, so it had survived its removal.
It was her love that had been so superficial, so artificial, it had vanished at the touch of a scalpel.
The ping of the elevator lurched through her. She stumbled out, walked with eyes pinned to the ground. She’d have to sell the apartment. Too many memories with Maksim here. She had to purge him from her life. If she hoped to survive.
Then she raised her eyes...and he was there.
He’d been sitting on the ground by her door, was now rising to his feet. Her legs gnarled together. And he was there, stopping her from plummeting to the gro
und.
Her eyes devoured him for helpless moments before common sense kicked in. “Leo... He’s not with me....”
“I know. I’m here to talk to you.”
And she panicked, pushed frantically out of his supporting arms. “No. No, no, no. You can’t keep reeling me in, shredding me apart, throwing me out then doing it again. I won’t let you do this to me. Not again. Not ever again.”
* * *
Caliope’s words fell on Maksim like fists dipped in ground glass...smashing into his heart and brain.
But he had to do this. He had to make her understand.
Taking the keys from her limp hands, he opened her door, urged her inside. “I have to talk to you, Caliope. After this, you’ll never have to see me again.”
The defeat and despair in her eyes made him wish again that he’d died on that operating table.
“It’s you who doesn’t want to see me, Maksim. You’ve reverted to your true nature, but I’m the same person who’s always loved you, who can’t stop loving you. I wish there was some medical procedure that would keep me from feeling like this, but if there were, I couldn’t have it, because of Leo and the baby. You said you’d rather not see me again, and you were right. I can’t see you again. Just thinking of you makes my sanity bleed out. Just looking at you makes my blood congeal inside my arteries with grief. If you want your children to have a mother and not a wreck, you won’t let me see you again.”
He deserved all that and more. But he had to do this.
He caught her arm as she turned away. “I left you once without explanations. I have to explain this time.”
“I don’t want your explanations. I don’t care why you’re killing me. It won’t change the fact that you’re killing me all the same.”
He groaned, “Caliope...”
She stepped away unsteadily. “Okay, that was over the top. I am too strong to shrivel up and die. I will regain my equilibrium and go on. For myself as well as for my children.”
His hands fisted, cramping with the need to reach for her. “This is what I want you to do. To move on, to forget...”
“You don’t get to tell me what you want anymore,” she cried out, strangled, shrill. “You don’t get to pretend you care about what happens to me. I don’t want to move on, and I don’t want to forget. It if weighs on your conscience, I can’t help you there. The man I love exists here—” she thumped her chest hard with her fist, face shuddering, eyes welling “—and here.” Another jarring punch against her temple, her whole frame quaking with the rising tide of misery. “He’s in my senses and reflexes, he’s part of my every cell. Even if you’re not him anymore, you can’t take him away from me, so the new you can feel better...”
His own torment burst out of him on a butchered groan. “I was aware all the time after I collapsed, Caliope.”
That brought her tirade to an abrupt end.
He went on. “All through the trip to the hospital, up to when they forced you, per my orders, to stay out of the O.R. I saw, felt everything. I was mutilated by what it did to you when I collapsed. I’ve never seen anyone so...wrecked, known someone could suffer so totally, so horrifically. And I realized that I’d done that to you. I’ve been far more selfish than you once accused me of being, involving you in this doomed relationship, where I get to have the happiness and blessing of your love as long as I live, only to leave you with the anguish of my loss and the curse of my memory.”
Tears still cascading down her cheeks, she gaped at him.
“Dr. Antonovich might say he’s over ninety percent certain I’m fully recovered, but there is still a percentage I’m not. And I can’t bear making you live in constant dread waiting for me to collapse again, and maybe this time not making it...or worse.”
Her tears suddenly stopped. Everything about her seemed to hit pause.
Then a cracked whisper bled out of her. “You mean you did love me? And never stopped?”
There was no way he could stop the admission now. “I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. I don’t think I can stop loving you, even if they remove my whole brain.”
This time her voice was more audible as her eyes became fiercely probing. “And you decided it was better for me to lose you while you were still alive? That’s why you pulled away after your surgery, to build up my resentment toward you, so that if you eventually died it wouldn’t hurt me as much?” His nod was wary, the dreadful feeling he’d botched this whole thing creeping up his spine. “Then why did you follow me here? Wasn’t my leaving what you were after?”
His breath left him in a strangled rasp. “I’ve been trying to make you opt for saving yourself. I wanted you to walk out angry and indignant, intending to put me behind you. But you were demolished instead, without any hope of getting over me. Bozhe moy...the last things you said, about going insane not knowing...about feeling like a widow. What you said now...about loving me no matter what...”
He felt totally lost, no longer knowing what he was here to do or how he could possibly get her to save herself.
He tried again. “I couldn’t leave you without an explanation again. I couldn’t bear letting you keep on thinking I didn’t love you. I love you so much, love our family and our lives together, I can’t breathe with it most of the time. But I can’t expose you to heartbreak of this magnitude again.”
A long, full moment dragged by, then her murmur sounded more like the Caliope he knew. “One final question. If I were the one who got injured or crippled, would you abandon me?”
“Caliope, nyet...”
She plowed on. “If you knew I would possibly die at any moment, would you give up one single day with me now, live whatever time I had left apart from me to save yourself the anguish you’d feel if I died while we were in utmost closeness?”
Feeling his brain simmering, his eyes filling with acid, he protested, his voice a ragged, broken moan. “I’d give my very life for any time at all with you. For a month. A day. An hour. And nothing would ever take me away from your side if you love me, no matter what.”
“Something is taking you away, when I love and need you, right now. You. You’re the one who keeps depriving me of you.”
And he realized. He hadn’t only spoiled his mission, he’d closed the trap shut behind him...and her.
“Bozhe moy, Caliope, dying or worse, living crippled, is far preferable to me to hurting you. But whatever I do, I’ll end up hurting you, and I thought...” He exhaled roughly. “I no longer know what I thought. Everything worked out in my mind when I was trying to drive you away...then I saw and felt the reality of your pain, and knew it wouldn’t just end if I made you leave...”
He stopped, stared at her helplessly, loving her so much it overpowered him, defeated him.
And she gently drew him to her, clasping him into heaven, her supple arms sheltering him, taking him away from all his fears and uncertainty. “Then just accept your fate, Maksim, being mine for the rest of our lives, however long that will be. Just be ecstatically happy and humbly thankful, like I am, for every second we have together. Stop trying to save me future pain and only hurting me now and forever. Start loving me again and let me breathe again.”
And just like that, every last shackle of anxiety snapped and every insurmountable barrier of dread came crashing down.
He surged around her, crushed her in his arms. “I can never stop loving you. I won’t stop loving you even when I stop breathing. You are my breath, in my every cel
l, too. My heart beats to your name, my senses clamor for your being. I am yours, and I beg you to never let me go.”
Her tears flowed again, this time of joy, of healing, drenching his chest, cleansing his soul. “I’ve never once let you go, mister. I’ve been clinging to you with all I have, but you’re the one who keeps leaving every time your misguided chivalry and skewed self-sacrificing tendencies act up.”
“If I ever stray again, out of any new bout of stupidity, club me over the head and drag me back into your embrace.”
Her lips trembled in a smile of such acute love, he dropped his head in her bosom and let his tears flow.
Her hands shook over his head, sifting through his now bristly, short hair. “Mmm... I can and will carry out the clubbing part, but you’re no longer a good candidate for being dragged back where you belong. No hair.”
His laugh choked in his crowded chest. “That hair is growing back, waist length if you like.”
“Ooh, I like.” She leaned back in the circle of his arms. “And I want, Maksim, and need...and crave. Three months without you has taken me through all the stages of starvation.”
“Can I dedicate the next thirty years to rectifying my major crime of three months of tormenting you in vain?”
She clung around his neck. “Make it fifty and you’re on.”
Feeling he’d just closely escaped an eternal plummet into hell, he swept her to bed, where he reunited them flesh in flesh, never to be sundered again.
And this time he knew that any lingering anxiety would only serve to intensify their union, make them revel in and appreciate each second they had together even more. If this wasn’t survivable, who cared? Life itself ended, but this, their love, never would.
When the storm of passion had abated after a long night of wild abandon, he rose over her, caressing her from buttock to back, marveling in her beauty, wallowing in her hold over him. “Can we go retrieve our little lion cub now?”
She arched sensuously, the very sight of contentment. “Oh, yes. He’s desolate without his dada. And Maksim...”