I remembered all the beautiful things he said to me that I hadn’t been aware of at the time, the many moments he might as well have declared himself to me that I was too stupid to see. I cut myself with memories, strangulated myself with the recollection of his touch. It was easier to wallow in the pain than to conquer it.
When I finally emerged from my bedroom, I was perfectly turned out. I had even painted my nails, something I never did because the chemicals from my paint solutions always dissolved the polish.
I didn’t want anyone to have a reason to point out my heartbreak.
Even though it hit me like a punch to the kidneys, I wasn’t surprised to see Elena in the living room drinking tea with Cosima.
She looked up at me when I entered and smiled sadly, as if I could understand what she was going through. It disgusted me that I did.
“He’s done it. He broke up with me,” she said.
Cosima didn’t say anything and I had the feeling she hadn’t in quite a while. She was perched on the edge of the deep leather chair, her arms braced on her legs as she leaned forward to stare into the bottom of her mug. She looked like she was trying to read her future in the tealeaves.
“I’m so sorry,” I said because I was.
She nodded again, her movements heavy with weariness. Despite that though, she looked even more put together than I in a gorgeous coal grey peplum blazer and matching skirt with every curl perfectly held in place. I noticed the suitcase leaning against the couch and frowned at it.
“I have business in LA for the week.”
“Awkward timing, can’t you reschedule or send someone else?”
“Why would I? This is perfect timing. I fully expect Daniel to come back to his senses after a week without me.”
“Lena…” Cosima murmured, shaking her head as she continued to look into her mug. “You said some terrible things about his character. His pride would take more than a week to recover, not to mention his emotions.”
Elena sniffed. “As always, you underestimate Daniel’s level-headedness. I apologized to him and when I get back, I’ll show him how sorry I am.”
When Cosima didn’t responded, Elena’s mouth rolled into a pout. “You don’t think he’ll forgive me, truly?”
Cosima lifted her head on her hunched shoulders and looked at me for a long second before turning to our sister. “I really don’t know. I don’t even know if this break up is about forgiveness. You may hate me for saying this but, really Lena, are you passionately in love with him?”
She opened her mouth to protest but Cosima held up a hand and qualified, “I mean the kind of love that sucks all the air out of your lungs so that the only hope of getting your breath back is by kissing the man who owns it.”
“Of course,” Elena said, too quickly.
I wondered for a wild minute, if what Cosima implied was true? Could Elena really not be in love with Sin?
It wouldn’t eviscerate my wrongdoings but it would go a hell of a long way to making my selfish self feel better.
“We’ve been through a lot together and in a few months, this crazy period of our lives will be just another thing we overcame. I won’t lose him. We are perfect for each other.”
Maybe that was the problem. Elena and Sinclair were so perfectly suited on paper that there was no room for improvisation, for growth or movement.
“How did you leave things with him?” Cosima asked.
“He’s staying at a hotel and he says he is moving out.” Her lower lip trembled and she bit it viciously to stop it. Then, in a softer voice, “I’ve never lived alone before.”
The three of us shared a moment of silence, all staring into the distance absorbed by our own reflections.
“I have to get going,” Elena said, standing abruptly.
Cosima nodded, standing too in order to embrace her. I watched Elena seep into her arms and I wondered at my younger sister’s ability to coax the best and most beautiful qualities from everyone. I wondered for the millionth time how she and Elena could have such a better, healthier relationship.
“I’ll cab with you to the airport, si?” she murmured to Elena, who closed her eyes and nuzzled closer.
My heart squeezed painfully with the keen awareness of betrayal. At this point, did it matter that I had turned Sinclair down when I had already done so much to orchestrate Elena’s heartbreak?
My phone lit up from where I’d place it on the coffee table, Sinclair name flashing like a neon sign. I grabbed it hastily, aware of Cosima’s eyes on me, and read the text message.
The Frenchman: Meet me at Devereaux’s restaurant in one hour.
I looked up at Elena, small and doll-like in Cosima’s arms, and felt the ugliness of my sin saturate my soul.
I texted him back immediately; okay.
He was at the same table Cage and I had occupied a few weeks ago when we had run into Elena and him on a date. It was cyclical and so totally Sinclair to have chosen it. He stood to greet me with a kiss on the cheek but remained silent as the waiter held out my chair and I settled in. His quietude left me jittery and intoxicated on the emotional fumes I kept bottled up inside me. I couldn’t even begin to guess at why he had invited me for lunch, especially because he had been too angry, so atypically expressive last night.
“I didn’t handle that well,” he began, and I wondered for millionth time how he could do that, switch from human to robot in under a second. “The affair and the secret of it but, specifically, last night when I tried to express my feelings for you.”
“Oh?”
His eyes narrowed slightly at my composure. Inside, I was as nonplussed by it as he was.
“The first time I wanted to tell you, we were in Mexico and you weren’t even awake. I had just netted that enormous fish and I flew up to the second deck to rub your nose in it because you make me feel like a boy and boys do that kind of thing to girls they like. But you were asleep, sprawled out on your stomach with all that coppery hair spilled around you.” He shook his head, shearing himself from the memory. “I was ready to heed your siren song, jump off the side of the boat and into the promise of your arms. But I didn’t know if you felt the same and, maybe even more importantly, I take my obligations seriously and I wasn’t ready to entertain the idea of leaving Elena.”
He cleared his throat and brought a glass of ice water to his lips. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swiftly drank half the glass and I tried not to be endeared by his nervousness.
“Then you told me that you loved me,” he laughed harshly, “or rather, I ordered you to tell me and as always you obeyed beautifully. I have never witnessed anything so stunning as the sight of you giving yourself to me, heart and body, with your skin covered in starlight.”
God, he was poetic.
My starving soul absorbed those devastating words before I could remind it that we were on a hunger strike.
“After you fell asleep, I called Cage and made a plan.”
He waited for me to swallow back the mass of hope that rose like bile in my throat.
“After I broke things off with Elena, I would stay with him while I looked for another apartment. It would take a few months to get all my affairs in order but then I was coming for you. Robert Corbett had already recommended an excellent private investigator and I was fairly sure you had told Stefan Kilos who you really were. I was so determined, I even wrote out a to-do list,” he admitted with a mocking twist of his lips.
“You didn’t,” I breathed, because this was too good to be true.
“I did. It took a bit longer than I may have liked, and obviously there is even more in the way than I had originally planned on but now I’m doing it. I’ve contacted an attorney to help us negotiate the separation of our assets and told Elena unequivocally that our relationship is over.”
“She doesn’t think it is.” I remembered the determination in her eyes that morning and shivered because there was a storm coming and the clouds rolling across the horizon were the exact c
olor of Elena’s eyes.
“To me, it is. It has been for a while now.”
“I don’t think that changes anything. Elena is still my sister, you are still her boyfriend –”
“Ex-boyfriend.”
“Fine, ex-boyfriend. But Sin, you still stayed with her for weeks even after you knew who I was,” I pointed out.
Until I said it out loud, I hadn’t really known that fact had bothered me. I could focus all I wanted on my reasons for staying away from him, but at the end of the day, it was his reticence that my heart focused on.
Sinclair adjusted his cufflinks, twin circles of silver engraved with the Percy family crest. “I did and whatever excuses I give you will be exactly that, excuses. But I want to give them to you nonetheless. The first was simply selfish. I told you when I met you on the plane that I didn’t like the idea that you could change my life and I meant it. My life pre-Giselle was a well-oiled machine. I had a lovely, intelligent girlfriend who loved me and whose aspirations perfectly suited my own. After years of work, my business was firmly established in the city and I was finally expanding internationally. My parents were proud of me,” he shrugged as he said it but I knew that his last point was the most important.
“When I saw you in Caprice’s kitchen the night we returned, I wasn’t prepared. Mostly because you fucking left that morning before I could tell you how I felt and I spent the rest of the day searching for you, trying to track down that damn Kilos to beat your information out of him if I had to. When that didn’t work, it dawned on me that maybe you didn’t want to be with me. It might have had something to do with Margot’s incessant scolding on the plane home, but by the time we landed I had already convinced myself that you were just a holiday affair.”
“I didn’t want to leave you but…” I trailed off because I didn’t know how to explain, in any language available to me, how I had felt that final night, tucked into his arms with so much love to give but no future to give it to.
He sighed raggedly. “There is one more excuse and it is a big one. In fact, it’s the mainstay of why I have been with Elena all this time, maybe even why she feels so dependant on me when she is a capable, independent woman all on her own.”
His pause felt cruel, like a commercial break at the climax of a television show.
“About eight months into our relationship, Elena got pregnant.”
I choked on my spit and started to cough.
Sinclair waited for me to stop before continuing, “I wasn’t thrilled about it because she had assured me she was on birth control and I wasn’t ready for children, or even sure that I wanted them. But you know Elena, she was thrilled.”
I could imagine her excitement, her face made uncharacteristically soft with joy, her voice high and bright and accented because she would forget to modulate her speech. My sister had always wanted children more than anything else. My hand curled into a fist over my heart because I knew the story wasn’t going to end well.
The waiter came, having lingered long enough on the sidelines waiting for a break in our conversation, and I happily let Sinclair order for me.
“I adjusted. There wasn’t really anything else to do but accept it. Elena wouldn’t get an abortion and even though I wasn’t sure if I wanted it, I didn’t want her to get one either. The only thing I remained firm on was the fact that I didn’t want to get married. She seemed okay with it then, I think because she was already too preoccupied with being a mom.
She had a plan. Finish her first year of law school and then take a year off to care for the baby. We moved in together and she began to buy little things for the baby, onesies with baby animals on them and this little pair of sneakers, each shoe smaller than my fist.”
“She lost it,” I blurted out, because I couldn’t handle it anymore.
“She lost it,” he confirmed in a hollow voice that matched the emptiness in his eyes.
“C’est tellement triste,” I murmured as unbearable sadness flooded through the suddenly open door of empathy I felt for Elena.
“It was horrible,” he agreed, unable to look at me. “Only Mama and Cosima knew. Sebastian was away on location and Elena didn’t want any of her friends to know about the pregnancy until the second trimester.”
Sinclair sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “The thing is, she had an ectopic pregnancy. It ruptured her fallopian tube.”
“She can’t have kids,” I concluded in horror. “She always made adoption sound like a choice, not the only option.”
Sinclair nodded jerkily.
Fuck.
I couldn’t understand why Sinclair would have brought me here to tell me this. I’d already rejected him, why did he need me to feel the true weight of this guilt? Was it to alleviate some of his own or merely so that I knew all the facts? For one brief moment, my passion for him flared into hatred so pure I felt electric with it. How could he have done all of this to my sister?
I glared at him with my teeth clenched so hard my head started to pound. He looked back at me, his expression perfectly neutral, his mouth slightly open as if he was willing to breathe in my toxic breath, to house all of my self-hatred and shame within himself so that I wouldn’t have to.
He reached across the table to place his hand parallel to mine. I couldn’t have withstood his touch in that moment, but his gesture of togetherness was just as comforting.
“I hesitated to tell you because it is really Elena’s secret to share and she is very guarded about it. She feels defective even though that is far from the truth. The ordeal brought us closer and I felt compelled to stay with her, to protect her and care for her because I had done that to her. I took away her dream and the worst part is, I was secretly happy about losing the baby.”
“I told you we aren’t good people,” I said softly. “But not wanting the baby didn’t make the miscarriage happen. You aren’t to blame either, Sin.”
“I know that now. I know a lot of things now.” Finally, for the first time since I had sat down across from him, he looked into my eyes and let his pretty, composed mask fall away.
I wanted to reach out and touch that sharp angled face. Instead, I touched the edge of my pinky finger to his where it lay on the table.
“I know that staying with Elena because I feel that I owe her my love after what happened isn’t fair to either of us. I know that it will take a long time to completely separate my life from hers and I know that she will likely never forgive me. It hurts me to know that, Elle. To know that a woman I have spent the last four years of my life loving will always hate me. I think that pain will stay with me forever and it’s going to ruin me at the most inconvenient times. I may not have been madly in love with her but she was my best friend, my partner and confidant.
But I also know that I have never loved anyone the way I love you and I honestly know that I never will. I understand that this is hard on you, that it’s unfair of me to ask you to choose me over your family but I’m still asking you to make that decision.”
I opened my mouth to say something then didn’t.
The waiter arrived with our dishes. When he placed a beautiful plate of seared Dorado in front of me, I blinked up at Sinclair. I felt so vulnerable, I was afraid a slight breeze would dissolve me, scatter me across the air.
“I’m asking you to make the decision but I don’t want you to make it right now and I don’t want you to make it lightly. I want you to know what I know. I have never been so serious or sincere in my life when I say that I want to be with you. I meant what I said in my office, I want to live with you, Elle, and one day I want to claim you as my wife. Some day, soon after that if you don’t mind, I want to have children with you.”
“Sin,” I said as I tore into the fish with the prongs of my fork but didn’t eat. “You can’t expect me to think you’ve done a complete about face on marriage and babies.”
“You’re right. That is why I invited you here today. I wanted to give you fair warning that I am going to woo you, Gisel
le Moore. I am going to show you who I am and how much I love you every day and I am not going to stop until I’ve convinced you that I am the only family you need.”
“You’re killing me.”
He nodded curtly and competently cut into his steak, utterly polished and confident once more. “It’s part of the process. This is going to kill you, this has been killing you all along, but I’m going to pull you out of this hellish situation and I’m going to love you more than anyone ever has every day after to prove to you how much that pain was worth it. We are going to resurrect each other.”
I stared at him numbly. Sinclair’s self-assurance may have drawn me to him originally and his aloofness had tempted me to linger but it was evidence of this, his boundless passion, which lay waste to my resolve. I tried valiantly to digest everything that he said but it felt as if I lacked the education, the fundamental principles needed to answer this mathematically, reasonably. Maybe because there was no way to respond reasonably to such a tangled conundrum.
Sinclair finished his steak in silence. A detached part of my mind wondered how difficult it was for him to restrain himself from ordering me to eat. My food grew cold and congealed, ravaged by my nerves but untouched. Still, I stared, my mind so full of thoughts that it shorted out and left me blank.
Finally, after paying for the bill, Sinclair offered me a small, genuine smile.
“I know this is a lot to take in, which is why I am more than willing to give you time to make the decision. The only thing I am not going to do is give you space.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his blazer, concealing something shiny in his palm. My skin sizzled uncomfortably under the heat from his touch as he gently took my wrist in his and secured something to it. He raised my hand to his lips, brushing his mouth against my fingertips, before releasing me.
I was too caught in his gaze to look at the heavy piece secured to my forearm.
The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2) Page 22