“Sylvia, Giorgio, and I.”
“When did you talk about me, and why wasn’t I part of the conversation?”
I can tell by how our conversation is going that I have already lost this battle.
“It wasn’t for you to choose.”
“It wasn’t? Maybe it is now. I don’t want to leave, and that’s that.”
“You have no say in this,” he says and pushes upright before turning and pouring himself another drink.
I find his demeanor absolutely infuriating, and without giving it a second thought, I close the gap between us, yank his drink off the counter, and empty it on the floor, our eyes clenched in a battle.
“I don’t want to leave. You can’t force me to go to Sicily. I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve this.”
He narrows his eyes at me, the distant flicker of a dark smile that looks, again, like a life sentence, flashing between his eyelashes.
“You need to spend some time away,” he says quietly with little pauses between his words, each nipping away at my resolve.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
I say words without a real meaning, hoping to make him talk and help me understand why this is happening to me.
“You won’t be alone.”
And those few words only confirm that this is not a random thing.
My spending a couple of days there picking lemons and watching the birds dive for food in the sea won’t be a mere vacation.
My exile will look like a string of long, empty days filled with unraveling threads of longing and desperation.
“I won’t be with you,” I say, my eyes inadvertently slipping to his mouth.
The mouth I’d love to feel on me––my lips, my hair, my thighs––although I know it will never happen.
I hate myself for saying that.
He doesn’t even flinch. Not a muscle throbs in his jaw. Not an eyebrow lifts with a questioning look.
His expression remains a frozen, painful puzzle.
“I’m nothing to you, Leilani,” he says in the frosted voice of someone delivering insignificant, at least to him, news.
He means it.
He looks like someone who does.
Unwavering eyes, a stern expression, and lips made for sin, refusing to bow to my needs, punishing me, the sinner.
Me.
What did I do?
My chest doesn’t move, my heart buried in a tomb of unrelenting disbelief.
‘You’re everything to me.’
I wish I could shout that at the top of my lungs. Let everybody know. See my world crumble. See the world at large implode.
