Page 85 of Taming Achilles

She and Geordie glared like two dogs circling in a ring. I swear, there was a silent battle of willpower happening, and in their gazes was an entire conflict that none of us could see.

“You’re hurting her,” Lea finally said, slowly, a low undercurrent of anger in her tone.

That was a killing blow. Geordie looked at me, and deflated. I looked away, not wanting to see his eyes. Not wanting to stare into a face that I had thought … that I had hoped …

Well, whatever I was thinking was moronic.

Chapter 41

Geordie

Everything was going too fast. I was within inches of getting everything I wanted. Everything and nothing all at the same time. I heard myself say the words like I was some spectator, watching myself speak, but owning none of it.

“I will’nae do it.” Had I really said that? Had I really said that I wouldn’t marry her when it was all I wanted to do? And she had crumbled. I watched her fall apart as I held her hands. I heard it on those fucking machines. She closed her eyes, closed in on herself, and scratched her leg until she bled.

She used pain to dull her hurt, and I was the cause of it. I wanted to grab her and hold her. I wanted to take her crumbling pieces and place them back together. God, what was I thinking?

I wasn’t, obviously. I was reacting in that room. Now in the quiet stillness of the empty hallway, the distant voices of nurses at their station around the corner the only melody to soothe myself as I smacked my forehead on a nearby wall.

“Yeah, you’re an asshole.” I don’t know what it is about an American voice chastising me that made me want to go ballistic. It’s the Yankee voice. The condescending, white city on a hill, we’re a superpower voice that made me want to deck my friend’s wife in the face. “But I’m going to need you to process this, so I can get to the real conversation we have to have.”

What was the mad hen on about?

But hell, I had a captive audience, and the secrets in my chest needed to be heard. I wasn’t like Pippa. I didn’t want to keep these things to myself.

“I have compromised for every chance to be with Pip.” My eyes were shut, and like a mad man, I was literally talking to a wall. “I have—”

“Christ!” I didn’t need to see Lea’s face to know she was rolling her eyes. “You’re really going to make me listen to it, aren’t you?”

“You’ve got no choice! You brought me out here.” I chuckled, grinding my forehead into the wall.

“Yeah, I guess I was asking for it.” Her acidic tone should have embarrassed me, but it didn’t. “Well, lay it on me, you melodramatic William Wallace.”

“I want to do it on the Ponto Duodo o Barbarigo. The bridge near the Musica a Palazzo.” I blurted out.

“Your wedding?” Lea asked for clarification.

“Aye,” I grunted. “That was where we had our first real kiss. Like grownups with the snow falling over the canals.”

I turned over, putting my back to the wall so I could face my best friend’s wife, and tell her all the secrets that I had kept under lock and key.

“Our fathers didn’t want us to come home. Hers, because he was on assignment. Mine, because he was in the middle of a big shipment that would apparently make our family a small fortune.” I shrugged, remembering the abandoned school, and how Pip and I were the only lonely souls there. “So we took a vacation together, like two unwanted toys.”

I wiped my hand over my face and looked to the side, my eyes becoming unfocused.

I bit my lower lip, overwhelmed by the memory of our secret, annual Venice trips. Of a lifetime of holding hands. Every single moment of my life could be found in those streets.

“She loves that bridge.” I chuckled at how we had been drunk teenagers, embracing in the cold.

The kiss was so natural, that it happened before I could think of the consequences. It was a life changing kiss. The kind that makes you feel like you weren’t alive until that moment.

“I want our reception at the Palazzo a Musica,” I was feeling the sting in my eyes, as the wedding I had planned in my mind, and kept as a deathly secret, was pouring out in front of this strange woman. “I want to hire opera singers because she loved La Traviata and that was the first opera we ever saw together.”

“Sounds totally pretentious,” Lea said with a sarcastic smile. “Fits you two perfectly.”

I chuckled at her tease. Lea wasn’t a sentimental sort, I knew that. She diffused sentiment with her cutting sardonicism.

“And I want her to wear a fucking dress that’s huge, baroque, and completely over the top with feathers. I don’t want her to have a bouquet, because she hates that cut flowers are already dead.” God, why could I not shut up? “I want her to hold a carnival mask, on a stick, that she can hold over her face for when we have our wedding pictures taken in San Marcos Square, or in a stupid fucking gondola near the Rialto Bridge.”

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