Page 2 of Endless Love

ONE

Willow

I’d started crying from the minute Allee found out she had incurable cancer. I felt her pain and Ryan’s in every bone of my body. The words on the page became blurs as my teary eyes brushed over their first and last dance…their fateful trip to Allee’s beloved Paris…Allee’s final words as Ryan lay beside her in her death bed. Their song, “I Won’t Give Up,” played in my head as I flipped the pages. Then, I totally lost it when I came to Allee’s love letter to her Superman. Big fat ugly tears pouring down my face, my sobs clogging my ears, I bawled until there were no more tears to shed. The last page of the book was soaked. Ready to fall apart like me. Emotionally drained, I closed the book and gazed at the cover. A beautiful young couple in love. They had everything to live for; unexpectedly, death took all that away. But their love, immortalized in this memoir, would never die.

The title of the book stared me in the face. I had experienced my own Undying Love. I’ll never forget the day I came home from high school, and my father sat me down at one of the tables in his deli. In fact, it was the very one I was sitting at today.

“Pumpkin, I have to tell you something you’re not going to want to hear.”

My eyes searched his misty, bloodshot ones. It looked as if he’d been crying.

“Mom is no longer with us.”

A chill traveled down my spine. “What do you mean, Pop?”

And then he told me. My mother, Belinda, had been hit by a cab. Instant death. She was only thirty-five. The tears just poured and poured. Enough to make brine in a barrel of pickles. The sadness was unbearable, the guilt unshakable. I never told her how much I loved her during my rebellious teenage years nor did I get a chance to say goodbye.

Pop and I went on with life without mom. His deli, Mel’s Famous, was a landmark institution on New York’s Lower East Side, and regular customers kept him busy. As for me, I threw myself into my dancing at Julliard. An aspiring ballerina, my dancing kept the pain away. My father was concerned about my obsessive-compulsive behavior and made me see a shrink. I’d become dangerously anorexic. All skin and bones. Dr. Jules Goodman saved my life.

Dr. Goodman was now saving my life again. I was on a sabbatical from the Royal Latvia Ballet. On my way to becoming a world-class ballerina, I had collapsed on stage while performing in Vienna. The in-house doctor said I was exhausted and malnourished. That’s what my dad was told. Only Dr. Goodman knew what really brought me almost to complete destruction. Physical and emotional. The real extent of the damage. For now, as I healed, that secret needed to stay between us. Gustave Fontaine, the company’s infamously handsome and brilliant artistic director, had gone on to another dancer. And not just any ballerina. Mira Abramovitch. My archrival since we’d been in tutus together in pre-school. I had given him everything—my heart, my soul, my body. My passion. But I was just another conquest. Stupid, stupid me should have known better. The other girls in the troupe had warned me, but foolishly I thought I was different. Special.

Being back home in New York, living with my dad, was good for me. Afraid of losing the other great love of his life, he took care of me, feeding me lots of homemade chicken soup—the soup that made Mel’s Famous legendary. Slowly, I put back on the weight I’d lost though I was still very thin by most standards. But the obsessive desire that had almost consumed me was gnawing at me. Now six months away from the stage, I was aching to put on a leotard and my pointe shoes. To dance for him.

Gustave had been my master. He possessed me, both figuratively and literally. Hungering to please him, I surrendered to the power he had over me as if he were a drug. He would be showing me how he wanted my leg to extend and before I knew it, my legs were extended around him, and he was fucking me without mercy until orgasms pirouetted through my body. One after another.

No place was sacred. He fucked me anywhere, anytime he could. Or should I say wanted. I was at his command. Between acts. During intermissions. In my dressing room. Behind the curtain. On the stage floor after the lights dimmed.

I don’t know if I loved him. But for sure, I was obsessed. Maybe more. I worshipped him like a god. His beauty and sexuality were irresistible, and the control he exerted over me trumped the gut-wrenching pain of being pushed to the limit. I even withstood the harsh punishments for not being good enough. For not being perfect. How many tears had I shed? Yet, more than anything, no matter what it took, I wanted to be his. So when I found him humping Mira in my dressing room, I was crushed to the bone. I was nothing to him. Just another beautiful body to fuck and control. My downward spiral began and accelerated at the speed of a bullet train until I was a shell of the person I was. Thinking back to the devastating events of the past year, self-loathing seeped into my bloodstream.

Don’t go there.

“What’s the matter, pumpkin?

The husky voice stopped me before I could descend into darkness. I looked up. My father. In his perpetually stained, floor-length deli apron over his ill-fitting baggy pants and a Mel’s Famous T-shirt. There was alarm in both his voice and warm chocolate brown eyes. His bushy brows furrowed.

“Oh, Pop! I just read the saddest book ever.” I showed him the cover.

My burly father smiled with relief as he wiped away my tears with the edge of his apron. “The author’s a regular. He comes in here from time to time.”

“Ryan Madewell? Really?” My tears subsided. “Do you think he’d be willing to sign my book the next time he comes in?”

My father’s smile broadened. “It doesn’t hurt to ask.”

“And, Pop, it doesn’t hurt to lose weight.”

Ryan Madewell showed up at my father’s deli exactly one week later. I recognized him instantly because I’d spent the whole week Googling him.

With a laid back but confidant gait, he strode up to the well-stocked deli case and surveyed the contents. An Indian summer kind of day, he was wearing black jeans and a simple white T-shirt. God, he was gorgeous. Tousled sandy hair, gemstone blue eyes, a movie star-handsome face, and a six foot-plus lean, buff body that shouted, “I work out.” In his Google images, he was gorgeous too. Just not this insanely gorgeous. His hair was now longer, the scruff on his face thicker, and his muscles more pronounced, making him even more impossibly sexy.

I was minding the store while my father was at the bank making a deposit. Almost three in the afternoon, it wasn’t very busy. In fact, he was the sole customer.

My gaze stayed fixed on him while he lingered in front of the meat counter. Finally, he said, “I’ll have my regular—a pastrami sandwich to go with a side of slaw.”

“Would you like it hot?” I asked, my eyes meeting his.

There was a short stretch of silence before he replied. “Yeah, I like it hot.”

His soft, raspy voice was so damn sexy. I swear my temperature rose ten degrees.

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