Page 313 of In Love with a Cruel Billionaire

Hewasa good man.

He just wasn't good to her and for her.

Him

THE PROFESSOR WAS GETTINGused to missing her.

He knew this because the ache he felt whenever he saw her had subsided, its agony blunted until it was nothing but a dull ache, like an old, untreated injury left for time to heal. But while he had learned to accept the existence of such feelings, he continued to question its validity and veracity, the pragmatic (and cynical) side of him unable to help but wonder if these feelings were nothing but a manifestation of some character defect in him.

The feelings existed, but they might not be what they seem to be.

For how could one miss a person when the time they spent with each other was, in the sum totality of their respective lives, but a fraction, something no greater than a few snatched moments in a lifetime?

He had known her for a total of 37 days, and of those only six had been pristine, just six days that the professor had managed not to befoul with his personal darkness. Six days, regardless of how precious they were, did not and will never a week make,and it was really just this - the sheer ephemerality of their shared history - that the professor could not ignore and obliged him to contest the nature of his feelings.

Six days.

Sixgod damneddays, and just like that, she had become his fucking emotional thermostat, the speed and strength of his heartbeat reduced into correlative values of her proximity and perception of him.

Six days, and it had given her unprecedented power over his whole being, to the point that he found himself actually rereading her thesis like a Preston & Child paperback, devouring and analyzing every word just because her work was the only tangible thing he had of her.

His way of staying connected to her, he would silently mock himself in occasion,when all hope was lost.

And because her work drew heavily fromConfessiones,the professor also found himself poring over the saint's voluminous tomes in a last-ditch attempt to find a truth that would either justify or dispute the current role she played in his life.

And he seemed to have found it, or maybe he was just so damn tired that he was ready to grasp at intellectual straws...either way, the words made more sense than the chaotic state of his emotions. In his musings over man's pursuit of happiness, the sinner-turned-saint remarked upon how such journeys began with one's earliest pleasant memories, childhood experiences which that same person would likely interpret as his first taste of joy.

All have the concept of happiness, and all would answer yes if asked whether they want it—which could not happen if happiness, and not merely the word for it, were not remembered.

And because he could not remember being happyuntil her,could only remember being happy when he waswith her,was it not possible it was the feelings she evoked that he missedand not her?

The answer, as it tended to be for life's greatest questions, persisted in eluding and taunting him, a diaphanous outline of truth that refused to solidify all the while skirting the edges of his mind.

It revealed itself only when it was already too fucking late (or as Christians would insist,all in God's time), the validation he sought making itself clear when they met each other at a French restaurant downtown.

He was with someone else, and so was she.

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