Page 87 of Charmingly Obsessed
But his expression doesn’t shift.
Not even by a fraction.
“A little,” he repeats, the words flat, dead. “He likes you…a little. Do you know,” he continues, his voice still quiet, but laced now with a raw, almost painful intensity that makes my blood run cold, “that I dreamed about you for three solid years, Diana? Every single fucking night. I came home that first night, after… after what happened in the kitchen… and I just… I sat in one place, in the dark, for half the goddamn night. Just in shock. Every morning, I woke up with a new, pathetic plan – like, ‘Today. Today, I’ll do something. I’ll fix it. I’ll talk to her.’ – and then I’d fall asleep, hours later, in absolute, utter drunken wreckage. Knowing I’d just… I’d stay in this self-made hell. Forever.”
“Three years?” I repeat, the words a choked whisper, shaking my head from side to side, a slow, disbelieving movement, like a wound-up, broken music box. “That… that can’t be…”
“Oh, sure. That can’t be,” he laughs again, that same harsh, bitter, heartbreaking sound. “One day isn’t enough to fall in love. Right? Yeah. Maybe for everyone else. For normal people. But I… I lived on that one single, catastrophic, beautiful day for three fucking years, Diana. And after that… after that, I don’t give a good goddamn what’s considered ‘enough’ or ‘normal’ or ‘sane’ anymore.”
I push myself up onto my knees on the enormous, rumpled bed, but I can’t seem to get comfortable.
The soft, ambient light in the luxurious bedroom isn’t enough for me to fully make out his face, to decipher the shadows, the emotions, flitting across his features. But if that’s the case… if what he’s saying is true… I don’t want the light to get in the way at all.
I keep coming back to his clouded, haunted eyes. He’s like an exhibit in one of the galleries. Mounted in place. Perfectly composed on the surface. But with a restless, almost violent energy thrumming just beneath. All of it condensed, right now, into the way his leg subtly, almost imperceptibly, sways.
“It’s… it’s hard for me to process all of this at once, Mykola,” I whisper, my voice trembling. “I… I wanted to talk to you. So many times. At least once. Over these… these past three years.”
“Yeah?” His voice catches. Breaks. “Yeah? You… you wanted to?”
“You stopped coming to the office,” I say, the words a quiet accusation. “Because of… because of me? Because of this?”
“Diana.” He says my name like a prayer. A curse. “My God. You know why I stopped coming. I looked at you. And you saw it. You saw what you do to me. You can’t not know. You can’t.” He finally shifts his shoulders, a small, almost imperceptible movement, like a man shrugging off an impossibly heavy, invisible weight. “And it just… it became impossible to keep… looking. And not… touching.”
I thought I had imagined it all. The intensity. The hunger. The… obsession. I mean, I had been looking at Frez, too. All the time. And I had never, ever been in a situation like this before. Never felt anything remotely like it.
“You don’t fully understand what’s happening here, Diana,” his words stretch out, slow, deliberate, as if there’s a delay in thesound, in the connection between his brain and his mouth. “And that’s… that’s partly my fault. My mistake.”
“What is happening here, Mykola?” I whisper, my voice hesitant, fearful, hopeful.
His body stills… gradually. His eyes, when he finally meets mine again, reveal something so tangled, so complex, so impossibly, achingly intense.
It’s like a reel of invisible film is running through them, scrolling upward, a chaotic, flickering montage of a thousand stories, a million emotions, a universe of unspoken signs and symbols. And he’s looking at me through all of it.
I shift again on the enormous bed, trying to find a more comfortable, less vulnerable position.
The pounding of my own heart, which had been a dull, steady thrum in the background, crashes down on me suddenly, loudly. As if my hearing had been muffled, suppressed, until this very second.
“Come closer, Diana,” Mykola enunciates, his voice low, a soft command that’s not really a command at all. It’s a plea. Each word deliberate. Precise. Irresistible. “Come… to the very edge of the bed.”
34
Chapter 34 Mykola
Iorder myself to stand still.
An iron command, issued from a part of my brain that still, miraculously, functions on logic and self-preservation.
Stand still, you son of a bitch, while she comes to you.
She moves closer. Slowly. Tentatively. As if crossing a minefield. Her hands, those small, delicate, artist’s hands, shift uncertainly in front of her, fingers curling with a nervous tension that I can feel in my own gut.
The simple gold wedding band, the one we bought in that surreal, velvet-draped room, gleams dully in the dim, intimate light of the Parisian suite. It sits too loose against her skin. A constant, infuriating reminder of how precarious, how… temporary, this all is. It needs resizing. Cut down, the excess gold melted away, then fused back together. Made permanent. Just like us.
My wife. She’s methodical, precise, almost clinical in all things… except touch. In touch, she is hesitant. Unsure. Almost fearful. Perhaps that responsibility, the responsibility of teaching her how to touch, how to be touched, should fall to me.
There’s little I despise more in this world than obligations, than responsibilities. But Diana… Diana is different.
She is diligent. Focused. And, hell, she’s so damn strong, so resilient, it feels like she’s impossible to truly ruin. And I don’t want to ruin her. God, I don’t. But maybe… just maybe… I’ll be able to stop wanting to completely, utterly consume her in about ten years. Maybe.
