Page 107 of More Than Nothing
“It’s OK. I get it.” The smile brushing Elenie’s lips was empty. “Your relationship with Zena is none of my business. You don’t need to feel responsible for me anymore. You’ve already done so much. More than anyone else ever has. I’ll be fine.”
Her bravery crucified him, even as his fingernails bit into his palms. She was ripping his heart out with both hands, leaving him hollow and bloody. “What about me?” His voice broke on the question.
“What do you mean?”
“What if I won’t be fine?” Roman pushed away from the doorframe.
Elenie wouldn’t look at him. “Of course you’ll be fine. This was just a small setback for you. The rest of your secondment will fly by. You’ll head back to Detroit stronger than ever.”
He closed his eyes. Even now, she believed in him.
“I’m not going back to Detroit. I don’t want my old job. And I don’t want Zena.”
That stopped her folding clothes.
His senses on overdrive, synapses vibrating, Roman was hyperaware of the scent of his own shampoo in Elenie’s hair, the rhythm of her breath, the tremor of her hands.
She turned to face him, her reply choppy. “Zena is the perfect partner for you.”
He shook his head. “Nothing about Zena is perfect for me. She’s self-centered and egotistical and she wanted me for what I gave her, never who I was. I felt pressured into proposing at a time when I was struggling. I wasn’t thinking clearly then, but I am now.” Roman never took his eyes off Elenie’s face. “There’s been a space in my life exactly your size, just waiting for you. Now you’ve filled it, you’ve ruined me for anyone else.”
Elenie clasped a dress to her chest. It was the one she’d worn for their fake date at the Barrel. “You deserve more. I’m just a complication you’re better off without. I need to make a fresh start somewhere I’m not hated for my surname.”
Roman took one long stride into the tiny room. The fuck he’d let her leave. “I don’t know if you’ve checked your phone at all, but mine has blown up with everyone asking about you. I haven’t even had time to answer the messages. My mom and dad, Thea, Flo, Summer, Dougie, Otto—even Caitlyn called from the hospital. You have so many more friends than you realize.” His fists clenched and released, clenched and released. “And you’re so far from a complication it isn’t even funny. You are my calm. My place of peace. You saved me. Being able to share what I went through saved me. I’m coming to terms with my ghosts because of you and I’m managing to let them go because of you. There’s nothing I want in Detroit anymore. My home is here. Because of you.”
She opened her mouth but Roman couldn’t stop the torrent of words he’d been kicking himself for not saying last night.
“I was there yesterday. I heard your mother, so I know what you’re thinking. But Athena was wrong, Elenie. She’s selfish and desperate and she’s completely wrong. You are so much more than nothing. You’re everything to me.”
She sagged against the wall, searching his face. “My family—”
“I don’t give a damn about your family. And I couldn’t give less of a shit if anyone else has an opinion about us. You have more strength and courage than anyone I’ve ever met. I’ll support you and protect you in any way I can if you let me. I like the person I am when I’m with you. Everything I am and everything I have belongs to you. It has from the minute we kissed at the gala dinner.” Roman lifted his hands to grip her arms, his fingers shaking, heart hammering inside his rib cage like a concrete breaker. “Feel it, Elenie, and believe it. Take it. I’m all yours.”
He bent his head to taste her chilled lips. She sucked in a pained breath, like someone being shocked back to life.
“I love you, Elenie.” Roman murmured the words against her mouth, pulling her closer into his body. “I love you and I love your beautiful face and your sexy body and your incredible facts and your odd sense of humor. I want to buy you new underwear and eat cotton candy and too much pizza and see your wonderful smile every single day.” He kissed her again, his tongue dipping between her lips with a growl. “I want to share my family and my friends with you because they all love you, too. There’s only half of me left when I’m not with you.”
Elenie’s eyes filled. She pulled his head back down and pressed her mouth to his, fingers curling through his hair. A sound—part sob, part laugh, part sigh—bubbled from her throat.
“I think I love you, too.” Her voice rasped around the words he suspected she’d never said before.
“I’ll take that.” Roman clamped her to his chest, blocking out the trashed and soulless bedroom, this house with its miserable memories and Athena’s damning words. She wasn’t alone anymore. “Stay in Pine Springs with me, Elenie.”
“OK.” She whispered the word into his shirt, and Roman’s throat burned with relief as he swallowed.
“Let’s get out of here, sweetheart. I want to take you home.”
Elenie’s smile was sunshine and flowers, heat and joy.
“I’m ready when you are,” she told him.
Chapter 52
Elenie
“I guess he was lucky there was no umbrella in the cocktail or he could have lost an eye.” Milo continued to find the story of Ben and Zena’s public humiliation utterly hilarious. It might just have been that he was sleep-deprived or high on the excitement of becoming a father. Either way, he’d laughed himself sick.
Elenie paid little attention—not to Milo, not to Dougie and Summer who had pulled up chairs to join them, nor to the general hum in Diner 43 going on around her.
