Page 111 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

She smiled against his shirt. “Will you tell Zoia?”

“Tonight. When I go back to say good-night.”

“Alone?” She looked up at him.

“Do you mind?” He smoothed his hand over her hair, then cupped her neck. There was turmoil in his eyes, but a calm sort of acceptance in his expression.

“No, I don’t mind.” Talking about his mother was very personal to them. She understood that. “I think she’ll be happy to know…” Oh, God. Her throat was closing and her chest grew weighted with bags of cement. “To know that you have a whole family wanting to meet you,” she choked out.

He would never be alone the way Zoia had feared.

He had people waiting to welcome him into their fold.

That’s what struck Carmel like a hammer.

He didn’t need her to be his safety net.

Perhaps he never had. She had only let herself believe it so she could have an excuse to be with him. Now she felt superfluous.

She began to pull away.

“What’s wrong?” He caught at her.

“Nothing.” It was a fib, one she couldn’t allow herself to get away with, but she finished pulling out of his arms before admitting, “It’s hitting me that we’re at the end of our agreement.”

“Does it have to be?”

She had spent the day steeped in dread of their parting, aware of the minutes ticking toward devastation. Instead, his words caused joy to explode through her entire being. Hopes she had barely allowed herself to acknowledge arrived in a vision that extended forward. A future with Damian. Forever.

“I thought…” She had to clear the huskiness of elation from her throat. “I thought you were mad about what I said this morning, but you…” She started to hug his waist again while tears glossed her eyes. “You love me, too?”

“I—” His hands closed on her shoulders, holding her off. “I care about you. Obviously. But… Carmel.” His tone held a patronizing edge. “That word is very loaded. For both of us. We have to be careful how we use it.”

“You don’t believe me.” She pulled away and might as well have fallen on her butt, she was so knocked breathless by what hurt more than the fact that he didn’t return her feelings. “You still think it’s something I say instead of ‘thank you for that orgasm’?”

“I’m not trying to start a fight.”

“This isn’t a fight. This is us talking about how we feel.

It’s fine that you don’t love me back, Damian.

That’s fine. ” That was true. Painful, but, “I can’t force you to feel anything, but don’t you dare tell me how to feel.

Don’t question how I feel. I’ve been in too much therapy not to know myself inside and out. ”

“Fine. But you don’t know me.”

“How can you say that?” she cried. “Damian. You’re terrified of loving and being abandoned again.

That’s why you don’t want to love me. That’s why you don’t trust me, even when I say that I love you.

Especially when I say those words. Because I betrayed you and left you once before.

That’s why I don’t expect you to love me back. That’s why it’s fine .”

She might have gone too far with that raw assessment of him. He glared at her, outrage flashing in his eyes. All of him looked carved from marble, but his cheek ticked.

“Why ask me to stay if you don’t love me?” She hugged herself. “Because it’s comfortable?”

“Hardly,” he bit out.

She ignored the sting of that. “Because we’re good at sex, then?

I came here because I wanted you to forgive me.

I didn’t expect it, but I hoped for it. I wanted to tell you the truth and show you I had changed.

That I’m not a spoiled brat anymore. That I am capable of caring about other people.

But…” She took a breath that burned, shoulders hunched protectively.

“You don’t spend as many hours in therapy as I have without thinking about what you truly want from life.

I’m trying to believe I deserve to be loved. ”

It hurt to meet his eyes as she said that. Admitting she wanted to be loved was deeply frightening. It felt arrogant while making her feel profoundly vulnerable. A fist closed around her heart and squeezed the air from her lungs as she continued to bare herself to him.

“I’m not saying that to put pressure on you. I’m saying that’s what I want and need for myself. I need to be loved, Damian.”

He still looked as if he were carved from marble, his expression so shuttered he was impossible to read, but his closed fist and clenched jaw told her how tightly wound he was.

“I think we were falling in love five years ago. I didn’t believe I was lovable so I took whatever small kernel of feelings you had for me and stomped on them.

I did that, I own it and I’m sorry. I’m sorry now because I can see what I might have had if I’d been braver.

I understand why you don’t want to risk your heart on me again.

” Tears were gathering in her eyes. In her throat.

“But if you don’t love me, if you can’t love me, then I can’t stay with you.

” There was barely any volume left in her voice.

It hurt too much to say what needed to be said, but she managed to push it out. “I need you to let me go.”

“Atlas said the last time we broke up—” His expression spasmed and he looked away.

She realized what he was implying and gasped, not having thought he could hurt her any more than he already had.

“Get over yourself, Damian,” she snapped. “I don’t need you to save me. Do you know how many times I’ve gotten sober in the last five years? Enough that I’m good at it.”

“Don’t make jokes about that,” he shot back.

“Then quit acting like you’re the only thing that ever made me unhappy. And don’t you dare keep me here as though I’m someone you’re willing to tolerate so I won’t hurt myself. I’ve been in that position and I won’t stand for it again. I deserve better. I deserve more .”

She moved to her bag, but there was a part of herself that stood at a distance, watching her burn her life to the ground again. Maybe she should shut up and stay with him. Maybe there was hope if she tried not to ruin it again.

No. She had played that game too many times to think this was the one time she could win at it. She hadn’t changed until she’d had to. She couldn’t expect someone else to change just because she wanted them to.

She found the envelope and slapped it onto the top of the kitchen bar.

“Sign these like you promised so I can find someone who actually loves me, flaws and all.”

The air pulsed with the charged emotions between them. For a minute, she thought he would refuse.

Then he came across and removed the papers from the envelope. He plucked a pen from the nearby cup. The flourish of his signature was a rapier that shredded her insides.

“You’re not going to read them?” The petition was very simple, declaring that both parties wished to dissolve the marriage with no settlements on either side, but she was begging for any stay of execution at this point.

“I read them the other day, after your brother left. But—” He dropped the pen back into the cup. The sound might as well have been the blade of a guillotine crashing down. “You’re right. We had an agreement.”

He pushed the pages back into the envelope and handed it to her, then walked away.

She could hardly hold on to it. The pages felt too heavy. The entire package could have been on fire, the way it burned against in her numb fingertips. Her face ached with the effort to keep from crying.

Behind her, she heard Damian ask, “Are you home? Your sister is leaving my apartment. I’ll have my driver—”

She snapped her head around to see he was on the phone.

“Yes. That’s what I was concerned about. I’ll walk her down to the lobby, then.”

He ended the call. She stared in disbelief.

“I don’t need a bloody chaperone to get from here to my brother’s place. You think I’m going to head into the nearest bar? I will never give anyone that kind of power over me again.”

“He said paparazzi are staked out at his building. He’s sending his driver so you can go in through the underground.”

“Oh.” Aside from trolls making “like daughter like father” remarks online, she hadn’t been bothered too much over her father’s scandal, but that had been while she’d been at the villa on Damian’s remote island. She supposed a reckoning on that front was coming along with everything else.

She threw the signed papers into her bag and shouldered it, then she marched down the hall to grab her suitcase. When he tried to take it from her, she slapped his hand away and rolled it into the elevator herself.

They rode down to the lobby in profound silence. When Atlas’s car pulled up to the curb, the doorman hurried to open the door.

Carmel kept her chin high as she sailed out, not even saying goodbye.

Stella waited for her in the back seat. Her hair was in a messy clip atop her head. She wore one of Atlas’s T-shirts over the damp outline of her bikini.

“You left the pool to come get me?” She could hardly believe it.

“Of course. Do you want to talk or—”

The door slammed behind her and Carmel fell into Stella’s hug, letting her tears swamp her.