Page 76 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

‘I’d go for the rum punch,’ Leo suggested. The waiter was chatting with him, laughing and friendly without being intrusive. He heard himself chatting back, discussing the menu, asking about the mahi-mahi, but his mind was on Cassie and that question she had asked.

Had he ever brought anyone to the villa with him… Was she jealous? This was dangerous territory.

He remembered that time when he had been exposed and vulnerable, and recalled his resolve never to go there again. Yet, when he thought about her being jealous, he wasn’t annoyed, he was pleased—more dangerous territory.

When he’d embarked on this plan to take the thing he’d once been denied, to tie up loose ends, it had seemed very clear-cut: sex. He would get her out of his system because he’d realised the thing he still hankered for, through all the bitterness, was physical. He could deal with that.

But things felt complicated now. He hadn’t taken into account how the feel of her warm body next to him would play tricks with his resolve.

He hadn’t predicted how her laughter would cut through his iron-clad defences or how the past would keep making inroads into the present in ways that were small but significant.

None of this worked for him. They had a couple more days left here and it wouldn’t hurt to remind them both of exactly why what they had came with a deadline. Why there was no room for nostalgia, jealousy or any emotion bar the straightforward one called desire.

Maybe it was time the past was discussed after all. It would leave an acrid taste in both their mouths but it would put things into perspective before she started over-inflating what was going on between them.

Before he started over-inflating what was going on here between them, a little voice whispered. Before he weakened. No way was he going to do that.

‘Have you decided what you’re going to eat? Everything’s freshly prepared here, so it’s wise to order well in advance, because the main meal can easily take a while to arrive.’

‘Any recommendations?’

‘I would go for the fish. You won’t get anything like it in Canada.’ He paused and waited until the waiter took their order.

He made no effort to lighten the very subtle shift in atmosphere between them and he could see that she was as conscious of it as he was.

Something inside Leo twisted at the thought that he was hurting her, and he gritted his teeth, irritated that she could still have some kind of weird power over him without even trying. He wasn’t that gullible boy any longer!

‘When we came here,’ he said heavily, ‘I told you that the past wasn’t a place we would be returning to.’

‘And I haven’t,’ Cassie told him quickly. ‘If there was the occasional reminiscence, then that’s inevitable. We’re not robots, Leo. I don’t think we have to beat ourselves up if we sometimes go back down memory lane. It’s not as though we spent a lot of time there.’

She tilted her chin defiantly and gulped down some of the rum punch.

She’d been right—he’d been acting weird and now this. It had been stupid to kid herself that she hadn’t imagined an undercurrent swirling just beneath the surface.

She was guiltily aware of the feelings for him resurfacing. She didn’t want to acknowledge them but she would be a coward not to. Was it just the old pull of friendship; the feeling of being with her soulmate?

Or was it more dangerous than that…? Was she falling back in love with a man who no longer had similar feelings for her?

Oh, no, please no.

Cassie’s heart picked up speed. Had he noticed it as well?

Was he about to cut short their week? Cassie was horrified to realise that she didn’t want that.

She didn’t want this glorious interlude to end but if for ever wasn’t meant to be then the here and now was something she would grab with both hands.

She finished off the rum punch and made a fuss over the starters that had been brought to their table.

Desperately trying to think of something, anything, that might lighten the tension, she looked up when he said seriously, ‘I was wrong.’

‘Wrong? Wrong about what—coming here? We can leave any time you want, Leo!’

‘Wrong about thinking it would be possible for us to sleep together without discussing what happened eight years ago—and I don’t mean a little jaunt down memory lane where you remind me of something I once said or I remind you of something you used to do.

You’re right—we’re not robots. I’m talking about how things ended between us. ’

‘You said there was no point to digging that up.’

‘And yet I find that there probably is. So…where do we start with this one?’

He sat back, signalled to one of the waiters without taking his eyes off her face and ordered a beer for himself, another rum punch for her and a bottle of wine. The silence lengthened until Cassie sighed and sifted her fingers through her tumble of hair.

‘It’s not going to change anything, Cass,’ Leo told her quietly.

‘But it’s beginning to feel like it’s more of an effort avoiding the landmines than just risking an accident in an attempt to defuse them.

Your parents persuaded you to dump me because they didn’t think I was good enough for you, is that it?

Is that why you dumped me without any explanation? Was it easier?’

‘I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what I did and there would have been no point meeting up to talk because…because it wouldn’t have made any difference.’

‘Shocking turnaround for a girl who’d not a day earlier been joyously talking about sharing a future with me.’

His voice had cooled and, in that coldness, Cassie could see the bitterness that had crept into him and mushroomed over the years. The sex was mind-blowing but, for Leo, there would never be forgiveness. The sex would never give way to love because he could never forget.

‘Yes, my parents convinced me that it wasn’t the right time for me to leave, to follow you wherever that might take us.

I mean, it would have meant not just leaving town, but leaving Canada.

You wanted to spread your wings. You wanted an Ivy League university and a career that could only happen in America.

You wanted out of small-town living completely. ’

‘And you didn’t, Cassie? I wasn’t the only one with wings that wanted spreading. I’m guessing the fact that my father was a lowly employee at your father’s construction company played a part in ending the whole wing-spreading thing?’

‘That’s not it at all…’

‘Oh, really? Enlighten me, Cass. Now that we’ve started down this road, there’s no point shying away from full disclosure.’

‘There was other stuff going on,’ Cassie muttered.

‘What other stuff?’

‘Leo, why are we picking away at this now?’

‘Is that what we’re doing? Or are we just discussing something that’s become a rather large elephant in the room?’

‘It’s a bit late in the day for us to start acknowledging the elephant, isn’t it, considering we’re winding down to going our own separate ways?’

A treacherous part of her longed to hear him tell her that he didn’t want what they had to end. But he didn’t.

‘Maybe I would rather not have the elephant following me once I return to reality. Maybe,’ he said with cool, relentless persistence, ‘Both of us need to wrap things up properly, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t after eight years.

It’s not as though we’re involved with one another beyond what we have here. So, talk to me.’

‘And after we’ve finished talking?’

‘We enjoy our dinner and head back to the villa and have fun for the remainder of the time we’re here.’

‘I was so young, Leo. My parents… When I told them about you, yes, they were shocked. They’d had no idea we were together. Well, no one had known.’

‘No, the secrecy angle was a big deal for you, wasn’t it, Cassie?’

‘Can you blame me?’

‘No. No, I don’t suppose I can.’

‘I know you don’t mean that but there was more than just…

There was…’ Cassie shook her head. She felt raw inside.

Maybe he was right. Maybe they had to part company with everything out in the open so that they could finally be rid of one another.

Yet, when she thought about that, she felt a little sick inside.

She hadn’t moved on, not in the way that he had. She just hadn’t realised how deeply stuck she had become over the years. Perhaps this would be a release for her in a way she couldn’t have predicted.

‘Things were going on on the home front that I’d known nothing about.

Things had been going on for a while, maybe a few months, and Mum and Dad might have kept it all quiet if I hadn’t told them about our plans to leave town and me go to America with you.

You wanted to make it big, to go to MIT, and I wanted to come with you.

I told them that we planned to marry, that I loved you. ’

‘And I’m guessing that spooked the life out of your over-protective parents,’ Leo said drily.

‘My mum had been having tests,’ Cassie told him in a low voice.

‘Tests? What are you talking about—tests for what?’

‘She’d been having a few bad turns. I hadn’t really noticed. I’d been so busy living my own life that I’d barely registered what had been happening. Two days before I broke the news to my parents about us, the consultant in Toronto confirmed that she had the onset of multiple sclerosis.’

‘What?’

‘It was devastating, Leo. I didn’t know what to do. It was like the ground suddenly opened up under my feet. Everything was in disarray. They didn’t want to tell anyone, no one at all. My mother had always been a proud woman. She said she couldn’t stand the thought of people pitying her.’

‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing!’

‘There’s no timetable for that illness. She could have lived happily with it for years with just minor flare-ups, or she could have started declining immediately.

She told me, though, that she would be hollowed out if I left, that she needed me there with her.

And my father begged me to stay. They both cried, Leo.

I was devastated. I thought about you…about us…

but I knew that I couldn’t walk away from that crisis. They swore me to secrecy.’

‘So you sent me a goodbye text.’ It looked as though his mind was reeling with shock; with anger that she hadn’t breathed a word and a deep sadness about a situation he’d known nothing of.

‘I knew that it would have been unfair on you to have said anything. Even if I’d decided to go against my parents’ wishes and told you about Mum’s diagnosis, there was no way I would have wanted you to be conflicted about what to do.

You had your future in the US all mapped out.

Whichever way I looked at it, I knew that I had to sever the ties between us completely, even if that meant…

even if it meant that you would walk away thinking the worst of me. ’

‘I really can’t believe what I’m hearing,’ he repeated.

‘You had your dreams and you were always meant to follow them, Leo, and there was no way I could have borne the guilt of thinking that I had somehow got in the way of that because of my own family constraints. I couldn’t have lived with myself.’

‘So you simply removed that choice from me by making it yourself.’

‘You have to see that I did what I thought was best. I did what I did because I loved you.’

‘You walked away from me.’ He looked at her as though he knew that her intentions had been honourable, but also that her abandonment had rendered him helpless in a way he’d sworn he’d never be again. ‘I never told you about my mother, Cassie. She did that to me as well.’

His mouth twisted. ‘Maybe with less honourable intentions, but she walked away from my father and me and left me to spend my childhood picking up the pieces of her desertion.’

‘Leo…’

‘You swore your love to me. You should have trusted me with the truth, trusted that I would have known how to handle my own response. An impossible situation, I agree…but, yes, you could have taken the risk.’

‘Leo, I’m so sorry. I had no idea about your mother. We never talked about her… I never knew…’

He drained his glass and looked at her, ‘No matter now. It’s done.

What it does prove, though, is why this thing needs to end in two days’ time.

We were too young. I was impatient, eager to move on with my life.

You had problems you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me about.

We were two people who deserve to be right where we are—together, but never for ever, because neither of us can ever return and fix what got broken eight years ago… ’