Page 45 of Love Among the Ruins
“Let’s.” She didn’t want to lie in bed, and the room was musty and stale, reeking of alcohol and body odor.
A short while later, they were sitting outside a nice little café, drinking coffee.
“My mother gave me a present last weekend.” She’d been keeping that conversation to herself, mulling it over, dissecting and trying to imagine the faceless monster her mother had been in love with. The father figure she had never known. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that her mother only told her enough about her father, but had kept much hidden, like his name, and maybe a picture. Surely she would have a picture of him? Because her mother referred to him as her first and only love. “She told me about my father.”
Stefanos jolted to attention. “She did what? What did she tell you?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not so great.” Eleni recounted the conversation, telling him about the hairpin, and everything, except the part about her father wanting her mother to abort her. After, she felt better, as if a heavy load had washed clean out of her system. Her thoughts were no longer festering inside her.
Stefanos was such a good listener and a precious friend. He listened intently, and without interruption, so that she felt heard. He told her she was better off without a man like that in her life.
“I know.” She tapped her fingers on the shiny menu, her thoughts a million miles away.
“I don’t like this, Leni, you sitting here as if you’re at a funeral. Shit...” He closed his eyes hard, cringing at what he’d said.
“It’s okay. You are allowed to talk about death and funerals and accidents.” She couldn’t fall apart all the time. Shedidn’tfall apart all the time now. She didn’t wake up every day feeling sad. Time passed, and she had learned to come to terms with Jonas’ passing. There was a knowing, deep in her heart, that the expedition represented a closure. A milestone. An ending and a beginning. The expedition was a goal post in her mind, something to aim towards, a chapter in her life she was ready to assimilate and be done with.
“This weekend has been good for you.”
She smiled. It had been good. She had loved being with her friends again, and letting her hair down. But there was Dominic. And what she had said to him. How she’d behaved. She sucked in a heavy breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She didn’t want to discuss it. “Thanks for organizing it. That club, it’s the sort of place I’d never go to.”
“But it was your twenty-first, it had to be special.”
“It was. I needed to let my hair down.”
“You were dancing in the capsules, Leni!” Stefanos chortled, “Was that the highlight or was it when your boss turned up? That man.” Stefanos shook his head in disappointment. “He’s wasted on women.”
And what a woman to be wasted on.
She had been everything Eleni expected. Beautiful, elegant, poised. Enjoying an evening with her lover. She shivered, feeling uneasy. She hadn’t looked at anyone in over a year, hadn’t had the space or mental clarity to do so.
She sat up with a jolt as Jonas’ face flashed by her, and she remembered snippets of their conversations.
She hadn’t thought of him much now, not since she’d been in Athens. Guilt stabbed like a hot poker through her. She was forgetting him.
“You noticed him too, huh?” Stefanos examined her face closely.
“Me? No. He’s my boss.”
“More reason to fantasize about him.”
“You’re crazy.”
“And you’re lying.”
It was entirely possible that after last night Stefanos could tell. They had all been drunk, but maybe she’d been more drunk than the rest of them? “I am not. He’s my boss. I don’t have an opinion about him.”
Liar.
“Of course you don’t.”
A server came to take their order, and as Stefanos gave his, Eleni watched the young girl scribble down the order. Things had changed in such a short space of time. For one, she was not a server anymore. And two, she was starting to have feelings for someone again.
* * *
