Page 84 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“Do not speak about your sister. This is about you and your dishonesty. How are we ever going to trust you again? I thought we raised you to be a good, honest person.”
A whimper lodged in my throat, and I choked on it as I struggled not to cry. Raffa pushed me into the cabinets at my hips, and it was oddly comforting, being pressed between immovable objects. I could trick my body into thinking it was safe while my mind and heart remained under siege.
“I am a good person.” The words were more breath than voice. It eviscerated me to hear him suspect my basic human decency because it was the foundation Dad and Mom had always laid thickly for us. Be good, do good, and good things will come. I didn’t believe in the ethos as much as I had when I was a girl. I had been good all my life, butunlucky in the extreme. Gemma had been a good person, despite her lies and manipulations, and she was dead.
I wasn’t sure being good got you anything.
“But this was something I needed to do forme. Not for you and Mom.”
“You’ve never even been to Italy before. What could have been calling you? What reason could be good enough to explain betraying your parents like this?”
“You never explained to me why you hate it here so much,” I countered, voice rising as my temper did. “I asked you all the time, and you always shut me down. I’m a grown woman, and I’m just supposed to trust your opinion about an entire country? About a place that is in my bloodthrough youwhether you like it or not?”
“Trusting me should be enough,” he retorted, his tone matching mine. “If you care at all about us, you’ll come home right now. Enough is enough. We can talk about the consequences of your irresponsible actions when you get back.”
Behind me Raffa’s body shifted just slightly, a tensing in every muscle he tried to curb so I wouldn’t detect the way those words affected him.
He didn’t want me to go.
And neither did I.
Staring into my own face as if I were staring down my father, I declared, “I am not coming home. I have three weeks left here, and I’m going to enjoy them.”
“Guinevere, honey, please come home.” The sudden shift from fury to pleading derailed me. “After everything we’ve been through when you were young and now with ... with losing Gemma. Your mother and I can’t handle this.”
“Does she know?” I asked, thinking about how devastated my mom would be with me for lying, but especially for lying about this. Even though it was Dad’s hang-up about his homeland, Mom had always supported his aversion completely, and she hated to see him upset.
The sigh that unspooled over the phone was so weary, it made my heart ache. “No. When a friend sent me a photo of you with some man on a red carpet outside Pitti Palace, I thought it might have been a very good resemblance. Even when I called ... I honestly never thought you would defy me. I-I was hoping I could convince you to come home, and she never needed to know. You must, Jinxy. It’s not safe in that godforsaken country.”
I winced, realizing how stupid it had been to be photographed together, even though I never could have assumed a random society page article would get back to my dad. I didn’t even know hehadfriends in Florence to keep in touch with.
Raffa had turned into something carved from marble, a cage around me instead of a comfort. I looked at him in the reflection, but his gaze was pinned somewhere I couldn’t follow.
“Can you explain why you think that is?” I asked Dad softly, because I wanted to understand. I always had. I just needed more to go off than “because I said so.”
The silence was telling, filled with anger and fruitless frustration on both ends.
“I’ll see you in three weeks,” I said, silk over steel because I hated that he was hurting, that I had been the one to make him hurt, but I was not giving up on this dream because it would have been giving up on myself. “I’m still coming home, Dad, and you’ll still see me every day at work in the fall. I just ... I can’t give up on this. Not yet. Not now.”
Maybe not ever,a cruel voice at the back of my mind whispered.How will you ever get over this place and this man?
As if privy to my thoughts, Raffa softened, dipping his head to press a kiss to the mark he’d made sucking into one side of my neck.
“Guinevere, if you stay, there won’t be a job waiting for you when you come home because we will not have a relationship,” he threatened.
My heart, so full of new experiences and new people, withered in my chest.
“Fine,” I whispered as tears finally fell down my cheeks. “If that’s the way it has to be, I’ll live with the consequences of my actions. What I can’t live with is giving up on what I want just to keep you happy.”
Silence met me on the other end because he’d hung up.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the burn of hot tears springing from the backs of my eyes and let the waves of sorrow take me under, somewhere dark and deep and lonely.
Distantly, I was aware of Raffa gently pulling the phone out of my grip and lifting me into his arms as he took us from the bathroom into the bedroom and sat carefully on the bed, arranging me in his lap with his back against the headboard. I was crying hard, but silently, soaking Raffa’s bare chest and the hem of the fresh pair of shorts he’d put on.
He didn’t seem to care.
He held me in his arms as I cried until there was no water or salt left for my body to produce and my head throbbed like an open wound. One of his hands was in my hair, stroking it back from my wet face, and the other was rubbing soothing circles into my thigh.
