Eleanor > Recent Status Updates

Too much tearing off of garments. Especially from such a beta male

My eyes are rolling out of my head.

His teeth bared in a grimace that told her he fought to retain his temper. Good. Goading him was the closest she’d get to revenge and she was human enough to revel in it.

And he laughed again, even more grimly than before. "I'd stop talking if I were you because you'll be eating every word before long, and some of those words won't go down so easy the second time.”

“The problem, Maximos, was that the less you gave, the less I asked for. I kept thinking you'd realize how great I was. How goddamn accommodating."
She laughed without humour, laughed at the pain inside her, the pain that had been there for so many years (...). "I thought you'd appreciate my independence, value my strength. But you didn't. You just kept taking. Taking. Taking.”

“You know what bothers me most," she said, her voice strained as she broke the heavy silence. "I deliberately never asked anything of you, never demanded anything of you. I was always careful not to be a burden, not to make trouble." (...) "I should have made trouble," she whispered recklessly, furiously. "I should have made trouble from the beginning. It would have saved us two years of wasted time and energy.”

Would she have loved him so intensely if he'd been more available? (...)
For that matter, had she ever fallen in love with someone available?
Had she ever fallen in love with someone who actually loved her?
No.
It had always been one-sided. It had always been unrequited, as if love had to be sharp and love had to cut. Love, the ruthless, Love the critic, Love the judge.

Maximos was one of those men who for whatever reason couldn't commit. One of those men who loved but was afraid to risk, afraid of being hurt. He was the kind of man who'd always find a reason why things couldn't work out.

She didn't want that, didn't need that.

The truth was, at work she was aggressive, she knew what she wanted, she went after what she wanted, but at home...it was something else entirely. At home she wasn't sure about the rules. How did one get more?
How did a woman get what she needed?
Was she to ask? Demand? Was it overstepping her boundaries to express what she needed?

(...) Love stopped being simple, direct, uncomplicated. Love became difficult.
Dangerous. Complex. Love became something one could lose, something elusive and negotiable.
It became about behaviour.
It became a reward.
It even became a punishment.

As a child love had seemed so very simple. Emotion had been simple.
You loved, you laughed, you hoped, you feared. Emotion had just been that―emotion. And you made your decisions based on honest emotion.
Then you learned.
You grew up.
You changed.
(...)

And every time he left her, she prayed he'd say, I'll call you. And then she'd pray, let him call. Let him call soon. But he never did. He made her wait. And wait.
And slowly it broke her. It was the waiting for love that reduced her to this.

She could take the brutality from anyone but him. She'd been his...how could he hurt her like this? How could he continue to be so cold, so hard, so removed?
What she needed most was tenderness. Now. Right now. She needed his arms around her, holding her, needed his lips against her neck, her cheek, her mouth, warming her, soothing her. Loving her.

Her voice broke and she dipped her head, hiding her face and Maximos knew she was trying not to cry.
If she were really his, he'd pull her to him and comfort her.
But she wasn't his. Couldn't be his.

No, she had to make sure she was safe. Valued. Treated well.
She deserved to be treated well.
And those thoughts, those elusive rational thoughts allowed her to stand on tiptoe and kiss him, kiss him gently, tenderly, kiss him with pain and heartbreak before she broke away, descended the rest of the staircase and exited through the front door.

Because beyond the discomfort of the moment, beyond the pain, there was pride. And self-respect. As well as something called self-preservation.
If he wasn't going to help her, protect her, then she had to protect herself.
And if he couldn't respect her, she had to do that for herself, too. Tears welled in her eyes and for a moment she felt lost. Abandoned. And it wasn't something she ever wanted to feel, not again.

He shrugged. "I gave you what I could."

She gritted her teeth at his tone, hating his calm indifference, that insufferable arrogance which set him above her, making him the mature, rational one and she the emotional, needy female.

She loved that about him. He would resort to silence whenever he didn't like the direction the conversation was heading. How nice to be a man. How admirable to be able to resort to silence, the lofty heights, the superiority of a non-answer.

She was angry, very angry and he didn’t blame her. Everything she’d said was true. Everything he’d done had been manipulative. The problem was, in her world what he’d done was wrong. Immoral. But in his world, he’d been sly, clever. He’d found the woman he wanted and taken her, made her his. In his world this was good. Successful.

“I’ll have to kill you,” she said dully, filled with weary resignation. “It won’t be easy, but it must be done.”

The tent was silent and for a long moment Tally held her breath, waiting for his response. And then it came. He laughed softly. “Good luck.”

“You’ve been to war?”
“I live the war.”
She didn’t know what that meant. It was such a vague, cryptic thing to say. Part of her wanted to know what he meant and another part of her didn’t. He was frightening, too frightening, his body a canvas of cuts and wounds, his strength formidable, his courage incomparable. She’d never met anyone who could do what he could do.

“You’ll be fine if you do what you’re told,” he added shortly, thinking he’d already spent far more time conversing than he liked. Talking irked him, it wasted time. Too many words filled the air, cluttering space, confusing the mind. Far better to act. Far better to do what needed to be done.

He hesitated, turned ever so slightly, and smiled a cool quizzical smile. It was a smile he must have practiced for moments like this, when he needed to put distance between himself and others without appearing aloof. The smile was a little slow, a little crooked, and made his rugged jaw wider, his cheekbones stronger.

She didn’t think. She didn’t have to. There was no staying here. There was no more hoping. If there was one thing she’d learned over the course of her life it was that when a man told you who he was, what he wanted and what he could give, it was the wise woman who believed him and governed herself accordingly.

And she was finished, finally, with being so foolish.

“You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he said softly, searching her pretty face, marveling at the brightness there, and inside him, where nothing had been bright in a long, long time. “You don’t know what I might do.”
Because she looked at him with whole summers in her blue eyes, and her smile made him want to be the man she saw when she looked at him, whoever that might be. Whatever it took.

“I really hate you sometimes.' She wanted the last word.
“Whereas I will love you with my dying breath and when they lay us in our final resting place in our crypt of gold it will be like this, with the scent of your beautiful hair against my face and my hand covering your lying little heart. There,' he concluded, 'is that flowery enough to beat Samir's one thousand deaths?'

62 times in this book someone sighs. Literally! :)

"Fortune was a heartless witch in perpetual anticipation of her monthly courses. And didn’t Ash know it."