In His World

Chapter 10

Adrian POV

I woke up and something was different, something warm and soft against my chest, and it took me a second to remember where I was and who was with me.

Elena.

I guess sometime during the night we'd moved toward each other and now she was pressed against my side with her head on my chest and my arm wrapped around her shoulders, and I didn't know when that had happened or how but here we were tangled together like we'd been sleeping this way for years.

I should move, should pull away before she woke up and realized what we were doing, but I didn't. I just lay there watching her sleep and thinking about how peaceful she looked right now, how all the worry and fear had smoothed out of her face and left her looking younger than nineteen.

She wasn't thinking about her dead parents or the debt crushing her or Sophia's diary or the balcony where a woman who looked exactly like her had jumped to her death.

She was just sleeping and breathing and warm against me.

Her eyes opened slowly and she blinked a few times before focusing on my face, and I waited for her to pull away or say something about how this wasn't appropriate but she didn't move.

"Morning," she said and her voice was rough from sleep.

"Morning."

"We're cuddling." She pointed out.

"Yes." I replied still not moving away.

"That wasn't the plan."

"No it wasn't." I should have let go of her but my arm stayed where it was. "We must have moved in our sleep."

"Must have." She shifted slightly and her hand was resting on my chest right over my heart and I wondered if she could feel how fast it was beating. "This wasn't in the contract." She said

"I know." I replied to her because that's the truth.

Neither of us moved and the space between our faces seemed to be shrinking even though neither of us was actually moving closer, and I could see every detail of her face this close. The small scar on her eyebrow, the freckles across her nose, the way her lips were slightly parted.

I wanted to kiss her and that thought came out of nowhere and hit me like a truck because I didn't want to kiss anyone, didn't want that kind of connection, but here I was thinking about closing the distance between us and seeing what she tasted like.

She must have been thinking the same thing because her eyes dropped to my mouth and then back up to meet my gaze, and the air between us felt charged with something I didn't want to name.

The space kept shrinking and I could feel her breath on my face and smell whatever shampoo she used and I was about to do something incredibly stupid when she pulled back.

"I need to know something first," she said.

"What?" I asked her, my voice laced with something I can't identify or maybe I don't want to.

"The diary, Sophia's diary, she wrote about you changing." Elena sat up and I let my arm fall away from her shoulders. "She said when she first met you, you were different, warmer, and then over time you became cold and distant and shut down completely."

"And?" I didn't quite understand why she's asking that now.

"And is that true? Did you change or were you always like this and she just didn't see it at first?"

I sat up too and put some distance between us because this conversation wasn't one I wanted to have while lying in bed with her. "It's true."

"So what happened? What made you shut down?"

"Does it matter?" I asked her.

"Yes it matters because I'm trying to figure out if you're capable of caring about anyone or if you're just going to do to me what you did to her." Elena crossed her legs and looked at me. "I need to know if there's a person under all this ice or if this is just who you are."

"There's no person under the ice, Elena, this is who I am and who I've been for years and nothing is going to change that." I started to get out of bed but her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

"That's not an answer, that's an excuse." She didn't let go. "Tell me what happened, tell me why you changed."

"Why do you care?" I asked her.

"Because I'm married to you and sleeping in your bed and almost kissed you five seconds ago so I think I have a right to know." Her grip tightened. "And because Sophia cared about you enough to write pages and pages about trying to understand you and she deserved better than what she got."

"She knew what she was signing up for." I said.

"No she didn't because you weren't always like this, you changed and you never told her why and she spent two years trying to reach someone who'd disappeared." Elena's voice got harder. "So tell me what happened, what made you shut down?"

I looked at her hand on my wrist and thought about pulling away but something in her eyes stopped me. "My mother left when I was ten."

"You told me that yesterday."

"I told you she left but I didn't tell you why." I took a breath. "My father had an affair, multiple affairs actually, and my mother found out and confronted him and he told her he didn't love her and never had, said their marriage was just a business arrangement between their families and she was stupid to think it was anything more."

Elena's hand loosened slightly on my wrist but she didn't let go.

"My mother broke down completely, cried for days, begged him to try to make it work for me and Charlotte but he refused." I could still see her face that last morning before she left, red and swollen from crying. "She told us she loved us but she couldn't stay in a house with a man who'd never loved her, couldn't keep pretending everything was fine when it wasn't."

"That must have been hard to watch." Elena said sympathetically.

"It was worse than hard, it destroyed her and I watched it happen over weeks and months before she finally left." I pulled my wrist free from Elena's grip. "My father sat me down after she was gone and told me that love was weakness, that my mother had made herself vulnerable by falling for him and I should look where it got her. Alone and broken and starting over in a foreign country."

"So you decided never to let yourself be vulnerable." Elena asked like she wanted to make sure she heard right.

"I decided never to be weak like she was, never to give someone that kind of power over me." I stood up and walked to the window. "And it worked, I got through school and university and my first marriage without ever feeling anything real for anyone."

"Until Sophia." Elena said.

"I didn't feel anything for Sophia." I clarified.

"Then why did you change? Why did you shut down if you didn't care about her?" Elena got out of bed and came to stand next to me. "Something must have happened that made you pull back."

She was right and I hated that she could see through me this easily. "Sophia told me she was falling in love with me about six months into our marriage."

"And?"

"And I panicked because that wasn't supposed to happen, she wasn't supposed to develop real feelings, this was supposed to be a business arrangement that ended cleanly after two years." I looked out at the city. "I told her she needed to stop, needed to keep things professional, but she said she couldn't just turn off her feelings."

"What did you do?"

"I pulled back, stopped having dinners with her, stopped asking about her day, stopped doing any of the small things I'd been doing to make the marriage feel less fake." My hands clenched into fists. "I thought if I created enough distance she'd realize it was hopeless and move on."

"But she didn't move on." She completed it.

"No, she just tried harder to get my attention and I pulled back further and it became this cycle where the more she reached out the more I retreated until we were basically strangers living in the same apartment." I turned to face Elena. "That's what made me shut down, her falling in love with me when I'd specifically told her not to."

"That's not fair to her."

"I know it's not fair but I didn't know what else to do, I couldn't give her what she wanted and staying warm and friendly was just giving her false hope." I crossed my arms. "So yes I changed and yes I became cold and distant and yes it probably contributed to her jumping off that balcony but I don't know what I was supposed to do differently."

Elena was quiet for a long time just looking at me and I couldn't tell what she was thinking. "You were supposed to talk to her."

"I did talk to her, I told her I couldn't love her back."

"No you told her to stop having feelings and then you disappeared emotionally instead of actually having a conversation about what was happening." Elena stepped closer. "You could have told her about your mother, about why you're scared of being vulnerable, about why love feels dangerous to you."

"That wouldn't have changed anything."

"It would have helped her understand, would have made her feel less like she was the problem." Elena's eyes were bright. "Instead you just shut her out and let her think there was something wrong with her for having normal human emotions."

"There's nothing normal about falling in love with someone who tells you from the beginning they can't love you back."

"People can't control who they fall for, Adrian, feelings don't work like that." She reached out and touched my arm. "And you can lecture all you want about keeping things professional but you're human too and humans aren't designed to live without connection."

"I've done fine." I said to her because I did just fine without feelings.

"Have you? Because from where I'm standing you look miserable and lonely and so scared of feeling anything that you've locked yourself in an emotional prison." Her hand moved down to grab my hand. "That's not fine, that's just existing."

I looked down at our hands and wanted to pull away but didn't. "What do you want from me, Elena?"

"I want you to help me understand, I want you to tell me why you changed and what made you so afraid of letting anyone in." She squeezed my hand. "I want to know if there's any hope of this year being bearable or if I'm going to spend eighteen months watching you repeat the same patterns that killed Sophia."

"I won't let that happen." I promised her though I know that's not enough to reassure her.

"You can't promise that because you didn't mean to let it happen with her either but it happened anyway." Elena's voice cracked. "So help me understand, tell me the truth, why did you change and what made you shut down?”