My Date From Hell (The Blooming Goddess Trilogy, #2)

The Understatement of the Century (Part 7)

I didn't understand him, but I also didn't want him retreating into his head, dwelling on whatever horrible acts had gone down. "Kai."

He shook his head and sat up sharply. "Despite you thinking I'm a complete asshole, Hades is worse. So is Zeus. And if that means you and I need to suck it up for the greater good, then guess what? That's what we're gonna do."

That's honesty for you. I scraped my toe over a tiny scratch on the floor. Eyes fixated on the motion. "So romantic."

"No. It's not." He jumped off the table and clasped my chin in his fingers, just tight enough to force me to look at him. "I'm praying Zeus didn't show you what he's really capable of. Because the manacles? A fun afternoon out. Hades is just as bad."

He paused and released me. "And I do like you."

I scowled. Both because I didn't want someone loving me to be a duty and because he was right. "Okay. Sucking it up. Lives are on the line. We have to try and take whatever's between us and turn it into something more. But why didn't you just tell me this from the start? Why lie—"

He opened his mouth to protest and I held up a hand to cut him off.

"By omission if nothing else. And then try to take on Hades yourself, knowing that this," I gestured angrily at the torture machine, "was a possibility?"

He glanced away. I could practically hear the wheels in his brain spinning as he spun another lie.

I shook my head emphatically. "No way. For us to have any chance, there needs to be trust. Be honest with me here."

"Honest?" His voice hardened. "Did it ever occur to you, even once, to see this from my perspective?" His face twisted with pain. "What it was like for me? When Persephone died? Or disappeared or whatever the hell you did, leaving me without you?"

He smacked the table so hard it sounded like a gunshot. His eyes glittered more with anguish than anger.

I flinched in reaction. I opened my mouth, but no smart retort came out. Because it hit me that I never had. Not once. I raised bleak eyes to him.

Kai watched my shoulders slump and laughed bitterly. "No, of course not."

"I can't remember," I protested. Even to me it sounded weak.

Kai's expression turned grim. "But you never even bothered to try and imagine it."

He was right. I hadn't. So I did.

What must it have felt like to suddenly lose the greatest love of your life with no concrete explanation of what had happened to her? To have lived, wondering if she was really dead, or just gone all those years, only to find her again and realize she had no idea who you were.

That in fact, she wasn't even herself anymore. But she was.

My chest felt empty. Even from what little I knew about their relationship, I imagined that had it happened to me, I would have felt like my soul had been ripped out.

Dully, I felt all our previous encounters fall into a new kind of clarity. I gnawed on my lower lip, uneasy. "It was never about mind games with me, was it? The attraction, the pushing away."

Kai didn't agree, but he didn't refute it, either.

"It was because you'd been hurt." I stroked his arm. He tensed under my touch. "I'm sorry."

"There you were," he said, his voice hollow, his gaze focused slightly past me, "insisting you were both. Sophie and Persephone. That I had to accept you as both. But where was a little bit of freaking understanding that maybe you saying you were Persephone wasn't enough? That it wasn't easy to accept you as her, on your say-so. That even being around you was so hard."

He closed his eyes in resignation. "I tried to go after Hades a different way, didn't come clean about the ritual, because I didn't want to have to love you."

Because you weren't her ... I bit my lip.

"I'm sorry. There was no good way to say that." He stared at me intently, then brushed a lock of hair out of my face. "What are you thinking?"

I threw up my hands, then gave a mocking laugh and mimed putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger. "Pow."

Kai smiled. "Guess that's a start."

I wasn't about to share that the thought trumpeting around in my brain was that when I did get Persephone's memories back, did learn what it felt like to be that loved, how was that going to make me, Sophie, feel when it came to Kai? It was one thing to intellectually know about their grand passion, but feeling it? Remembering it?

If Kai and I fell in love, I'd forever be making comparisons between Kai having loved Persephone because he wanted to and loving me because he had to.

A heavy weight settled in my chest. Almost like sorrow or loss. But that was crazy, right? Because I didn't even want Kai to love me. It was a high school crush. I wanted him out of my system.

Kai held out a hand. "No more games between us. No more betrayals. Deal?"

I eyed it for a second before taking it, feeling the warmth of his grasp. "Deal." My hand remained in his, both of us staring at each other. I sighed. "This isn't going to be easy."

Kai laughed, the first genuinely amused chuckle I'd heard from him here in the trailer. "Sweetheart, that's the understatement of the century."