And suddenly, he understood her panic. He understood how hard he had made it for her, how strong she was to have walked away.
He realized the truth in her words. It had not been about protecting her at all, just as she had said.
It had all been about him. About pacifying his guilt, about his selfish needs, about keeping her in his life, about taking everything she gave without reserve but giving nothing of himself.
Was that what he had always done? Had the gut-wrenching pain of his mother’s death made him a self-fulfilling prophecy, a man who only chose the shallowest of relationships, the most ephemeral of things to fill his life?
Could he reach for more now? Could he risk that pain, knowing that he might have lost his chance with Jasmine? Wouldn’t that pain still be better than this emptiness?
He felt Stavros’s arm on his shoulder, feeling as though nothing would ever touch him again. “I thought you would be angry with me for interfering,” Stavros said softly, as if he knew how raw Dmitri felt inside. “I thought you would come at me with your fists.”
But then, nothing in the world had ever laid him this low.
Breathing through a throat rough with emotion, Dmitri shook his head. “Because you did what I was unable to do and cared enough about what she wants? I was determined to not let the past matter, Stavros. I was determined that it wouldn’t leave a mark on me. And yet...”
“It is a part of you, Dmitri.”
“I hurt her and I don’t know how to fix it now. I don’t know how to tell her that I need her in my life, and not for all the reasons I made her believe.
“Theos, everything we have built, everything I told myself I needed to fill my life, they mean nothing to me if she’s not there.”
Stavros squeezed his shoulder and left without another word. As if he understood, for once, that there was nothing he could do to help Dmitri.
Long after noon gave way to dusk, Dmitri sat there in that vast kitchen in that house that Giannis had given to him, where he had learned to be civilized, where he had learned that he didn’t have to live with pain, where he had learned that not all men were alcoholic, out-of-control cowards like his father. Where he had learned that he could be more than the product of his genes and his father’s abuse.
But more than anything else, Giannis had tried so hard to give Dmitri back his self-worth. Suddenly, Dmitri was filled with purpose, hope and a yearning.
If he had to spend the rest of his life waiting for Jasmine, proving to Jasmine that he needed her in his life, that he absolutely couldn’t breathe for knowing that she was somewhere in the world and not his...
He would do it. He would show her his heart; he would show her that his life was empty without her.
* * *
Fashion photographers, Jasmine discovered to her utter shock over the next few weeks, were apparently a whole other species who thought they didn’t have to follow the dictates of polite society.
One week into her new career and she felt as though she had been steamrolled, turned inside out for everyone to see.
Maybe it was that she had gotten used to seeing the very obvious appreciation and lust in her customers’ eyes when she had taken the stage at the nightclub, even though she’d hated it at that time. Or maybe because, apparently, she was the twenty-three-year-old village idiot, who knew nothing about how the fashion industry worked, amidst models, both men and women, younger and more experienced than her.
That first week after she had left Dmitri—because her whole life was now clearly demarcated by that one event, before Dmitri and after Dmitri, as if nothing else could even come close to holding significance in her life—had been a seamless blur of outward activity, more than she had seen in the past five years of her life, and a growing sense of stillness within.
She found herself asking the same question during the strangest moments during the day.
Had she thrown away her only chance at life with the man she adored in the name of weakness? Had she traded the happiness of at least a few days for the emptiness in her gut?
The agency had loved her after the screen test, calling her their next big find. With help from Stavros’s lawyer, without whom she would have signed away her entire life, she signed a very tight, time-limited exclusive contract with the agency.
Sick of moping around the flat while she waited, she had made a habit of visiting Leah every day at her factory after a rigorous workout at the gym next door to keep in shape, and really, to keep the ever-gnawing void in her stomach at bay.
There wasn’t a minute that she didn’t think about Dmitri, a day where she felt like she would ever be normal again.