Peter was having a meltdown. There was nothing I could say that would make him stop screaming at me, some of it was in Greek, the rest was in English, and all of it was hysterical. Alex sat at the dining table behind me, having taken one look at his fuming son and walked past him to the espresso machine. He offered me a cup and I was torn between smacking him upside the head and just laughing again.
I rubbed my head and leaned against the counter for support trying to just tune Peter out for even a second so I could figure out what I was supposed to say.
“—not even close to the same thing—”
“Oh, fuck off, Peter, no one said it was or that I was trying to get my revenge,” I snapped, just grabbing a can of pop from the fridge.
He snatched the drink out of my hand and slammed it onto the counter, making me jump and flinch away from him. “You’re whoring around with my father; I can’t just let this go.”
Peter and Alex looked alike but more than that, they had the same temper, and while Alex had mostly grown up and was able to control it, Peter lashed out often. I couldn’t count the number of times we had gotten in arguments, but this one didn’t have the incentive of angry sex waiting on the other side.
“Move,” I said, shoving past him. Peter was allowed to be mad in the same way that I was, and I wasn’t about to stand here defending myself for hours on end.
I was jerked to a sudden stop and it took me a second to realize that he grabbed my arm. A crashing sound drew both our attentions and suddenly Alex was standing between me and Peter, shoving his son away and glowering at him. “That’s enough,” he warned, pushing me behind him. “You do not ever lay a hand on someone like that.”
I placed my hand on his back gently, just trying to keep him calm. The tension between the two men radiated in waves and I couldn’t meet Peter’s gaze. I knew before he and I had gotten together officially that he dated Lena for three years, it wasn’t a secret. And knowing that my secret was so devastatingly close to being outed made my stomach twist into knots.
“I fucking knew that something was wrong,” Peter said bitterly. “You couldn’t even own up to it when I asked you—”
“You need to leave,” Alex interrupted, stepping forward. “You can come back once you’ve calmed down.”
“No!” Peter yelled. “I’m not leaving! I asked you what was going on—”
I couldn’t see Alex do anything but take another step towards his son and suddenly dragged the other man outside. I stood there, rooted to the spot and feeling like I had just completely ruined their relationship, or what was left of it. Worse yet, Peter had known that there was something between Alex and I, he hadn’t been willing to talk to me about it but he had clearly spoken to his father more than once.
They were screaming at each other on the front porch, I couldn’t hear them through the well-insulated glass but I could see the way they spit venom in their words, their shifting feet that made it obvious they were fighting back the urge to move closer and maybe become physical. I wrapped my arms around myself as I watched them circle each other so slowly that they probably didn’t even notice it. Alex kept reaching out to him, palm flat as if to say ‘calm down’ but Pete would just jerk away from his offer in a repulsed sort of way.
My foot tapped against the floor and I fought the urge to gnaw at my lower lip. He has to forgive us eventually.Eventually. Not today, or tomorrow, or next week, but I couldn’t live with myself knowing that this was the final nail in the coffin of their relationship. The room around me felt like it was getting smaller. I was being crushed by it and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was across the room in a second, throwing the door open and making them both jump.
“Chloe—” Alex began.
I held up a hand to cut him off. “I want to talk to Peter alone.”
There was silence as I held his dark gaze. This was between Peter and I, and I needed to fight my own battle. Not only that, but Peter deserved answers, and so did I. Alex frowned and glanced at his son before bowing his head ever so slightly and stepping around me inside.
“I’ll be right here if you need me,” he promised softly.
I waited until the door was clicked shut before finally looking at Pete. He looked devastated, just fucking destroyed and I hated how badly it made my stomach hurt. In the darkness outside with only the warm glow from the inside lights to illuminate us it was easy to feel like we were alone on a stage. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” I told him honestly, my voice crackling and tears blinding me as they welled up. I wiped my eyes and fought to compose myself. “I fucking deserved to get back at you but I couldn’t do that, not after everything we’ve been though…”
Peter crossed his arms and glared at me, his mouth a hard line and stance rigid. “What happened between Lena and I was a mistake, I did it because she made me feel like a person and not a prop, Chloe. I should have talked to you but talking to you is like talking to goddamn brick wall at the best of times.” He paused and took a deep breath. I could tell his was struggling to hold himself together – his thick voice told me everything I needed to know. “You knew what my relationship with him was like. You saw us fighting all the time, how he makes me feel like shit. For fuck’s sake Chloe, I didn’t speak to Zander for years.”
And I chose him. It was the unsaid part, but I could hear the accusation. I did choose Alex. After every fight, every threat of breaking up I still stuck around. Maybe I had been able to convince myself that I stayed because I loved Peter, but I knew that I stayed because of the things the Peter could have been. He could have been Alex; he looked like him, talked like him, I pretended that it was enough. It wasn’t fair to Peter.
I swallowed the lump in my throat before finally saying it out loud, “I was with Alex before I was with you.” I couldn’t look at Peter. I covered my face with the sleeves of my shirt and let myself cry into the soft fabric. “I didn’t know you were related,” I continued around gasping breaths. “I didn’t until we had already been together for so long that breaking up with you over it didn’t feel right—”
“I knew it!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ, I fucking knew it and he just kept saying that I was imagining things…”
I peeked out from the cuffs on my shirt, watching him pace back and forth with his hands in his hair. He was just listing of obscenities and growling while he stomped. “Peter, I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s too late for that,” he snapped. “I know I broke your trust Chloe, fuck, I know how much it would’ve hurt you to be with Lena of all people, but this isn’t the same. It’s just not. You knew exactly what my relationship with him was like, you knew how he treated me.”
That was it then. I was the monster for being cheated on because I had a relationship after things were over. “I don’t want this to hurt what’s left of your relationship with your dad,” I began, trying to reason with him despite the half of my brain saying it was futile. “Peter, I know he cares—"
“Chloe, stop.” Peter demanded. He stared at me like I was the evillest person in the world and he was disgusted. “Don’t give yourself the credit for burning this bridge, I know you want to but there’s a good reason I call him by his name.”
Alex loves you. I knew it was true, he loved his son, he just found him frustrating. But it wasn’t my place to convince him otherwise. I stared down at my knotted fingers and mulled his words over. “I don’t want you to hate him, I know you do but still. And I don’t want you to hate me either because I don’t know if I could actually hate you back.”
“There were days when I thought you hated me,” he said with a shrug. “Days when all it felt like you wanted from me was stability.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not true, that’s how I felt.”
You really thought that little of me? I sniffled and wiped my nose with my sleeve. Maybe my relationship with Alex and our arrangement had rubbed off on me more than I realized. “Alright, well I can’t change that,” I said at a moment. “I can’t take it back, and I don’t think you really care one way or the other. I’m sorry, Peter.”
I turned away from him and reached for the doorknob, Peter spoke suddenly, and I froze again. “We could have fixed things. I wanted to fix things with you.”
My grip on the warm metal tightened and I closed my eyes. “No, we couldn’t. Not after Lena.”
I went inside alone, feeling empty and drained and wishing I could go back to bed. Alex was at the stove, a carton of eggs sat beside him and he was fixated on the pan. He was wearing a worn out old t-shirt with plaid flannel pyjama bottoms. It could have been a normal evening and he was just casually making a snack before bed, he definitely didn’t look like a man whose family was falling apart.
“Is he coming back in?”
I glanced back out on the porch; Peter was barely visible now but I could just make out his outline as he wandered down to the guest house. “No, he’s heading back to the bungalow.”
“Hm.”
I rolled my eyes and strode over to him; wrapping my arms around Alex’s waist I laid my head on his back. His heart was so loud and I could almost feel it against my cheek. I centered my breathing around his heartbeat. In. Out. In. Out. I nearly fell asleep as my own pulse slowed.
“Glykia mou, you need to go pack a change of clothes,” he said after a minute or so.
“What, why?” I asked, pulling back.
Alex flicked the stove off and divvied up the fried eggs onto plates. He had done bacon as well and already had the jug of orange juice on the counter. He pulled one of my hands away from his abdomen and kissed my knuckles before grabbing our plates and nodding in the direction of the table. He pulled out his own chair and took a seat but when I went to do the same thing he pulled me into his lap. I yelped and he laughed as I squirmed into a more comfortable position.
“Open,” he ordered, cutting up the egg. My cheeks heated but I complied and he fed me before taking a bite himself. “You’re easier to talk to with your mouth full,” he teased as he fed me again. I flipped him off and he just smirked. “We’re going on vacation, you don’t need to pack a lot, you can go shopping when we get there.”
“Where is ‘there’?” I asked, covering my mouth while I chewed.
“Wherever my baby girl wants to go.” He kissed my exposed shoulder; my shirt was slipping, and he took the opportunity to push it further, just brushing his lips against my skin and teasing me. “I have an invitation to some white-tie event in Rome, so we can go to Italy for a while, or really anywhere.”
Rome… My blush returned as I thought about our first visit there; fucking on the balcony overlooking the Tiber River, literally just dripping in diamonds that I’d worn to a party his friend hosted as he whispered in my ear about being a spoiled slut. It was the first gifts he had given me, everything before that had been purely financial, but that trip he gifted me a Harry Winston set of earrings, a necklace, and matching bracelets. I had a few pieces of what he had given me on hand, the rest was in the states in my safety deposit box.
“What if we went to Italy for the party and then somewhere else?” I asked dazedly. God his mouth was hypnotizing.
“Where would you like?”
The Bahamas. It would be fun to return to our last paradise, but I knew where I really wanted to go. “Barcelona.” The first place we went together after meeting in California. The first time we had sex. The first time I had sex.
“Barcelona,” he mused, tucking my hair behind my ear. “That would be a nice trip down memory lane…”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Italy and then Barcelona then?” I asked, hopeful.
“Whatever you want,” he agreed. “We can leave tonight or tomorrow morning—”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I interrupted quickly. “Lena and I… Well, I need to talk to her before I leave or I’ll feel guilty for the entire trip.” I took a sip of the juice and worked up the nerve to talk to him about the hard stuff. We couldn’t just ignore it. “Alex you can’t run away from them.”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now, Chloe,” he warned. “You know how I feel.”
“Alex, please—”
“No,” he snapped. “Stop.”
“No,” I retorted, sitting back just enough to glare at him. “I’m not doing this again, your family isn’t an off limits topic anymore and you need to work on shit with your son.” I didn’t give a fuck about Marie, but that was Peter’s mom so Alex needed to work on that relationship too.
Alex glared back. He was good at this game, but I was better. “I would think that after what you told me when we had sex a week ago that you wouldn’t care,” he said dryly.
“Of course, I care. I don’t want to think that I’m the reason you don’t have a family anymore.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw and a slow smile spread across his face. “You might not be my daughter-in-law anymore but I think you still count as family.”
I groaned and shoved at him playfully, he made like he was about to dump me off his lap and I squealed as I grabbed at him for support. “Just let me enjoy some time with you,” he whispered frantically against my collarbone. “Just a few days, a week or so, I just want to make up for all the lost time.”
That wouldn’t be so bad, right? Only a few days or a week and then we could come back and try and put the pieces together. We could figure out what exactly our relationship was now, and we could do it without being in the place where his son and wife had lived.
“Okay,” I agreed. “We can leave tomorrow afternoon.”