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He harrumphed. “I never rampage.”
“Of course not. You’re too organized and premeditated for that. I should have said ‘incursion.’ That is your MO, whether it’s on a personal or a global level.”
“By definition, an incursion is hated, resisted. I remember nothing but…approval, encouragement. On a personal level.”
“You have that effect on the people you take over—the super power of Stockholm syndrome. It took me a year and a half to realize what you did to me.”
He went totally still. “What did I do to you?”
She looked at him as if he’d once strangled her cat and didn’t remember it. She finally shook her head, let out a rough chuckle. “You didn’t even realize I dyed my hair.”
“And that made me…insensitive? Negligent? The hair on your head looked so natural with your tan. Thanks to your grooming habits, there was none anywhere else to give me a clue. What else did I allegedly do to you?”
She shook her head again. “You exist in a universe starring you, don’t you? Other people are the bit players who exist just so you can bounce your lines off them.”
“Why are you saying that when you know it wasn’t true…then?”
“Listen, I’m not criticizing you or laying blame…”
“No? You have a strange way of not doing that. The way you tell it, I was an egocentric, exploitative bastard. Come to think of it, I do remember a comment you hurled at me on your way out of my life. About my so-called self-absorption. Is that how you rationalize the way you ended things between us?”
“‘Things’ would have ended between us sooner rather than later, and you know it. I did us both a favor—”
“Why don’t you speak for yourself?”
“Fine, I did myself a favor by not sticking around to experience the deterioration of ‘things’ before their inevitably nasty end.”
He stared into the twin storms of her eyes.
Was this her admission that there’d never been more than self-interest behind her actions? Or was it self-preservation? Her words could be interpreted that way. Had his rage at the time made her fear he’d take his bitterness out on her?
What was he thinking? Why was he debating this yet again? He’d admitted there was no way to find out the truth for sure. And what did it even matter? That was then. This was now.
He was taking now. And when the end came this time, he wouldn’t spend eight more years agonizing over the reasons why. The whys would be of his own orchestration. And his own timing.
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