The Ex (18+ Only) [COMPLETED]

6: In Which She Goes with the Flow

6: In Which She Goes with the Flow

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Yaya probably doesn’t know. How could she? I told myself, tossing and turning for the millionth time that night. This wasn’t going to be my first sleepless night – or my last – that was for sure. Every night I crawled into this massive bed, I felt like screaming.

Sitting up in the dark, I kicked the covers off and blindly got to my feet, my eyes quickly getting used to the faint light of the moon. I crept to the glass door leading out onto the balcony and slid it open, stepping into the night-time air. Hugging myself, I watched the waves hug the solid walls of the hill and retreat. For one silly minute, I was caught in a moment of nostalgia.

This had been our honeymoon room. Days and nights of passionate, heated sex and romance had made Kástro a place of happiness. Now it was just an empty shell of memories.

I shouldn’t even be thinking about that.

Yaya had put me in the exact same room Kon and I had made ours over the course of that blissful month. Out of the twenty boudoirs in the castle, she’d picked that exact same room. She couldn’t have known. She just couldn’t have, but, if she did, she was a cruel woman.

I watched the sea for God-knows-how-long before I eventually returned to bed and fell into a dreamless slumber.

***

“You still haven’t mentioned any special man in your life,” said Yaya, taking a long drag of her cigarette. A plume of smoke escaped her lips as she leaned back in her chaise-longue and let out a satisfied sigh.

I reddened. “There isn’t one.” A reprimand was on the tip of my tongue. At her advanced age, Konstantin’s grandmother shouldn’t have been smoking. Hell, she shouldn’t have been smoking, period.

Yaya surprised me by letting out a raspy laugh. “Christos seems to think otherwise. He mentioned a schoolteacher?”

“He talked to you about me?” I asked in disbelief.

“He tells me everything, Francesca.”

I couldn’t see her eyes through her Ray-Bans but I was absolutely positive that Konstantin hadn’t told her about how I’d succumbed to his recent sexual advances on many an occasion. Yaya was the type of woman to just come out and say it and the fact that she wasn’t meant that she had no idea.

“Then you must know that there is no one,” I said simply. “Your grandson made sure of that.” I leaned forward and picked up my glass of wine. It was an old Bourgogne pinot noir, Konstantin’s favourite selection. It had been the wine of choice on our wedding day and I'd never forgotten the taste. Chugging it down was like having the taste of him on my tongue.

“Surely you want to settle down, Francesca.”

I was only twenty-five. “Settling down” wasn’t exactly expected of me. Yet. What was it with old people these days? Why were they outliving their children? My mother’s mother, Abuela Tina, was a few years older than Yaya, yet she regularly got down on her knees to do the gardening in her Suffolk cottage. When she’d gotten pneumonia last year, I’d been afraid that I was going to lose the only family I had left. She didn’t prod me into marriage.

“I’ve done the marriage thing,” I said flippantly, staring out at the horizon. “It just wasn’t for me.” It felt strange to discuss my failed marriage to Konstantin with his grandmother.