Page 194 of Romeo

“I know.” I almost laughed because I could hear exactly how insane it sounded coming out of my own mouth. “I never believed the damn thing either. I thought it was family folklore—something the mamas told around the dinner table to make generations of questionable decisions sound romantic.”

“At least we agree on something.”

“My mother met my father when she was seventeen. Aunt Marabella met her husband at fifteen. Uncle John and Auntie Gail were barely seventeen when they ran away together. Granddaddy Pierre met his wife when she was nineteen and he was thirty-two. It happens over and over in my family.”

“And that makes this okay?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Fiona makes whatever happens between us okay or not okay. The curse only explains why I knew.”

King watched me without saying anything.

I’d spent months trying to separate those two things inside my own head. Knowing what I wanted had been easy from the first night. Learning that Fiona’s uncertainty mattered just as much as my certainty had taken longer.

“The first time I saw her, something changed,” I said. “Call it the curse. Call it instinct. Call me a fucking lunatic. I don’t care. But it happened.”

“So you took one look at a seventeen-year-old girl and decided she was your soulmate.”

“Yes.”

“And you expect me to be fine with that.”

“I expect you to listen to what happened after.”

King’s jaw flexed.

I continued. “I went home. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t ask her to wait for me. I didn’t tell her she belonged to me. She turned eighteen, and I still didn’t do any of those things.”

“You’ve been talking to her for months.”

“Yeah.”

“Every fucking day?”

“Pretty much.”

His expression darkened again. “And you don’t think that’s pursuing her?”

“I became her friend.”

King scoffed.

“I’m not pretending I didn’t want more. I did. I do. But Fiona needed the chance to figure out whether she wanted more without me shoving my certainty down her throat.”

He stared at me for a moment before shaking his head. “You’re thirty-one. She’s eighteen. You’ve had thirteen more years to figure out who the fuck you are. She just graduated high school.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying that like it makes it better.”

“It doesn’t make it better. It makes it something I have to pay attention to.”

King paced away from me again. For several seconds, only the muffled noise from outside reached the room.

Then he turned back. “Cash is thirteen years older than Kytten.”

I almost smiled. “So you noticed.”

“Don’t get fucking cute. I had plenty of problems with that.”