bound | reus

23.

Good, Marco wished he could say. Tell them that you called her a worthless whore. That you said you wished she'd been murdered by her own family. That every blow she'd given you, even if it resulted in the death of our unborn child, was what you deserved. She was blackmailing him into silence, and in return, she would offer hers. The public didn't know that Romessa had attacked Jessica. They knew there'd been a catfight of sorts, and there were rumors circulating that she was the one to cause the miscarriage, but Bella and Julian had already forced the guests to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. All that kept Jessica from ruining Romessa's career was Marco's distance from her, and as much as it hurt him to stay away from Romessa, it would hurt him more to see the ways her life would be ruined if the world knew the truth. So he remained silent, and he stopped trying to contact her, and he let the world believe that he and Jessica were the happily married couple that they absolutely weren't.

It was Christmas Eve. Much to Marco's relief, Jessica was stuck at the airport in Los Angeles, while Marco had already taken Lucia to his family's house. Currently, Marco was smoking a cigarette on the large balcony of his Westfalenpark apartment—he'd gone there to escape Jessica's scent, which plagued the mansion they lived in.

God, he thought, Where are you, Romessa? The days and weeks were a void nothingness without her around. He would give anything for a signal, or a glimpse, or even the chance to hear the sound of her voice. If he missed her especially, he'd watch one of her old interviews—she was so well-spoken and eloquent; all it took was listening to know that she was beyond well-educated. She spoke of how she wanted to use her technology to one day make the world a better place for people like her—for refugees and immigrants, for people of color, for women. It was unfathomable how life had chewed her up and spit her out—she was the most pure-hearted person Marco knew, and she deserved everything good in the world, but she'd received the exact opposite.

It was his fault, and he knew it. If he could've just kept his hands off of her—if he could've ignored her beauty when they met at his mother's house that fateful night two years ago—then none of this would've happened. Romessa wasn't the same person now that she was when he initially loved her, but it didn't matter to him. Earlier that day, he'd spotted a daisy growing in the cracks of his driveway; a rarity, given the snowy and bitter cold of the German climate. He picked it up, allowed it to remind him of Romessa, how rare her beauty was. But then he began to pick the petals off of it, one by one. Although it was missing several parts of it with each petal he picked, it was still just as beautiful. But eventually he'd plucked off all the petals until it was barren, nothing left but the small yellow center, the green stem which held it up. He'd transformed a beautiful and rare flower, one which emerged from the concrete and drew despite the snow, into something barren and broken. He'd done the same to Romessa.

But in that moment, he realized that even though it'd been used, touched and left, it was still the same flower that it was before. It still held the same beauty that it'd had when it possessed all of its petals. And even once he placed it back on the ground, he thought, so what? It was full of potential, full of beauty, full of strength—full of an essence that no other flower in the entire world could possess. Marco sighed, lit another cigarette, and answered a call from his mother—though it was technically Lucia, who was calling from Manuela's phone. "Papa, when are you coming? You promised we would make cookies for Santa."

Marco bit his lip. "I'm sorry, Lulu. I forgot, but I'll come soon, okay?"

Lucia let out a sassy groan. "Fine, but please hurry! Bye, papa. I love you!" Lucia kissed the receiver and left no time for Marco to respond before she hung up, causing him to smile a little before he placed his phone back in his pocket—but not before doing an instinctual check on his social media feeds. Practically all he saw on his explore pages were posts about Romessa; those algorithms were damn good at figuring out what he was thinking about. In wake of her virtual absence over the past few weeks, nearly everyone had been coming up with theories about where she could've been. But one account had saved the outrageous rumors, instead posting a collage of photos from Romessa's old Instagram—the one she'd had when she met Marco. He couldn't stop revisiting that post, admiring and reminding himself of why it was so easy to fall in love with her back then, and even easier now.