روايات بقلم kivierichard1

"Nyx, baby, please just hear me out." The voice came from behind me while I was locking up the restaurant days later, I didn't need to turn around to know who it was. Sven. I turned slowly, keeping the door at my back. "What are you doing here?" "I came to apologize." He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, flowers dangling from one. "I know showing up like this is crazy, but you weren't answering my calls or texts. I needed to see you face to face." "I wasn't answering because I have nothing to say to you." "But I have things to say to you." He took a step closer and I fought the urge to back into the door. "I've changed, Nyx. I've been seeing a therapist, working through my issues. I realize now how badly I treated you and I want to make it right." "How did you even find me?" I asked. "I have my ways." He smiled like this was charming instead of disturbing. "Anna posted a photo from that café the other day. You were in the background." The fact that he'd

"Nyx! We've missed you so much!" Anna threw her arms around me the moment I stepped into the café, nearly knocking the breath out of me. Marco was right behind her, grinning like we hadn't just seen each other two nights ago when I'd made a complete fool of myself. "It's only been a few days," I said, extricating myself from Anna's enthusiastic hug. "A few days too long." She pulled me toward their usual corner table. "We need to do this more often. You've been locked in that restaurant like a hermit." "I've been working." "You've been hiding," Marco corrected, sliding a coffee across the table to me. "From what, we're not sure yet but Anna has theories." "I do not have theories." "You absolutely have theories. You texted me seventeen theories last night." I took a long sip of coffee, letting their familiar banter wash over me. This was normal, this was safe, this didn't involve stepdads I'd kissed in moments of weakness and who'd been avoiding me for three days straight. "Ea

"Stop looking at me like that." Gus's words cut through the quiet of the restaurant kitchen where we'd been working side by side for the past hour, me prepping tomorrow's sauce while he replaced something else in the kitchen. It has been three weeks since I'd arrived in Sicily, three weeks of this dance we were doing, pretending the tension between us didn't exist. I looked up from the tomatoes I was crushing, meeting his eyes across the kitchen. "Like what?" "Like you're trying to figure out something about me." "Maybe I am." I went back to my work, my hands moving automatically. "You show up here every day, fix things and refuse to let me pay you. Normal people don't do that." "Who says I'm normal?" He shrugged "Exactly my point." He huffed something that might have been a laugh and returned to scraping grout. We fell into comfortable silence that should have felt wrong between a stepdaughter and her mother's husband but somehow didn't. I'd stopped trying to hate hi

"You can't avoid me forever, Nyx, It's a small town." Gus's voice drifted down from somewhere above me while I stood in the restaurant kitchen, glaring at the ancient industrial oven that had decided today was the perfect day to die. Three days after the funeral and pretending the man living upstairs didn't exist, and now the universe was forcing my hand. "Watch me try," I called back, kicking the oven door for good measure. His footsteps creaked across the ceiling, then down the stairs. I didn't turn around when he entered the kitchen, didn't acknowledge his presence even though I could feel him taking up space behind me. "That model stopped being manufactured in 1987," he said. "You're not going to fix it by assaulting it." "I wasn't asking for your help." "I know. You've made that very clear." He moved past me, crouching down to examine the oven's wiring. "But unless you want to explain to your customers why there's no food today, you might want to let me look." I

"Your mother is dead, Nyx. You need to come home."The words were the last thing I expected to hear while elbow-deep in someone else's dirty espresso cups, my third shift of the day barely halfway done. I stood there in the back of the café, trying to process what my mother's lawyer had just said.Dead? My mother was dead? "Miss Torelio? Are you still there?"I realized I hadn't responded or even breathed. "When?" My voice came out flat. "Three days ago, it was a quick heart attack."Three days. She'd been dead for three days and I was just finding out now because I'd been too busy chasing a dream that was slowly starving me to death in this expensive city that didn't care if I lived or died. "The funeral is tomorrow," the lawyer continued. "And there's the matter of the restaurant. She left it to you." The restaurant was a tiny, rundown place in Sicily that barely made enough to keep the lights on. My mother had poured her life into that restaurant after my father died, and n