Chapter 50 MICELI

We are not a Romance .

But if we aren't, what are we? Because the woman who just climbed off my bike and walked into her home without saying a word to me, is more than just a means to an end.

That twenty-one-year-old college student makes me feel things I thought I could no longer feel. The heart that I would swear had atrophied in my soul, is beating again.

Black it might be. Stained with sin. But it beats.

Róise is more than my sweet flower. She is sensuality wrapped in innocence. She is a conscience I thought long dead. She is a smile when everything around me is pain and destruction.

She is a hope. My hope.

I swore I would never fall for a woman like my brother and my cousin.

But only a weak man denies the truth when it stares him in the face.

Róise doesn't just give me her body, she sparks tendrils of expectation for the future. New eyes to look at the world, even this dark one we were both born into.

She is not my light, because that implies she could be turned off.

She is everything good that infuses the center of my being.

And she thinks I'm an asshole.

Which? Is the truth.

But she will learn to love this asshole. Because I will not be in this obsession alone.