Isn't It Bromantic (Bromance Book Club #4) - Lyssa Kay Adams Page 0,33
Elena took one step forward and threw her arms around his waist.
The air vacated his lungs in one exhale, and Vlad quickly returned her embrace. “It’s going to be okay now, Lenochka,” he whispered, using her nickname. “It’s going to be okay.”
“We got married right away. Very small ceremony. Just my family. I thought she would come back here with me immediately, but there was delay in getting her visa approved. Probably because of her father, but that was never explained. I had to get back to America for the start of the summer training camp, so I had to come back without her at first. She finally came over a month later.”
The next part was difficult. “But when she finally got here, she . . . things weren’t easy. She cried a lot. Locked herself in her room. Wouldn’t talk to me or open up to me. It was like we were strangers. When she said she wanted to go to college in Chicago, how could I say no? I thought it would be good for her. She was obviously miserable here with me, and her visa does not allow her to get a job. I thought she just needed space. I thought that if I was patient, she would eventually come back to me and we could officially start our lives together. I was wrong. She told me at your wedding that she wants to return to Russia and be a journalist like her father.”
“I don’t understand,” Mack said, shaking his head. “In all that time, you guys never talked about the future? About what this marriage would eventually be?”
“There are a lot of misunderstandings between Elena and me.”
“Horseshit,” Mack snapped. “Misunderstandings can be fixed with a simple conversation. You’ve had plenty of time for that. So something tells me that’s not really what’s going on here.”
“People only let misunderstandings linger when they’re afraid to talk about them,” Malcolm said, nodding in that annoying we’ve got you figured out way of his. “Or when they’re too afraid to hear the truth.”
“Even if that were true at one time, it’s too late,” Vlad said.
The guys exchanged long looks. He knew those looks. He’d been in on those looks before. The guys were starting to read something into all of this, and that meant they were going to try to make him read something into all of this, and that would be a mistake because there was nothing to read here. And even if there were, he’d already skipped to the end of the book, and it was not a happy ending. Something he would need to remind himself repeatedly over the next several weeks.
A tear dripped down his cheek. “I know what you are thinking, my friends, but this isn’t a situation the book club can fix. There is no manual for this one.”
“That’s why you’ve been avoiding us,” Noah said. “Isn’t it?”
Vlad looked at his lap. “It was too humiliating. I couldn’t tell you the truth.”
“But that’s what we do in book club, man,” Malcolm said. “And I know you didn’t mean to deceive us maliciously, but I feel a little betrayed right now.”
Yan pouted. “After everything we’ve been through, the way we’ve all spilled our guts over the years, and you never once told us what was going on in your own marriage?”
“I’m sorry,” Vlad said. “I did not want to burden you. Not with everything you’ve all been dealing with.” That, at least, was true. The things these men had endured over the past few years—from Gavin’s marriage troubles, to Mack and Liv’s struggle to get together, to Noah and Alexis’s fight to turn friendship into love—had always made his own issues seem small.
“How can you say that?” Mack crouched next to the bed and met him eye to eye. “We’re a family, Vlad.”
“We’re brothers,” Malcolm said, clapping a hand on Mack’s shoulder. “We are always here for you.”
“I’d b-be divorced right now if not for you,” Gavin said, his lifelong stutter emerging with his emotion. “D-do you really think I wouldn’t drop everything to do the same for you?”
Vlad’s eyes blurred with tears. He might have screwed up so many other things in life, but finding these guys, joining them in their effort to become better men, was the best decision he’d ever made. “I’m sorry,” Vlad said, voice tight. “I should have told you. But it would not have made a difference.”