Gabriel’s Inferno Trilogy by Sylvain Reynard Page 0,214

to keep her trepidation from showing on her face.

“The year she arrived was my most difficult. I was working on my dissertation along with being a teaching assistant to a very demanding professor. I was staying up all hours writing and getting very little sleep. That was when I started doing cocaine.” His gaze dropped, and he fidgeted with his hands, drumming atop the table.

“I used to go drinking with the guys from my program on the weekends. We’d get into fights, on occasion.” He laughed. “I wasn’t always on my best behavior, and sometimes we’d go out looking for trouble. It paid off, though, with Simon.”

He leaned forward in his chair, resting his forearms on top of his knees. Julia watched his legs bounce nervously. With every sentence he grew more restless, indicating that he was approaching closer and closer to the edge of the abyss in which he had hidden his secret.

“One night someone passed around some coke. I wondered if it would help me stay up so I could work. That’s how it started. I used it as a stimulant, and I alternated its use with alcohol. I thought because I went to Harvard, I was a respectable recreational drug user. I thought I could control it.” He sighed deeply and the tone of his voice dropped. “I was wrong.”

“Paulina was constantly around. She’d knock on my door at all hours because I was always awake. I’d write, and she’d sit on my couch and read or make Russian tea. She started cooking for me. Eventually, I gave her a key since she was over all the time. When I was doing coke, I didn’t eat much. She was the only reason I ate anything nutritious at all.”

Now Gabriel’s voice took on a darker tone, as if the guilt inside him was clawing to get out. He read the question in her eyes and his jaw set.

“She knew about the cocaine. At first I tried to hide it, but she was always there. Finally, I gave up and started doing it in front of her. She didn’t care.”

Now he avoided Julia’s gaze. He looked ashamed. “She’d lived a sheltered life. She was completely innocent about drugs and a lot of other things. I was a corrupting influence. One night, she stripped out of her clothes and suggested we snort lines off one another. I wasn’t thinking straight, obviously, and she was naked…”

He exhaled slowly and shook his head, keeping his eyes on his fidgeting hands. “I won’t make excuses. It was my fault. She was a nice girl who was used to getting what she wanted. And she wanted me—the drug addict downstairs.” He rubbed at his chin with the back of his hand, and Julia suddenly realized he hadn’t shaved that morning.

He squirmed in his chair. “The next morning I told her I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t interested in being monogamous. The coke made me crave sex, although it eventually impaired my satisfaction. Karma, I suppose. I was used to being with different women every weekend. But when I told her all of this, she said she didn’t care. No matter what I said or did, or how much of an asshole I was to her, she kept coming around. So that’s how it was. She acted as if she was my girlfriend, and I acted as if she was a convenient lay. I didn’t care about her, I only cared about myself and the drugs and the damned dissertation.”

Julia felt her heart sink. She knew that Gabriel had never wanted for female companionship. He was a handsome man who was sensual in the extreme. Women fell all over themselves in order to attract his attention. Julia wasn’t pleased about his past, but she’d accepted it and told herself that it didn’t matter.

But Paulina was different. She’d known this intuitively from the first time she heard the name. Even though she believed Gabriel was no longer involved with her, what he was beginning to describe was much more serious than a one-night stand. The green specter of jealousy curled around her heart, squeezing it.

Gabriel stood up and started pacing, back and forth and back and forth. “Everything came to a crashing halt when she told me that she was pregnant. I accused her of trying to entrap me and told her to get rid of it.” His face contorted with emotion, and he looked as if he were in pain.

“She cried. She got on her