“I felt like a liar. I don’t know how else to put it. I felt like — I couldn’t come around the workshop or you, if he was there.” She wrung her fingers together. “Tony, the fact that he wouldn’t acknowledge me made me feel as though I was supposed to be a secret. From him!” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Have you seen — I’m sure Jarvis has a recording of what happened. Tony, Dummy was never going to be ready. The way he spoke, when he didn’t have any idea at all that I was his … ‘competition’. He didn’t want it to work. And I,” she sighed, “was impatient. I felt left out and unwanted and like I was enabling you to cheat on him.”
“I was not cheating,” he snapped, instantly defensive, but it drained away quickly to a sort of pensive, sullen quiet as he thought over it, arms crossed and looking at the tiles of the balcony. …Maybe it had been cheating, inadvertently. He didn’t want to talk about this. They didn’t come to Dubai to talk about this. Sure, they hadn’t really dealt with the issue yet, but that was how Tony dealt with things; by not dealing with them until they stopped bothering him. Eventually, though, he did look back up at her, almost like he hardly dared to. “Are we sure there was no coaxing him around?” ‘Are we sure we couldn’t have just been happy for five minutes?’ went unsaid.
“I can’t answer that, Tony!” Summer’s voice cracked, half-anger half-anguish. “That was the last reason I went to talk to him. I want to coax him, I wanted to show that I was a person worthy of you. Of him. And the first /fucking/ thing he did was threaten to kill himself!” She called half a dozen sparks out of the air, swirling them around her hands, trying to hold her temper. She went on, bitter, “He was manipulating you, Tony. Using your emotions, your love for him, as a chokehold, a spiked collar. ‘Let me possess you or I’m going to kill myself.’
“I’m not perfect. I’m jealous, short-tempered, I don’t think I’m pretty, and the ability I have makes me push aside my morals and ethics far too often. I have a smart mouth and a sharp tongue, I’m lazy as hell, and I set my expectations too high and don’t voice them enough.” The sparks swirled over to Tony, swooping around him in wild loops. “But by all the gods that ever were, I’ll love you just as you are, no matter whom you love or how or any other stupid thing. I’m sorry I was impatient. I’m sorry you got hurt. I’m sorry you had to choose like that.” The sparks cascaded down, vanishing before they hit the ground. “I guess the nightmares are my punishment, the price I pay for loving someone like you.”