"Then why did you leave me?" he said bitterly, it seemed no matter how many times she said it, no matter how many reasons there were, he still didn't accept a single damn one of them. Because they weren't fair. "If you didn't laugh about me, cause I'm still pretty sure he did, the way he talked to me in Bangkok, before he abandoned you I mean. He thought I was a joke, that I didn't deserve you and I couldn't help but think that's how it must have been. You and him thinking I'd gone as far as I could, that I'd lost it. And I had come close, I'll tell you that for nothing. I lost you in Merano, I lost my title, and it wasn't even fair. He never beat me. Not really. I just couldn't fight back anymore. When I lost you that was it."
It was true, he'd spent months wallowing in it before Walter had tracked him down. The dethroned king. He'd talked of revenge. Talked of finding a way to make the commie and his mistress pay. And Freddie had figured they deserved it. They'd treated him like nothing, and who knew, maybe she'd realize that, maybe she'd been dreadfully unhappy. But that wasn't how it had worked out. It had been so much worse than all that.
And now she was trying to joke with him, was that sympathy, talking about cleaning up after his outbursts. He didn't know if he was angry about that or not yet. "You knew they were to make us more money, you knew that, let them think of me as the next Bobby, let them think of me as the one to hate. I was winning and people love a winner, and they love controversy. I was doing everything right except for you. I didn't know you hated it that much because you never tried to tell me. Not really, you went along with it most of the time. Till that match. It changed then and how was I supposed to know. I didn't know how unhappy you were." Freddie finally pulled his hand back after she'd done so, he drank down the dregs of his coffee and got to his feet. "But we should start back. Get you properly settled, conversation like this its not helping either of us now is it?" he confirmed.
If he was honest he wanted her back, that hadn't changed. But he was going to do it right this time, take his time, make sure she saw he'd changed in a lot of ways. She should have tried harder and maybe now she would. Maybe things would change for them. "Promise me you'll talk to me, if I do something wrong, if I go too far, if I hurt you. You tell me, maybe you'd still be mine if you'd done that." He truly believed that she would be again. But he wasn't going to tell her that yet. There was no sense risking it.