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He caught the expression on his face in the mirror and stopped. He looked dark, feral. He looked...like his father. With that insatiable glint in his eye. Narcissistic and intent only on his own self-satisfaction. Uncaring if someone might be innocent, pure. Like his mother. Like Sylvie.
He was no better than his father. This proved it more than any teenage humiliation with a porn actress. Something cold settled down over Arkim’s heart. Something hard and familiar.
He went back out to the main area of the tent and saw Sylvie sitting on the side of the bed, the sheet wrapped around her body. She looked at him over her shoulder and the dark hardness inside Arkim nearly split apart because she looked so forlorn.
He reached for his trousers and pulled them on, irrational anger growing deep down inside him and crawling upwards to catch him in its hot grip.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He walked around to stand in front of her.
She looked shell-shocked. Arkim drove the emotion down.
‘Why?’ It burst out of him like the firing of a rifle.
Sylvie flinched, her hands clutching the sheet to her chest. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d notice. I almost told you...but I didn’t know how.’
Arkim felt as if all of his ugliness was exposed. He sneered. ‘How about, Hey, Arkim, I’m a virgin, by the way...be gentle with me.’
Sylvie stood up then, and Arkim could see how she trembled. The exposed skin of her shoulder and upper chest was very white. Delicate. Fragile. And he’d been like a rutting bull in a china shop.
He wanted to smash something.
‘I didn’t think you’d notice and I didn’t think it was important.’
‘Well, I did notice and it is important.’ Arkim stalked away and then back, folding his arms across his chest. ‘You’re twenty-eight and you work in a strip club—how the hell are you still a virgin?’
Sylvie hitched her chin. ‘It’s not a strip club. And I just...was never interested before now.’
She started to look around for her things and Arkim caught her by the arm. The anger inside him was a turbulent mass. Everything in him wanted to lash out, to blame someone—blame her. If she’d told him...
What? asked a snide voice. Would you have let her go?
Never.
‘Why, Sylvie? And it’s not just because you weren’t interested. You’re a sexual being—it oozes from you. I had no idea. If I had—’
She wrenched her arm free, fire flashing in her eyes now, any hint of vulnerability gone. ‘You’d have what? Declined the offer?’
She spied her robe on the ground and grabbed it, letting the sheet fall as she tugged it on—but not before Arkim saw that luscious body and his own reacted forcibly.
Then she stopped and glared at him. ‘You want to know the psychological motivation behind my still being a virgin? Really?’
Suddenly he didn’t. But she went on.
‘My father rejected me as a child. My mother had died—his beloved wife—and I resembled her so much that he couldn’t bear to look at me. So he sent me away. He’s never been able to look at me since then without pain or grief. The truth is he would have switched me for her any day of the week.’
Arkim’s chest ached. ‘How can you know that?’
‘Because I overheard him talking to someone. I heard him say how he couldn’t bear the sight of me—that I was a constant reminder that she was gone and that if he could he’d have her back instead of me.’
Arkim reached out, but she slapped his hand away.
‘And as for why I decided to let you be my first lover...? Well, maybe I felt bizarrely secure in the fact that you’d already rejected me on pretty much every level that counts. When you’ve protected yourself against rejection your whole life, it’s almost a relief not to have to fear it any more.’
She stepped back, the robe pulled so tightly around her that every curve was lovingly delineated, and then she left.
* * *
Sylvie was so angry and humiliated she could have cried. But her anger kept the tears at bay. What on earth had possessed her to spill her soul to Arkim like that? As if he cared about the sob story of her relationship with her father. Or about her deepest inner fears of being rejected. She’d never even spoken to Sophie of any of this, not wanting to burden her sister with a negative view of their father.
