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He had to end these sublime moments before he…expressed how moved he was by them, shattering them instead.
He first had to try to tell her what her belief meant to him. “Your trust in me is a privilege and a responsibility that I will always nurture with pride and pleasure.”
Her gaze suddenly escaped his, flowed down his body.
By the time they rose back, he was hard all over. Thankfully, her eyes were intent on his, full of contemplation.
“Though you’re so big, with no doubt proportionate strength, it never occurred to me you’d be that capable of physical violence.”
The vice that had released his heart suddenly clamped around it again. “Does this…disturb you?”
Her laugh rang out. “Hello? Have you met me? It thrills me. I would have loved to see you decimate a few thugs and neuter some bullies.”
His hands, his whole being itched, ached. He just wanted to squeeze the hell out of her. He wanted to contain her, assimilate her and never let her go again.
He again held back with all he had, then drawled, “And to think something so minuscule could be so bloodthirsty.”
She grinned impishly. “You’ve got a lot to learn about just what this deceptive exterior hides, big man.”
Though her words tickled him and her smile was unfettered, he was still unsettled. “Is it really no problem for you to change your perception of me from someone who’s too civilized to use his brute strength to someone who relishes physical violence?”
She shook her head, her long, thick hair falling over her slight shoulders down to her waist. “I don’t believe you ‘relish’ it, but you’ll always do ‘what works best.’ At the time, violence was the one thing that would keep the sharks away. So you used it, and to maximum efficiency, as is your way with everything. I’m only lamenting that there’s no video documentation of those events for me to cheer over.”
The delight she always struck in his heart overflowed i
n an unbridled guffaw. “I can just see you, grabbing the popcorn and hollering at the screen for more gore. But I might be able to do something about your desire to see me on a rampage. I can pull some strings at the prison and get some surveillance-camera footage.”
She jumped up to her knees on the couch, nimble and keen as a cat. “Yes, yes, please!”
“Uh…I’m already regretting making the offer. You might think you can withstand what you’d see, but it was no staged fight like those you see on TV. There was no showmanship involved, just brutality with only the intent to survive at whatever cost.”
She tucked her legs as if she was starting a meditation session, her gaze ultraserious. “That only makes it even more imperative to see it, Aram. It was the ugliest, harshest, most humiliating test you’ve ever endured and your deepest scar. I need to experience it in more than imagination, even if in the cold distance of past images, so I’d be able to share it with you in the most profound way I need to.”
Stirred through to his soul, he swallowed a jagged lump of gratitude. “You just have to want it and it’s done.”
“Oh, I so want it. Thank you.” Before he pounced with a thank-you, she probed, “You’ve really been needing to confide this all this time. Why didn’t you?”
She was killing him with her ability to see right into his depths. She was reviving him with it, reanimating him.
“I was…ashamed. Of my weakness and stupidity. I wanted to prove to Shaheen and his brothers that I didn’t need their help after all, that I’d make it on my own. And I got myself involved in something that looked too good to be true because I was in such a hurry to do it. And I paid the price.”
She tilted her head to the side, as if to look at him from another perspective. “I can’t even imagine what it was like. When you were arrested, when you were sentenced, when you realized you might have destroyed your future, maybe even tainted that of your family. That year in prison…”
He wanted to tell her that she was imagining it just fine, that her compassion was dissipating the lingering darkness of that period, erasing the scars it had left behind. But his throat was closed, his voice gone.
The empathy in her gaze rose until it razed him. “But I can understand the ordeal was a link in the chain that led to your eventual decline. Not the experience itself as much as the reinforcement of your segregation. You couldn’t share such a life-changing experience with your loved ones, mainly because you wanted to protect them from the agony they would have felt on your behalf. But that very inability to bare your soul to them made you pull further away emotionally, and actually exacerbated your solitude.”
When he finally found his voice, it was a hoarse, ragged whisper. “See? You do know everything.”
Her eyes gentled even more. “Not everything. I’m still unable to fill some spaces. You were going strong for years after your imprisonment. Was that only halawet el roh?”
Literally sweetness of the soul. What was said in Zohayd to describe a state of deceptive vigor, a clinging to life when warding off inevitable deterioration or death.
“Now that you mention it, that’s the best explanation. I came out of prison with a rabid drive to wipe out what happened, to right my path, to make up for lost time. I guess I was trying to run hard and fast enough to escape the memories, to accumulate enough success and security to fix the chasm the experience had ripped inside me and that threatened to tear me open at any moment.”
Her eyes now soothed him, had him almost begging her to let her hand join in their caress. “Johara told me you were at the peak of fitness, at least physically, three years ago when you attended their wedding in Zohayd. From her observations, you started deteriorating about two years ago. Was there a triggering event? Like when it sank in that they were a family now? Did their togetherness—especially with your parents’ reconciliation—leave you feeling more alone than ever?”
He squeezed his eyes on a spasm of poignancy. “You get me so completely. You get me better than I get myself.”
