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“I may have already relapsed, I just haven’t been checking up to find out. I may have cancerous recurrences all over my body as we speak…”
“And you think I care? What’s your worst-case scenario? That you won’t last a year? I was trading my life for two months with you. What do you think I’d trade for a year?”
Too much. Too much. Love, gratitude, pride, agony, desperation. He staggered around, tears pummeling their way out of his very depths again. “No, no, no, Gulnar. I’m not putting you through this. And I’m selfish, too. I can’t bear seeing anything but admiration and burning hunger in your eyes. I can’t see worry and pity and anguish replace that. Dying is fine by me, it’s torture I can’t stand. You said so yourself during the hostage situation. I’ve been through every physical and psychological agony. And you know what? They’re nothing compared to the month away from you, nothing compared to fearing for you on all counts. You may think you can bear it, seeing me fade away, but you won’t. I can’t—I won’t do that to you!”
“Do you love me?”
Her tear-drenched, suffocating question splintered his agitation, silenced everything. He swung back to her, saw his devastation reflected in her every quivering facial muscle. “Love you? Love you? No, I don’t love you, Gulnar…” She lurched as if he’d shot her, and he roared with it all. “I love cold days and cast skies, I love the night and children’s laughter, I love an exhausting workout. I love cats and horses and dolphins. I love a couple of friends. I thought I loved my family. And, hell, yes, I love life and I love myself. You, you—I have no name for what I feel for you. It’s all that I can feel, all that I never knew is there to feel. It’s infinite and unconditional. It’s blinding, agonizing, crippling, it’s exquisite and illuminating and empowering. It’s unadulterated ecstasy and pure torment—it’s all there. It’s everything. I’m only sorry it is so potent it made you love me.”
“You’re sorry I’m alive?” He jerked at her intensity then at her rough grab for him. He was already so shaky, he lost his balance. They went down together on the mattress. She kissed him, hard, then harder and harder, all over his face, her tears filling his eyes, his mouth, his soul. She expended her frenzy and slumped on him, her lips at his healed wound, her bleeding words filling his chest. “I lived only when I loved you. Now I realize it’s because you loved me, too. I don’t care for survival any more. Either I live, and that’s with you, or I don’t.”
He went death still. Pain was flooding his left side. Was he having a massive coronary? Would he die of too much love, in her arms? He wasn’t doing that to her either. “No, Gulnar. No.” His rasp was almost inaudible. “You had the right idea all your life, not getting close so it wouldn’t hurt to lose. I won’t stay close so it will kill you to lose me. When I’m gone, you won’t know what happens to me, may even hope I’m OK, and you’ll always remember me as I am now.”
He tremblingly put her away and she clawed at him, weeping and wailing. “The only thing that will kill me is losing you this way. Have mercy, Dante, don’t leave me, not now that I know you love me, not this way…”
He jumped to his feet, grabbed his shirt, his backpack. He’d run. Run until he dropped. Then he’d lie there and let go. He’d just end this.
He escaped her snatching hands, long deaf so he wouldn’t hear her wails, snapped the tent’s zip down and ran out—and into six masked, armed men.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE men shoved him back into the tent, ramming him with the barrels of their guns. He shouted out the only thing screaming in his mind.
“Put something on, Gulnar, now!”
He struggled with them, giving her time to dress. In the end he stumbled back under their combined weight and violence, spilled from the inky night outside back into the light of their tent, glaringly artificial by comparison.
His gaze sought her. She’d slipped into her track pants, was now quakingly buttoning up her shirt. Their eyes collided, clung, communicated.
Don’t worry. I’ll be OK, his said.
I’m not worried. We’re together, hers answered.
One of the masked men barked something Dante recognized as Badovnan.
“He’s saying we’re their prisoners. That they will avenge their brothers in arms,” Gulnar whispered.
Dante laughed, loud and taunting. “How predictable.”
The man barked again, at Gulnar. She said something, translated most probably. And the man turned on him, rammed him hard in his chest.
Dante gritted his teeth. “Gulnar, tell him, I’m the one who brought their terrorist operation down and caused the deaths of two dozen of their comrades.”
Gulnar shook her head and he snarled, “Tell him, Gulnar.”
She held his eyes for one more second then turned to the man. Her rapid Badovnan was cut short when the man swung the back of his hand and slapped her so hard she staggered and tumbled to the ground, sprawled flat on her back.
Dante’s world exploded in vicious crimson. He heard a deafening roar and then he was straddling the man and bashing his head on the ground, the manic bellows unbroken. Then the world exploded again, in a detonation of blue and yellow. Then black.
Something fell on his cheek. He tried to brush it away and couldn’t find his hands. He didn’t care. Gulnar! Where was she?
He opened his eyes and she was there. It had been her tears that had roused him from unconsciousness. She was leaning over him, kissing him, whispering he didn’t understand what. Then he did.
“Thank God—Oh, darling, are you OK?”
He didn’t find his voice so he nodded. It took him another chaotic moment to realize. His hands were tied behind his back. Then it all came back.
He’d attacked the piece of trash who’d struck Gulnar down. He remembered his clear intention to kill the man. No one was abusing her ever again. He’d given it a good shot, too, until the bastard’s comrades had come to his rescue. From the nauseating pounding in his head, and the fact that he’d been unconscious, they’d bashed him, and hard, on the head.
