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“A life with you?” She spat, fury evident in the hushed delivery of the question. “I don’t even know who you are! How can I want a life with the man who … who …” she let the statement die, the hurt in her eyes showing him what she couldn’t say.
Silence beat around them, heavy with accusations and hope. Then, finally, she continued. “So what? We sleep together, and then you go away again?”
She waited, her breath held, her heart racing. And then, he nodded. A crisp, single movement that confounded the tiny fragment of a dream she had left.
“Five years ago, I was not free to be with you. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Because I’m not royal?” She demanded, floating her favourite of the theories that had filled her mind since that horrible morning. She liked it best because there was nothing she could do about it.
“Partly,” he tilted his head forward, thinking of all the reasons his family had objected. Sarah Smith had been raised in a trailer park. She had no parents. No money. She hadn’t been to university. She spoke only one language. And yet, for all she had sounded unsuitable, Syed had loved her. She had been smart and kind, proud and brave. Beautiful, unique.
“Partly,” she shook her head, the one word angering her, apparently.
He drew back to the present with urgency. “More so, because I was engaged,” he amended.
She froze, the words making no sense to her. Had something b
een lost in translation? “You mean, like, busy?”
“No, Sarah. I mean engaged. To be married.”
Like stones, the admission fell into the clear water of her life. Not once had she suspected anything along those lines. It had never occurred to her.
“Engaged?”
He nodded.
“Jesus.” She squeezed her eyes closed. Guilt was hot, guilt was cold; it was pervasive. “So you cheated on your fiancé. With me. And then you left me and I … I was in love with you, and you were engaged to someone else?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she overrode him. “How dare you? How dare you allow me to become the other woman? That’s not what we were! Oh, God. She must hate me!”
“I barely knew her. It was an arranged marriage. But it was a dear wish of my father and mother’s, and so I valued the union.”
“And did you … are you …” Her eyes swept closed as bile coated her throat. “Are you married?”
“No. It’s over. She married my cousin.”
Sarah blinked. “Well, that’s cosy.”
His lip twisted with genuine humour at the quick sarcasm that flowed from her beautiful, pink mouth. “Indeed.”
“So that’s the reason?” It was a rhetorical question. “After years of wondering, I must say, I’m kind of relieved to know that it was nothing I did wrong.”
Her words dragged him back to earth with a thump. “You? No, Sarah. You were perfect. I was wrong. I knew you wanted more from me than I could ever give…”
“And that’s sex,” she interrupted angrily. “That’s what I was to you.”
His eyes locked to hers, vaguely mocking and sardonic. But he didn’t refute it, like she so desperately wanted him to.
Silence swirled over them, a silence that was weighed down with accusation and pain, desperation and a hope that had no place in reality. “What do you think?” He asked, the question gravelled.
“I think you’re a bastard,” she said stiffly. “I think you had no right to come into my life and lie to me like you did, to make me love you, and then to leave me when I needed you most.”
“Why did you need me?” He asked, something like warning running over his skin.
She pressed her lips together, visions of what she’d seen that horrible morning burning across her mind. The crushing grief of losing her sister to domestic violence, of being the sole carer of a dependant, exhausting new born. The pervasive need for the man who had stolen her heart.
“As it turns out, I didn’t,” she said with a trace of the strength that had helped her survive. “I didn’t need you. And I don’t now.”
