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“Is she mine?”
Something primal twisted in Sarah’s gut. “She could be,” she snapped. “You didn’t stick around to find out. You didn’t call me to check… you didn’t even leave me a way to call you,” she hissed angrily.
“I left you my name,” he said thickly. “Enough to contact me if needed. Is she mine?”
Sarah’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “You are such an arrogant son of a bitch. How did I not see that before?”
He didn’t respond to the question. “She’s not mine?”
“No, she’s not yours, Syed.”
“Her father?” Though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. If she said that she’d met and married another man, started a family, something inside of him would die.
“Dead.” A single word. The flat line of hope. She didn’t elaborate. She couldn’t. Not since that hateful day had she been able to contemplate explaining those injuries to another soul.
He nodded again, slowly, his eyes digging through her experiences, reading them as though she were speaking. She looked away. The intrusion was not welcome. He had learned all of her Tells back then. She was pretty sure he still knew them.
“When?”
November nineteenth. She closed her eyes for a second as the date whispered through her. “When Lexi was a month old.”
He scraped his fingers over his stubbled jaw. “She is how old?”
“Four. She’s four.”
His expression shifted as he did the math. “I see.”
He smelled so good. Just like she remembered. In fact, everything about him was as she’d remembered. His thick hair, strong face, hard body. Inwardly she groaned, recalling the pleasure of loving him, of being needed by him.
Until he had no longer needed her. How easy it had been for him to discard her. And how she had suffered in the wake of that rejection.
“Syed?”
He
flinched at her use of his name. He had simply been ‘Sy’ to her back then.
“You can’t just come back like this.” She swallowed convulsively. His eyes dropped to the smooth skin of her exposed shoulder. As if of their own volition, his fingers drew to the fabric of her sweater and lifted the collar, where it had fallen low. They brushed her flesh and the contact sent darts of awareness through her.
That was normal.
He had been her first lover, and he remained her only lover. His ability to stir her to a fever pitch of need was nothing new. Even her dreams of him had done that, making her cry out with an ache of lust low in her abdomen.
She stepped backwards instinctively, moving out of his reach, and he took advantage of that moment of unknowing surrender to crowd inside her front door.
“I beg to differ.”
But he was big and her house small. She hadn’t really noticed that before. Then. Perhaps she’d just been used to him, and to his dominating presence.
Time had dwarfed her. All of her. Those aspirations that had puffed her up, the optimism of youth. Financial freedom. All of that had flooded from her over the years, leaving a woman who felt frail in Syed’s overwhelming presence.
Timid.
And she hated him for that, even more than she hated him for leaving in the first place.
“What do you want?”
His lips twisted, but it wasn’t what she’d call a smile. “I want you to be mine again, azeezi.”
