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“No, thank you.” She sipped her tea, replacing the cup with a clatter. “About last night.”
Something shifted inside of him, but he waited, his features implacable. “Yes?”
“It shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t necessary. I don’t need you to ‘make me happy’ for the next four months. I’d prefer it if you pretend I don’t exist.”
His hand formed a fist at his side, his body tense. “Why?”
Her lips were rimmed in white. “Because.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Her fingers shook as she reached for her tea. “I don’t want to have sex with you again. It doesn’t make me ‘happy’.”
His laugh was a scoff, but her eyes narrowed with anger.
“I’m not like you. I can’t just sleep with someone and separate my feelings from that.”
His back straightened and some long-forgotten sensation spiralled through his gut, threatening to collapse the structures around his life all over again. “Are you saying — you have feelings for me still?”
“God, no.” Her swift denial should have been everything he wanted, but it was impossible to hear that dismissal without contrasting it to the morning when she’d told him she loved him. “But we’re married and I’m pregnant with your baby. If we sleep together, it will get complicated.”
“There is nothing complicated about what we did last night.” He wondered at the tightening in his chest, as though a band were being pulled hard over his rib cage.
“No,” she agreed after a beat. “The sex has always been…”
Right. He held himself back from offering the word with difficulty.
“Automatic,” she concluded, an unsatisfying description of the way their physical chemistry burned him alive.
Her teeth dug into her lower lip, and her eyes showed worry. “But it’s not necessary, and it’s definitely not helpful.”
“But it is enjoyable.”
Something like a smile whispered across her mouth, but it was melancholy, so that a blade seemed to be digging in beneath his rib cage. “Yes. For a brief moment, and then I hate myself.”
His body tightened. That she would feel that way after what they’d shared was unexpectedly devastating. He grappled with the rush of emotions, quelling them with great effort. “There is nothing wrong with sex,” he said, trying to face this with logic.
“Of course you’d say that. You see sex as something purely physical. It’s an itch you scratch with women all the time. But for me, it was always tied up with more, and I know that’s stupid. Academically, I am fully aware of what we are to one another, and I think it’s…demeaning…to let physical desire dictate my actions. I’m furious at myself for falling into that trap last night. I won’t do it again.”
“Trap?” He repeated, something firing through his blood. Acid burst into his mouth, distaste a wave that was swallowing him. “There was no trap.” He’d been driven by a pummelling need, a pull to her that was as old as time.
“Not that you set consciously, but it’s still there. If we fall into a pattern of being intimate together, I’m worried I’ll lose sight of what we’re doing here, and it’s not worth it.”
Something lashed his side, spreading a feeling akin to pain over his torso. “I disagree. I believe we can establish boundaries —,”
“No.” Her eyes held a rigid challenge. She stared him down, something like warning in the terse lines of her face. “There’s no point, and too much risk.”
“What risk?”
Her lips pursed. “That I’ll start to enjoy being married to you.”
He ignored the way his chest inflated, something like pleasure warming his veins for the first time in a long time. “And that would be a problem?”
She made a growling noise, pushing her chair back abruptly, bracing her palms on the table as she glared at him. “Yes, Zafar, it would. I’ve learned my lesson about wanting more from you, and I won’t do it again. Do you have any idea how much you hurt me back then? You broke my heart. I know that’s a phrase that’s bandied about all the time, but I mean it somewhat literally. I was destroyed by what happened with us, and I will never, ever risk that pain again. I will never trust you, and I will never risk caring for you.”
He could barely breathe. His lungs were filled with an acrid smoke rather than air and if he doubted the sincerity of her words, he need only glance at the rigidity of her body, the tension on her features, to know she meant every word.
“You might think sex is just physical but it’s not. It’s intimate and it’s a shared experience that makes it easy to forget what we’re doing here. But I can’t. I won’t.” A sheen of tears glossed her eyes and the world tilted completely off balance for Zafar. “In a few months, we’re going to be parents, and this baby has to come first.”
