“You used your own tears,” he said, all but broken, “to wash the blood from my face?”
To this, Alizeh had no glib response.
The earlier prickle of embarrassment had become a full-body mortification as she stood there, her head heating as she listened to him take inventory of her earlier actions.
She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.
“Alizeh. Please look at me.”
She shook her head at the floor. “This is quite humiliating for me, Cyrus. I won’t look at you.”
“Why is it humiliating?”
“Because I wasstupid,” she said in a sudden burst. “I was kind to you only to discover that you’d been lying to me all this time—that you’d stolen my book and refuse to give it...”
The words died in her throat.
Alizeh had lifted her head as she spoke, anger burning away the worst of her unease, but she was stopped short by the look on Cyrus’s face. The anguish in his eyes struck a bolt through her chest.
“Why did you do it?” he said, his voice strained. “Why were you so kind to me? I’d heard someone crying, but I thought the sounds were part of a dream, or a hallucination. God, the way you touched me—” He cut himself off, his expression tortured. He shook his head, dragged a hand across his mouth. “Alizeh, my own mother has never touched me with such tenderness. I didn’t think there was any chance you could be real.”
She didn’t know what to say.
Her heart was beating so hard she could hardly hear her own thoughts. Cyrus had looked at her many times since she’d met him, and always with varying levels of intensity, but never quite like this. Never like he wanted to fall to his knees before her.
She heard her voice shake a little when she said, softly, “I believe the words you used to describe me werequite charmingly pathetic.”
Cyrus exhaled so hard she watched his chest cave a bit. He looked devastated. “I deserve to be shot for saying that to you.”
She managed to smile, but there was no life in it.
“Will you tell me what was happening?” she said instead, hoping to somehow dull the fire in his eyes. “You told me that this always happens to you, that it was part of a cycle.”
“Yes,” he said, but the word was raw, worn out. “It’s a medicinal sleep. It always puts me into a strange fog. Afterward, it’s the only way to keep me alive.”
Alizeh paled. “You mean Iblees tortures you nearly to death and then brings you back from the brink—just to do it again?”
“Yes.”
She thought she might be sick. “Does he do this often?”
“Yes,” he said softly.
“How often?”
“It depends.” He swallowed. “Sometimes twice a week.”
She clapped a hand over her mouth and made a sound, something like a sob.
Cyrus only looked at her, looked at her with the same,unremitting heat in his eyes and said nothing. A heavy silence descended between them, the quiet thick with things unspoken. Something had changed in the wake of these revelations, and Alizeh wasn’t sure she could define it. She knew then only what she saw, and what she saw was a version of Cyrus she’d never seen before.
He seemed shaken.
What’s more, he had touched her—drawn his hands down her body, pressed his lips to her skin—and now they both knew it. Alizeh hadn’t really allowed herself to think about what’d transpired between them, for she’d filed away his delirious words as inadmissible testimony; she’d not thought it fair to consider his drugged actions as evidence of overarching feelings toward her. But the longer he stood there without speaking aloud a retraction—without issuing an apology or denial—the more she wondered whether he stared at her now not with fear, but with longing.
He moved slowly then, shattering the silence with his quiet movements, closing the inches between them until the memories of him came back to life with a fever that seared her. She could still hear the crickets, could still see the moonlight on his face. She doubted she’d ever forget the desperate way he’d asked if he could taste her, the sound he’d made when he pressed his face to her breasts.
Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe.
