“Yes.”
“It just felt like I was much older.”
I smiled. “Your experience made you much more mature than the average woman your age and why you need to live, to discover and experience life. To learn what’s out there. You’ve taken all the pain, everything you’ve endured, and turned it into strength. That strength now has the time to shine.”
“Because of you,” she said.
“No.” I dragged a slow finger along her jawline. “I found you when you’d already decided to fight him. To take back your life. To free yourself from his binds.”
“Yet I took that freedom to the edge of a cliff, ready to plunge into another dark pit of hell.” She sniffled.
“If you were, you would’ve kept running until gravity gave out on you, jumping without pause. You chose not to. That was a choice you made, all on your own.” This battle was becoming more challenging by the second.
Her shoulders sagged lower. “But you allowed me to breathe again when I knew nothing and had no one.”
I slipped my hands into my trouser pockets to keep from touching her. “Sometimes we commit acts with good or bad intentions that need forgiveness.”
“What are you saying?”
Rising, I turned my back on her and moved away, trying to find the best way to explain something I didn’t quite understand. “Some might say my intentions for saving you were selfish because of how you make me feel. You’re young, with your whole life ahead of you. I saved you. Yes. But I shouldn’t have touched you. It was wrong.”
She came up behind me and placed her hand on my shoulder. “If your touch was wrong, what do you call what Kabir and all his sick friends did to me, Xavier? You’re a saint where they were sinners. You loved where they hurt. You allowed me to breathe while they stole my oxygen. You killed for me when they killed me. How can you even question yourself? How can you question what we have? I don’t understand you.” Her voice rose with each utterance, filling with an anger I’d seen that night she broke the mirrors. “Maybe Shakespeare was right. ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.’” Her hand dropped away.
Surprised by the quote, I turned around to stare at her. Once more, her intelligence floored me.
“Am I right?” she asked. “If love can be explained, grasped, understood, or measured, it isn’t real, right? That’s what Shakespeare meant, didn’t he?”
She was right. Love was so incomprehensible and unformulaic that no one could understand its workings. Perhaps that is why the curse worked on the Sinclair family, and so many men died before it could be broken. Moral teaching from the universe that love was insurmountable, not easily obtainable.
The fact that this woman, so beautifully innocent to life itself, could grasp and understand the concept shocked me into silence.
“He had what Levana would call a screw loose, but his literature packed a punch. To a girl starved of education, life, and simple things, he made a lot of sense,” she added when I said nothing. “Don’t make me an excuse to deny your heart of the love it truly deserves.”
Sadly, I had to refuse my heart because she needed to live a fruitful life she’d been robbed of. “And what I’m giving you now will quench that hunger for the things you missed.”
Her brow furrowed. “You’re giving me everything but what I need.”
Unable to answer, I walked over to the window, seeking the horizon as my shield. Pregnant silence engulfed the room, leaving us both in our own mind space.
“Xavier?” she called after what seemed like an eternity. I turned to look at her. Her watery eyes on me, she closed the distance between us and placed a hand on my chest. “Say it,” she whispered, her lids sliding shut.
“Feel my heartbeat, love. Breathe. I’m right here with you. You’re safe.” I repeated the words I’d often used to calm her trembling soul.
She inhaled slow deep breaths as if committing this moment to memory. I knew I was. Her eyes opened, and the falling tears had me biting the inside of my cheek. “Before you, I breathed to survive. After you, I breathed to live,” she lifted the hand on my chest to my cheek, “and even though you’re taking back the heart I need to live, I will survive. If for nothing else but the day you return it to me.” She dropped her hand, and I tightened my fists until my knuckles ached.
You’re taking my heart with you.
“Ella,” I released her name with a low sigh, unsure if I was aiming to convince her or myself that this was the right thing to do for the both of us.
“You not only promised to keep me safe, you also said I’d find love someday,” she said.
“Promises I will keep until my last breath but what you’re feeling right now.” I touched her chest where the beating organ lay below. “Is gratitude. Not love. You’re not in love with me, rather the idea of you and me together. Built solely from a mind that hasn’t had the time to learn the affection yet. You’re still young, you have much to see and discover, and I will guide you every step of the way.”
Shaking her head, she backed away, pivoted, and walked off. At the door, she paused to look at me over her shoulder. “Loving someone from afar is not necessarily a bad thing, Xavier. It just proves that love sprouts on sight but flourishes in the heart.”
My harsh exhale sounded like a bomb had gone off in my chest. And maybe it had. Perhaps my heart had indeed exploded. I should’ve stopped, gone after her, and declared my love for her.
It would’ve been selfish if I did.
