She nodded. If he ever needed her she’d be there in a minute. For all her confusion, that much she knew without a doubt.
All the fight went out of him. He took both her hands and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Isn’t that exactly what your Baba did? He chose to stay with your mom even though she got sick.”
Ria tried to tug her hands out of his. He didn’t let go.
“It’s not the same thing,” she hissed, struggling to pull away.
“How is it not the same thing?”
“You had an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
“What happened to your mother wasn’t anyone’s fault either.”
“It was. It was her fault—
her
fault. She knew this would happen to her. It had happened to her mother too. She could have spared him if she had left him alone. She had no right. No right to ruin his life.”
She knew what she was doing when she married my father.
“Ruin his life or yours?” He whispered the words, but a scream might have been less violent.
She couldn’t believe he could be this cruel. She yanked her hands out of his with all her force. This time he let her go. She tried walking away again, but the asylum building loomed in front of her and she turned and headed away from it.
“So you’re doing the right thing?” he said, following her. “You’re doing what she didn’t do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She was headed straight for the lake and she changed course again, heading for a thicket of woods. Suddenly there was nowhere to go.
“Why? Because you can make the decision to stay with me, but I’m not allowed to make the same decision, and your parents couldn’t either?” he said, chasing her every footstep. “Have you considered that maybe, just maybe she didn’t know she was sick when she met your father? Or maybe they both knew what was going to happen, and they both still wanted it, wanted you, wanted whatever time they could have together? ”
She came to a tree and pressed her hand into it. She was panting, restless energy trapped inside her chest like a caged animal. “But I don’t. I don’t want just a little bit of time and then a lifetime of pain for you.”
He spun her around. “Are you for real? Do you have any idea what these ten years have been like for me? I’ve been in hell, Ria. Do you know what I was doing when you walked into the basement that day?”
She slumped against the trunk behind her.
“I was trying to make another woman you. I was trying to feel alive by pretending to be with you when I was with someone else. I was doing that to another human being. And it wasn’t the first time. Do you know how that feels?”
Mira’s lovesick face flashed in her head, and a sick nauseated feeling swirled inside her.
“Do you know why Mira and I broke up?”
“Please, Viky. Please don’t.”
His fingers tightened on her shoulders. “I said your name when I was with her. I had been suppressing it, holding it inside for so long, I thought maybe finally it was gone. But then you came back and I had no chance in hell. That day after I watched you read those vows at the temple, after I had you in my arms, there was no going back. I had my mouth on her and I tasted you. I had my hands on her and I touched you. I called out to you. Do you know what her eyes looked like after I said your name? It was like I had hit her, Ria.” There was such anguish in his eyes. “You want that instead?”
Mira’s heartbroken face swam in her head. Viky stuck in a wheelchair swam in her head. Her own face on her hapless, bruised mother lying in a padded room swam in her head. A horrible coldness closed around her, pulling her under.
“You didn’t see Baba, you didn’t know him. There was just so much sadness in him. It hollowed him out. I watched it hollow him out. I can’t bear the thought of you like that. I could be flinging myself at walls, Viky. I could set you on fire.”
“Or you couldn’t. You are twenty-eight years old. Your mother, your grandmother, they were in their early twenties when it happened. And you’ve never shown any signs of mental illness.”
She met his eyes, sagged against his hold. “Yes, I have. I spent a year of my life not being able to talk. Even now I struggle not to lose my words. I struggle with sadness, with strangers, with things that happened so long ago.”
His hands rubbed up and down her arms. “That was trauma. You were attacked in your own home when you were barely more than a baby. It’s probably PTSD and you’ve lived with it your whole life. And you worked through it on your own. With no professional help. Look at what you’ve achieved.” Love colored his eyes, his voice. His fingers intertwined in hers. “The only thing crazy about you is how you make me feel, Ria, and how you want to protect the hell out of everyone around you. You are the sanest person I know.” He dropped a kiss on her forehead and smiled. “Except that day when you jumped on that photographer.”
Despite the horrible pain in her heart, she laughed.
“Now, what else have you got? Tell me. Let’s end this. You’re aging me.”
She closed her eyes. If she didn’t say it now she’d never be able to say it.
“Really? There’s more?” he said, as though he were making a joke, but he stroked her face. “Say it, sweetheart. Please.”
She didn’t open her eyes, and she let it out. “I can never have children. I won’t ever have children. I won’t pass this on. I won’t risk pushing myself over the edge.”
She steeled herself against the resolve she was sure she’d see in his eyes, the sacrifice she had no doubt he would feel compelled to make. But when she opened her eyes he was smiling.
“Viky, are you insane?”
He dropped a kiss on her lips, on her nose. “Sweetheart, this just isn’t working out for you, is it?”
She had no idea what he meant, what that stupid smile meant.
“You know how I started V-learn? I was living in Careiro, it’s this small town near Manaus in Brazil. The only place I could find a room to rent was in this orphanage. And they let me live there if I taught the kids. It was the most beautiful place.” His eyes glowed. She stroked his face.
“I wanted to bring all those kids home. All of them. I was a hardened, half-dead bastard. But those kids, they melted through me like butter.” He pulled her hands to his chest. “I always planned to go back and adopt as many as I could. With so many children who need families, I don’t want to bring more children into the world.”
He flicked a teardrop off her cheek and kissed the edge of her lips, and stayed there until he could speak again.
“Now, what’s your next excuse?” he said finally.
She stroked his lips, the thought of ever losing him becoming more and more unbearable with each passing minute. “I feel it coming for me, Viky. It’s in my blood.”
“Or maybe it isn’t. We’ll find the best doctors, do everything we can to prevent it, or even treat it if we have to. Your mother might have had a chance if she’d had the right treatment. Drew works with all forms and levels of psychosis. He says treatment has changed drastically in the past decade. It’s an illness, Ria. People spend their lives researching it. We’ll get help. Chances are we’ll never need any of it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But I do know that it doesn’t matter. I want you, exactly the way you are today, the way you’ll be tomorrow, and fifty years from now. And I want you to want me enough to deal with whatever happens. I can’t promise you’ll be okay. But without you I will never be okay. And I know that without me you will never be okay either.”
She wrapped her arms around him, his words sinking deep into her marrow. He pulled her close, sensing the change, and threw his head back in relief.
His eyes brightened and she followed his gaze to the tree they were standing under. He let her go with a meaningful look. A branch shot out of the tree like a miniature version of their bridge. He pulled himself up onto it and held out his hand.
Wordlessly, she took his hand and let him pull her up on the branch next to him. He snuggled close and kissed her ear. “It’s time to stop fighting, Ria. Please.”
Shivers of pleasure raced down her neck, making her press into his mouth. He always knew exactly where to touch her, how to touch her. He sucked her earlobe into his mouth and pure, untainted joy bloomed inside her. He had removed her earrings that first night they’d made love and hidden them away and she hadn’t worn earrings since. And she never wanted to for as long as she lived.
She grabbed his denim-clad thigh to keep from tipping back. Strong, warm muscle bunched beneath her hand. She stroked it. “That thing about the wheelchair was a lie, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe.” He smiled against her neck and found every sensitive spot up and down the column of her throat. She had to laugh. Her incorrigible, irrepressible Viky.
“How can I be with a person who lies to me with such ease?”
“You think that was easy?” he said between kisses. But he’d done it all the same. What choice had she given him? “Maybe I can make up for it by giving you a few acting lessons,” he said. “You have to admit those are some serious skills.” He grinned into her eyes with the full force of that mismatched smile.
She shoved him, but not hard enough for the show he made of almost falling off the branch. “You’re a ham. And you’re crazy. That’s what you are.” She held his precious face in her hands.
“Totally. Crazy in love with you.”
She kissed him. Overwhelming need flooded through her. Powerful jolts of fear knotted her stomach. He kissed her back with frantic urgency, lazy greed making her wild, out of control. But for the first time in her life, under all the intensity of her feelings, she recognized her well-being, the rightness of it. The way he made her feel, who she became with him. It wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t a dream, it was who she was, who she loved being, and it was beautiful.
He consumed her with his lips, the sheer force of his will in his kiss. A will that had made it easy for him to get anything he wanted. Except her. Her he’d had to fight for. And he’d fought with everything in him. He always would.
She pulled away from him, searched his love-struck eyes, what they held within them untouched by time. “You’re right, Viky, I will never be okay without you.”
His smile was all smug arrogance, but the tension in his shoulders eased beneath her fingers. She’d let him down so many times, and still he believed in her. She wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder, more grateful than she’d ever been in her life. He pulled her to him and leaned his head into hers. They sat like that entwined together in silence and stared at the building that loomed in front of them.
“She looked almost happy, didn’t she?” she asked finally, her voice barely a whisper. “My mother.”
But he heard her. “Yes, and peaceful. Baba would’ve been so proud of you, Ria.”
And that’s why she loved him.
That incredible, imperfect mouth of his—it hadn’t driven her crazy for the better part of her life only because it was beautiful, but because it always, always knew exactly what to say to put her together. She reached for his lips and claimed what was hers.
And when he jumped off the branch and asked her if she wanted to go home, she said yes, she wanted to go home.