There was a wild, anguished look in her eyes.
‘Oh, God, Nikos, that time we had there together only proved to me how right I was to be so afraid. You thought I rejected you afterwards because our time in the desert meant so little to me. But it was the very opposite!’
Her voice dropped.
‘So I can’t be safe from such fear—it’s impossible.’ She closed her eyes, felt her hands clench before her eyes flew open again. ‘I can only try to insulate myself from it, protect myself.’
Even as she spoke she knew the bitter futility of her words. It was far too late. But she plunged on all the same, for there was no other path for her. None except this path now, lined with broken glass, that she must tread for the rest of her life.
‘Just give me my divorce, Nikos,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s what I came here to beg for.’
‘So you can be free of me?’ He paused. ‘Safe from me?’
Her eyelids fluttered shut. It was too much to bear.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Safe from you.’
She could not see his face. Could not see his eyes, fastened upon her. She could only hear him say her name. The words he spoke.
‘Diana—what if you could be safe? Not from me, but safe with me?’
Emotion was welling inside him. An emotion that he scarcely recognised, for he had never felt it in all his life, had never known until he had seen it in his mother’s eyes, as she lay so frail, so pitiful, awaiting the operation that might take her from him for ever.
He felt it again now, fresh-made, rising up in him like a tide that had been welling, invisible, unseen and unstoppable, for so, so long.
Since he had held Diana in his arms beneath the burning desert stars.
‘Safe with me, Diana,’ he said again.
That strange, overpowering emotion welled again. It was an emotion full of danger—a danger that the woman he spoke to now, whose clenched hands he was reaching for, knew so well.
Yet it was a danger he must risk. For all his future lay within it. All her future.
All our future.
Urgency impelled him, and yet he seemed to be moving with infinite slowness. Infinite care. So much depended on this.
Everything that I hold precious.
That emotion seared him again, rising like a breaking wave out of that running tide within him, so powerful, so unstoppable.
He felt her hands beneath his touch, her pale fingers digging into the sleeves of her jacket. He gently prised them loose, slid them into his hands, drew them away from her body into his own warm, strong clasp.
‘Diana...’ He said her name again, softly, quietly. Willing her to lift her sunken head, open the eyes closed against him.
‘Safe with me. Safe.’
He took a breath—a deep, filling breath that reached to his core, to his fast-beating heart, and with his next word he risked all—risked the fear that had crippled her for so long, wanting to set her free from it.
‘Always.’
Her eyelids were fluttering open...her head was lifting. His hands pressed hers, clasping them, encompassing them. Drawing her towards him, closer and yet closer still.
She came, hesitant, unsure, as if stumbling, as if she could not halt herself, as if she were walking out across a precipice so high she must surely fall, catastrophically, and smash herself on rocks. Her eyes were wide, distended, and in them he saw emotions flare and fuse. Fear. And something else. Something she tried to hide. Something that was not fear at all—something that filled him with a rush, an urgency to speak. To say what must now fall from his lips.
The most important, the most vital, the most essential words he would ever say. Words that he had never dreamt in all his life would be his to say. They were filling his whole being, flooding through him, possessing him and transforming him. Fulfilling him.
They could never be unsaid.