It was just perfection between them.
So when Shaheen had asked for an update, really asking about projected developments, he couldn’t bear thinking of any. How could he when any might tamper with this blissful state? He was terrified anything would happen to change it.
They were both unconcerned about the world and its conventions, and things were flourishing between them. He only hoped they would continue to deepen in the exact same way. So even if he wanted to, he certainly wasn’t introducing any new variable that might fracture the flawlessness.
For now, the only change he wanted to introduce was removing the last barrier inside him. He wanted to let her into his being, fully and totally.
So he did. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet. Something nobody knows.”
She turned to him, her glorious mass of hair rustling as if it was alive, those unique obsidian eyes delving deep inside his recesses, letting him know she was there for him always.
Just gazing into them he felt invincible. And secure that he could share everything with her, even his shame.
“It happened a few months after I left Zohayd….” He paused, the long-repressed confession searing out of his depths. He braced himself against the pain, spit it out. “I got involved in something…that turned out to be illegal, with very dangerous people. I ended up in prison.”
That had her sitting up. And what he saw on her face rocked through him. Instantaneous reassurance that, whatever had happened, whatever he told her, it wouldn’t change her opinion of him. She was on his side. Unequivocally.
And as he’d needed to more frequently of late, he took a moment to suppress the desire to haul her to him and crush her in the depths of his embrace with all his strength.
The need to physically express his feelings for her had been intensifying every day. But she’d made no indication that she’d accept that. Worse. She didn’t seem to want it.
It kept him from initiating anything, even as much as a touch. For what if even a caress on her cheek or hair changed the dynamic between them? What if it made her uneasy and put her on her guard around him? What if he then couldn’t take it back and convince her that he’d settle for their previous hands-off status quo, forever if need be?
He brought the urge under control with even more difficulty than he had the last time it had assailed him, his voice sounding as harsh as broken glass as he went on, “I was sentenced to three years. I was paroled after only one.”
Her solemn eyes were now meshed with his. He felt he was sinking into the depths of their unconditional support, felt understood, cosseted, protected. It was as if she was reaching to him through time, to offer him her strength to tide him through the incarceration, to soothe the wounds and erase his scars.
“For good behavior?” Her voice was the gentlest he’d ever heard it.
He barked a mirthless laugh. “Actually, they probably wanted me out to get rid of me. I was too much trouble, gave them too many inmates to patch up. I almost killed a couple. I spent over nine months of that year in solitary. The moment they let me out, I put more inmates in the infirmary and I was shoved back there.”
“You ended up being…solitary too many times throughout your life.”
She’d mused that as if to herself. But he felt her soft, pondering words reaching down inside him to tear out the talons he’d long felt sunk into his heart. Making him realize that it hadn’t been the solitude itself that had eaten at him but the notion that he’d never stop being alone.
But now she was here, and he’d never be alone again.
Her smile suddenly dawned, and it lit up his entire world. “But you still managed to make the best of a disastrous situation in your own inimitable way.”
“It wasn’t only my danger to criminal life-forms that got me out. I was a first-time offender, and I was lucky to find people who believed that I had made a mistake, not committed a crime. Those allies helped me get out, and afterward, they supported my efforts to…expunge my record.”
The radiance of her smile intensified, scorching away any remnants of the ordeal’s despondency and indignity. “So you’re an old hand at expunging your record. And I wasn’t the first one who believed in you.”
He didn’t know how he stopped himself from grabbing her hands, burying his lips and face in them, grabbing her and burying his whole being in her magnanimity and faith.
He expended the urge on a ragged breath. “You’re the first and only one who did with only the evidence of my word.”
She waved that away. “As you so astutely pointed out the first night, I do know Maysoon. That was a load of evidence in your favor, once I’d heard both sides of the story.”
He wasn’t about to accept her qualification. “No. You employed this unerring truth-and-justice detector of yours without any backing evidence. You read me. You believed me.”
Her eyes gleamed with that indulgence that melted him to his core. “Okay, okay, I did. Boy, you’re pushy.”
“And you believed me again now,” he insisted, needing to hear her say it. “When I said I didn’t knowingly commit a crime, even when I gave you no details, let alone evidence.”
Teasing ebbed, as if she felt he needed the assurance of her seriousness. “Yes, I did, because I know you’d always tell me the truth, the bad before the good. If you’d been guilty, you would have told me. Because you know I can’t accept anything but the truth and because you know that whatever it was, it wouldn’t make a difference to me.”
Hot thorns sprouted behind his eyes, inside his heart. Everything inside him surged, needing to mingle with her.