“Ariel…” He leaned back against the wall at her speech.
“One day one of us might go outside and not come back, and I want to be able to say that the last thing that happened between us was beautiful. That we’d slept next to each other naked, sweating from sex, moaning from excitement. No regrets.”
“It hurts too bad when that day comes,” he murmured.
“It hurts worse if you haven’t looked into the eyes of your family members and said ‘I love you’ before they left.”
He dropped his head in defeat again, staring at the floor while no one moved.
“We were childhood sweethearts. Our families should have taken us underground somewhere by then. It was growing more dangerous by the day. I was at work that day, and when I came home, I found my entire family slaughtered in the house. All of them stabbed to death. My mother and father were tied to kitchen chairs, dead. My mother was a fighter. She wouldn’t have let them take her alive. My brother was upstairs dead in his room, his body slumped over his desk.”
She pursed her lips, trying not to react.
Seconds ticked by before he continued, still staring at the floor. “I ran next door next. Reese’s parents were the same as mine. Tied to kitchen chairs, gagged, dead from stab wounds. I died ten thousand deaths as I took the stairs two at a time to the second floor. I didn’t honestly think I would find her. I thought she would have been taken.”
His breath hitched and he let out a sob, running a hand down his face, his body slumped forward, his back holding him up against the wall.
Ariel’s heart was racing. She hurt so badly for him. Unimaginable pain he lived with every day.
He jerked his gaze. “She was nineteen, Ariel,” he shouted. “Just like you. Fucking nineteen. She never got a chance to live.” He grabbed a book off the nightstand because it was the only thing not nailed down near him and threw it hard against the wall. “Nineteen,” he screamed. “They fucking held her down and raped her. So many men she couldn’t even count them. They raped her so brutally that she couldn’t move. And then they left her there to die, blood pouring out of her.”
Ariel gasped. She couldn’t stop it from happening. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from making any further sounds.
“She was still alive, dammit,” he shouted at the room. “I could have saved her. I fucking could have saved her. But I left her my fucking gun and went to get help and she used it to shoot herself in the head as soon as I left the room.” A loud scream of frustration filled the apartment right before Stu flipped the bedside table upside down onto the floor.
Ariel’s heart stopped. She couldn’t breathe. The room felt like it was spinning.
Stu looked at her, and she hated that she couldn’t school her face from the horror she felt. “That’s why I don’t want to love another woman, Ariel. It fucking hurts. I never want to feel that pain again. I have to live with it every day. Reese was my world. My life. My lover. My partner. And she died because fucking militants raped her and destroyed her soul.” He was shouting so loud that Ariel was certain neighbors on either side could hear if they were home. Hopefully, they weren’t.
It seemed like there was a piercing ringing noise in the room, but she knew it was in her head. The pain was real as if she had been there. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. She had no idea what else to say.
“So stop pushing me to join your family. Stop asking me to love you. I can’t do it. I can’t love again.” He dropped to his knees, defeated, head hung, arms coming out to brace against the floor.
Ariel didn’t care what the repercussions might be. She rounded the bed, dropped down next to Stu, and wrapped her arms around him. “You already do love me, Stu. It’s too late.”