28
Mecca
Later, after we had worked our bodies to shut-down mode, I lay, relaxed. There wasn’t a solid bone left in my body, and if they were there, they had melted. All I was able to move were my eyes, and they kept falling closed. The firmness of the mattress was all that kept me from dissolving and floating away.
An idea burst to life in my brain. Arjen’s name. His name was starting to make lyrical sense in the light of us. Spelled different but sounding the same, Arjen and origin, held similar meaning.
He was the origin of my most powerful kiss, the origin of my first uprising of emotions, and he was the origin of a man that invaded my dreams before I ever saw his face. I could no longer deny him the precedence he had set in my life, the places he had marked in my heart, and the tattoos he had scribed into my mind, on my body, and within my spirit.
“Can I ask you a question, and you give me an honest answer?” I asked him. A smile barely reached his lips as he rolled up and met my eyes. “I have never lie to you, don’t intend to.”
The truth in his tone made me believe him before it flashed in his eyes.
“I know we’ve broached this subject before, but tell me about the kiss? The wedding kiss. I gave you my side of it, but I want to know your side. Was it for show, for the audience?”
I believed we had started at that kiss. Now, I had a strong need to know if he had experienced the same charged vibe that I had that day.
“You are so beautiful, Mecca. But, so quickly you became more than just this pretty woman. You were about to become my wife, a permanent fixture in my life. The magnitude of what everything meant hit me all at once, and I no longer wanted it to be an arrangement. When I glanced deeper than your outward appearance, I connected with something more profound, something that was blind to my eyes at first, but blaringly loud to my instincts. I had this urgent need to connect with what I sensed. It’s hard to explain.”
“You’re doing a good job of it so far,” I stated, eager for him to continue.
“Once I kissed you, that first small touch was confirmation of me connecting with something so much bigger than me. It was bigger than anything I understood. When you kissed me back, it grew stronger, so intense that I didn’t want to let go.”
His eyes were fixed with a dreamy expression, and I imagine mine were also.
“For someone like me that’s never experienced much outside of pain and disappointment, it was a connection that I wanted to last for as long as possible. If that meant causing a scene at our wedding, it was a small price to pay.”
We stared at each other, his eyes closing when my fingers brushed his chin. It was an action I hadn’t intended, but one I couldn’t help, lending to his explanation of experiencing something bigger than us. Even though he had admitted such intimate details, I had a strong desire to dig deeper.
“For you, was it a one-time thing, or have you experienced the connection again after our wedding day?”
He leaned in, placing his lips to my ear, the closeness warming me fully. He knew how his closeness affected me.
“I feel it every time I’m in your presence. I feel it now. I feel it the strongest when we touch.” He leaned back enough to capture my gaze. “When you initiate a kiss or caress without being prompted, it’s overwhelmingly strong.”
His heavy eyes searched mine, but it wasn’t lust reflected in them. I believed it was our special connection, the one that raged through me as intensely as I believed it did him. I leaned in and brushed my lips across his, loving the way he shivered and his breath caught at the small action. His reaction let me know that we were on the same playing field, that we were experiencing our special connection together.
He responded to the harder press of my lips with a firm caress of his own. Our link eased into an intersecting solid emotion that had me relishing the warm sensations coursing through me. I brushed a soft peck along his chin until I reached his ear. “I feel it too, and I didn’t want to let go either. I never have.”
At those words, he drew me into a tight hug that took my breath away and made me release a playful giggle.
Who knew that I would find genuine affection in the midst of an arrangement that was meant to build a bridge that linked danger and chaos?
* * *
“So husband,why don’t you tell me how you got such a wicked reputation? I sensed it and got a glimpse of it when you cut out George’s tongue. I’m always hearing whispers, but you do a good job of keeping that part of yourself hidden. And don’t skimp because I know that your devil is in the details.”
The boyish smile, laced with a ton of charm, got me every time, enticing me to grin. The cute crinkle that showed up at the edge of his right eye, and the way his lips bent and filled up his face, were small details that let me know his smile was genuine, along with the way his nose wrinkled when he was thinking hard. I liked it, realizing I had never paid that much attention to a man’s less obvious features.
“You can say that my reputation was built from years of training, and torture, but mostly abuse.”
Torture? Abuse?The words stuck out and latched onto my brainstem.
“There is no doubt in my mind that our father was the living version of the devil planted here on earth. I’m sure you know already from all of your data collecting on me and my brother that we grew up in the syndicate, but what you probably don’t know is that our father started grooming me to be a death-soldier at age five. He started taking me to syndicate sanctioned beheadings, firing squads, and executions of every kind. He wanted me desensitized so that I’d get used to the gore involved in death.”
This bit of news kicked up my intrigue and had me glaring harder at his lips as he spoke, unwilling to miss a thing.
“It took a good year for me to start stomaching most of what I was being exposed to. Khane had arrived a few months before I started training, and the only reason my father left him alone was because he was a toddler. The kind of training I was receiving at five, the syndicate suggested you start at eighteen. My father didn’t care, and my mother loved him more than life itself, so she went along with whatever he wanted. There was no school, no mingling with other kids our ages. We trained with other boys in the syndicate whose fathers wanted them to start early. We were homeschooled, one-on-one tutors, and would end up punished as severely for academic failures as we were for our so-called training.