“You’re right. She’s here now.” She stroked his face. “And you are too.” They were both so brave, and how terrible she had been to them. “Everything you see in me, it’s a lie.” Her very existence was an ugliness.
“Everything I see in you is truth, and it’s more beautiful than anything.”
“No, it isn’t.” She sat up. “You don’t understand. That’s not true.”
He pushed himself off the bed and stood, unabashedly naked and so very beautiful. “Can I show you something?” He held out his hand.
“I think I’ve seen everything you want to show me.”
His eyes smiled and he made a beckoning gesture with his hand. “Come on.”
She took it and stood, wrapping a sheet around herself, and followed him, dragging the sheet along as he led her to a huge mirror in the alcove. He positioned her to face her reflection.
Behind her he was a head taller. Wrapping his arms around her, he rested his chin on her head. Their bodies were made to fit together, perfect jigsaw pieces.
Their eyes met in the mirror and there she was. Seeing herself through his eyes, her downfall.
It had made her feel wanton, always. Not a word she’d known to use in high school, but one of the many intangible things she had ached for ever since losing him. He brought out this hot, pulsating spirit inside her, turned all of her into reckless desire. Hair down loose, arms akimbo, breath not held. Ready for anything. Her. The her who had thrown herself at the ball on the pitch. The one who had pushed Rico down on the bed and climbed on top.
In every part of her life, that was all she ever wanted to be, forcefully the same on the inside and the outside. Able to say what she wanted to say, able to do what she wanted to do, able to think of herself as she wanted to be thought of.
So many people loved her, and yet her love for them was tainted with fear. Her cousins, her friends, her aunt and uncle, her aji, they would always love her. Their love wasn’t conditional, the logical part of her knew that. But she couldn’t stop working for it, aching for it. She never felt worthy of it. Because they knew the truth about her.
Only with him had she never had to work for it.
Despite how that had ended, she wanted what they’d had again with a terrifying desperation.
He kissed the top of her head without looking away from her. She needed his gaze and he would not take that from her.
Look at you. Look at what I see. He didn’t have to say the words.
Being with him was the only glimpse she’d had of being fearless, of not being in need of armor. All the rest of her life had been spent in fear of being unwanted.
And now she knew it definitively.
Marital rape is hardly rare.
Ashna’s stomach turned and instinctively Rico’s arms tightened around her.
He is not like us. Life is hard enough with someone who’s your social equal.
That had been such a terrible lie. Life was hardest when you pushed away love. So many terrible lies her father had told her. It still felt like betrayal to think critically about Baba, even as her rage shifted inside her.
It doesn’t help that she romanticizes Bram so much.
Mom had that wrong. Ashna had never romanticized her father. She’d just felt like he was all she had. Actually, that was a lie. Truth was, she had always felt like she was all he had. In the end, she’d been right, because when she left him, look what happened.
Finally, eyes still clinging to Rico’s unwavering gaze, Ashna spoke the one truth she could tell. “I was never fierce, Rico. It was what you imagined me to be. No one else ever saw me that way. Just you.” How much she had needed that. How many things it would have changed to have had it for longer.
“That’s not true, meu amor. I’ve seen you with your family. Everyone sees you that way.”
She’s too fragile.
She pulled his arms from around her, but she kissed his hands before going back to the bed and retrieving her clothes. “My family sees that I’m broken.”
He stood in the doorway watching her put her clothes on. Then he followed her lead and pulled on his shorts.
“I come from the kind of dysfunction you can’t even imagine.” She thought about her mother, powerful to a point that standing in her presence made you judge yourself against her. But so physically small. And her father had been a giant; even as a young man he’d been close to three hundred pounds and over six feet tall. For all her fierceness, Shobi would have no chance against him.
No wonder Mom had never wanted her. And all Ashna had ever done was judge her for it. She’d been a person who punished the victim, her own mother.
Dear God, if she threw up in this beautiful suite with Rico watching she would never forgive herself.
Rico came to her and cupped her cheek. “Tell me what happened.”
Where could she even begin?
“My mother never wanted me.”
“Did she say that to you? Did you have a fight?”
She had to laugh at that. How she envied him the innocence of thinking a parent could only say those words in anger, without meaning them. “I grew up hearing my parents fight about how they never wanted me.” If he wanted to understand her, well, he was welcome to wade through the mess that she was. “It’s not just that either. She was forced into a marriage to my father.”
“That’s sad. But not your fault.”
If one more person said that to her she was going to poke their eyes out.
“It is my fault.” She twisted her hair into a bun. “Because without me she would have moved on. She would have left him. But my father . . .” How did you say the words? “My father forced himself on her.” She had no idea when her forehead ended up on his chest, pressed into his sternum, his skin warm and salty against those ugly words.
This is what she’d missed most. Someone she could hold when everything spun.
“You know why I hid you from my family? It was because I couldn’t let them see the lie I was being with you. And I couldn’t open that door and let you see me on the other side either. I didn’t want you to see the real me. I wanted to be what you saw, wanted to know what being wanted without pity felt like.”
He stroked up and down her arms. “What I see is the real you. That was you on the pitch. You in the kitchen.”
“No.” She shook her head so violently, her unpinned bun loosened and slid down her back.
The green of his eyes darkened. “You’re not broken. You’re hurting. You can hurt and be fierce at the same time.” He said those words like someone who knew. Age-old pain was naked in his eyes and something deep inside her grew ravenous.
All she wanted was to rise up on her toes and touch her lips to his again and again. But now he knew. Suddenly she couldn’t tell what it was that shone in his eyes, love or pity.
Then she remembered the loathing in his eyes after he’d met Baba. It came crashing down on her. All of it. He had seen who she was when it came to her father. And the first glimpse of it had made him run.
Who are you, Ash? How can you stand being around such a horrible person?
When she hadn’t been that girl—the one on the pitch, the one in the kitchen—he hadn’t wanted her.
“I have to go,” she said, unable to breathe.
“What? Why?” His eyes grew wild at the idea of her leaving. She knew exactly how he felt.