Apricity

Part 16

"It is pitiful to need someone by our side." A mordacious glint twinkled in her otherwise distant eyes. With a rueful sneer painted with her bruised lips, her sullen and ashen face was the epitome of cynicism. "There is not a soul I can trust to not abandon me when scales tip towards inconvenience."

A sneer twisted on his lips as he snarled, "No, it's not a true lack of need at all, is it? You don't want anyone close because you dread the moment they could abandon you. Your desperate desire for connection has been charred and extinguished by your own terror of being left alone."

A mirthless snigger danced on her twisted lips. "If you had lived through what had been my reality, you would realize the imprudence of your suggestions."

A disdainful judder rocked her head. "You would realize, perhaps then, how unfulfilling and pointless such pining can be. You would realize how easier it is resigning to solitude than to gather and rejoin smithereens of crumbled faith."

The sharp edge to her words pierced straight through his lacerated conscience. The charged moments when he cursed her to remain untouched by joy when the wound of her refusal stung came back to plunge him into the bottomless depths of remorse.

Her heart had been closed off to the world for so long that it seemed permanent. Joy and optimism felt foreign to her, like distant memories of a life she no longer wanted. Contentment was nothing more than a dream, a pipe dream, something too far out of reach. Years of repression left her broken and clueless as to how to live in joy. She had accepted this empty existence, a life devoid of light, one he couldn't fathom ever living himself.

The clog of saliva in his throat refused to budge like a stone. His sloping shoulder and downcast eyes eased a fraction of the tension in her contracted muscles and the sternness in her squinted eyes diminished.

She took a deep breath, trying to find solace in the musky scent of the hospital room. But she could not seem to escape the shroud of darkness that had settled over her vision. The gray hue on her lenses transformed every emotion into something sinister and forbidding--the red of concern blending seamlessly with the alarming shade of judgment and rage. She knew it wasn't real, but still she shivered at what she saw.

"I-I'm sorry. I, uh, I don't know what comes over me when I... I discuss the past." She looked into her lap and fidgeted with the rough blanket, crumpled between her fingers. "It's not your fault. It's me," she said, rolling her shoulders with an awkward and rueful smile.

The distraught man descended to the stool next to the bed. "It's not your fault either, Suhani. Look, I, uh, can't claim to know the truth. But I know you know Yukti told me something..."

He ignored how her shocked eyes flicked towards him and how her chest fluttered in an erratic rhythm. "Each possibility in my mind runs darker than the previous one. I don't know which one of them is the truth, but I know you are faultless in each of them, Suhani."

Tears brimmed in her eyes and overflowed from her face. She looked down at his clasped hands, which were strong, with knuckle hair and fingers that had hardened through use and abuse. Her tears plopped on the back of his hand like fat raindrops on an oilcloth. She tried to bite down harder on her bottom lip. What came out was a whimper that tore into the blue shell around her heart. It hurt as though it collapsed and twisted upon itself.

"You... you would not say that if you knew the full picture. If you knew..." She sniffled and clasped the sheets between her fingers till her knuckles grew bereft of color. "If you knew, you'd hate me. You would... I would disgust you!"

Disbelief gleamed in his eyes, and he huddled closer to the bed. "How do you know that? You are a reasonable businesswoman, who knows even one percent chance is a chance and there is always room for error in our judgments. You never tried me, so how can you decide my response?"

His words, full of love and acceptance, made her heart swell with hope. But the child in her was struggling against the chains that bound her, cuffed by fear and mistrust, to fight the shadows that obscured her rational thought. Her emotions were at war- one side yearning for acceptance while the other held her back from trusting his advances.

Her eyes, behind the tremulous film of lacrimation, searched for hints of malice and condemnation in his eyes, and instead found compassion and encouragement swirling in his tear-filled eyes.

"For all we know, she could have enticed him. The mother delighted in being the center of attraction. No reason for her daughter to be any different. The apple doesn't fall far away from the tree."

An icy chill bit into her flesh, numbing her to the core. Even with his comforting presence behind her, she felt nothing but dread and fear flooding her veins. Her breaths shortened as if a thousand needles were piercing her lungs. Her nails snagged against the sheet in an attempt to ground herself, though it did little to stop the relentless waves of memories that crippled her. A sharp, monotonous trilling filled her ears like a warning, a message of impending doom.

She struggled to open her eyes, as though thick tendrils of the darkness had wrapped themselves around her eyelids, blinding her. Her trembling heart slammed against her chest and she felt a sudden collapse of her body, as if her insides were imploding inwards. Her fingers outstretched towards him like claws, and he sprung from his chair, barely able to comprehend the situation and her terrifying confusion. She seized his shirt, feeling the thundering beat of his heart pounding beneath her damp hand.

"Suhani! Suhani... let me call the doctor!"

"B-breathe... I can't... I can't breathe," she said between the gasps, tugging at his shirt. His heart raced with frenzied panic under her desperate touch, and he struggled to reach the button to call the nurses for help without going out of her reach.

The somber darkness that pervaded the air seethed and vibrated around her as if alive with evil intent. Through her narrowed eyes, she could see the perturbed man's lips moving, but her confused and petrified ears failed to make sense of his words.

Nausea bubbled up in her throat, bringing a deluge of salted bile to her tongue, intensifying with every wave of perceived rotation of her body. Her shaky hand shot out and fiercely grasped onto the dreadful man's shoulder.

She felt her heart plummet as she spiraled down into a swirling abyss of tenebrous tenement, sapping away all her hope and desire to fight against the natural pull. When the darkness engulfed her like a thick fog for what seemed like the hundredth time that day, she reluctantly surrendered to it with an exhausted surrender instead of running far, far away.