Mine

Chapter Six

I want you to need me, like the air you breathe...

One year later

The second time she sleeps with him, it's no accident. Miray goes to him because she either must or go mad. Their friendship is different now. It's charged. Before they slept together, they had tried to ignore that hum of attraction between them and had been able to keep those boundaries of friendship up. Their friendship was comfortable.

It's not comfortable now. They can't seem to fall back into that ease that they had around each other. The looks are too long, the accidental touches too frequent. Her every nerve ending strains to be closer to him when he's around.

She actually sees Boran more often now than before she had her son. Their son. That's why, she knows. She wants Boran to be around his son. It started off that way. She didn't want him to miss any of Alihan's firsts. The little boy adores him. He calls him Bo Bo...although at first it sounded like 'Baba' which angered Kubilay and frightened Miray even as it broke her heart. She locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed into a towel so he wouldn't hear. She doesn't know how Boran felt about it. His face had shuttered so completely that nothing could be read in his expression.

She doesn't change her name. Maybe that's when the first knot in her resolve starts to unravel. Kubilay doesn't push her, but she can tell it irritates him. She tells him it's because she's already established her career under her own name. The entertainment world knows her as Miray Daner. A dark voice in her soul taunts her with the truth. A part of that is true, but the real truth is...I don't belong to you, she thinks when she looks at her husband, when she sleeps with him. Her soul has been claimed by another and it refuses to relinquish its hold. Would she change her name if Boran wanted her to? Yes. Unequivocally yes, but her response is so easily given because she somehow knows he would never ask her to.

Miray tells herself to give her marriage time. It's only been a year and that first year has been taken up with a new baby. She's not being fair to Kubilay. She owes it to him and to her son to try harder, but even though she knows she should be enjoying sex with her husband by now, enough time has passed after Alihan's birth, Miray...feels nothing. Physically her body feels as if its rewired itself. She's just not there with her husband and she can't orgasm. Even on her own, she tries and the only time it happens is...when she thinks of him. It feels like a betrayal of her vows so at first she tries to stop herself from thinking of Boran. Gradually she doesn't stop herself though because she yearns for the release. Not just the physical release, but that release of just letting herself go, of not having to watch herself all the time, worried that she'll give something away, that release of giving herself to another human being so totally and knowing she's safe in his arms, even if it's only in her mind.

That night with Boran, she'd given all of herself so completely and he'd taken her and kept her safe in his arms and awakened her in ways she had never fathomed existed. It was more than sex. So much more. Now she felt as if she was living half of herself. Miray told herself that she just needed to try harder. She'll have that with her husband and Alihan will grow up in a loving home.

Her son is starting to look like Boran. That's when the second knot in her resolve starts to unravel. Nobody says anything so at first Miray thinks she's surely imagining it. The way her little boy's hair curls in an unruly locks when she doesn't comb it, The same full lower lip, the same shape and colour to his eyes. The dimple. The same dimple in the exact same place on her son's cheek when he smiles. If it wasn't for her cheekbones, her jaw and her nose, Miray would see nothing but Boran in her son. She tells herself she's exaggerating what she's seeing. Surely the resemblance is not that strong. Then Alihan's first birthday comes and Boran is of course invited and his parents are in town and Miray invites them as well.