Page 11 of Iridescent
My husband isn’t the sort of man who bleeds where anyone can see it. When something hurts, he turns silent. Unreachable in that infuriating way of his, as if pain were a hostile takeover he could outlast by discipline alone.
So I gave him space.
Then space became distance.
Distance hardened into late nights, distracted kisses, hands that hovered at my waist without pulling me close. Weeks ago, when I could no longer pretend not to notice the way he slept beside me like a man trying not to disturb a stranger, I sat him down and asked him what was happening to us.
He said it was work.
He said everything would be fine soon.
I believed him.
Look where that got me.
Foolish of me, really, to think this day would be different. To believe we could fall in love again the way we did a lifetime ago.
We are not the people we were then. Infertility has made me a shell of myself, and Xavier is no longer the twenty-five-year-old who once crossed London in the rain because I mentioned, half-asleep and wrung out after training, that I was starving. He had shown up outsideThe Ninth Bellwith damp hair, a ruined coat, and a paper bag clutched to his chest like it contained state secrets.
“I couldn’t get you spanakopita,” he’d said, with the solemnity of a man presenting diamonds instead of takeout. “The Greek place was closed. But I didn’t want you going to bed hungry.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “You came all the way here because I said I forgot to eat?”
He was supposed to be in Mayfair that night, trapped inside some investor dinner. I wasn’t supposed to see him until morning. Yet there he stood, drenched from head to toe, looking genuinely devastated that he had failed to get my favorite.
His brows drew together, confused by the question. “You were hungry.”
As if that explained everything.
Back then, it did.
He wasn’t rich enough to buy out restaurants or fly me across oceans. He was tired, broke in the way ambitious men refused to admit, and still audacious in the way he looked at me, as if the world were a solvable inconvenience.
“Yes, but—”
“I told you,” he murmured, brushing rain from my cheek with his thumb. “I will give you a life where you never have to wonder whether you are cared for. I meant it then, amor. I mean it now. Every version of me from this moment forward belongs to that promise.”
He kept the life. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the care.
Tears trickle down my cheek, warm against skin chilled from waiting.
I lose track of time staring into nothing. The room blurs at the edges, and the silence begins to feel permanent, taking me with it.
A slow, pendular sway brings me back. Warmth beneath my cheek. The faint abrasion of wool against my skin. Bergamot and sandalwood reach me through the fog, dragging my senses into reluctant awareness.
Xavier.
My lashes flutter, but the room refuses to cohere. The ceiling drifts above me in pale, fractured pieces, and my stomach rolls with a sudden, watery warning.
I am moving.
No.
Being moved.
One of his arms is under my knees, the other locked around my back, holding me to his chest as if I weigh nothing at all. My fingers are curled intohis shirt. I do not remember putting them there.
“Yara,” he whispers, low and close. “Amor, stay with me.”
