Chapter 50 Chapter 0050
•ANEIRA•
The weeks that followed were nothing as I expected.
I had imagined that if Rafael and I ever reached some kind of peace, it would take some time. But I found myself loving him even more each day.
He was the kind of man I had imagined him to be behind the mask he put on so people would think he had a stone for a heart.
I giggled when I watched him trying to do things he wasn't able to do after being shot. I could see how hard it was for him to push himself, but it still made him look sexy.
"Please don't hurt yourself, mister," I muttered while he was walking a little faster on the treadmill. "I don't want to see you in the hospital again."
"Why would I go to the hospital when you'd be my nurse and touch me until I get better?" he smirked as he looked at me and I giggled again.
"No, please," I replied, clearing my throat. "We can't afford any risks. I need you healthy if we are to have sex until we are old and weary."
He smiled and seemed to like that idea. He then reduced the gradient and the kilometers on the machine.
"Fine, ma'am," he said when he looked up at me. "It's sorted."
We were in the gym room and I was watching him so he wouldn't lose his balance and hurt himself.
His chest still hurt whenever he took deep and rapid breaths, and I was there to make sure he didn't exceed his recommended heart rate.
But damn, he looked so good shirtless. He made me imagine things even when he wasn't doing much.
He recovered faster than his doctor thought he would and slower than he wanted. He complained every morning and I had to talk sense to him every time he wanted to consult another doctor.
He pushed himself too hard, the way I had already come to understand he pushed everything.
"You'll tear the stitches," I told him on the fourth day when I found him standing at his desk going through paperwork.
"I'm standing," he said, not looking up. "Not running."
"Sit down, Rafael. Can you cooperate for a day and stop being stubborn? You survived a gunshot in your chest, so you need to give your body time to heal."
He looked up then. He studied me for a moment with that dark, unreadable expression that I had spent so long trying to decode, and then he pulled out his chair and sat down.
It was such a small thing. But it stopped me for a second.
He had listened.
I brought his meals to him for the first week because the stairs were not yet easy for him and he refused to admit it.
We ate together at his desk, or sometimes on the narrow office couch where we had sat the night everything broke open, and we talked the way we hadn't before.
Not the forced conversations of a contracted marriage, and it wasn't the cold silences that had stretched between us for months.
Just talking.
He told me things about his parents that I had never known. Not the story of their deaths, which I already understood, but the smaller things.
The way his mother had kept a garden, and the way his father used to read aloud at dinner until Rafael and Polly were old enough to be embarrassed by it.
I loved his stories and always imagined him telling them to our late child. I always imagined her as a girl and cooing every time she heard her daddy's voice.
In return, I told him things I had never told anyone. About growing up invisible beside Narra, and the times my mother never missed the opportunity to remind me that she mattered more to her than I did.
I told him about the time I had convinced myself that Chris truly loved me because the alternative was too lonely to sit with.
He was my first love and I believed that I was his great love as well. But when I walked in on him with another woman, it broke my heart and made me feel lonelier than I had felt before.
And we talked about the earliest days of our marriage, when he looked at me and I could see that he was searching for her face in mine.
He was quiet for a long time after that.
"I was," he admitted. "In the beginning, I was looking for her." He met my eyes. "But I stopped and fell in love with you, and not the thought of what I saw when I met Narra."
"I know," I chuckled. "And I honestly never thought you would react so kindly when I revealed my true identity to you."
He nodded. "Then say it, all of it. Tell me everything I made you carry." His voice was low. "I want to hear it."
And so I told him.
It took more than one night.
It was not gentle or clean, and there were moments when I was so angry that my voice shook and he sat completely still and let me burn at him without flinching.
He didn’t defend himself or explain or try to move past anything before I was finished.
He just stayed beside me and listened.
When I finally ran out of words, the weight on my shoulders felt lighter, and it felt like therapy.
"I know there's nothing I can do to give back what I took from you," he said. "But I will spend every day I have left trying."
I looked at him for a long moment before answering. "Thank you, baby. That means a lot to me."
He sat beside me on the couch and put his arm around me and neither of us said anything for a very long time.
I don't know how long we sat there. Long enough for the light in the room to change, and for the house to go fully quiet around us.
He kept his arm around me and I kept my head against his shoulder. I smiled as I took in his scent and savored it.
Afterward, I looked at him and muttered. "I want a real marriage this time."
He looked at me and smiled. "Okay, that's granted."
"I don't want a contract," I continued. "Not an arrangement. I want us to choose each other every day because we want to. Because it means something." I met his eyes. "Can you do that?"
He leaned down to my forehead and planted a gentle kiss before he pulled back and looked at me.
"Yes," he answered. "That's all I want as well."