Lake

“I’m going to bed,” I said, many hours later.

Aras and I had eaten the chicken and dumplings, something he’d said he liked, though I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to make me feel better. We spent the rest of the evening in the library, not exchanging more than two sentences in conversation.

“May I join you?” he asked.

Strange, but I didn’t recall him ever asking anything like that before.

I wondered what it meant, but wasn’t brave enough to inquire.

“Yeah,” I said.

I stood, and then he did, and followed behind me as I went to the bedroom.

I brushed my teeth, braided my hair, and climbed into the king bed.

Aras had stayed in one corner of the room, leaning against one of the heavy dressers.

The room was dark, save the light from a small lamp.

I lay there, watching Aras in the dim light as he watched me back.

We stayed that way for I didn’t know how long, but then he finally pushed off from the dresser and sat at the foot of the bed.

He unlaced one boot, pulled it off, did the same with the other.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?” Aras responded, not looking at me as he pulled off his socks.

I ignored the frustration his response caused and instead answered the question. “Why did you kill Gaspar?”

He didn’t answer immediately, and I waited, wondering if he would make some comment about me asking questions, or do something else to dodge.

I had debated asking, but then decided I couldn’t not. But it was up to Aras to answer.

“I gave him an order. He disobeyed it,” Aras said.

He stood, pulled his T-shirt over his head, and began to neatly fold it.

I gave myself a moment to watch the play of muscles on his strong back and arms but didn’t let myself get distracted.

“What order?” I asked.

He laid the shirt on the dresser and then looked at me.

It was usually so difficult to read him, but now I had no problem at all. He was deciding what to tell me, and I saw when that decision had been made. “I told him not to touch you,” Aras said.

He had made the statement matter-of-factly, then unbuckled his belt and began rolling it up.

I fell back against the pillows, my mind spinning.

How should I interpret that?

There were two possibilities, as far as I was concerned.

Aras, a stickler for discipline if I ever met one, had had an unruly employee. The content didn’t matter; what mattered was him going against Aras’s word, a slight I knew he wouldn’t abide.

A reasonable explanation, one that I bought, but one that I didn’t think explained everything.

But was I willing to consider the rest of the explanation?

Because to do so would mean acknowledging that Aras had killed Gaspar because he had touched me.

The instant I allowed my mind to be open to the possibility, I knew it was true.

That should have scared me, disgusted me, or at the very least, seeing what Aras was capable of should have.

But it didn’t.

Seeing what Aras had done, knowing why he had done it, made me feel something I never had in my entire life.

Protected.

For years it had been me against the world, no one in my corner, no one who had my back. No one who really cared if I died, let alone if someone hurt me.

But Aras had.

He might have had some other reasoning, some macho code, but at the base of it, he had stood up for me in the way that no one else had and no one else would.

I looked at him as he stripped off his pants and underwear, folded them as neatly as he had the T-shirt, then walked toward the bed.

I clicked off the light, then listened as he pulled back the covers and lay down next to me.

He pulled me into a tight embrace, my back to his front, the silk nightgown the only thing between us.

He held me tight, his arms sheltering me. But he didn’t do anything else.

I lay still, then lifted my hand and laid it atop his, feeling the swollen, scarred skin there as I had before.

“Thank you,” I whispered.