I closed my eyes. “Thank you.”
“It isn’t pity. You have given yourself to me, and you’ve asked for nothing in return. That isn’t common, especially among the people I’m used to associating with.”
“The first time Neil told me he loved me,” I began, unable to keep the tremor from my voice, “he said he knew I didn’t want anything from him. I think that was why he could love me. But, now…”
“But, now, you want something,” El-Mudad finished for me.
I nodded. “I want him back.”
“He will come back to you. You are his north star. He cannot find his way without you.”
I took a breath that shook from the bottom of my lungs.
El-Mudad put out his hand. “No expectations, Sophie. But let me love you. You’re aching inside.”
In more ways than one. Somehow, he’d twisted my agony into something bittersweet and hopeful. I put my hand in his.
We started toward the bedroom. Maybe if things were different, I wouldn’t have wanted him there with me, without Neil. As it was, I needed the familiarity and comfort of my own surroundings.
On a more practical note, how familiar was I supposed to get with another person with Olivia in the house? Though she slept through the night, now, she might need me. What if she woke while I was in bed with with El-Mudad? I would feel ashamed, but I didn’t know why. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and she wouldn’t know what was going on, anyway. Still, I would feel like I had to answer to her for something.
No, I would feel like I had to answer to Emma.
“Wait.” I put my hand on El-Mudad’s arm to stop him, just for a second, until I could get my wits. “I think…I think I want to take a bath. If that’s okay?”
We went to the bedroom, me to the dressing room and him to the bathroom. I heard the taps turning on. I found a slinky gold peignoir set and brought it with me to wear after I got out. Maybe it was a seduction thing. Maybe it
wasn’t. I hadn’t decided, because I hadn’t gone over my mental future conversation with Neil, yet.
He wouldn’t care, I told myself, then guilty changed tacks to add, but you would.
I went to the bathroom and found El-Mudad stirring the bubbly bath water with his hand. “Do you still love this tub as much as you did on my first visit?”
“More,” I said with an exaggerated groan. I stripped my shirt over my head, and I noticed, in the second before the collar came up over my eyes, that the action surprised him. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I finished as I slid my t-shirt down my arms.
“I must say, you’re handling this situation much better than I expected. From what Neil said…” El-Mudad’s voice trailed off.
“Oh?” I tried to keep my tone light. Neil had sent El-Mudad to me because he was worried. But was Neil so worried because he thought I couldn’t handle taking care of Olivia and myself without him?
“He simply thought—”
“I know what he thought,” I said, and the anger crept in. I let it. “You know, if he was so goddamn worried that I couldn’t handle this, why did he leave me?”
“He didn’t leave you,” El-Mudad corrected me quietly.
“But he was going to!” I didn’t want to be saintly Sophie, anymore. I wanted to be selfish and angry, the way I’d never allowed myself to be angry with Neil before. He’d nearly abandoned me, so many times. Sure, he couldn’t have controlled his cancer, or his addiction, or his daughter dying. He wouldn’t have gone through any of it, if he’d had the choice.
He didn’t have a choice when he was suicidal, I reminded myself. You know this.
I knew it, but I hated knowing it. It would have been so much easier if I didn’t.
“I have all of this pain,” I bleated helplessly. “I don’t know what to do with any of it.”
El-Mudad came to me, catching one of my hands and holding it at my side. He cupped my cheek in his palm. “Give it to me.”
Cradled in the womb-like confines of my tub, I spilled my guts like the bathroom was a slaughterhouse killing floor. I told him about how I’d given Neil that first drink the night Emma had died, and the guilt I’d been carrying over that ever since. I told him how angry I’d been at Emma, and how awful I felt for even saying it out loud. With every admission that should have made me seem like a horrible person, El-Mudad just listened sympathetically, offering a kind word now and then, but never trying to take my pain away. Never trying to fix me. When the water grew cold, he ran more to warm it. And, when I was tired, he helped me out and wrapped me in a towel, drying me as though I were helpless as a child.
We didn’t have sex. The ghost of Neil was very much between us in the bed, conjured by our mutual longing for him. We held each other, and just having the contact of human skin against mine, heat and weight there to reassure me when I woke in the night, healed me in a way I could never have anticipated.