Her muteness shattered. “Settled? Settled how? You think showing me this answered anything?”
His teeth made a terrible sound. He said nothing.
More realizations bombarded her. “Was that why? Why you broke it off with me in the past, why you didn’t take me up on my offer now? For God’s sake, Leonid, why?”
“What do you mean, why? I just showed you.”
“I see no answers here. Absolutely none. What do your injuries and loss have to do with anything between us?”
He looked away, as if to hide his response to her feverish response. She teetered up to her feet, approached him. Her heart broke into tinier pieces as he pulled farther away, as if unable to bear her proximity, guarding against her possible touch.
She stopped advancing, stood trembling from head to toe. “If you think you’ve given me an answer, the answer, all you’ve done is give me more maddening questions. So just tell me, Leonid. Everything since the accident. Please.”
He appeared about to evade her again, then she sensed something crumbling inside him. That...dread of laying everything inside him bare before her.
Heading back to the couch, he sat down heavily. Wincing, supersensitive to his every move more than ever, she followed him, sat far enough away to give him the space he needed.
Then he talked. “Everything started before the accident. While I was training, I realized our arrangement had only been satisfactory because we were together almost every day. Being apart from you made me realize I wanted to be with you, all the time, all my life. I wasn’t sure if you felt the same, but I was going to risk it. I was going to propose.”
She’d thought she was now prepared for anything he’d say, would hold it together no matter what he threw at her. But this confession made her collapse back on the couch in a nerveless heap.
His expression blipping momentarily at her reaction, he went on. “Even if you’d said no, I’d have waited until you one day wanted me enough or trusted me enough, if that was the issue, to change your mind. But before I could, the accident happened. Then you came to me.
“I’d just been told my legs were beyond salvaging. I also had a spinal injury, and they thought I’d suffer severe erectile dysfunction or even total impotence.”
Falling deeper into shock, every second brought her more proof the past two years had been built on misconceptions and ignorance. She’d known nothing of the life-uprooting blows he’d suffered, and he had chosen to suffer alone.
Oh, God, Leonid.
“I was agonized I’d never be a competitive athlete again, would at best rehabilitate enough to walk with a minimum of pain. But what devastated me most was knowing I’d never be the man you’d wanted so fiercely, and had taken such pleasure in.”
Before she could cry out that she would want him whatever happened, his next words made her see how he would have never believed it, how he’d convinced himself of the opposite.
“But I knew you were noble, and if you knew, even when it repulsed and horrified you, you wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t have you stay with me out of pity. I couldn’t saddle you with an impotent cripple. I would have been worse than useless to you, a constant source of unhappiness. I knew even if I was selfish and terrified enough that I clung to you, I’d lose you anyway, when the reality of my situation drove you away in disgust or crushed you in despair.
“I decided to drive you away, without letting you even doubt my prognosis, thought it better to do it at once, rather than in a slow and far more mutilating ordeal. But I didn’t expect you to make it that hard. You forced me to push you away as viciously as it took for you to leave me, to save yourself.
“Just as I thought I succeeded in setting you free, you told me you were pregnant. I asked if you’d keep the baby, vaguely wishing your pregnancy wouldn’t continue somehow, or that you’d maybe consider giving the baby up for adoption, so you’d sever every tie you had to me, so you could restart your life unburdened again.”
This. This was it. What she’d gone insane for, the explanation for his sudden cruelty and coldness, what she’d felt had to exist, but had to accept didn’t, to her deepening heartache. But it existed. It explained everything and rewrote history. He’d forced himself to hurt her, fearing he’d destroy her if he didn’t. He’d loved her so much, he couldn’t let her share the bleak fate he’d thought awaited him.
His gaze swept downward, as if he was looking into his darkest days. “The next months were a worse hell than even I’d imagined they would be. The least of it was the anxiety over my impending physical losses. The memory of hurting you became more suffocating as time went by. My sanity became more compromised as I lived in dread that what I’d hoped for you, that you’d move on, would come to pass, and then feeling even worse when it didn’t, when you had Eva and Zoya and confined your whole life to them.
“After many setbacks, they managed to save one of my legs, if in the condition you saw. My spinal injury healed without any neurological deficit, and they hoped I wouldn’t be impotent. Not that I could test that. All I could do was struggle to heal, physically and psychologically, and cope with my new, severe limitations. And all that time, I watched you and the twins obsessively from afar as you went through everything I should have been there for, alone.
“Then I was back on my feet, real and prosthetic, just in time for Zorya to call me to duty. And though I never dreamed of having anything with you again, I was no longer going to let anything keep me from being there for you, and from serving the family you gave me, the family I never had, and my country.
“But the moment I saw you again, I knew. My potency was more than intact, and the separation and suffering had only left me perpetually, ferociously starving for you. Yet I had to stay away. You deserve better than the disfigured wreck I am now. I...I would have rather had my remaining leg cut off than let you see me this way, and see that look of horror in your eyes. But your anguish and confusion cornered me into showing you. Now you can at least understand, if not forgive, everything I did.”
He fell silent, breathing strident, eyes reddened, face clenched as if with fighting against unbearable pain.
She stared at him, paralyzed.
The enormity of what he’d suffered and lost overwhelmed her. And through it all, he’d selflessly, if mistakenly, thought only of her needs, and not his own.
But his last words had been the worst. Along with his irrevocable losses, his self-worth had been shattered.
The tears finally came, pouring out of her very soul as if under pressure.
Grimacing as if she’d stabbed him, he groaned. “Bozhe moy, Kassandra, I can’t bear your pain, or your pity.”
“Pity? Pity?”
Finding nothing that could express her outrage at how totally he’d misconstrued her reaction, she charged him, knocking him back on the couch and climbing all over him, trembling hands groping every inch of him, real and replacement. Inert with shock, he lay beneath her as she smothered him in hugs and kisses and drowned him in tears.
“How dare you... How dare you think anything you suffered could have burdened me or put me off? How could you make that decision for me, deprive me of being there for you through your ordeal? Didn’t you realize I would have given anything to be with you at all, let alone in your darkest time? Didn’t you realize that whatever you lost only makes every inch of you even more precious to me? If I could give you a limb to restore yours, I wouldn’t think twice.”
Looking dazed by her fervor, this last bit made him shudder. “Don’t say that, Bozhe moy, Kassandra, don’t...”
“I’ll say it because it’s true. Because I love you. You are the only man I loved or would ever love.”
He looked even more flabbergasted. “How can you love me after what I put you through, no matter the reasons?”
She grabbed his face, forced him to look at her, as if to drive her conviction into his mind. “I now know I must have always felt what’s in your heart, never believed what you said in mine. It was what agonized me most, that what I felt and what I thought I knew were such opposites. Your reasons would have been more than enough to forgive you if you’d done much worse that just pushed me away, and thinking it was for my own good.”
His breathing, which usually never quickened due to his supreme fitness, came in rapid, ragged wheezes beneath her burning chest. “Kassandra, you don’t know what you’re saying, you’re shocked by what you saw and heard, feeling sorry for me...”
“Oh, my beloved Leo, I do feel sorry, but not only for you, for me, for us. I am crushed with regret, because I wasn’t there for you through it all, because you deprived me of you, throwing us both in hell apart. I feel as if my heart is splintering because you deprived yourself of me and my love and support, of our daughters, missed out on having them bless your life and heal your heart during your darkest time, as they would have even before they were born. But I’m not letting you deprive us of each other anymore. Marry me, Leonid, my love, my only love, for real and forever.”
His eyes had been reddening more with her every word. But with her last words, his face contorted and air rushed into his chest, as if he’d been drowning and was drawing a lifesaving breath after breaking the surface.