His Scandalous Bride

23: Now

Saddiq didn't want much. Privacy and anonymity. It was all he had ever wanted. It was all he had ever needed. Until he met her.

"Why do you like me, Saddiq?" She had asked him once and his reply had been without any shadow of doubt.

"I just do!"

She had seemed unconvinced but she wouldn't push and he had no other words for her. Was there any reason why we like what we do? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But in the end, those reasons don't really matter, do they? Because in the end, what really matter is that we do. What really matters was he like her.

"I just like you!" He had felt the need for her to know, and perhaps understand. It was the greatest truth of his life. It had felt futile to let it be misunderstood.

Nothing had changed since then yet everything had changed. How was that even possible? Saddiq would know. He lived it. The echoes. The nightmares. The fears. The Kisses—, especially the kisses. He remembers the first but it is the second he liked best. The second kiss.

It's been a year and a half after that day in his office when she had confessed to wanting to kiss him, an ample time, it would seem, to finding that there is a thin line between heaven and hell, and despite not wanting to, straddling both lines in aching strides.

"Don't try to know too much, Saddiq, trust me, it's not worth it."

Would the outcome be the same if it hadn't happened? Saddiq was unsure. They had kissed, and he had realized his feelings, and he had acted on them, and he had lost her. He was unsure if there was anything he could have done to prevent the chain of events that had unfolded since that March afternoon when Aisha had crash landed on him.

Yet he was still mystified by the entirety of all he had survived since he met her. There was more he should know, more even he should understand but nothing. It was still a puzzle as to how he knew every inch of her body yet her entirety still remains a mystery? How can he know yet not know her? And despite wanting to argue that it doesn't matter, and it was impossible to know everything but even he knew that wouldn't apply to him, to them. In retrospect, he fears he might have fallen in love with an idea or perhaps a narrative he'd kept telling and retelling himself.

Aisha isn't a figment of his imagination. She was real. He had met her, married her and lived with her for a year. But his memory scorn him sometimes of their time together. There were too many parts that won't fit, too many that straddles insanity and like the toss of a coin he was still uncertain what parts were real and which was unreal.

Notwithstanding, there was his pain, and guilt, and nightmares, and fears which were beyond any doubt, real. He had loved. He had lost. That much was true. Real or imagined, it doesn't really matter. And to some extent, he could understand being left behind she had made no promises beyond what had been initially agreed even when he'd laid out his entirety for her in a silver platter despite knowing she could break him whenever, however, yet hoping she won't even if he tried not to show so as not to pressure her. He could understand her complicated feelings which despite wanting desperately to know, she had never trusted him with herself. It were as if the more he gave, the farther she gets from him. However, try as he might, he couldn't make sense of this particular scene unfolding before him.

He wipes his face amidst a slamming desperation to unsee, to be wrong but he wasn't seeing wrong. It is Aisha. Aisha and another man. Aisha is hugging another man. She would never let him hug her like that except under the cover of darkness yet here she was, smiling and hugging another man in broad daylight with an abandon which caused an acute pain in his chest suffocating each and every cell in his body.

What is happening, he holds the wall to prevent him from falling as his world crashes into a million unmendable pieces. She had left but she loves him, she'd told him so herself. And he believed her. Aisha loves him and leaving him, though cruel, was an inevitability even if the reason still evades him. He had known even if he had wished for a different outcome. It doesn't change the fact that he is loved, by her even if in this instant, he falters. He had gone to hell and back just to find her yet here she was happy with another man. How? Why?