Adhura Alviida

new beginnings

"Zoya! Baby! Kya hua ?" He asked while running into the room behind her.

When he saw the bathroom door closed, he knew something was wrong. He couldn't help but wonder...had he done something to offend her? She seemed so embarrassed while she ran away from him. Were they going too fast? He remembered her telling him about what she had been through. Aditya mentally smacked himself for being so inconsiderate. He had just promised her to shelter her and take care of her yet here he was already hurting her not even a few moments of promising her never to do so. Aditya worriedly began knocking on the door.

"Baby...baby...please talk to me. I'm sorry I was being so inconsiderate." He continued reasoning but to no avail.

After a whole ten minutes of knocking, Zoya emerged from the bathroom and looking at her, he felt guiltier than ever. Her eyes were red and her cheeks had been marked with tear stains. He immediately grabbed her and wrapped her into a warm comforting hug. Zoya, however, failed to reciprocate.

"It's quite late...we should get to bed." Zoya said, not looking at him.

"Z—"

Before he could protest, she walked past him and settled into the bed. She turned in the opposite direction that she would normally sleep in and he sensed the tension between them. It made him so uneasy when he knew she was upset with him. He quickly got into bed alongside her and slid his arm around her waist as she remained unaffected by him.

"Please talk to me, baby. I can't go to sleep knowing that I've upset you. What did I do?" He asked, the uncertainty evident in his tone.

The innocence in his voice broke her as she turned around and faced him. Seeing her eyes still ever-present with tears, his heart broke a little.

"Aditya...do you think I'm impure?" She asked, not wanting to hold her insecurities in her heart anymore.

He was taken aback by the brazenness of her question. Had his embarrassment over something so minor caused her to get insecure about her own self. He really felt guilty now.

"No, no, no...baby...I'm so sorry. That's not what this was about."

He immediately wrapped his arm around her and pressed her body to his own.

"I'm so sorry.."

Zoya removed herself slowly from his embrace.

"So then...why?" She began choking up on her words as her tears made their own decision to escape.

There was nothing more devastating for Aditya than to see tears in his wife's eyes especially knowing that he was the cause of it.

"You're going to laugh if I tell you, Zoya." He said chuckling as he began removing the tears from her face using his thumbs.

Zoyaa looked at him in confusion with her innocent doe-shaped eyes.

"I...uh...actually..." He began scratching his hair trying to look everywhere but her face. "I didn't have any ...erm...protection on me." He blurted out making his cheeks instantly red.

He became worried when the expression on Zoya's face remained the same.

"I'm not...I...Aditya...I know after knowing what happened to me, any guy would have reservations. I get it. It's not easy to be with a woman who's been ...raped." She said, swallowing in disgust at the last word. "But...that doesn't mean that you can automatically assume things about me. I'm not impure because a few guys decided that I should be the victim to their vile actions. I don't have any diseases, if that's what you're implying and even if I did...don't you think I would let you know before we got to that point with each other?" She sighed.