LITMIR.BIZ

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he was breathing hard, his heart beating fast. He couldn’t remember a time before Chloe when a simple kiss had possessed so much power.

      Sex had always been easy for him to get. Women liked the combination of looks and power he possessed, and that meant from the time he’d wanted sex he’d been getting it with ease. So that had meant that a kiss had never been anything more to him than a prelude to the act.

      But he wanted to savor it with Chloe. To kiss her slowly, deeply. Until she relaxed into him. Until she begged for more.

      The fantasy had changed. He had thought of dominating her. Of taking his pleasure in her. Those images were gone now. How could he think of such a thing when she was sitting here like this, so brittle he feared she would break if he handled her too roughly?

      Tenderness invaded him, a feeling that was so foreign he might have been experiencing it for the first time. He didn’t know it was possible for him to feel it, not anymore.

      Sura was the only woman, the only person, to ever make him feel the emotion before. And not since. Never since. He waited for the reminder of the woman and child he’d lost to kill the feeling, to come to his aid and remind him of why this was impossible for a man like him. Why he must never let himself feel.

      It didn’t work. And it made him angry. “Look at me,” he growled. She complied. “Why are you afraid of me?”

      “I’m not,” she said, her breasts pitching up sharply with her indrawn breath.

      “You are.”

      “It’s not you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “It’s men.”

      The admission hit him like a physical blow. “All men?”

      “Certain types of men. Men with power. Men who like power.”

      “What man doesn’t like power? The alternative is to be without, and I don’t think that’s anyone’s preference.”

      “It’s different,” she said, “for some. There’s liking… control, I guess, over your own life. And of course people like that. I like that. I liked it, I miss it sometimes.”

      “You feel like you don’t have control now?”

      “I don’t have control. You and I both know that.” He nodded once and she continued. “But then there’s… there are men, Sayid, that love to dominate. Love to control. Love to have power and watch how they can use it to control other people. And there are people who let them. Because of… of passion. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

      He knew all about people like that. There were people like that who ruled countries, countries he’d had to go to war with. And in the prisons… the prisons were run by men like that. Men who liked to watch others in pain. Who liked causing it. He’d spent a year in the hands of a madman like that.

      And that she’d seen something of that in him… it made him ill. That she’d seen it at all made his vision red, a haze of violence making it hard to see.

      “Who hurt you, Chloe?” He knew his desire for blood was audible in his tone, knew that he sounded as enraged as he felt. Good. Let her hear it. Let her know that if it were in his power, the man who dared put his hands on her would die with Sayid’s fingers curled around his throat.

      The anger was suffocating, uncontrollable, as foreign in many ways as the tender emotion from a moment ago.

      Chloe blinked rapidly. “I… he never touched me. I always wondered why. But then, I think for both of them life was better if they just ignored me.”

      “Who?” he ground out.

      “My parents. My father. He…” She took a breath. “One of my first memories is just this one little clip. There isn’t even sound. I remember I couldn’t get something out of the fridge on my own, so I must have been very small. I was looking for my mom, so that she could get me a snack. I walked into her room, just in time to see my father put his hands on both of her shoulders and shove her against the dresser. She hit her head on the corner and fell. That’s all I remember. I have a hundred more memories like that. My mother being bruised, my father hitting her. Knocking her unconscious. And I have a hundred more memories of them kissing. Having sex against the hallway wall like I wasn’t there to walk in on my way out of my room.”

      She let the breath out, a slow, shuddering sound. “I hated it. So much. I hated that he had that power over her. I hated that she let him have it. I hated their passion.”

      “Is that why you’re a scientist?”

      “There is passion in science, but there’s an order to it. Science is about fact, at the very least, it’s about the pursuit of fact. To discover what is. To understand the world, the universe. To know how it works.”

      “You hoped it would make you understand?”

      “I hoped. But I don’t. Not yet. Maybe never. No… never. I never will. There is no answer to that, there’s no logic to it. It’s emotion. And emotion is…”

      “Beyond logic,” he said. “On that we can agree.”

      “I’ve given everything up for Aden,” she said, her voice softer now. “And that makes sense. He can’t take care of himself and he… he needs me. But I don’t know what made my mother give up her right to basic human decency to hold on to a monster.”

      “People don’t make sense,” he said. “You and I have seen that. We’ve seen the darkness that lives inside the human heart.”

      “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s it exactly. And now I see it everywhere.”

      He nodded. “There is wisdom in that.”

      “But?” she asked.

      “But, that is not how I see it.”

      “How do you see it?”

      “I do not speculate. I find out what is, and what isn’t, and I act. I don’t waste time on emotion, or on worrying about that darkness. Rather, when I see it, I eradicate it.”

      “Do you know how much I wished I could?” she asked.” Sometimes… I wished I was strong enough to make him stop. I thought about it. Fantasized about it. And then one day I asked her why she didn’t leave. She said the pleasure he gave her was worth the pain. And I realized she didn’t want him gone. Or at least, she didn’t think she did.”

      “Are they still together?”

      She nodded. “But I don’t go home. Ever. It was like being in prison. I won’t ever go back.”

      “No. You would never choose to go back to something like that,” he said.

      He knew what a hell it was to watch others be tortured. He’d experienced it during his year in prison. It was why he never screamed. Although, he’d learned not to years before that. Pain had been inflicted on him early and often, an attempt to teach him to never break under threat of pain.

      It was the one time he’d broken since Sura. And again, it had caused terrible devastation. He had deviated from the plan to prevent the enemy from capturing a man, and it had ended with the loss of so many more.

      “Not every man is like that, Chloe,” he said.

      “I know,” she said.

      “I’m not like that.”

      She looked up, her eyes clashing with his. “I just… it’s hard. Trusting. There are things I know in my mind, but…”

      “Your body believes something different?” She nodded. “I know all about that,” he said. “I know about forcing your body and brain to be completely separate. To want separate things.”

      “You don’t ever feel, Sayid? Do you want?”

      Sayid answered without thinking. He didn’t know the answer until he spoke it. “People

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