CHAPTER 44: IT’S YOU (2)

"Uhhhh!" A low grunt left him, and her eyes snapped open.

"Oops! ... I’m sorry!" She quickly released her hand and reached for the blanket to cover him again. However, before she could, she felt him turn and curl in a fetal posture and wrap his arms around her!

Shelby froze.

’What is it with him and seated waist hugs?’

She tried to detangle him, but he wouldn’t budge. Shelby took off the towel that was now pressed between them wetting her already thin attire and placed it back in the basin. Shelby reached out with a bit of difficulty and brought the blanket around him and her legs so that he was at least fully covered. After she was done, she turned to look at him only to see him staring straight up at her. Her heart skipped another beat!

’My poor heart!’

Meeting those clear but cloudy set of eyes made Shelby’s calm heart go haywire.

’Oh no! He caught me! What do I do now? Ahhhhhhhhh! Shelby! You silly girl!’

"It’s you!"

"You’re awake?"

They both said at the same time. His voice was slightly weak yet mesmerizing, and his eyes looked a bit unfocused upon closer inspection. Shelby was too startled to think straight at this time, though. She raked her mind, trying to find something to talk about and, most importantly, something to defend herself that did not sound like a silly excuse. In short, she just felt guilty.

"I-an, it’s not what it looked like... I mean, it’s not what it felt like, I -"

While she stammered, his eyes fluttered close, and his breathing evened out.

"What? Hey!"

He never woke up, and she was stuck in that position. She wiggled a bit and rested her back on the bed frame. After a while, she felt him adjust himself until he found a comfortable position around her, but Ian never woke up. She also tried to think of anything but his erect member she had seen, but that was truly a hard task to accomplish. How can one unsee something already seen?

Thankfully, the basin had been left on the nightstand close to her, so she routinely wiped his face. The fact that his fever was still raging subtly evaded her thoughts, successfully putting what she had seen out of her thoughts.... Just temporarily, though. The words he had spoken in his delirium still nagged at the back of her mind.

With nothing to do and a little hungry, she picked up half of the juice left and drank right from the bottle. Never once caring that she had fed him from same. After about a couple of hours, she noticed him sweating profusely.

"Sweat! That is good!"

From her days of taking care of sick children at the orphanage, she knew that sweating most of the time signalled that a fever was breaking.

She discarded the towel. The water was slightly warm anyway.

Shelby tried to stretch and get out of his embrace as she was starting to feel numb in that position, but she failed. Giving up momentarily, she casually glanced around the room, her eyes finally resting on a picture of a smiling dark-haired girl on the nightstand.

"This must be the famous Aliya," she said, reaching for it.

Ava’s words echoed in her mind there and then.

’Something is not right here, Shelby. Do you really think Ian was married prior? ... Just look at how the pictures of your ceremony are all out there on the same night of the marriage ceremony that he did not even attend.

If he married once, don’t you think that we would have such media from their ceremony? Also, .... Take a moment to think of it, Shelby. Did you see any prior wedding pictures of the supposed first bride? ... Check the estate....’

She mulled over those words for a while.

Over the weeks after the wedding, the media had swallowed that news and rebroadcasted it several times, but Shelby did not care. She had received many calls from ’friends’, but she ignored all of them.

Of her friends, only Ava and one other mattered then. But even out of these two, she could only talk to Ava. She had tried dialling the other person’s number several times, only to give up.

"It turned out that Ava was right! Ian never married before in his life!" She was still on the fence about knowing that she was not married to a widow.

"Aliya! The one girl who torments me even though she is not in the land of the living! Living in Aliya’s shoes is and will forever be the hardest! Living in anyone’s shadow is hard, not to talk of one who is dead!" Shelby whispered to herself as she traced the outline of the pretty girl staring at the camera with a wide and infectious smile.

"Ingrid is her mother’s spitting image, but even in a still picture, Aliya exudes a confident aura missing from her child. I wonder who Ingrid’s father is if it’s not Ian... Yeah, that is a very strange thing.

None of the children are his, but he is hung up on their mother. What does that make him? Or was it that Aliya was his girlfriend or fiancée? Noooo, .... I don’t think so. With such a prominent family like this, I doubt that they would allow a single woman with three children to marry their son... but that could be so.... Whatever! It’s none of my business, and the complexity of this whole love circle or triangle of whatever hurts my head."

She placed Aliya’s picture back on the nightstand.

How did Shelby deduce that the picture was Aliya and not some hidden sister or friend of Ian? Simple, Aliya was the only female associated with Ian in the short time she had known of him. She was the one person who had gotten him to shut himself from the world. Why would he have any other person’s picture on his nightstand?

After placing the picture back, she could not help but wonder what Aliya had brought to the table that had smitten a giant of a man so much that he had to isolate himself from the world for this long time to grieve.

’You should teach some of us your tricks, Miss Aliya. In as much I do not like to hear of you and be compared to you, you did do something right for him to be still stuck on you.’

"I want some water," She muttered to herself and looked at the empty glass on the nightstand, then down at Ian, who was still entangled around her.

"I must get up. How long can I stay in this position?"

She wiggled a bit and tried to unwind his arms. Succeeding a few moments later, she panted and smiled in relief, stepping her numb legs on the floor.

Just as her legs touched the floor, she was yanked back onto the bed on her back. Her startled look met his clear eyes.

’Wasn’t he asleep just now? Was he faking it?’

She was trapped between his arms as he stared down at her, lowering his lips toward hers.

’It’s going to happen again!’ She thought just as his cool, parched lips met hers.

*********

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