Whistle over the waves. {BXB} [COMPLETED]

28. Madhav

Everything is good.
For now...
He sleeps so peacefully.
I want to stand up and admire him properly but I cannot risk waking him up. So I see what I can from between the tangle of our bodies.

I love him so innately that it pains me. He has become an unexpected dependency. One that will wreck me in it's absence but I have not fooled myself. I knew the mortality of what we have the day I first kissed him in New York.

I've loaned this love for myself and I'll pay dearly upon return.
I've always been aware of that.
Yet, sometimes, there is this sliver of hope.
One that tells me that he won't leave me after the truth is out.
One that says that maybe he means his declarations.
But it is only a sliver.
An easily silenced, barely audible sliver.
And I don't get along with hope.
Hope is a gamble that has burnt my fingers before.

When I was 12, the shadow was 18.
5 years had passed since he had first claimed my body,
By then,
I was adamantly faithful.
We were meant to be lovers. Husband and wife. Bodies that fit together like the men and women in the videos he made me watch and reenact.
And he would be the one to take me away, far away to my real home.
And he would always be with me.
All I had to do was make him happy,
And sometimes his friends too....
They would meet us in the woods and do to me what husbands do.
Sometimes it would hurt, sometimes it wouldn't.
But I never told anyone because if anyone found out that he was my husband then he would be sent away and then no one would take me away from my house.
Afterwards the boys would give him all sorts of stuff like money, packets and he would be happy and he would be proud of me.
He was proud of me.
Sometimes I would get tired or hurt from all of it and I would try to stop him and he would beat me but it was obviously my fault because wives shouldn't disobey their husbands.
I would shut up because I was scared he won't take me away.
Away from my house,
To my home.

Then,
One day,
He told me that he was leaving to go faraway to some other country, to study, to become a big man.
I cried and I begged him to take me too.
He said I couldn't come because I was still a kid.
I would pack my little school bag everyday,
He would refuse everyday.

The day he finally left, he promised that he will come back and take me with him.
I agreed. I had to.

Then he went away.

In the beginning he would visit me every few months. Then he stopped coming back. I would wait and wait and wait for him to come, for him to say that it was time for me to go away from everything, from the yelling that would echo from my father's room, from the fights, from all the beating.

But he didn't come.
When I failed school at 13 years old and managed to fall sick repeatedly, my father noticed and he sent me to a doctor, one for the mind.

He was a kind old man.
He asked why a smart boy like me had failed?
So I told him I was worried about a friend of mine, who had an older husband who had left, whose mother didn't love him at all, whose father would always be away from home, whose house would ring with shouts.
He told me to tell him more because he wanted to help that friend of mine.
I asked him if he could bring my friend's husband back.
He agreed.
Excited, I told him everything. Everything about everything.
I told him the truth.
How I missed the shadow because he was kinder to me than mom was.
How mom wasn't really my mom.
How he hadn't kept his promise.
He listened to everything silently and then went out with his phone.
Dad arrived soon after that. He and the old doctor fought a lot. I don't remember much about that but I remember dad begging the doctor by the end.
When he came back, his eyes were moist.
"Why are you crying Doctor?"
"Nothing son. I've just talked to your father. I've told him that you don't like it here... You're going away to a new place now. Are you happy?"
"Yes doctor. But will he be there too?"
"Who?"
"My husband." I said, my face turning red.
"You must not refer to him as your husband anymore. You two are not actually husband and wife, son. They'll teach you why at the school you're going to."
Questions rolled around in my head. Too much was happening.
"Son, now whenever someone asks you about him you must not call him your husband. Do you understand that?"
"But...but...I... then what should I say?"
"You say brother. Because that is what he is. Your elder brother. Nothing more."