Alyssa glances up when the door opens. Her eyes pass over me for maybe a second before she looks back at her crossword book. She doesn’t so much as acknowledge my presence beyond that.
My ego tells me that this is just another tactic. But common sense tells me that she’s hurt and she’s just trying to protect herself.
I meander around the basement, pretending as though I’ve come to check on everything but her. I know from experience that she hates a long silence.
But the minutes tick by and still, she says nothing. As far as tactics go, if that’s really what she’s doing, this is a good one. The anger and frustration, I can handle. But this? Fuck this. Indifference is a beast that I’m not used to.
“Do you have everything you need?” I ask at last.
She doesn’t look up from the crossword. “Oh, absolutely,” she drawls. “I’m a very comfortable prisoner.”
Okay, so there is some spark there. Now, how do I light it up?
“Has Lev been coming down here?”
“You should ask him.”
“Alyssa.”
“Uri.”
She still hasn’t so much as lifted her head and it’s driving me crazy. Another thing that’s driving me crazy? The fact that she hasn’t pulled down her slip. I see endless thigh and the curve of her ass.
Surely she’s doing that on purpose.
“I asked you a question.”
“You sure did,” she muses. “But believe it or not, you can’t control everything, Uri. You can lock me down here and throw away the key, but guess what? I don’t have to answer your questions. Same goes for Lev—he can do what he likes.”
I scowl. “I don’t control him.”
“Really? Telling him where to sleep and who to speak to… That kinda seems like control to me.”
“I’m trying to protect him.”
Her eyes snap up to mine. Finally. “Just like you’re trying to ‘protect’ me?”
“That’s different.”
She shrugs. “You can come up with as many excuses as you want, but at the end of the day, if you don’t allow the people around you to make some decisions on their own, you’re gonna lose them.”
Her mouth quivers for a moment before she bites down, trying to stop the wobble. She slaps the book closed and throws it onto the bed beside her.
“Wanna hear a story? I’m gonna tell it either way, so you might as well say yes. About a year after she was diagnosed, my sister decided she wanted to stop treatment.” A tear slips down her cheek as she swings her legs to the side of the bed. “We had so many fights. God, so freaking many. I even stopped talking to her for a couple of weeks.”
I inch a little closer, my breath slowing in my chest.
“She managed to convince our parents that it was the right decision for her. Her leukemia was aggressive. She wanted to enjoy her last few…” Her sob stops her in her tracks. “Fuck. This is why I hate talking about Ziva. I start blubbering like an idiot.”
“You’re not blubbering.”
She meets my eyes for a second. “The point is that I missed out on weeks with my sister because I was so busy trying to make her see things my way.”
“I would have done the same thing.”
She flinches and her eyes softly shutter. “That’s just it. It wasn’t my decision to make.”
“It was your job to protect her.”
This time, when she peeks up at me, she doesn’t look away. Like me, there’s a breath caught in her chest. Another tear runs down her cheek as she nods. “It was my job,” she agrees softly. “And I failed.”
“You didn’t convince her to start treatment again?”
She swallows. “I did, actually. By then, it didn’t make a difference. She spent her last few months in the hospital, puking her guts out, getting poked and prodded, hopped up on drugs that made her feel like shit.” The tears are coming fast now and all I want to do is hold her, but I know better than to venture close. “It wasn’t until the day she died that I realized how selfish I had been.”
“No,” I growl firmly. “You loved her. You wanted her to live.”
“I wanted her to live for me,” she corrects. “I made her life, her cancer, her pain all about me. I should have let her choose what she wanted. I should have given her the last few months of her life.”
I don’t consciously decide to move, but suddenly, I’m squatting in front of her, resting my hand on her knee. I notice the little spark of surprise in her eyes but she doesn’t try to move away from me.