Chapter 19

'Affection?'

Yerenica Demir

When I was eleven, I saw a documentary playing on one of the televisions in an electronics store window.

I had been sent out to run an errand but had gotten distracted. Watching television was a luxury, one I couldn't miss. So I stood there, wide-eyed and shivering in my thin sweater, staring at the screen while the city moved around me.

A bear caught a deer. I should have looked away, but I didn't. The bear tore into the deer's throat with a brutal efficiency, crimson spilling over the snowy ground. But then it did something that lodged itself into my memory forever. The bear, still stained with the deer's blood after ripping it's throat out, began to lick the dying creature with something like tenderness, something that looked like affection.

Affection, I thought at the time, was strange. Affection could look like that, like ruin, like mercy, like devotion all at once. It was a wound inflicted with the same hands that soothed it. And perhaps, I realize now, I have been living inside that paradox all along.

Now, years later, I am in a bed so soft it feels like I might sink into it and never surface again. A luxury. I had never had something like this before. The room is large, foreign, too opulent for someone like me. The walls, high and cavernous, seem to swallow sound whole. The silence is thick, pressing, only disturbed by the quiet clink of porcelain against wood. A maid, one I don't recognize, arranges a tray on the bed - a table, some sort of breakfast setup. A nurse adjusts the drip connected to my arm, her fingers ghosting over the IV tape as if she is handling something fragile, breakable.

It has been three days since I woke up.

Three days since they told me I have brothers.

The words had fallen from their mouths like an offering, like something sacred, something meant to fill the void inside me. But all it did was terrify me. I was too afraid to speak, too afraid to look at them, too afraid to exist in the same space as them. When they realized I wouldn't even acknowledge them, they left hesitantly, reluctantly, like men abandoning a wreck they were responsible for but too afraid to salvage.

But I could tell. They had been around.

One of them always visiting, lingering just outside my reach, talking to the nurse, asking how I had been, trying to make small talk. Leaving when it became clear I wouldn't answer. Shadows in my peripheral vision. Footsteps fading before I could register them. Their presence was a constant specter, looming but never intruding.

The nurse and the maid urge me to eat, but I don't move. My body has become a house I do not wish to live in. My stomach, a clenched fist. Hunger is a familiar companion, and ignoring it is easier than accepting what has been given to me.

Then a voice cuts through the room, smooth but firm. "Leave us."

Cihan.

The nurse and maid exchange glances before bowing slightly and retreating. The door shuts, and then it's just us.

He moves with an effortless grace, lowering himself into the chair beside my bed. The scent of expensive cologne, faint and warm, reaches me. He picks up the bowl of soup. He stirs it, mixes it well, then gently blows on it before moving the spoon toward me.

I stare at him.

I don't understand this. I don't understand why he's doing this. Why he wants to feed me. Why the same hands that have taken so much from me now wish to give.

When I don't move, he exhales softly. Not out of annoyance, something I have experienced too much in my life but out of something else. Something heavier. Something bordering on sorrow.

"When we were younger," he starts, his voice gentle, careful, "when our mother was pregnant with Rezan, Zyran and I really wanted a sister ."

The words brush against me like something distant, a story belonging to another life. But he continues.

"Then when she was pregnant with Dehrin, the three of us wished for a sister with all our heart. But after Dehrin, we knew we wouldn't get one."

He pauses, watching me. I say nothing. I feel nothing.

"When she was pregnant with you," he continues, softer now, "there was hope again. The four of us would stay up all night talking to her stomach, hoping you could hear us. We went over different names. And when Zyran finally said 'Yerenica'... you kicked."

Something inside me withers, turns inward like a dying flower. I want to close my eyes and disappear into the void of sleep, but his voice tethers me here, binding me to the weight of his words.

"The moment we found out we had you back..." His voice dips lower, as if the words ache coming out. "There was nothing we wouldn't do to make sure you felt loved."

Loved.

I do not understand that word. It is foreign to me, an artifact from a world I do not belong to. The bear and the deer flicker through my mind again, love and destruction, affection and violence, bleeding together into something indistinguishable.

Midway through his story, Cihan had started feeding me without me realizing it. The bowl is nearly empty now. I feel a lump forming in my throat, my chest tightening. I do not want to cry. I do not want to feel.

But the body betrays before the mind can intervene.

A single tear slips down my cheek before I can stop it, and he notices.

He gently wipes it away, his fingers barely grazing my skin. Then he cleans my mouth with the napkin. He sets the tray aside, adjusts the table, fixes my blanket.

Everything he does is meticulous. Careful. Like I might break apart at any second. Like I am already broken, and he does not know where to begin mending me.

Then, as if it's the most natural thing in the world, he reaches out and pats my head.

I flinch.

He stills.

His expression shifts, something in it cracking, something breaking apart and reforming into something else. But he forces a small, pained smile before lowering his hand. He says nothing else, only gives me one last glance before standing and leaving the room.

The door closes behind him.

And I am alone again.

What do we think about Cihan?

Which brother's Pov do you like the most?