All he had wanted was her love, but it was not to be his. And the flower he had thought he'd found turned to poisonous thorns in his hands. He wished it had been different, but wishes are the useless hopes of what one knows cannot exist. All he desired now, unable to alter the world, unable to alter her heart and mind, was a part of her to keep, to replace the heinous time they had not needed to create, and they had both created it. Her mind and heart lost to him, he sought only something that would serve as a memory of a better time, a concession from her, an irretrievable confession of what she had done. He had said his apologies, expressed his sorrow, but she had denied her own actions, stayed silent in spite. Yet his need for something and her need to return to him the love she had wrongly exploited for attention was greater than both of them. If he could not have her heart, her mind, he wanted her face and body, in some way, the body he had come to desire like the desert in need of rain. He had come to worship her presence, this women he would never have believed he could be attracted to, quietly watching her graceful dance. If she could not love him, she could give him that much, as she had made no pretenses about attraction and had not been openly adverse to letting him have her, to see her. It was little for her to give, given what had happened, and would serve to heal wounds, not make them disappear, only easier to bear. 

He openly asked for nothing but remorse, only waiting for her conscience to, one day, lead her to need to give him something. There was a connection between them that would remain forever, a bond that had become a nightmare. She had the power to make it into something else, but she had to find her soul and slay her pride. She owed him for the lies she had told and the destruction she had wrought in revenge, something bigger than a mere acknowledgement with words or a simple apology. And he knew that she was not the simpering puritan she had played, not the innocent child she had acted. If she had any heart within her at all, any manner of compassion or honesty, then she would understand what he needed from her, why he needed it, and what she needed from herself, because, as much as she pretended, as much as she sought to bury it, guilt had never left her. She had ruined him for nonsense. She could find it in herself to fulfill her coy suggestions and lay aside her feigned modesty in secret ... and let him love her from afar until he died.