He flinched as if she’d slapped him. “And you’ve changed yours? When you can barely stand with wanting me?”
She felt the twitches of loss of control seizing her. God. She’d made her life’s worst mistake coming back here, being so weak she’d needed to see him one last time. She should have just disappeared.
Feeling crazed with desperation, she taunted, “That is what you’d like to think, isn’t it?”
He stared at her, his eyes deadening.
When he finally spoke, he sounded smooth, tranquil. “How about we drop the charade? I have nothing but games everywhere in my life. But in my bedroom I allow only sexual ones. You think the remaining six weeks should carry a more substantial price tag than sharing my bed and privileges? How remiss of me. I should have put an offer you can appreciate on the table. So if you have demands …” He suddenly yanked her to him, bent her over a potent arm, his other hand pressing her hips to his, his erection grinding against her long-molten core, the refined man she’d known receding fast. “Make them. I’ll meet them, whatever they are.”
Her heart crumpled.
Oh God. This had gotten uglier than anything she could have imagined. He thought she was bargaining with the unstoppable desire that had raged between them from the first glance. Though his repugnance was total, he seemed willing to pay anything for more of her.
She tore herself out of his arms. She had to end this. Now.
Only the ugliest lie would do.
Feeling the resignation of a death sentence settling over her, it flowed from her in a lifeless voice. “I thought I owed you the courtesy of not disappearing without saying goodbye. But it seems I should have spared myself the unpleasantness, should have known you’d react with the barbarism of your culture and the conceit of your inherited status. You may be good in bed, Farooq, but so are a hundred other men. I like variety, and I always leave when my lovers start to bore me. I thought it best to go before I was sick of you. I didn’t want to spell it out, but it’s clear I shouldn’t have bothered with civility.”
Before she collapsed at his feet in a weeping mess, she staggered around him, snatched up her handbag, images of a baby who looked like him fueling her march out of his bedroom, out of his world.
But the image that would remain imprinted on her retinas for the rest of her life was of his face. The face of the hostile stranger she’d managed to turn him into in mere minutes.
The hostile stranger she’d never see again.
One
“Bagha … bagha …”
Carmen paused in the middle of hanging the nursery’s new curtains. She looked down at Mennah, listened to her chirping her latest “word,” her heart in a state of expansion.
She’d gotten used to feeling her heart filling her whole chest, her whole being, since she’d given birth to her daughter.
She’d demanded Mennah the moment she’d come out of her womb, disregarding the doctor’s grumbling that he had to close said womb first. He’d succumbed, though, had placed the smeared, nine-pound miracle on Carmen’s bosom. And for long moments, as she’d first touched her baby, felt her precious weight, her flesh and heat and reality, Carmen had been afraid she wouldn’t survive the explosion of emotions raging through her.
She’d searched for the right name long and hard. She’d found the perfect one, what this baby was, in her father’s mother tongue. Mennah. Her gift from God.
Now her gift was latching chubby fingers onto her playpen’s railings, hauling herself up to a standing position. She then tried to stand unsupported and landed on her diaper-padded bottom with a cry of chagrin-mixed glee, tearing a laugh from Carmen’s depths.
“Oh, Mennah, darling, you’re in such a hurry.”
And she was. At only nine months, she’d been sitting unsupported for almost three, crawling for almost two and was now clearly on her way to overtaking another milestone.
Carmen slotted the last hook, climbed down the ladder and headed to the playpen. Her sunny angel grinned at her, good nature brimming from golden eyes, displaying her newly acquired set of teeth, her dimples flashing in the perfection of her cherubic face. A surge of emotions clogged Carmen’s throat, rising to her eyes.
Could she have been so blessed?
Mennah held up her arms. Carmen obliged at once, bent and cradled the robust little body that was her reason for living. Mennah mashed her face into her mother’s neck, and Carmen’s arms convulsed around her. It was a good thing Mennah loved fierce hugs. Carmen bore down on the flare of love, rocked Mennah in her arms, one hand luxuriating in the raven silk of her locks. Hmm, the bald patch from before Mennah started rolling around was totally gone.
Suddenly Mennah pushed away, looked up expectantly. “Bagha bagha.”
Carmen tickled her nose. “Yes, darling, you’re trying to tell me something and your mommy is so dense she hasn’t figured it out yet. But that’s a new word. Give me a day and I’ll figure it out. Say—could it be you’re telling me you’re hungry? It has been a couple of hours since you’ve eaten.” Carmen started to undo her shirt only for Mennah to slap her hands on top of Carmen’s, squealing, part playful, part admonishing. Carmen sighed. “No mommy-produced sustenance?”
Mennah giggled. Carmen sighed again. She’d been hoping to prolong nursing. But this was another area where Mennah was in a hurry. She’d been refusing to nurse more and more ever since she’d been introduced to solid foods, decreasing Carmen’s milk flow. This was the second day with no nursing at all. During that time Mennah had even given her grief about eating previously much-loved foods. And Carmen could guess why.
“I shouldn’t have given you a taste of my filet mignon, darling. Seems you share more than your looks with your father. He, too, is a big panther who relishes red meat—”
Carmen stopped. Mennah was looking up at her with such absorption, as if she was memorizing everything her mother said.
Carmen had been indulging in the heartbreaking pleasure of constantly talking to her about her father. Maybe she should resist giving in to the urge. There was no way Mennah understood now, but maybe before Carmen realized, she would. And she didn’t want to explain her father’s absence for years. Not that she’d ever have enough time to come up with an adequate explanation.
Exhaling, shaking off a resurgence of the despondency that had suffocated her all through her pregnancy, she walked out of the nursery, headed to their open-plan, sunlit kitchen.
She secured Mennah in her high chair, dropped a kiss on top of her glossy head. “One bagha bagha coming up.”
She placed plastic toys in front of Mennah, set the iPod to a slow rock collection and started preparing the dish that had converted her baby to gourmet cuisine. Amidst singing along with her favorite songs and Mennah’s accompanying shrieks of enthusiasm, she stopped periodically to gather the toys with which Mennah gleefully tested gravity, giving them back to her so she’d restart her experiments over and over again.
She was finishing the mushroom sauce when she noticed it had been a couple of minutes since she’d fetched for Mennah,
