Behind the Curtain - Page 77

“He hit your cousin—”

“Zarif hit Asher first, and was about to do it again,” Laila said, irritation rising in her voice even though she’d said the same thing dozens of times last night. She’d never seen Zarif behave that way. She hadn’t even known he had it in him to be such an aggressive caveman.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, coming here.”

“It was your idea. The only thing I’m doing now is finalizing it. You told me a thousand times last night how dishonest I was being by sneaking around.” She met her dad’s gaze squarely. “All I’m trying to do now is be honest.”

“We’re doing this for your sake, Laila.”

“No. I’m doing this for you,” she corrected coldly. “I love him, Baba. I’d never do this for myself.”

Her father closed his eyes briefly, and she felt his pain. She felt everyone’s pain on that gray morning. She wished like hell she could make it stop.

“You’re nineteen, Laila. You’re young. This will pass,” he said quietly. “You have to believe me when I say that I’m thinking only of you in this. Of your happiness. I’m going to allow you to speak to him this one time. But understand this. Never again.”

Laila said nothing. She’d heard it so many times last night, the words felt like hollowed-out missiles. They still hurt, but they weren’t penetrating as far. Something had hardened inside her.

She peered out the window at Asher’s face and saw the discoloration on his jaw where Zarif had hit him. She saw the worry in his eyes. A numbness settled on her. She turned to her father. He looked different to her. Older. Had last night aged him? Or maybe it was just that he was looking at her—Laila—differently?

“I’ll only be a few minutes. Stay here.”

She opened the door and stepped out onto the driveway. She slammed the car door. For several seconds, she stood there, her gaze locked with Asher’s.

The she started to walk toward him. That was when she first felt it: the icy hand of fate gripping her heart.

• • •

“. . . and so that’s how it all happened,” Laila was saying in a flat tone. They sat in his mother’s sitting room, Asher at the corner of a couch. Laila perched on the edge of a chair. As she talked, she rubbed her hands together in a nervous gesture. Asher was growing more and more concerned by the pallor of her face, the dark circles under her eyes and the frozen quality of her usually animated expression. When they’d entered the sitting room earlier and shut the door, he’d tried to take her into his arms. But she’d just walked around him and sat down on the chair, where he couldn’t sit next to her.

“My cousin Zarif is really smart, and he’s close enough to our age to know when something’s up,” she continued, still refusing to make eye contact with him. “He noticed Zara sneaking out last night to meet Eric and followed them to Chauncy’s. From what I gather, he didn’t find them in the most beneficial of circumstances. They were in an empty back room alone at Chauncy’s, fooling around. Anyway, accusations were flying between them, and suddenly Eric blurted out all this stuff about you and me. I don’t know why he did it then—”

“To deflect your cousin’s attention off kicking his ass onto kicking mine,” Asher said, his mouth curling in disgusted fury. Laila gave him a startled glance at his concise, bitter evaluation of things. “I know how Eric works,” he stated simply. “Then what happened?”

“Zarif hauled Zara back to the cottages and woke up her parents. My mom and dad, and Tahi’s too, got up because of all the shouting at Zara’s parents’ place. In the midst of all the chaos, Zarif told my dad about what Eric had said about you and me. They stormed into my and Mamma Sophia’s room and saw that I was missing.” She paused, her face tightening briefly in pain.

“Laila?”

“My grandmother got confused and scared by all the shouting and confusion,” she continued in a muffled voice. “She tried to get out of bed by herself, and she fell—”

“Jesus,” Asher said, sitting forward and taking her hand. “Is she okay?”

Laila’s chin fell down to her chest. Wild concern swamped him when he realized she was shaking, her entire body quaking in a fine tremor. She wasn’t actually cold and distant in those moments, he realized. She was in misery, and barely holding it together. He went down on his knees and moved before her in the chair. He cradled her head and lifted her face gently.

“She’s okay,” Laila said. “We took her to the ER, just to be sure. There’s some bruising, but she’s okay.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Laila,” he said, knowing her well enough by now to know precisely what was going through her head.

She clamped her eyelids closed, shaking her head in his hands. “I have to go. I can’t keep putting this off by talking about last night,” she said, her voice so thick with emotion he could barely understand her. “It’s done.”

“What’s done?”

She opened her eyelids. He glimpsed through a crack that deep inside, she blazed like she was burning . . . like she was in the pain of a person at the center of a fire.

“We’re over.”

“We’re not over,” he said, laughing slightly after a stunned pause, sure he’d misheard her. She just stared at him, the blaze of pain slowly leaving her eyes, the window to her soul shutting tight. His thumbs feathered her cheekbones. Despite the tension of the moment—despite the impossibility of it—he wondered again at how beautiful she was. How rare. “Laila, you can’t let them get to you. We’ll find a way to keep talking. To see each other. You can’t let them turn you away from what you want.”

“What I want,” she stated, “is to not hurt my family anymore. The only way I can do that is to try to respect the rules they’ve laid out for me while I live under their roof. I hate it. I should do it, though.”

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