“So it’s an official document. And you want me to get creative.” The teeth sprouting in her stomach sank into its walls.
“Just give me the exact language. Better yet, paraphrase.”
He pouted in mockery, continued dictating. She kept writing until he told her to sign her name. She did, raised her eyes. She’d only written two paragraphs. “That’s it?”
He shrugged one massive shoulder. “It takes only so many words to pledge oneself unto eternity.” He reached for the paper, ran his eyes over her efforts. “I’m impressed.”
Without waiting for her reaction to his praise—an upsurge of irritation for wanting it, for being so pleased at having it—he turned to his own paper, started writing the words he’d dictated her. And she forgot everything as she watched those fingers that had once owned her flesh, moving in the certainty of expertise and grace, producing a req’uh script of such beauty and elegance, such effect, it did feel like a spell.
After he signed both documents, had her sign his, she rasped, “So not only a prince, a tycoon, a philanthropist, a diplomat and a handyman but a calligrapher, too.”
“Yet another side-product of my unearned privileged existence.” His eyes mocked her, documented her chagrin at being caught out at a pettiness, at the need to apologize for it, at her anger at that need and at him.
Not that he waited for her to come to a decision about which urge to obey. He let go of her eyes, pressed three stamps to the inkpad, marked the documents with each. Judar’s royal insignia, the Aal Masood family crest and the date. The one he’d fixed to the day they’d first made lo—had sex.
She stared at the seals. The dark red ink became viscous as it dried, like congealing blood. She did feel she’d just signed a blood pact. A binding, unbreakable one.
He rolled up both documents, tied each with a ribbon, placed them in the larger box. “Those papers aren’t considered legitimate without two witnesses. As soon as we land in Judar, Shehab and Kamal, my brothers, will add their seals and signatures to ours.” He rose, extended a hand to her. “Now we’ll check on Mennah.”
Everything in Carmen squeezed. Fists, guts, lungs, heart.
Mennah. The reason he’d just taken her on.
The reason she’d just signed her life away.
Seven
A gentle nudge jogged Carmen out of the twilight between exhausted sleep and strung wakefulness.
It took her a second to realize they were touching down.
Her sandpaper-lined eyes scraped open. And there he was.
Farooq sprawled opposite her, an indulgent lion letting his overzealous cub crawl all over him. He was still watching her.
He scooped Mennah up with kisses and gentleness, rose, came to stand over her. They both looked down on her from what felt like ten feet, his face opaque, Mennah’s ablaze with glee.
“Do you need a few minutes to wake up, or shall we go?”
She shook her head, sprang to her feet. Her sight darkened, disappeared. His arm came around her, would have released her the moment she steadied if not for Mennah. Their daughter threw an arm over Carmen’s neck, bringing the three of them into an embrace.
Carmen went limp with the blow of longing at feeling him imprinting her in such tenderness, even if borrowed, at Mennah mashing herself against them as if seeking their protection, their union. At the hopelessness of it all.
She lurched away before her eyes leaked, held out her arms for Mennah. Mennah reached back.
Farooq only walked on. “I’ll carry her.”
She scampered, kept up with him. “But she wants me now.”
“Do you want your mother, ya gummuri?” he cooed to Mennah, who looked back on Carmen with dimples at full-blast, as if she thought her father was playing catch-me-if-you-can. Carmen gave him a glare from an angle Mennah wouldn’t witness. His Mennah-smile remained on his lips but his eyes frosted over. “She will see her land for the first time, be seen in it in my arms, a princess held up by her father the crown prince for all to see.”
Carmen’s legs gnarled with the power of image he projected, the poignancy. She rasped, “Put that way, you go right ahead.”
Not that he was awaiting her approval. His strides ate up a path to the exit, leaving it up to her to keep up or not.
She scrambled in his wake, looked at the multitime zone clock on the way out: 9 a.m. in New York, 5 p.m. here. It had been sixteen hours since she’d found Farooq standing on her doorstep.
Sixteen hours. They felt like sixteen days. Sixty. Far more. It felt as if her life before those hours had been someone else’s, her memories sloughing off to be replaced by another reality that had unfolded with his reappearance.
Then she stepped outside and into another world.
And it was. Though her life had taken her all over the world, Judar felt…unprecedented, hyperreal. The azure of its spring skies was clearer, more vibrant, the reds and vermilions starting to infuse the horizon as the sun descended were richer in range and depth, its breeze, even in the airport where jet exhaust should have masked everything, felt crisper, more fragrant, its very ambiance permeated by the echoes of history, the lure of roots that tugged at her through her connection with Mennah, whose blood ran thick with this kingdom’s legacy.
Mennah, who seemed to recognize the place, too.
Secure in her father’s power and love, she looked around, eyes wide, face rapt as she inhaled deep, as if to breathe in the new place, fathom it, make it a part of her.
Carmen knew how she felt. With her first lungful of Judarian air, she felt she’d breathed in fate.
Then she heard his voice, the voice that had steered her fate since she’d first heard it, that seemed would steer it forever, permeated with intensity and elation.
“Ahlann beeki fi darek, ya sagheerati.”
He was welcoming Mennah home. And only her.
Carmen groped for the railing of the stairway, feeling as if a wrecking ball had swung into her.
How stupid could she get? She wanted him to welcome her home, too? When it wasn’t her home, only Mennah’s? When the only reason he’d brought her here, where he didn’t want her, was Mennah? How could he welcome her where she wasn’t welcome?
She nearly gagged on the toxicity of her feelings of alienation. She had breathed in fate, could feel it all around her. Mennah’s. She was just its vehicle. Her fate was not even a consideration here.
Farooq’s arm came around her shoulder.
She couldn’t bear him to act the supportive husband, lurched away, continued her descent, blurted out, “I thought you were taking us to Judar, not to some space colony on another planet.”