“You conned me?” He only shrugged and held her eyes, unrepentant. At length she tossed her hair, sending the sunlit waterfall thudding down her back. “You deserve that I wolf down this mouth-watering food in silence.”
And he guffawed. “You mean you still haven’t?”
She popped another piece of logmet el guadi into her mouth and chewed defiantly.
He leaned closer, brushing her exposed forearm with his, took a piece himself, mimicking her actions.
After their logmet el guadi eating competition had emptied the plate, with her still looking up at the thirty-foot-high tented ceiling, he drawled, “You won’t last. You can’t be silent. Not with me.”
She swung her eyes back to his, defiant, irritated—magnificent. Then she drawled back, “If this isn’t work-related any more, why should I tell you anything?”
“No reason.” He shrugged, knowing that his nonchalance was a flimsy act. Especially when he added, “Except for me.”
For him. Was there a better incentive? Jay thought.
She sighed, wondered when she’d finally stumble back out of this fantasy dimension she’d spilled into the moment she’d plopped into his car and he’d materialized out of the darkness.
It had felt just as mystic as sharing this with him, the best meal—the best experience—of her life. Incense fumes shrouded them, echoes of past and future twining with distant live music, the reed-like lamenting naay weaving with the oud, the melancholy of the quarter-tones of the music deepening the feeling of unreality.
She leaned on one of those incredible cushions, resuming her surrender to this out-of-sanity, out-of-life encounter. “So—what do you want to hear? The highlights in bullet form?”
“We have all evening—as long as we want.”
She watched him unfold his magnificent body, hers throbbing as he bent one endless leg on the floor, the other at the knee with his forearm resting there, like a sultan preparing to watch a show thousands had sweated their lives away to provide him with. He’d taken off his jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves and undone his shirt. She’d been right. His body was that of a higher being. His beauty made her ache.
And he, this perfect creature, was asking her to reveal herself to him, of all people, when she’d never done so to anyone. It was one thing he’d find out her secrets from a security report, another that she’d tell him her story herself, in words she’d never tried to formulate—and see pity or even distaste forming in his eyes.
He reached out, ran a finger over the hands entwined tightly on her lap, startling her out of her chaos.
“Listen,” she blurted out. “Just get on with your security checks. I’m sure your people will give you a far more accurate rundown of my life than I ever will.”
“They would, if I wanted a background check, which I don’t. I want to hear about you from you.”
“There’s not much to tell, really. It’s all very boring.”
“As boring as you’ve been so far? I’m certain it’s an impossibility that you, or anything about you, can be boring.”
What she’d thought about him earlier.
She fought to the surface, tried one last time. “I assure you a professionally gathered and written report will be far more entertaining.”
He shook his head, dislodging a thick, glossy lock from his slicked-back mane. She thought she’d tell him anything for the privilege of smoothing it back. “Tell me, Janaan. Please.”
It was the “please” that undid her.
“Oh, all right,” she muttered. “But I’m shutting up at the first yawn.”
He chuckled, did to her what she was dying to do to him and tucked back a lock of hair behind her ear, electrifying her. “If I yawn, it will be because in forty-eight hours I’ve only shut my eyes for the minutes it took for the accident to occur. You are the only thing keeping me awake.”
“Oh … OK.” With her last escape blocked she tried to think where to start, her heart bobbing in her throat.
He twined another lock of hair around two fingers, gave an almost imperceptible tug and whispered, “Start at the beginning.”
He’d read her mind! Or maybe she was just too predictable.
But anyway, he’d given the only logical place to start.
She exhaled. “I was born twenty-eight years ago next month in Chicago to a twenty-year-old single mother. She never married, so I was an only child. With no family herself, it was all she could do to take care of an infant as she studied and worked as a nurse. When I was ten, she stopped working and we subsisted on unemployment pay. I guess even then she’d started the plunge into depression, that it was why she couldn’t hold a job anymore. But she was only diagnosed with a major depressive disorder when I was fifteen. By then I was working in two part-time jobs to boost our meager income, had already jumped grades and had a scholarship to pre-med school. Once I entered med school, the scholarship lasted only one more year as I no longer qualified for it with my scores plummeting. By that time my mother was almost totally dependent as she started abusing alcohol and anything else she could lay her hands on. Soon we were in debt, and I had to work in any job I found just to keep us off the street.”
She stopped, groaned. God—she didn’t have to tell him all that, not this explicitly, this intimately.
But she wanted to. For the first time in her life, she wanted. needed to share with another. With him.
What about him? He couldn’t possibly want this level of personal detail imposed on him.
She ventured a look at him, whispered, “Sorry that you asked already? I told you it was boring. I neglected to mention it was pathetic too.”
His hand wrapped around both of hers, squeezed, silencing her. “Don’t. Depression is devastating to any family when any member is afflicted by it, but for it to be the mother, and for you to have had no family members to help you carry the ever-increasing burden! That you became in effect parent to a mother who was incapacitated by psychological illness, and at such a young age, is nothing short of heroic.”
“Yeah, sure,” she scoffed. “So heroic my mother kept plunging deeper, and I did less and less to pull her back as I kept getting busier. So heroic she ended up killing herself.”
Silence crashed, splintering all around them, shredding her worse than the burst of relived anguish had.
She endured it for an overflowing moment, almost flinched when his fingers came beneath her chin, coaxing her face up to his. He insisted, moving closer, his body a protective barrier blockading her, warding off her torment, sympathy—empathy—blazing on his face. He’d known loss, helplessness to stop it, to reverse it. She knew it. And he was reaching out with the understanding that had been scarred into his own psyche, defusing her own guilt and agony.