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And he took her mouth again with all that consummate skill, that wondrous fire, and Cleo didn’t have the chance to tell him that she was still using the year’s worth of birth control pills she’d brought with her on her backpacking trip.
Not then and not later, when he smiled down at her in that way that she knew meant he believed the matter was settled. Solved.
She didn’t tell him that she hadn’t stopped taking those pills in these past months. That she’d taken one every morning when she brushed her teeth the way she always had at home, even during their week in the oasis. That it was one of the only routines she’d kept from her old life.
She would tell him when they discussed this further, she assured herself. She wasn’t trying to deceive him, she was waiting to get to know him better. He would understand that. Cleo was sure he would.
Which was why she also didn’t tell him that she had no intention of stopping them.
* * *
“Have you tired so quickly of the marital bed?”
Khaled glared at the shadow that detached itself from the wall outside Cleo’s rooms so much later that night that it was well into morning and became Nasser.
“You are the only man alive who would dare to say such a thing to my face,” he said in a low voice. “And the only man I will not kill for such temerity.”
Nasser smiled, unperturbed. “And well do I know it.”
Khaled started walking, smoothing an unnecessary hand over his shirt as he moved down the long hall that led toward his office. Always his office. Always something else to be done. Always another fire to put out.
And never the fire he craved most.
“My duties did not suddenly come to an end with a great feast and a brand-new wife,” he said darkly. “I must secure the future of Jhurat. You know this as well as I do. And there is one very easy way to do that.”
“Ah.” His old friend was quiet for a moment. Then, “Babies. That would cement your line as Talaat has not, and secure your position in the eyes of the world nicely, wouldn’t it? Everyone loves a happy family.”
“Fairy tales for all.” He hardly recognized his own voice.
Yet not for him. Never for him.
That week at the oasis, ripe with longing and yearning and shot through with glimpses of the man he’d never be, the life he’d never lead, had been a mistake.
“A man who must do for duty what he would do anyway for love should look happier, Your Excellency,” Nasser murmured after a moment, when there was nothing in the grand hallway but the sound of their feet against the polished marble floor, bouncing back at them from the ornamental columns. “Should he not?”
“This isn’t about happiness,” Khaled bit out, and he understood that he shouldn’t be so angry. That there was no need for this intensity. Worse, that Nasser saw all the things he didn’t wish to admit to himself. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Or love, God forbid. This is about Jhurat.”
“Of course,” Nasser said in his soft way, which meant he didn’t wish to argue further, not that he agreed.
Later, Khaled sat at the ostentatious desk that his grandfather had claimed as a spoil of an old war and listened with only half his attention to the conference call with his ministers, most of them handpicked by his father and bristling with their own mortality. Their job was to be fatalistic, he knew, and they rose to the challenge this morning the way they always did.
Talaat’s rebels were taking over the country while they did nothing! Talaat would foment civil war if they weren’t vigilant! Talaat would topple the government with a single meeting of his agitators in this or that village square—had already done so, if the reports were true!
Khaled didn’t believe the situation was quite as dire as it seemed in the dark and ever-gloomy imaginings of old men, he was tired unto his own death of that pain in his ass, Talaat, and anyway, he could see only Cleo.
His brown mouse of a wife, whom he hadn’t been able to banish from his thoughts as he’d planned, and whom he hadn’t thought of as a mouse in a disturbingly long while. If ever. His wife, who consumed him still and always, like an addiction. He didn’t understand it. Every night he promised himself he would break the cycle, and every night he betrayed himself and went to her anyway.
Khaled couldn’t seem to get enough of her.
She haunted him, and he hated it. Their week in the oasis had been meant to break this unreasonable hold she had on him—this need for her that was only getting worse. That roared into something darker and wilder when she stood up to him, almost as if he wanted her defiance, her strength, as much as he wanted her. As if it called to that part of him he’d been denying for so many years it was second nature to him now.
