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She swallowed nervously. “Why?”
His lips pulled to the side in a gesture that was part grimace. “I wanted to speak to you. But it can wait until morning if you’re tired.”
The uncertainty in his voice was completely unexpected and made her feel strangely vulnerable for him.
“No,” she demurred unsteadily. “I’m up now.” She waddled back to the bed, taking a moment to rearrange the pillows so she could sit comfortably.
He watched, his eyes on her, so her skin prickled with goosebumps and when she lifted her eyes to his face, her cheeks were flushed. Not from exertion, but awareness.
“Is this about our divorce?” She said, when he didn’t speak.
“Yes.” The question seemed to rouse him and he moved to the other side of the bed, sitting on the edge of it, his face angled towards hers.
“Okay.” She tried to prepare herself for this but her stomach was in knots. There was something about the dawn and its magic that made her hope for things her rational, thinking brain knew better than to want.
“I don’t want to get divorced.”
Her lips parted and she did her best to conceal the immediate rush of relief that flooded her. She couldn’t stay married to him. It would never work.
“We’ve already dealt with this.”
“But you didn’t have all the facts,” he pushed. “In the desert, I tried to call off the divorce, but I didn’t tell you why. I didn’t even know why myself. I just knew that the idea of letting you go was akin to walking ten miles with a sharp stone in my shoe. Every breath has hurt since you first floated the idea of beginning our marriage with an end point. It’s the opposite of what I want.”
Me too, she wanted to shout. “This is so unfair,” tears filled her eyes. “None of this is what I want either, but we have to make the best of the situation. I can’t stay married to you. Not like this.”
She looked away from him.
“The last few months have almost killed me, Zafar. I’ve been so miserable. So tense. So nervous. I can’t keep going.”
“This has also been a mistake,” he groaned. “Habibi, listen to—,”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” she interjected hotly, for some reason the term of endearment hurt more than ever.
“But it’s the truth. You are my love. You have been from the moment I first saw you—more than my love, you are my true destiny. I have fought that because I believed my sole obligation in life was to serve as Sheikh to Abu Qara until the day I died, whilst not convoluting the bloodline any further.”
Millie’s head was spinning. She couldn’t answer him, she could only listen, open-mouthed.
“I have felt guilt and shame all my life,” he admitted.
“For things that were beyond your control,” she managed to squeak out, as her heart inflated and deflated at a rapid rate.
He dipped his head in acknowledgement of that.
“I have lived with a shadow over me all this time, a shadow that precluded the possibility of a personal life and love, but that doesn’t mean I have not felt those things. That I haven’t wanted them.” He was very still, like a statue, almost as though he were afraid of reaching out to touch her. “The day you told me you loved me, that you offered to stay here, was the worst day of my life, without doubt. You were offering me everything I wanted, but couldn’t accept. You held out a poisoned chalice to me and rejecting you was like dousing myself in acid. I did it because I knew what was expected of me, and I hoped that I was the only one suffering because of my actions. I had no idea you would be so broken—,”
“I loved you,” she growled. “Not in some stupid teenage way, but with my whole heart, and all of me, for all time.”
He nodded, angling his face away. “I know that now. I know that your feelings were as real as mine. But that was also what I feared. I promised myself I would never have children.”
“Because of your stepmother and your adoptive mother?”
“Neither of them required that of me,” he said stonily, then shook his head. “But I have always known it’s what they wanted. I was a blight, and that blight needed to end with me.”
“You are no such thing!” She denied indignantly. “How dare you speak of yourself that way?”
The hint of a smile touched his lips, but it was bitter. He pushed on, ignoring her interruption. “You were just nineteen years old. I told myself you’d meet someone else, someone less complicated. Someone who could give you everything I’d sworn I’d never be a part of.”
“I didn’t want those things with anyone else.”
