Another Shot at Forever, page 16
She’d thought that she could remain with him and learn to be as emotionally detached in their relationship as he was, but it wasn’t as easy as she presumed it to be. Worse, starving her love for him was starting to feel impossible. And it made her wonder whether she had doomed herself to forever pining away for Ara in secret, never having her love returned and never being happy with him again.
“I just wanted a change of scenery for dinner, and this restaurant came highly recommended from Anisa. Apparently she and Nasser dined here recently.”
Though his explanation didn’t fully settle her nerves, Zaynab nodded slowly and moved along.
At the boat, waitstaff ushered them in with smiles and guided them to one of the tables on the empty boat. Besides figuring that they arrived earlier than anyone else, she thought nothing of their being the first guests aboard the floating restaurant, except for the fact that she was now briefly stuck with Ara.
It should have been the perfect window for her to tell him how she felt about him had her tongue not anxiously tangled up on her.
I don’t want a marriage that’s empty of passion.
That was all she had to say, but that one sentence was full of the incomparable weight of her love for him. She couldn’t just blurt it out... Could she?
Before Zaynab tried, Ara stood up from their table near the center of the boat and he left her to walk up to the glass walls of the ship.
In his well-tailored charcoal gray striped three-piece suit, he looked the same as always. But with his back to her, his hands locked behind him, and the view of nightlife teeming along central London in front of him, Ara didn’t sound like himself as he said, “Besides dinner, there’s another reason I invited you here, Zaynab.”
Ignoring the way her heart took a nosedive like an anchor heaved off the side of a ship and into the murky depths below, she gulped.
“I’ve been thinking about the divorce. About us.”
She curled her hands into fists in her lap, her nails indenting into her palms.
“But before that, I have to tell you something about me. Something I hope will help you understand my reasoning and my actions lately.” She heard him sigh, the sound gratingly loud in the quiet of the boat. Even the staff appeared to have made themselves scarce. And with the ship covered in glass, it truly felt like they were trapped in their own little bubble right then.
“Since my parents died, I’ve always carried this feeling that I should have been with them. That if I had been, I could have saved them.”
Zaynab pinched her lips together and stopped the comforting words that rushed up in her, and though she forced herself to remain seated, she gazed at him with a longing to give in to the need to embrace him.
“And I might have, had I not allowed an argument to keep me away from them. I let my anger get the best of me, and although I know it didn’t kill them directly, it held me back from being with them in their time of need. It’s a regret I will live with for the rest of my life.” She believed what he said. The grief in his voice heavy and thick, and pressing down on her lungs as though she was grieving with him. And, in a way, she was. Her love panged for him. Made her want to run up behind him and wrap her arms around his shoulders and hug him until he forgot the tragedy that both disfigured his past and shaped him into the man he was today.
She hadn’t wanted to interrupt him, sensing that he needed to expunge his feelings, but Zaynab couldn’t help herself from trying to console him.
“I’m sure that’s not true...”
“It is,” Ara intoned. Behind his back, he tightened his hands, his fingers locking around his wrist, knuckles jagged against his deep brown flesh. “Because I should have been there, Zaynab. I... I had time off school. A holiday break. And when most of my friends left to visit their homes, I had remained on campus to avoid the inevitable arguments I knew awaited me if I returned home to my parents. An argument about my leaving my business program and pursuing being a chef, of all things.
“It was stupid,” he breathed out harshly. “And though it felt so important to me then, I wish it hadn’t been. More than anything I wish—Allah, how I wish I had taken the time to go home, be with them, even if it was one last time.”
She knew he was done when he hung his head and his shoulders drooped suddenly as if burdened by an invisible pressure. And he held perfectly still, like a beautiful statue after that, the silence no longer holding her curiosity as he’d given her a peek into what he was thinking and feeling.
But she couldn’t feel relieved knowing that he was hurting.
Only before Zaynab could rise from her seat and go to him, Ara glanced at her over his shoulder.
“I hurt them with my selfishness, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that to anyone I love again. But I did, with Anisa when she moved away. Because I wanted, selfishly, to have her by my side where I could protect her. I allowed four years to pass without speaking to her, and I almost lost my remaining family because of it.”
Zaynab’s breathing staggered at the ardor tightening across his handsome face right before he looked away from her.
“I want to be selfish,” he said, his words spoken to the glass wall in front of him, but they were aimed at her entirely. “I’m fighting against the thoughtlessness of keeping you with me. But if I lost you—Zaynab, I can’t lose you. I won’t. Not even if I have to act inconsiderately and make you hate me.”
Hate him? The notion couldn’t be further from her mind, not especially when her love for him surged up in her more powerfully than ever before.
“I loved my parents, and their deaths nearly destroyed me. If I hadn’t needed to care for Anisa, needed to step up and be the remaining family she had, I don’t know where I would be today. And it’s because I loved them that I’m still hurting so much.”
“You’re right,” she said, finally finding her voice and feeling like she had to speak up. “About love. I loved my father, and it pained me when I finally realized that he didn’t love me back.”
“It’s his loss,” Ara remarked.
Zaynab smiled at his quickness to defend her, not that it was needed. Though it’s appreciated. And because she believed that she now understood where he was going with this, she said, “I know it’s hard to care about someone and question if they care much back.”
“I do care for you,” he rasped, “love you even—”
She had already been on the edge of her seat the entire time, so she rose up fairly quickly.
“What did you say?” Walking slowly over to him, she glimpsed her reflection hovering behind him and saw the uncertainty that gripped her heart crinkling her brow and trembling her lips. She touched his shoulder when he wouldn’t turn around to her, when he wouldn’t repeat what he’d just told her. But that small bit of contact worked in rousing him, and Ara gave her what she wanted. What she’d always ever desired from him.
“I love you, Zaynab,” he said.
* * *
“I always did,” Ara said, lifting his hand to where she touched his shoulder, his palm enveloping her fingers. “That was never in doubt, at least not for me.”
“I thought... You said you didn’t, couldn’t.”
“I lied.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you getting hurt by your father’s crimes. And then because I didn’t know how to be a husband to you.” Telling her all of this after bottling it up inside for so long was at once terrifying and relieving. He hadn’t felt freer in all his life, even though a part of him still wanted to cower from Zaynab behind the last shreds of his usual defenses.
I want to show her this.
He needed to at this point.
“After Sharmarke was imprisoned, I’d hoped that maybe—” he paused and grasped her hand a little tighter “—we could live together and I could learn to be a better life partner to you.”
“You did?”
He could see Zaynab’s eyes widen in her reflection. Although he’d finally opened the floodgates on his thoughts and feelings, Ara still hadn’t looked at her fully. This was the most vulnerable he’d been in a long while. Not since his parents died and he’d equated love and any other emotion like it as a security risk to his mind and heart.
“I did. But then you asked for the divorce, and I wanted to give you what you wanted. I didn’t want you to force yourself to stay with me. When I signed the divorce application for you, I’d thought it would be the last time I ever saw you.”
Then she’d messaged him that she was pregnant, and Ara’s every primal-charged instinct was to claim his family.
“The baby was my second chance at making amends to you,” he said.
“Ara, I... I didn’t know you felt that way.” She took her hand away and he let her go, but he still didn’t turn to face her, not even when he felt her stepping back away from him, her sandals moving soundlessly over the carpet. From what he could see in the glass wall’s reflection, she was pacing behind him.
“At the hospital in Mogadishu, when you were in a coma, I was worried that you’d never wake up. We were married for two months then, and I was already thinking about a divorce, but then you were injured so badly and all I kept thinking was that I wouldn’t speak to you again—and I knew, I just knew then that I loved you.”
It wasn’t news to him that she loved him. He’d begun to suspect that she did from how sad she would become because of him, but it was another thing to hear her say it aloud.
She loves me.
And she was concerned that she’d almost lost him. It was exactly the distressing kind of situation he’d wanted to avoid inflicting on her; the whole reason he had suppressed his love for her and refused to tell her of it. To think that his worst fear had already happened a while ago and that he hadn’t known about it.
Ara’s heart constricted, and he waited for his usual doubts to creep in and ruin this special moment with her. When nothing happened he was surprised but pleasantly so. He knew that he owed it to Zaynab. Talking to her was helping, and had he known that it would, he might have braved telling her all of this a while ago.
As if reading his mind, she sighed and said, “I wish you would’ve told me all of this a long time ago.”
“I do too.” And knowing how much he regretted it the first time Ara didn’t want to suffer the remorse of another missed opportunity. “That’s why I want to ask you to give me another chance.”
By his side now, Zaynab touched his hand.
“I’m scared that if I do, that it might not be enough,” Zaynab said far more quietly, the fear threaded in her words clear to him, touching that final part Ara hadn’t even realized was closed up in him. He hadn’t looked her at her properly when they’d been talking this whole time. Now, desperate to remedy that, he gently took hold of her wrist and pulled her around him, trapping her between him and the glass wall, and taking her face in his hands.
“I love you,” he said, seeing the tears beading at her eyes and knowing that she needed to hear it again. That we both need it. “I’ve always loved you from the moment I first saw you. I might have struggled to get to this point, but Zaynab, it was never because I didn’t care for you. Never because I didn’t love your heart, your smile, everything about you that made me want to ask you to marry me.”
She closed her eyes and her lips parted on a whimper.
“If you give me this chance, I swear I’ll use it to show you this time.” He paused, gathering his courage for this last part. “But if you can’t trust me, I’ll understand. I just can’t give you what you’ve asked of me. I won’t condemn us to a marriage where we’re not in love.”
Her eyes fluttered open at his ultimatum, a blend of a cry and laugh coming from her. “Are you saying you’ll divorce me?”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling stupidly as her sparkling eyes softened his heart completely.
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Say yes,” he urged her and watched her chin tremble anew. Only now it wasn’t because she was unhappy with him. Rather, with her eyes shining, Zaynab kept him on tenterhooks until the very last moment.
“All right,” she whispered.
Ara expelled the breath he had been holding in anticipation.
“But only if you promise to speak to me. Tell me how you’re feeling and let me in up here,” she said, touching his temple before smiling serenely and moving her hand to his chest, her palm pressing down over his heart, “so that I know how to protect this.”
Feeling his own eyes watering after that, Ara lowered his head and kissed her, giving them what he knew they both wanted and needed. Almost all too naturally, he slid his hands down to her hips and she wrapped her arms around her neck. Their kiss was at once both soft and sweet and fiercely passionate, but it was also everything in between. It was the perfect reflection of the ups and downs they’d gone through together, and now standing there, with Zaynab in his arms where she belonged all along, Ara wouldn’t have had it any other way.
He would’ve kissed her to breathlessness just to prove his adoration for her, but they broke apart as noises filtered over to where they stood in the restaurant alone. Ara suspected that would be changing soon as the sounds crystallized into individual voices.
“I was beginning to think we might have the restaurant to ourselves,” Zaynab said, her brows knitting together like the thought of sharing the space now displeased her.
“Are you disappointed that we won’t?” he teased.
Still in his arms, she swatted at his chest lightly but laughed. “A little. Aren’t you?”
“Oh, most definitely.” Ara then bussed her lips quickly, playfully. “But I actually rented out the restaurant for the evening.”
That grabbed her attention, her face switching to confusion in the blink of an eye.
“Then who else could be here?” she asked as the noises only grew louder, the voices headed straight for them.
Ara spun her in his arms and pointed out the glass wall, his head hovering by hers, lips brushing the heated tip of her ear. “Take a look for yourself.”
And she did, gasping, “Is that my mother and your sister? Salma? Oh, my God, Ara, did you invite Opaline and Remi?” She looked away from their family and friends to goggle at him. “Why?”
“Simple. They’re as much a part of our lives as Button is,” he said and drawing her back against him, he settled his hands over the taut swell of her belly and smiled when her hands gripped his.
She leaned into him with a little frustrated moan falling from her soft, kiss-swollen lips. “That’s sweet of you, really, but I still would’ve liked it if it were just the two of us.”
Ara laughed, never thinking he’d ever feel this lightened of burden... Or this happy again. With Zaynab though, he suspected he’d be happy eternally.
EPILOGUE
A few months later
IT ALL FELT full circle standing on Ara’s yacht, gazing out at the horizon where the deep blue of the Indian Ocean met the cloudless blue skies of that sunny and warm late October afternoon. Zaynab didn’t think there could be a more perfect day for a wedding.
Standing off at the bow by herself, she smiled at the swell of laughter and cheers sounding from behind her where Anisa and Nasser’s reception was in full swing, but it was the strong arms snaking her waist from behind that had her giggling full-on. Flushed with happiness, she pushed back against Ara, knowing she’d never tire of his embraces, or stop longing for him to hold her the way he was now.
“Are you hiding from me?” he asked, nuzzling her ear and kissing her cheek.
Arching her head back and resting it on his shoulder, laughing when his lips teased along her jawline, Zaynab stroked her hands over his arms and murmured, “Maybe, but only because I know you’ll have us scandalize the wedding guests.”
“Not my guests,” he said between little nips, “not my problem.”
Zaynab snorted and let him have his way a little longer before she wriggled enough to get him to loosen his arms and allow her to turn to face him, her gaze lovingly roving over his features. She was still getting used to seeing him without that big beard of his. He’d grown it for as long as possible and then, right before she’d given birth, Ara had suddenly decided to shave it all off. Now he kept his jaw mostly clean-shaven, except for the occasional dark stubble of his five o’clock shadow.
But without the beard, the scar he’d gotten from his brush with death stood out to the world starkly.
Tracing the scar with her fingertips first, she followed it by kissing that little imperfect part of him that still, somehow, was flawless to her.
“What are you doing out here all alone?” he asked.
It must have looked strange to anyone who’d noticed her standing alone since the party was nearer the stern of the ship and spilling along the port and starboard. She had the front of the boat all to herself before Ara had sneaked up on her.
She hummed noncommittally. “Just thinking to myself, that’s all.”
“Are you having doubts about moving back to Berbera?”
Less than a week ago, they had settled back in his house right on time for Anisa and Nasser’s wedding.
She shook her head and said, “No. Not one single doubt in my mind that we’ve made the right move for us.”
He smiled at her and, not even bothering to see if anyone was looking in their direction, he swooped down and kissed her deeply and thoroughly. Once he ravished her into a panting, blushing state, he gestured for the shore of Batalaale Beach in the distance and where they could make out the hulking shape of the fortified stone enclosure that circled their home.
“We should head back. I miss Aasma.”
“I miss her, too,” Zaynab said, her heart sore at the thought of being apart from their little girl. Named in honor of Ara’s late mother, little Aasma was only three months old and already she was their whole world and had them wrapped around her tiny baby fingers. “But we can’t just leave your sister’s wedding. What would everyone think? Besides, my mum wouldn’t be too happy if we showed up early. Because then that would mean less time for her to coddle her granddaughter.”
