He came towards her, dark and threatening and dangerous. “But I am that type of man, Lily.” The words were quiet, cold. “That is precisely the kind of man I am.”
She refused to be intimidated. Instead she moved towards him, meeting him head on. “You’re not. Stop seeing things in yourself that aren’t there.”
“Oh, but they are there. Because, you see, I did pick up that riding crop. I picked it up and I used it. On Khalid. I hit him, Lily. I beat him. And when he went down onto the floor, I kept hitting him until he stopped moving.”
* * *
She’d gone white, all the color leached from her face. Her dark eyes wide and black as they stared into his. Was that horror there? Yes, and that was good. She should be horrified. Because what he’d done, what he’d allowed himself to do to his own father was worthy of horror. Far from learning from Khalid’s example, he’d become Khalid.
Her long, elegant throat moved. “What happened?”
“I told you what happened.” He felt cold. Detached. And that too was a good thing.
“The details, Isma’il.”
“You don’t want the details, Lily.”
She moved even closer, the look in her face fierce. “Tell me, damn you!”
He could smell her, the clean scent of her damp skin and hair, and suddenly his proximity to all her vulnerable, naked warmth felt so wrong. He turned away, walking to the tent’s entrance and stopping. Night air flooded in, the sounds of the celebrations still going on in the big meeting tent drifting across the oasis. He took a breath as his detachment began to fade away, leaving him feeling suffocated, his chest squeezing tight. He did not want to tell her. He did not want the horror exposed to the light.
But he had to. She could not go on thinking of him as someone he was not. It would hurt her. It would hurt him. But she was right, she’d given him so many little pieces of herself and he’d given her nothing in return. Anything less than the truth would demean those gifts, and he could not do that to her.
“I came into the dining room one morning to find Khalid threatening my mother with a riding crop,” he said, keeping his attention directed out into the desert night. “He had managed to get her a couple of times over the face and she was bleeding. I tried to protect her, but he turned on me and starting beating me too. And I . . . ” He stopped, trying to find the same detachment he’d had earlier and failed. Making himself go on anyway, he forced the words out. “I snapped. I hit him in the face. I was as tall as he was by then, so he went down easily.” Isma’il closed his eyes, trying not to see the images that refused to stay buried. “But I did not stop there. I was so . . . angry. So filled with rage. I did not want him to hurt me anymore. I did not want him to hurt anyone anymore. So I . . . ” The words would not come. He made them, ripped them from the part of his soul that he hated so much. “I picked up the riding crop and I hit him with it.” The leather slippery under his fingers. Slippery with his blood. His father’s blood. His mother’s. So much blood. He’d never been able to wash the slick feeling of it away. “And I kept on hitting him with it until he stopped moving.”
Silence behind him. But he could feel her shock like a physical thing.
“Isma’il . . . ” Her voice sounded thick, but he didn’t turn around. Didn’t want to see the expression on her face. See the warmth that had been there for him the night before die away and be replaced by something cold.
“Those are the details, Lily.” His own voice didn’t sound much better. “Don’t make me say them again.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“You blame yourself.”
He found he was gripping the tent pole rather hard. “Of course, I blame myself. I picked up that riding crop. I hit him. I was the one who lost control.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t given you any provocation.” She sounded closer this time. “You were protecting yourself. You were protecting your mother.”
Isma’il turned sharply and the expression on her face was worse than he’d thought, because it wasn’t horror he saw there. It was understanding. “I nearly killed a man, Lily. My own father! It doesn’t matter who I was protecting. I lost control of my temper and I nearly beat a man to death!”
Any decent woman, any decent person, would have run from him. Turned around and walked away, but Lily didn’t. She came across the tent, dressed only in her towel, tall and beautiful and defiant, and stood right in front of him, dark eyes blazing into his.
“And so you did. And now you’re going to punish yourself for the rest of your life because of something you did as a bruised, battered and beaten teenage boy? You defended yourself from an animal, Isma’il! You fought back. Do you think I wouldn’t have done the same to Dan if I hadn’t been so scared and confused?” Color had come flooding back into her face, flushing her golden skin. Water still lay in the hollow of her throat and he wanted suddenly and desperately to yank away the towel. Lick the water from her skin. Bite her. Make her scream . . .