Secrets of the Oasis

by Abby Green

  Jamilah looked at Salman with wry impatience now, bringing him back to the present with a jolt. ‘Every time I talk about anything remotely personal you clam up.’

  Salman sent her a warning look from across the lavishly decorated and heaving dinner table. ‘I think I’ve already spoken far too much.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jamilah persisted with a gentle voice, ‘about something that happened to you when you were a child… But what about everything else? Nadim? Your life so far?’

  Salman found himself constricting inwardly. He knew he’d been avoiding talking about anything too personal—he already felt as if Jamilah knew far too much. His voice was brisk. ‘There’s nothing to tell. It’s quite mundane and boring. I wanted to get out of Merkazad since I was eight years old, I’ve blamed Nadim on some level my whole life for what happened, which I know is irrational, and I’ve made a disgusting amount of money.’

  He smiled then, and Jamilah shivered slightly.

  ‘Don’t try and psychoanalyse me. My life so far is exactly as you once said: soulless. And that’s the way I like it.’

  Jamilah knew she should stop and take the hint, but she couldn’t. ‘So, what? You won’t be hurt again? That’s impossible, Salman. We open ourselves to hurt every minute we’re alive, but also to incredible joy.’

  Salman was stuck for words for a moment. The concept of incredible joy was an alien one to him, and yet hadn’t he caught a glimpse of it here with Jamilah? He shook his head mentally. Joy was not for him. He didn’t deserve it. He was determined to wrest back some of his sorely lacking control. She was pushing him too close to an edge where his whole world threatened to drop away into an abyss.

  Salman came out of his chair, and in a smooth move Jamilah never saw coming plucked her effortlessly out of her chair, into his arms, and over to the bath behind the screen which had been prepared while they’d been eating.

  Jamilah blushed to imagine what the villagers must think of them. Even though she knew she was putting on a good show of confident bravado to Salman, she was still quaking inside—sure he’d seen through her gauche attempts to make it appear as if she was in control of what was happening.

  The past two days had slipped by with such deceptive ease that it scared her. They truly were cocooned in a tiny bubble of sensuality. The outside world could be going up in flames for all they knew or cared. And did Jamilah regret giving into Salman for one moment? As he undressed her now, with delicious intent, she felt some dim and distant regret, but told herself once again that she would think of it when this was over and she was back in Merkazad, in the real world, getting on with her life. She would have the rest of her life to regret.

  Salman instructed her to get into the bath with a note of steel in his voice, and Jamilah responded with a delicious shiver of anticipation.

  She watched as he too disrobed and stood there, powerful and intimidating. ‘I want you to touch yourself like you did the other night,’ he said.

  Jamilah groaned softly. He was going to make her pay for what she had done to him earlier, in the glade. She’d noted the glint of determination in his eyes at the time, and now it was payback. She found the soap and let the magic of this moment out of time suck her under again, giving in to the heady pleasure and telling herself weakly that she’d let the questions go unanswered for now.

  The following morning, early, Jamilah sat on a bench outside the tent and saw some of the local boys tending to the horses in nearby enclosures. She quirked a wry smile at the memory that she’d threatened to escape on one the other evening, when she’d arrived, and how Salman had autocratically declared that he’d forbidden anyone to let her take one.

  Her smile faded, though, when she went inwards to the thoughts that had been plaguing her ever since Salman had fallen into a deep slumber beside her. She’d envied him his ease of sleep. It was day three. They were due to go back to Merkazad. And Jamilah knew she had two options open to her: she could avoid Salman again, for all the good it would do for her mental health, or she could try and take things further, but in the process risk much much more. She risked everything with that option—risked being hurt all over again.

  She knew that if she insisted on pressing him to open up even more, he’d push her away for good. At least that was the gamble. Even as she accepted the futility of wanting that, a small, ever-persistent and ever-optimistic voice pointed out that things were different this time. This Salman was a different Salman from the one she’d known in Paris.

  She sighed deeply. She couldn’t stop the hopes and dreams. Was she on some level hoping for him to be cruel again? To reject her brutally? Wishing for a sort of punishment for having allowed herself to be so stupid as to believe that he might have changed? Her mouth tightened. She certainly deserved it, if that was the case.

  She heard a movement come from inside the tent and resolutely stood up, mentally steeling herself for the exchange to come.

  Salman had woken up to find Jamilah gone. He was pulling on a pair of discarded jeans when she appeared in the doorway, dressed in her own jeans and a shirt. The village girl had returned them yesterday, washed and ironed. A frisson of unease went down his spine when he saw the familiar tilt to her chin and the crossed arms.

  ‘Good morning.’ His voice was still husky from sleep, and he could see how Jamilah’s arms tightened fractionally, as if it had affected her. Immediately blood thickened and rushed to a strategic part of his anatomy. Pushing aside any niggles of inexplicable apprehension, Salman strode over to where Jamilah still stood, just inside the entrance, as if she were about to bolt.

  He caught her face in his hands and pressed a kiss to her mouth, willing her to soften and relax into him. But she was rigid. He pressed a hand down her back to her bottom and pulled her into him, but to his chagrin she fought and pulled back, out of his arms.

  ‘No, Salman. We’re done with this. We’re done here. Three days—that was it. We go home today, and I’m not going to go through this again with you. This time it is over. Really over.’

  Salman looked at her and tried not to let those huge pools of blue affect him. He felt tight inside. ‘Why does it have to end, Jamilah? I fail to see why when we’re so good together. Why would you want to do that to yourself?’

  ‘Because I’m trying my best not to be a complete masochist, Salman. You hurt me badly once before, and I’m not going down that route again.’

  Salman felt sick inside. ‘But it’s not the same this time. We’re different—you’re different. You know why—’

  ‘Why what, Salman? Why you rejected me in Paris even though you didn’t want to? Well, you did…and I have a confession now, too.’ Her heart thumped ominously. ‘I was in love with you. And it hurt me more than I can tell you. I’m not a robot, Salman. Perhaps it’s easy for you to keep your feelings on ice and locked away, but I can’t promise that…’

  Salman felt anything but cold at that moment. He felt heat rising, because Jamilah had just told him she had loved him. He ran a hand through his hair impatiently, loath to keep on this track, afraid of what she might say…

  Feeling desperate, as if something precious was slipping out of his grasp, and not liking it, he said, ‘Stay here with me for another few days…until Nadim comes home. We don’t have to deal with anything till then.’

  Jamilah shook her head, her eyes huge and boring all the way to his soul. ‘No. We have to deal with this now. All you’re asking for is a stay of execution. I’m not interested in prolonging an affair that’s just about sex. We have a relationship, whether you want to admit it or not, and relationships are about intimacy. Telling each other things, opening up. Nothing has really changed from six years ago, and when you walk away again, back to your life and your other women, I’ll be right back to square one.’

  Anger was like a tight knot deep inside Salman—anger at himself, for having indulged his weakness for Jamilah again. ‘What do you want, Jamilah? More sordid tales of what happened to me? Like the fact that one day the so
ldiers brought out one of the maids from the castle and used her to give me a demonstration of what a man did with a woman? Is that what you want? Is that what will allow us to continue this affair?’

  Salman saw how Jamilah paled, and immediately he cursed and wanted to claw the words back. He’d had no right to tell her that. He’d already burdened her with too much. But even as he watched she composed herself and stood up tall, colour slashing her cheeks.

  Jamilah shook her head sadly. His words this affair were lancing her inside. She was doing the right thing. That was all it was to him—all it ever would be. ‘I’m sorry, Salman, truly sorry that you had to see that. But I’m not talking about that kind of intimacy. I’m talking about something that grows between two people in a relationship who…who care for one another, and you just won’t admit that we have that. I’m talking about the banal details of our lives, our hopes and dreams.’

  She had no idea how monumental what she asked was. Salman reached out to take Jamilah’s shoulders in his hands, barely aware of what he was doing. ‘You ask too much. It’s an intimacy I’m not prepared to indulge in with anyone. I can’t.’

  Shock and renewed pain cut through Jamilah like a serrated knife-edge. She wrenched free of Salman, tears blurring her vision and slipping down her hot cheeks. ‘I know the horrors you faced, Salman, and I can imagine how they made your belief in the fundamental goodness of man disappear. But it doesn’t have to be like that again. What happened to you doesn’t happen to everyone, and it’s not to be expected.’

  Salman’s face was stark. He sneered, ‘How can you possibly know what it’s like?’

  Jamilah put out a hand. ‘Exactly—how can I know, unless you tell me?’

  Unconsciously she put a hand to her belly.

  ‘It’s not that you can’t indulge in that kind of intimacy, Salman, it’s that you just won’t. And all the sex in the world can’t disguise that. I don’t know why I let you believe that my baby wasn’t yours, Salman, when you need a good dose of reality. But it was!’

  She tried to dash tears away ineffectually, not even noticing the way Salman had paled. ‘I know that must be hard to take—a man of your supreme control failing in one crucial aspect. But the fact is that it was your baby, and mine, and it died before it had a chance to live.’

  The awful remembered pain nearly crippled her. She was livid with herself for being so stupid all over again. She was so angry she lashed out with words designed purely to wound and hurt as she hurt. ‘Do you know what? I’m glad that baby didn’t live, because you would have made a terrible father, Salman. You’re an emotional wasteland, clinging onto your past like a shield, and you don’t even deserve to be loved.’

  Salman watched, stunned and in shock, as Jamilah fled outside. Her words had fallen like little arrow tips all over his skin. A baby. His baby. It wasn’t possible. Medically, it wasn’t possible. If it was any other woman he would automatically negate what she’d said, but it was Jamilah. She wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t lie. And, as if to compound the suspicion that she could be right, the doctor’s words came back to him as if it were yesterday.

  ‘You’ll need to come for regular check-ups to make sure the operation has been successful. There shouldn’t be a problem, but as with anything else there’s a small failure rate.’

  Recrimination burnt through him. Salman had naturally gone to the doctor with the highest success rate in his field. Once he’d had the operation he’d been supremely confident, and he’d been supremely busy. Of course he hadn’t gone for any follow-up appointments…so it was very possible that the operation might indeed have failed. He had a sick feeling that if he went to get checked out that was exactly what he would find.

  His head bursting and reeling with this knowledge, Salman remembered the hurt look in Jamilah’s eyes the night she’d told him of the miscarriage. He’d thought it had been for the loss of the child, not because he hadn’t recognised that it had been his. He cursed himself. Blindly, he went outside to follow her, but couldn’t see her anywhere. He cursed again, and then heard a thunderous sound. Jamilah appeared from one of the enclosures on the back of a horse, hair streaming out behind her.

  ‘Jamilah!’ Salman shouted, furious with the fear that rose up even now to strangle him. He couldn’t move, and could only watch as Jamilah cantered towards him, bringing the horse to a dramatic stop just feet away. Salman could feel clammy sweat break out on his brow. He’d never felt so weak in his life, and he detested that weakness.

  A wealth of sadness rang in Jamilah’s voice. ‘At least I know you won’t follow me, Salman. I’ll come back when I hear the helicopter, and not before.’ She whirled the horse around on the spot with an expert precision that even Salman could appreciate, and in a flurry of dust she was gone. Far away from him.

  For hours Salman paced up and down outside the tent, his face as black as thunder. He’d issued orders and now waited for them to materialise. No one came near him, and there was no sign of Jamilah.

  When the helicopter finally arrived he breathed a sigh of relief. Now she would come back, and he would talk to her. He knew now that he had to at least give her some kind of explanation.

  The chopper pilot checked in with Salman. Time went past with no sign of Jamilah. Salman felt rage building upwards, and wondered if she’d been stupid enough to try and ride all the way home. Then he reassured himself. She wouldn’t have—not without provisions. Jamilah had local knowledge, and while their country might not consist of the more traditional desert, its rocky and mountainous topography held just as many dangers as an undulating sea of sands.

  Just then Salman saw a young boy, leading a horse by the reins. It was the horse Jamilah had been on. With a different kind of fear constricting his insides into a knot, he strode over, learning that the boy had found it wandering in the village shortly before. Salman’s insides curdled. It had come back without Jamilah.

  Shouting orders—and an urgent one for someone to find the local doctor—and ruing the decision he’d made to bring Jamilah out here in the first place, Salman gritted his jaw against the onset of panic at what he was about to do. He swung himself onto the horse’s back. He knew the chopper was nearby, but the horse itself would be the quickest way back to Jamilah’s exact location. He would call the pilot and navigate him in if he needed to.

  He hadn’t been on a horse since the age of eight, but up until that time he’d been a more proficient horseman than even his own brother. Now he depended on knowledge he’d long since buried, nudging the horse in the direction it had taken with Jamilah and praying that it would take him back to her. If anything had happened to her— He blanked his mind. He couldn’t go there.

  The horse only started slowing down when it had cantered for about half an hour on the other side of the village. Miles from any habitation. This area was far from the lush oasis he’d left behind, and was as arid and rocky as the moon.

  ‘Jamilah!’ Salman’s voice was hoarse from roaring her name.

  He stopped the horse and turned it round and round, despair starting to snake into his veins even as he denied it. There was nothing remotely human as far as the eye could see. He knew the search party he’d commandeered wouldn’t be far behind him, and they would have supplies, but there were treacherous rocks everywhere. A sudden mental image of Jamilah lying unconscious and bleeding made him squeeze the horse into a trot again as he called out her name for the umpteenth time.

  And then he heard it—faint but distinct. ‘Go away!’

  Salman’s head went back. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the relief that went through him was nothing short of monumental.

  He nudged the horse in the direction of her voice. ‘Jamilah, habiba, where are you?’

  ‘I’m not your habiba. Leave me alone. I’m fine.’

  Salman followed the voice easily enough, and jumped off the horse when he saw a familiar, albeit dusty figure sitting on a rock, long tendrils of black hair loose over her shoulders. He made sure to
tie the recalcitrant horse to a lone tree before walking over to her. She was looking resolutely away from him with arms crossed, and he sucked in a breath when he saw blood and a nasty bump on her forehead.

  ‘You’re bleeding.’

  Salman’s voice was like a balm to Jamilah’s ravaged emotions, but at the same time she wanted to stand up and rant and rail and beat her fists on his chest until he might feel even a smidgen of the pain she felt. She sniffed, finally allowing that she’d been far more scared than she was letting on. ‘The horse got spooked by an eagle and threw me. It was gone before I could get up.’

  Salman was in front of her now, and to her chagrin all Jamilah could think about was how wrecked she must look. She still wouldn’t look at him. His big hands were gentle, probing and touching her, smoothing back her hair to see the bump. She uncrossed her arms and slapped his hands away ineffectually, but she might as well have been swatting a fly. She heard the ripping of material and felt him press something damp to her sore head. She sucked in a breath.

  Feeling very thirsty, but loath to admit it after doing something as immature and foolish as haring off on horse into the unknown with no supplies whatsoever, she gasped with relief when she felt an open water bottle being pressed to her mouth, a hand on the back of her head.

  For the first time she let her eyes meet Salman’s. She choked on the water; he looked wild. His eyes were very dark and his face was pale. He was covered in dust. He was encouraging her to take more water, and as she did so he said throatily, ‘I’ll save the lecture on running off so irresponsibly on a stupid horse for later. How sore is your head? Do you hurt anywhere else?’

  Jamilah said meekly, ‘I glanced my head off a rock. It’s just a bump.’ She saw how Salman’s face paled even more. And then she said hurriedly, when that set off butterflies in her belly, ‘I think my right ankle is sprained.’

  He crouched down at her feet and peeled up her jean-leg. Her foot was indeed swollen above her sneaker and he gently took it off—and the sock. Jamilah winced with the pain as her ankle seemed to balloon before their very eyes.