A Prayer Heeded

by Samreen Ahsan

  He pulls my hair away from my shoulders and wraps his arm around me. “Before I uncover your eyes, I want to tell you that I didn’t plan to do it this way. But since you weren’t willing to talk to me, I had to choose this path.” He unties the blindfold from the back of my head, and gently wipes the remaining grief from my eyes with his thumb. “Open your eyes, Rania.”

  I open my eyes slowly, to examine my surroundings. I find myself in a huge dome-shaped tent, surrounded with red rose petals. There are no lamps in the tent, and I wonder where the light is coming from. I look up and am stunned at the sight I’m seeing. I am under a dazzling sky, with millions and millions of stars, almost like a whole galaxy shining on me. My mouth drops open at such an amazing view. The dome of the tent is transparent. It feels like Heaven is watching us. I look at Adam with shock, and see him watching my expression.

  “Happy birthday.” He gives me his beautiful smile. “And I wish you have many many more.” He picks up my hand and kisses my knuckles. Did he do all this to create this surprise for me? He didn’t mean to harm me or kidnap me? He only did it because he wanted to bring me under the stars. My heart bursts into tears of happiness, which flow from my eyes. He hugs me tightly.

  “I am so sorry, baby. I didn’t want to hurt you. I know it wasn’t the right way to bring you here, but if I had invited you, you would never have come.” He speaks gently, while stroking my hair to calm me down. I cry harder, digging my head deeply into his chest.

  “I’m sorry for my behavior. I know I have made a big mistake. I shouldn’t have treated you like that at the party. You said you had forgiven me, but you forgot to forgive yourself. I know you have been punishing yourself all month, for trusting me. Please, don’t do that. We both are in pain and we both know that.” I cry more at his comforting words. It is as if I was holding these tears in for so long, and I was waiting for his embrace to let my sorrows out.

  He lets me cry for a few minutes, then holds my face in his hands. “I’m sorry I scared you, but…” He kisses my forehead and wipes my tears from my face. “I brought you here because I want all these stars and planets to witness what I have to say.” I look up at him, into his burning eyes. What is he saying? “I know I have hurt you a lot, but I’m asking you in front of all these stars, in front of the whole universe, to forgive me. I want all the creatures of the sky to witness this moment, so that when I’m not around you, they will remind you of me.” He takes a deep breath and pulls my face closer to him. “Rania Ahmed, I love you with all my heart and my soul.”

  My heart stops beating, as I hear the magical words from his mouth.

  “Yes, I confess under all the stars and all the lights of the universe that I am madly and crazily in love with you.” He smiles at me, looking at my lips and then to my eyes. I watch him with shock. I wasn’t expecting this revelation tonight.

  “You captured my heart when I first saw you outside my office. I was badly awestruck the moment you looked into my eyes. The feeling was so new to me that it took time for me to realize that it was love at first sight. I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since then. I don’t know if you feel the same for me or not, but I don’t want to hold on to my feelings anymore. I love you and I will always love you.”

  His words diffuse in my blood, and my heart and body melt down. I shake my head in disbelief.

  “No, Adam, you can’t love me.” He ignores my words. Moving closer, he kisses my lips gently, but with deep passion. I can’t help but let him do it. He keeps kissing me deeper, as his tongue discovers my mouth.

  “I have waited for this moment for so long,” he whispers in between our lips. He passionately kisses my neck, my collarbone, and his hand slides down to my waist, pulling my shirt up. “I love you so much, Rania. I will never let you go, ever.” I feel like melting in this very moment, wishing it would never end. I let him kiss me everywhere, savoring each and every passionate kiss on my soul. His hand touches the bare skin of my back, and my hand automatically slides behind his neck and I give him full space to discover me. I am riding the waves of my impulses, and instead of drowning, I swim.

  Never in my life have I realized I could get so aroused by someone’s touch on a bed of snow, inside a tent, lying under millions of stars. He strokes up and down my neck with his fingers while he explores my mouth with his tongue. His kiss is confident, skilled, with just the right amount of passion to turn me on wildly. He gently places my head down on the soft pillow and keeps deepening the kiss, stroking my tongue with lush slides of his own, until I give him my tongue and entwine them together.

  He instantly pulls back, his eyes on fire and his heartbeat raging against me. “Shit! You are so fucking hot, Rania.” He continues his kissing and his hand explores the bare skin of my back till it reaches my bra. A sudden wave of thunder hits my back when he unhooks my bra, while kissing me and stroking his fingers on my front. His weight is all over me, and I am totally consumed in his fevered arousal, achingly aware of every hot, hard inch of him. My heart starts pumping and I am unable to see. What is happening to me? I have never felt this emotion in my life.

  Ever.

  When his hand reaches my breast, my spine gets frozen and I feel doors of my past opening in front of me. The moment of passion is gone. I shake my head wildly and stop the kissing.

  “No no no, you can’t love me, Adam. It’s not possible.” I speak in between our lips. He pulls his mouth away and takes his hand out of my shirt. I sit up instantly, trying to catch my breath. I hide my face behind my hands. “You can’t love me, Adam. I don’t deserve to be loved. I can’t let you go so far. No.” I keep shaking my head in anxiety.

  “Please, don’t say that, Rania. You’re the only one I want—no one else. Stop saying that. Don’t spoil the moment.” He takes my hands off my face. “I’m never going back, from now on. And I’m not letting you go back, either. Now that I have felt you deep inside, there is no way I’m letting you go. Not a chance.”

  “No, Adam. I can’t love you. This is not possible. I can’t hurt you more.” I squeeze my eyes to avoid my pain. “I cannot move with you beyond this. I told you earlier, I have nothing to offer you other than friendship. You don’t know anything about me. I can’t take any further steps till you know everything from my past.”

  “I don’t want to know anything about it, Rania. As long as you’re mine, I’m not concerned about your past. I know it’s painful for you to go back in time and relive those memories. I want you to forget your past and live in the future, our future.” He cups my face in his hands. “I promise I will make you forget everything.”

  I pull my face away and close my eyes. “It’s not what you think, Adam.” I take a deep breath and, without looking at him, I confess. “I am married.”

  THE TRUTH

  ♂

  What the fuck? I feel the sky falling on me, millions of stars breaking on my existence, like someone has taken away my soul and shaken it badly.

  I pull away from her, and she looks at me with distressed eyes. “You can’t love me, Adam. I have someone else’s name. I can’t give you anything. I told you earlier.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. I can’t even speak properly. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for a moment and looks back at me. “You said it was only friendship. I was selfish, not telling you earlier, because it was hard for me to tell you about my past. That day when you were playing the ‘king and his chamber’ game in your bedroom, I realized your feelings for me are more than just friendship. I could clearly read it in your eyes. I had to escape you, but your love and sincerity tied me to you, and I couldn’t run away.” She pauses for a moment. “At the party, when I saw Nathan, I agreed to dance with him because I knew it would make you jealous and create a scene. And my plan worked.” She’s not even looking at me. She is flatly looking at the tent wall.

  “You did that on purpose?”

  She looks down remorsefully and nods
in silence.

  “When you didn’t contact me for a month, I was glad that you had moved on with your life.” She tugs her knees over her chest, squeezing herself into a tiny ball of distress. “I never wanted to tell you about my shitty past. I thought we would continue our friendship. And now today…” She looks at me painfully. “I don’t know what happened to me, right now. I was lost in the moment. Your touch made me forget everything.” She hides her face on her knees. “I am so sorry, Adam. I am no good for you.”

  “Who is he?” I finally ask her, gathering all my courage, though I really don’t want to hear.

  She looks blankly at the tent wall and continues her story. “I was eighteen when I met Jibran for the first time.” So that’s his name. “My dad gave me a car for my eighteenth birthday, and I was excited to drive it. I took my car to the highway right away and drove crazily. I was way too happy. I guess I was speeding, because a cop stopped me in the middle of the highway.” She takes a deep breath. “He was the best-looking man I had ever seen. For me, it was love at first sight, I guess.” Do I need to hear this?

  “He told me that because I was speeding, he was going to give me a ticket. I asked him to let me go, since I was driving for the first time and it was my birthday too. I told him I was afraid of going back to my father, telling him that I got a ticket.” She licks her dry lips and thinks for a second. “I told him I would take him for coffee if he would let me go. He smiled at me and accepted my offer. I actually bribed him, but since I was charmed by his personality, it was much easier for me to date him.” She pauses.

  “The next day, he picked me up from my college and we had lunch together, rather than a coffee. We started meeting regularly, but I was too afraid to tell my parents. He was ten years older than I was, so I knew my dad wouldn’t like it. Jibran was an amazing company and I was falling for him more and more with the passage of time. After a few months, someone from Baba’s office told him that I was dating a cop who didn’t have a good reputation in his department. Baba was very disappointed and without even meeting him and judging for himself, he ordered me to stop meeting Jibran. I was very young—you know how hot-blooded you are at that age—so I went against my dad and kept meeting Jibran. My father kept warning me that Jibran was not a good guy, and he was only using me to get his hands on my father’s money.”

  I look at her quizzically. “My father is a millionaire too, Adam. And with a job at the UN, it makes him very respectable in his society.” She looks at me for a moment, and then faces the blank tent once more. “He didn’t want me to meet Jibran because it was jeopardizing his status in the Arab society. We have a very conservative culture. Girls don’t date boys openly, but the more my father objected to me meeting him, the more I rebelled. One day, I convinced my mom to come and meet Jibran. I knew if she would meet him once and accept him, she could convince my dad too.”

  I see tears coming from her eyes, but she is trying hard to hold them back. “In all my excitement and wild driving, I killed my mom in that car accident and she never got a chance to meet him.” Oh! That’s when she died. Shit! That’s miserable.

  “My dad knew I took her out to meet the man of my dreams. He didn’t talk to me after that.” She is holding her breath to avoid her pain. “I didn’t take God’s hint that he wasn’t the right one for me. After my mother’s funeral, I stayed with my father for three months, but he never spoke to me. We never consoled each other for our losses. We lived like two strangers under one roof, as if my mom was the only connection between us.” She inhales and exhales deeply. “I was so frustrated over my dad’s attitude that one day I asked Jibran to marry me. He accepted my offer and we went to an Islamic court and got married there. I was not even nineteen at the time. My father learned about it from the man who prepared our marriage documents. Coincidently, he was my father’s friend. Baba sent a message to me through him that he considered me dead, and he no longer wished to see me anymore. I was so blinded by my new married life that I closed all the doors behind me. I wanted to forget the pain of my mother’s loss.” Her voice is breaking with agony.

  “The first week of our marriage was great. I had the best time of my life with him. He was passionate, considerate, and loving, though he didn’t have much money. Everything changed when we went to Egypt. He told me he had a wife and two daughters there. That’s why he went there—to see them. For me, it was a shock, although his wife was okay with the idea of his finding a young virgin girl to marry in another country, as his wife was older than him. As long as he was supporting them financially, they didn’t have any problem.” She takes a deep breath.

  “Jibran had a handsome salary, but he always lacked money, because he was spending it all on bars and women. I didn’t know he was an insane womanizer. That’s when our arguments started to get worse.” She pauses for a moment and then continues. “One night, he came home drunk, and started yelling at me to ask my rich father to give me money. I realized that his words of love were lies—he’d only married me to use me to get my father’s wealth.” I see her body trembling at the thought of him. Fucker! How can a man take money from his wife?

  “After that truth was revealed to me, he used to come home drunk every night, fucked me hard until I cried, and beat the hell out of me to get me to give him money.” She looks at me with worn eyes. “I had closed all those doors myself, and I knew this was my punishment for disobeying my father.”

  I hold her shoulders tightly, trying to make her stop trembling. “Every night, he used to fuck me, beat me, and I was so afraid of him that my body started to resist him. I wasn’t feeling him anymore and that made the situation worse. He used to burn my skin with his cigarettes, yelling at me that he married dead meat which was of no use to him.” Bastard! How could someone hurt her? I close my eyes with pain.

  “He always found excuses to get enraged at me. Sometimes because the food was not hot enough, sometimes just because a button on his shirt was missing. I was like a doormat to him, with no emotional value in his life. He used to make the food as hot as burning coal and put my hand mercilessly on it, saying: This is what you call hot food. I never had enough time to heal my burns.” The tears flow freely now; she cannot find any way to stop them.

  “The thought of having sex with him was becoming a nightmare. The more he raged, the more my body resisted, and got frigid at his touch.” She looks down regretfully. “He used to come home and without saying any good word…” She is breathing hard, searching for the right words. I don’t know what she is about to say. “He used to put his whole damn hand inside me.” She squeezes herself harder. “And slapped me hard, saying: Oh Rania, you are never wet for me.”

  Oh fuck! I can’t hear it anymore.

  “Then he started to bring sex tools to hurt my body, assuming they would arouse me.” She shakes her head in distress. “People call them toys, but I call them weapons. Everything brought so much pain: butt plugs, anal beads, metal balls...he was treating me like his bloody submissive rather than his wife, peeling my soul away step by step.” She starts to cry harder and I hold her tightly.

  “Please, stop it, Rania. I can’t listen to this. I don’t want you to relive those painful memories. Just your words are shaking me from the inside out. I don’t know how you went through all this.” I wipe her tears, but they don’t seem to stop coming.

  “No, Adam. Please let me tell you. If I don’t say it now, I will never be able to say it again. This memory is rotting me from inside. I have to get rid of this plague.” She gathers her words and continues. “The painful nights continued for a few months and I didn’t have the option of going back to my father. I didn’t complain to anyone, because I thought it might be a penance for the sin I’d committed. I created my own hell before dying.” She pauses for a moment.

  “One day I found out that I was pregnant. I was happy about the news. I thought he would be happy too, but…” Her words start breaking again. “But when I told him…he said I can’t be pregnant from him, and
started accusing me of adultery.” She wipes her tears. “I tried to convince him that it was his baby, but he said when he didn’t make love to me, when I didn’t feel his body once, how could I carry his baby? It was like he forgot all the moments when he shagged me. I told him I could still get pregnant even if he was just using my body. Things got worse after that.” She looks down at her hands; I don’t know what she is trying to read from her palm.

  “He started demanding weird things for his pleasure…like a blowjob in my nausea.” Oh! That’s sick. How could someone be so cruel? How could he ask a young pregnant and nauseated woman to give him a blowjob for his own pleasure?

  “I used to throw up after pleasing him, but he never realized that I still obeyed him, being his wife. He kept accusing me of having a baby from some other man.” She wipes her face once again and forces herself to keep talking. I don’t want to listen to any more of this shit, but if it was rotting her, she should let it out.

  “Does your dad or Mike know about all this?” I ask her gently.

  “They both know he beat the shit out of me, but how shitty it really was...I never shared it with anyone. I couldn’t.” She looks at me with blank eyes. “You are the only one who knows about it.” She goes back to looking at the tent.

  “I was almost six months pregnant when I found out that I was having a baby boy. I thought once Jibran held a boy in his arms, things would go better. One night, he came home saying that he didn’t want some other man’s baby in my womb. I cried hard and begged him to believe that I was true to him all the time.”

  “But why did he think you weren’t sincere?” I interrupt her.

  “Because a couple of times when he took me out to his official parties, the men around him complimented him on having a young beautiful wife. Instead of appreciating it, he used to accuse me of trying to seduce other men. My beauty became my curse.”