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“So I’m suddenly more valuable now because I still had my V card?” She combed her fingers through her hair, quickly braiding it to the side. “I thought you a better man than that.”
“I have committed enough sins without adding that one to the list,habibi. It doesn’t matter to me how many men you’d slept with. It does matter to me that you’ve created a certain image for yourself and today you’ve decided to reveal the real you.”
“Ahh, gotcha. You’re worried that I might think you’re special because you’re my first lover?”
He clasped her chin between his fingers, an angry frown turning his face dark. “My point is that you decided to keep lying to me, even to the last second. Maybe you thought this would all be a big laugh, proving me wrong about you. Maybe it’s just a grand game to you. But I won’t make the mistake of assuming that tonight meant nothing to you.”
And you? Did tonight mean more than nothing to you?
“No, you’ll just assume that I want more from you than this. Isn’t that why you are here now—to set the record straight? To make sure I don’t see some big, bright future together?”
“Yana—”
“And people say women are the illogical ones. I won’t cling to you, Nasir. How can I make that clear to you?”
“Why is even having a conversation with you a fight?” He sighed, the back of his head hitting the headboard. “This talk was coming, even if we hadn’t had sex tonight. I’m not a man who bears the weight of his guilt easily, even when it’s justly deserved.” His tone hinted at volumes of grief and loss that shut her up instantly. “I’m here to appease my own conscience, to cater to my own ego, to make sure I don’t fall off the pedestal I tell myself and the world I stand on. Pick whichever of those you feel best applies.”
She laughed then and he glanced at her—her eyes, her mouth, her neck—and desire danced there, more than just a burning ember.
A whole conflagration waited there. Just that one look and everything she’d buried deep inside her heart awakened. In that moment she adored him more than she ever had, more than she’d ever thought possible again.
Here was the man who’d always been able to laugh at his own weaknesses and faults and yet had still tried to do better.
“Amina is going to hate me all over again,” she said, searching for a safer topic.
“That tactic won’t work.”
“We have decided that it’s your fragile masculine ego that begs to be tended to. What else is there to talk about?”
“What else about you has been a lie?”
Yana looked at her tightly clasped fingers and loosened the grip.
He had no idea what he was offering her. How burdened and cut off and lost she’d felt in the past few months. How she hadn’t realized that her stubbornness to do it right finally, to take charge of her life in a meaningful way, would nearly be her undoing.
She’d be even more beholden to him, but outside of the sex, she was beginning to believe that he cared a little about her. Even if only to right past wrongs.
“You know more about me than Diana knows, more than my grandfather did. More than even my sisters.” It didn’t even surprise her anymore that he was the one who’d ended up being the witness to all of her failures and flaws but also the one who’d see her strengths, who’d give her the validation that she shouldn’t still need but longed for anyway.
“Yana—”
“If you’re going to spend the rest of the night here, I propose we do something fun, at least.”
When he grinned like the careless, charming rogue she’d known once, she shook her head. “Not that, you rogue.”
“Ahh... What do you have in mind?”
“Since I’ve given you my virginity and my deepest secrets—” although there was something else she’d fight with her last breath from giving him this time “—I think a favor’s fair.”
Something about the naughty twinkle in her eyes, the sheer enthusiasm in her words, made Nasir want to kiss her all over again. Instead, he leaned back and gave a beleaguered sigh. “You’ve already robbed me blind,habibi. What else would you have of me? More importantly, I don’t believe you’ve given me all your secrets.” He grabbed a thick lock of hair and tugged until she arched up toward him like a bow and his mouth hovered over hers in a tempting tease. “I think you like keeping me hanging.”
With a flourish that made him laugh, she pushed him away, then sat up cross-legged, shoulders straight, readying for battle. His T-shirt fell off one shoulder, baring silky-smooth skin and drowning her in it. Hair in the messy bun again, face scrubbed of makeup, she looked utterly different from the sophisticated, elegant Yana she’d been earlier at dinner.
Even more beautiful in his eyes, because this was the real version no one knew.
Maybe no man should ever see her again like that, his possessiveness crowed, joining in with the irrational crowd of voices rioting in his head.
No maybe about it, said the part of his brain glutted on endorphins.
