TREASURES AND THORNS

Chapter twenty seven

"The female doesn't want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and say : 'Here is your home country. "
- Nizar Qabbani

AHMAD
<Ripples>

UNEDITED

It was a warm December night. The air was charged with the excitement marking the beginning of the end of the year. Although the air in the car differed from that. Rukkayya had been awfully quiet on the drive home. It wasn't different from her usual self but we had made quite some progress so her silence did not seat well with me. Mayhap she was having mood swings so I let her be.

The instant we got in to the mansion, she bade me good night. I knew for sure that something was a miss. I hated the one thought that persistently loomed in my mind.

A whoosh of air blew as she turned around to leave but I wasn't having her sulky attitude not when my mind was suspecting mischievous things. I held her wrist gently pulling her back. An alert expression masked her features as her eye brows raise in question.

"What did they say to you?"

I had been careless to leave her alone in the company of my wild cousins. I knew they were nice and friendly but all of them in one room could give rise to something entirely different.

"Nothing," she replied looking away.

"I see. Is that why you won't look at me?"

A pair of dark orbs immediately shot up to look at me but she averted her gaze the moment our eyes clashed. I could swear her eyes were the darkest that I had ever seen.

Freeing myself from the distracting orbs, I knew my next move. My grip on her wrist loosened as I moved towards the direction that I'd just passed.

"Where are you going?" she asked her voice laced with worry. It took at a stab at me. I quickened my pace because God knows, that voice, that voice could shatter my resolve.

"Ya Ahmad! Wait, stop please!"

My hands were on the knob when something crashed in to me. I felt everything from her small fingers that encircled me, to her fruity scent to the tiny zaps of electricity that scattered all around me. Goodness. My fear had caught up with me, only I wasn't expecting it to turn me in to a statue at the front door. I didn't miss the pace at which my heartbeat picked up nor the flame that it seemingly lighted flaming me up incandescently.

What?

"Stop, please!" She whispered in to my back.

If only she knew with her stance she didn't have to utter those words. It took seconds..No...minutes..No! Time froze, the clocks must have stopped moving too. Suddenly, my brain became frozen, my thoughts became a muffled mess, undecipherable, pointless.