Having given so much of herself over to him, Aria’s muscles were weak and graceless when he finally pulled at her to leave with him. Not wanting to stain her clothes and not wanting to lose the feeling of his skeet inside her, she grabbed one of her socks and used it to line her panties. Omkar had to help her summit the sill of the window that they were forced to open in order to escape. He didn’t drive her home. Instead, he decided to contest the will of his parents by finding a place to park the car for the night.
Omkar put the hawk feather that Aria had given him on the dashboard and climbed into the back seat, motioning for Aria to join him. When she did, he laid her down and cradled her head like a baby in his lap. “Shona, do you feel OK about what just happened between us?” he asked her.
Aria nodded her head to say yes but then asked, “What did you just call me?”
Omkar twisted the word around in his mind, trying to find a satisfactory translation. “It’s a kind of a nickname, kind of like ‘gold’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘sweetheart’ … Shona.”
Aria chuckled. “Those are three drastically different things,” she said.
“Does it bother you if I call you that sometimes?” Omkar asked.
“No, it’s fine.” Contrary to what she expected, she loved the idea of having a nickname. As far back as she could remember, she had never been addressed with a single term of endearment.
After a few minutes, the hushed space between them was breached by Omkar’s voice. “Thorns would have bloomed into flowers if I had loved them as much as I loved you,” he said, petting her hair away from her forehead. “I always loved that line. It was in a poem from my country that I read once.” He continued. “I don’t really want to not know where you are during the day anymore.”
Aria giggled and pretended to hit him. “Are you serious right now?”
“Hear me out: what if something were to happen to you? I couldn’t live with myself. I’m not trying to control you,” he said.
“Yes you are!” Aria said, still smiling from ear to ear at his possessiveness.
“No, I’m not – I just need to know where you are. Can you just do it for my sake?”
Aria paused for a long time and bit her lip, pretending to deliberate. She intended the suspense to tease him. “OK, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes at him.
“OK, I’ll get you a phone tomorrow. That way, if you ever need to call me or if I need to call you, then it will be possible.”
Aria laughed again, “Good Lord, how much thought have you put into this?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, just days and days, is all,” Omkar said, making fun of himself. “The phone may or may not have a tracking device.”
The sound of their laughter was softened by the way they so obviously cherished each other. When Aria fell asleep, Omkar spent some time adoring the sweet form of her face. Should lanterns shine, they would all lead him back to her. In their private dark, he found himself helpless against the conquest of her beauty. In those short hours before dawn would return to them, he reminded himself of the vow he had made to make a heaven of her life, for the love that he felt for her was immortal.
CHAPTER 34
“OK, I’ll see you at three o’clock,” were the last words Taylor said before hanging up the phone. Aria had called him on the prepaid phone that Omkar had given her to ask if they could meet sometime, at the café on the street adjacent to the Super Sun Market. Having not heard from him in so long, Aria was excited to see him. She was walking to the church to kill the hours between now and then.
The line for the humanitarian lunch service was longer than usual. It snaked slowly down the sidewalk and there were several people that Aria had never seen there before. From a distance, she could tell that Imani’s typical blithe attitude had vanished. Instead of the smile Aria had learned to expect, a frown now blemished her face.
When the line had moved far enough to place Aria in front of her, Imani greeted her with a forlorn, “How you be?”
“I’m OK, how are you?” Aria asked.
“Oh, you know, I’m doin’,” Imani said, spooning a portion of egg salad into a paper bowl.
Aria was tempted to leave it at that and not risk the rejection of asking Imani what was wrong, only to be told that she didn’t want to talk about it. “Are you sure you’re OK?”
The question alone made Imani sigh and start to cry again. She wiped the mascara stains from her lower eyelids. “Life’s just so unfair sometimes, you know it? This boy I known for a long, long time just got shot and I don’t know whatta do with it.” She paused before continuing to speak. “Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do. He a good kid though, a really good kid. It just don’t make no sense at all why these things happen … no sense at all.”
It felt wrong to Aria, after Imani had said a thing like that, to simply take her bowl and walk away. Instead she rounded the table to stand beside her, so that Imani could continue serving the other people in the line. Imani didn’t know any
