Rafiq was shouting something, and she looked around through the haze of her tears to see him close, perilously close, the two drivers running behind, their arms flapping as uselessly as their white robes. Two driving lessons would have to be enough. She’d learned the basics in those. Start. Go. Stop. How difficult could it be?
She threw the car into ‘drive’ and pressed her foot hard down on the accelerator. It moved like a slug, and she slammed her fist against the steering wheel. ‘Come on,’ she urged, and floored her foot again, this time remembering the handbrake at the last moment. She jerked it up, releasing it, and the car lurched forward. She spun the wheel, spraying sand behind her in an arc, and took off in the direction the family had disappeared. She would catch up with them, plead with them to let her return to Shafar with them. It was not as if she was going to keep the car. The family had only just gone. They couldn’t be too far ahead.
The vehicle snaked down the rutted track, difficult to follow and worse so through the blur of tears. He thought she’d married Hussein because she’d wanted a trophy husband? How could he think that, even if she had betrayed him? He should never have been there. Eleven months longer in the desert and he would probably have been over her. He wouldn’t have cared so much that she’d gone. A year in the desert and he’d probably have grown out of her, been relieved she was no longer an issue for him on his return.
A fresh flood of tears followed that thought, refusing to be staunched. He should never have come back early from the desert! He should have stayed away. Then he wouldn’t have seen her. And then she wouldn’t have been forced to lie to him. Forced to try and prove it…
She sniffed. She’d played her hand too well and convinced him with her words and her actions that she’d never loved him. And somehow that had been the cruellest blow of all. For hadn’t he seen her family gather around her, as if she was more a prisoner than a bride? Hadn’t he witnessed his own father in the audience, smirking as his plans to rid himself of another woman unworthy of being his daughter-in-law had gone even better than he had expected?
A wail erupted from her throat, chopped up into sobs as the car bounced over the rutted track.
And hadn’t he seen the sickness on her face at the reception, when Hussein had made her touch him—there—while Rafiq was watching?
How could he not have seen that? And he’d believed her lies, believed what his eyes had told him, and now he hated her. Damn him!
The car bounced and bucked its way along the desert track, past a sign that was behind her before she could read it, the wheel jerking out of her hands at times, the tyres finding it hard to get traction on the sandy hill. She couldn’t remember a hill, but surely they had passed this way earlier, hadn’t they?
All she could see through the mists of her vision was sand and more sand, red and endless, and if there were tyre-tracks anywhere the wind had long since blown them away.
Where was the track? Surely it was here somewhere. She blinked the tears from her eyes. Surely she hadn’t lost it? Fear gripped her, and she pushed her foot harder down on the accelerator, desperate to get to the top of the dune so that she might get her bearings. But there was no stopping at the top of the rise. The tyres suddenly found purchase and the car roared up the slope, launching itself into space before crashing down on the other side in a crunch of springs and a grinding of metal. Pain blinded her as her head smashed against the door pillar, stunning her momentarily. The car was steering itself down the other side of the dune, half sliding, half careening, until the terrain thankfully flattened out, the car slowing as her foot slid from the accelerator.
Sera took a breath, blinked away her shock as she reclaimed control of the steering wheel. The side of her head throbbed where it had collided with the pillar, and she knew she’d have a headache later, but at least the shock had stopped the flow of tears and she could see where she was going. The dunes were lower here, with a wide, flat depression between. At last something was going right for her. This would definitely make for easier going until she regained the track.
She pressed down on the accelerator and the car surged over a last small dune. She was starting to relax, her racing heartbeat finally settling, when the car lurched, nose-first, its front wheels digging into the desert sands. She tried to power her way through, but the wheels spun uselessly, only digging themselves deeper. She battled with the gearstick, trying to coerce it into reverse gear, by chance happening on the button that allowed her to move it.
The tyres spun wildly in the other direction. Sera willed them to pull free of the clinging sands, and yet still the car refused to budge. If anything, it felt as if the car was burying itself still deeper.