the friendship you had.”
That startled her because she loved her father, never wanted to hurt him. And here he was admitting that the times she’s spent with Rais in the past had given him pain. “Why didn’t you say something?” she asked, worriedly looking across the room at him.
His smile soothed her slightly. “Because he was good for you. You were more outgoing with his encouragement. He would say you might be good at something at school and that was all the encouragement you needed. You went after whatever he’d suggested with gusto and excitement. Sometimes you failed and sometimes you succeeded. But without his words of encouragement, you wouldn’t even try anything new. You were such a shy little girl for so long, afraid of your own shadow most times and nothing I said would change the way you looked at yourself.”
“That’s not true,” she said, not sure if she was denying Rais’ influence over her choices or how shy she was as a little girl.
He smiled softly at her and shook his head. “Of course it’s true. And believe it or not, you probably had the same, surprisingly powerful influence over him. I remember the two of you arguing over poverty one afternoon. I don’t even remember what the argument was about specifically but you were pretty firm about what you thought his dad should be doing in Dunari.”
She remembered that argument clearly. It had been a hot afternoon and they’d just come back from riding down to the creek and back. She was standing in the stables rubbing down her horse and he was standing next to her, helping at times but mostly just arguing with everything she said. “So? We argued about a lot of things when I was younger,” she said, fidgeting in her chair, unable to look him in the eye.
Her dad smirked before he said, “Honey, you argued with Rais about poverty and the next week I read about a huge shipment of school books and pre-packaged meals heading into the desert villages of Dunari. Education levels increased in that country tenfold over the five years following your argument.”
Her eyes widened at his announcement and she felt weak, shaky enough that she needed to put her cup of tea on the small, wooden table beside the sofa. “That doesn’t mean I had the influence to change his mind.” She said that disclaimer softly, as if she were worried about speaking them too loudly.
John groaned. “Why are you so powerfully against the man? You didn’t used to be this closed minded.”
She sighed and pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I don’t like who he is now, Dad. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
Her father was silent, thinking things over in his mind. “Why don’t you call it a night? You look pretty tired.”
She was exhausted and relieved to have a break from this conversation so she smiled and stood up quickly to escape. She washed out her tea cup, grabbed her bag from the floor where she’d dumped it earlier then walked over to her father. “Good night, dad,” she said and kissed him on the cheek.
In her tiny room that barely had enough room for a bed and a dresser, she got ready for sleep, then curled up under the warm blankets, ready to just lose herself in slumber so she didn’t have to think about what her father had revealed to her tonight.
Unfortunately, no matter how tired she was, she couldn’t find the escape of sleep. She kept going over the evening, the almost-kiss with Rais, her father’s comments about how Rais might have steered her life, the way she’d felt when he was close to her and made her whole body shiver with excitement. She thought about the conversations they’d had together while she’d been growing up but too many times, those memories were interrupted by images of Rais with a long-haired beauty in his arms, kissing her in the stables or wherever they happened to be. She hated him for all of those women. And for being so handsome and incredibly male that she hadn’t seriously dated any man herself. She’d dated, of course. And she’d kissed many of her dates. But it hadn’t ever gone further than that. She just couldn’t become intimate with a man who left her feeling lukewarm at best when she knew that just the thought of Rais made her feel things that no man had ever even come close to