Delgano: A Dark Contemporary Interracial Romance

“Deal with it.”

At some unknown point, he’d gone back to staring at her, so when she glanced at him, their eyes met. In hers, he saw reluctance and uncertainty, so with his, he reassured her that she didn’t have to say it out loud. Whatever was brewing between them, he felt it too.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

“It’s greener out here than I imagined.”

He’d been expecting a location resembling the Sahara or Mojave, with sand-colored residences made of brick and stone scattered in between. Instead, the villa had grass and trees. Had there been a view of the sea, it would have felt more like a tropical paradise than a structure in the middle of an arid landscape.

“Where the villa is, yes,” Sayeda said. “Money has everything to do with that, but that’ll change when we arrive in the more rural areas. In Morocco, the rainfall gets more scarce the farther south you go.”

“Are there ever any water shortages?”

“Shortages and long droughts.”

He took in the land, which gradually went from the more dense collection of vegetation to trees spaced far apart, their roots nestled in orange dirt. Deserts, he wasn’t very familiar with. There was one official desert in Brazil, but it looked more like an oversized dune with winding lagoons nestled between mountains of golden sand. The only similarity both locations shared was that the sun bore down unimpeded, so hot that at certain angles, the landscape glimmered like the surface of a pond.

Sayeda stopped the car, allowing a herd of goats to cross the unlined, two-lane road. The herd joined a larger group that grazed on the sparse grass and climbed trees to pick the leaves off near-empty branches.

When he turned six, he asked his mother for a pet goat, naïve to the fact that it would have simply been a third mouth to feed. Every birthday, she told him she would think about it if he kept his grades up. After a while, he’d understood that they couldn’t afford a goldfish, never mind a goat, but they kept up the pretense as a sort of tradition.

“You’re smiling,” Sayeda said, pointing to his face. “Did you have a pet goat?”

The smile barely dimmed. “No, but I wanted one.”

“I wanted a dog.”

“Did you have a name picked out too?”

“Bayard. What was yours?”

“Balthazar. Zaza for short.”

The herd passed.

They continued on.

The first piece of civilization they arrived at was an outdoor market, and she left the road to park in a dirt lot that housed a few additional cars.

“I need a few things,” she said, unhooking her seat belt. “Will you be all right by yourself, or do you feel safer with me?”

He rolled his eyes, removed his seatbelt, and exited the car.

Considering it was well into the late afternoon, he hadn’t expected the market to be as bustling as it was. The air smelled of spices, herbs, and mud, which worked oddly well together.

Like the earth’s natural perfume.

The entrance to the market took them onto cobbled alleys bordered by vendors wielding everything from stacks of ripe fruit to walls of fabric and thread. At some points, the open sky loomed overhead, while mesh ceilings covered other areas.

Someone called out to them, but Sayeda shook her head and replied to their request in Arabic. Then she nudged him along when he got caught up trying to figure out what spice formed a mound of red-orange powder on a table.

“So, Miss Taghia,” he began, “how many languages do you speak?”

“I speak English and what you probably would consider traditional Arabic,” she said. “I also speak Hassaniya Arabic, which is like a dialect with Arabic, Spanish, French, and Berber influences.” She looked up at him. “What about you? I know your first language is Portuguese, but you’re fluent in English and know quite a bit of Spanish and French.”

His gaze snagged on a wall of purses. When he realized he was trying to determine whether she liked purses, he tore his gaze away.