“Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”
I wiped a tear from her jawline, just above her birthmark, with the pad of my thumb.
“I didn’t tell you,” Soraya said, dabbing at her eyes, “but my father showed up with a gun that night. He told... him... that he had two bullets in the chamber, one for him and one for himself if I didn’t come home. I was screaming, calling my father all kinds of names, saying he couldn’t keep me locked up forever, that I wished he were dead.” Fresh tears squeezed out between her lids. “I actually said that to him, that I wished he were dead.
“When he brought me home, my mother threw her arms around me and she was crying too. She was saying things but I couldn’t understand any of it because she was slurring her words so badly. So my father took me up to my bedroom and sat me in front of the dresser mirror. He handed me a pair of scissors and calmly told me to cut off all my hair. He watched while I did it.
“I didn’t step out of the house for weeks. And when I did, I heard whispers or imagined them everywhere I went. That was four years ago and three thousand miles away and I’m still hearing them.”
“Fuck ‘em,” I said. She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “When I told you about this on the phone the night of khastegari, I was sure you’d change your mind.”
“No chance of that, Soraya.”She smiled and took my hand. “I’m so lucky to have found you. You’re so different from every Afghan guy I’ve met.”
“Let’s never talk about this again, okay?”
“Okay.”