Page 36 of Under the Arabian Sky

I opened my eyes.

I felt him make the slightest move backward, parting us.

I caught my breath and feared that I had somehow just broken a spell.

Tariq stopped scrubbing.

“And then, we rinse off all the soap and dry our hands with clean towels before applying the antiseptic and putting on the gloves.”

He turned off the running tap and patted my hands dry with a towel, then his own.

Over the next twenty minutes I watched him carefully stitch up the wound on the falcon’s leg. But all I could think about was Tariq’s touch, his prayer, his lips on my neck.

I wanted to ask if he had intended to kiss me… or was it an impulse he instantly regretted and felt the need to pull away?

I wanted to ask if he felt the same connection I did… or was this something he did with every foreign stranger he met?

I wanted to know… had he ever loved another man before… or was his Islamic faith too strong to ever allow him to recognise his own feelings?

Was the prayer that I heard playing over and over in my head, the one thing that would stop him finding my heart?

Did I even want to know the answers?

“And there, all done,” he said, snipping the surgical thread with a pair of scissors before taking the large bird in his arms and placing her in a cage in the infirmary to recover. “You must be tired. I know I am. Shall we retire?”

We removed our gloves, and he turned off the lights in the infirmary, then he led me back to the spare room where my sofa bed was ready for me.

I was about to bid him goodnight, unsure where we stood after our handwashing session, when suddenly he announced, “I will sleep here with you tonight. In case the injured falcon wakes and needs attention.”

“Oh… um… yes… of course.” My staggered words clearly revealed my nervousness at the thought of us sharing a bed together. I only hoped they conveyed a hint of approval as well.

I started to lift my kandura over my head, then questioned myself. “Do we…?”

He looked at me curiously as he kicked off his shoes. “Do we… what?”

“Do we… sleep in the kanduras too? Or do we…?”

He laughed. “You can if you wish. Personally…” He pulled his kandura over his head and folded it neatly, revealing for the first time his muscled frame, the dark, sparse hair on his chest, and a trail of fur that led from his belly button to the waistline of his ezar. “I prefer to sleep in my under garments, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yes! Of course!”

I too removed my kandura. My body was lean, my skin pale compared to Tariq’s bronze colouring. But even I noticed my usual ghost-like sheen beginning to develop into a warm, sun-kissed glow.

“Do you like a particular side of the bed?” Tariq asked.

I did.

When Andrew was alive— whenever he was home— he would sleep on the righthand side of the bed, and I would sleep on the left. It was a habit I’d never managed to break, but that was something I didn’t have the energy to talk about at that moment. “I’m happy on either side.”

“Do you mind if I sleep on the left?”

Somewhere in the dark of the desert, dunes were moving, winds were shifting, the landscape was changing.

I paused, then said with a smile. “Not at all.”

Together we lifted up the sheet.

Tariq climbed into the bed first.

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