Page 56 of Under the Arabian Sky

“If I’m wrong then why are you leaving without putting up a fight?”

“Because trying to fit in with your religion is not my fight to have. I know you want to stand proud and be true to yourself. I know you’ve found some sort of balance between your spirituality and your sexuality. But this is not my culture, Tariq. It’s not my place to fight for my right to belong, when I don’t belong here in the first place.”

“And what about me? What about us? Isn’t that worth fighting for?”

“Yes. But maybe it’s a fight I’m not ready to have just yet.”

I could almost see the wall go up around his heart. “So that’s that, then. You’re just going to leave and not look back.”

“Yes, I’m leaving. I think I have to. But I’ll always look back at these few days with fondness.” The moment that word left my lips I regretted it.

“Fondness?”

I tried to take his hand, but he pulled back. “Tariq…”

“Forget it.” He turned and started walking to the house, but stopped before he opened the door. “For what it’s worth, you meant a lot more to me than someone I regard with fondness.”

He turned the door handle.

“Tariq, wait. I don’t want to end things like this. Maybe I can see you tomorrow morning before my flight. You and I… we can’t part ways like this. I need to—”

“I won’t have time. I have to go back out into the desert first thing. The falcon from Mahir’s stable is ready to return to her home… just like you.”

Without another word he opened the door and disappeared inside…

Leaving me to stand alone amongst the sharp and shattered fragments of my breaking heart.

CHAPTER19

At Cavendish’s place,the pipes in the building clanged, the footsteps from upstairs sounded like thunder, and I spent most of the night fending off mosquitoes and tears. Back at Tariq’s clinic I had managed to phone a taxi and pack my bag with such haste that I broke my theodolite in two. Now I was spending one last night in Oman sweltering in the heat and wallowing in despair, my heart as fractured as my beloved theodolite.

What had I done?

Was I really running away… or simply returning to the one place I belonged?

Had I just pushed away my last real chance at love… or was I protecting myself from a culture that didn’t even want me in the first place?

Was I shielding my heart from the possibility of more pain… or had I just locked it in a cage, too afraid to let it heal and set it free?

All night I tossed and turned, unable to sleep through the heat and the questions that stifled my brain and hurt my heart.

I was up before morning prayers.

When they echoed across the city from the loudspeakers atop the mosque towers, they seemed distant, cold, foreign… nothing like the hypnotic allure of Tariq’s prayer song in the desert.

I closed my eyes and pictured him kneeling there in worship, kneeling for a religion that would never accept him.

And instead of standing by him, what was I doing? I was leaving. I was abandoning him when I should have been holding him in my arms and telling him that if nobody else in the world understood or loved him, I did. But I was doing none of that. Instead, I was vanishing like a dune shifting in the wind, sailing away across the desert, never to return.

I was fleeing back to my unadventurous life in my little flat.

I was fleeing back to my leaky office.

The long, dark winters.

The gloomy days.

The lonely nights.

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