I blushed. I grinned. I was chaotically taken with her, the burgeoning love and desire all tangled in strange configurations, spilling out and overwhelming me at odd times. She was more herself there in the desert than she had been as my student. She was at peace in her own skin there in the wilderness. I found in her the same halting struggle to fit in the confines of Semadran society I myself struggled with. She was better at contorting herself to fit than I was, but the toll it took on her was the same as the toll it took on me. It was a comfort.

Sex with her the second time, in the hot, dark confines of her tent, was as revelatory as the first time. It was, somehow, sweeter and rougher at once. She left marks: scratches on my shoulder, the fading bruise of teethmarks along the long, pointed lobe of my left ear. I wore them like badges of honor. I wore them like they were proof of something, though I couldn’t have said what. Afterward, we lay side by side in the dark retreat of her tent. I lay on my side, facing her, and she lay on her back staring at the roof of the tent while a satisfied smile played around her lips. For some time, we listened to Sorcha pester Tamir. He asked endless questions—Where had Tamir been born? How had he lost the eye? Did he have children? Had he ever been to the City? What was the debt the Bardondour compounder owed him, and how long did he think he could milk it? How much of his life, on average, did he think he’d spent on camelback? Tamir answered rarely, and when he did it was a gruff yes or no, unadorned and not illuminating. But Sorcha asked anyway. I could hear the humor in his voice. I knew him well enough to know that whatever legitimate questions he’d started with had long fallen by the wayside. It was a game to him now.

Sorcha asked Tamir a particularly invasive question, something about whether Tamir and his wife had any sort of “arrangement” since they were separated so long and so often. Shayat laughed and threw her hands over her mouth to stifle it. Sorcha’s brashness startled her out of her post-coital serenity. She looked over at me. “Has he always been like that, your friend?” she asked.

“Yes, always.”

She smiled and ran her finger along the ridge of my hipbone. “Strange that you two fell in together. You’re so protective of your privacy.”

“I’m not with him.”

“Why not?”

I had no ready answer. There were never any ready answers to explain whatever it was between myself and Sorcha. I coiled a lock of her hair around my finger and tried to gather my thoughts. “Well, he…he is my roots,” was the best I could do.