It was just as she was drifting asleep that he knocked. He must have been having trouble with the light switch in his bedroom, which was kind of tricky and sometimes wouldn’t go off. Or maybe Mourad was calling on Ghazi’s cell phone.

“I’m coming,” she said. He opened the door before she could turn on the light or get out of bed.

“It’s cold in here,” he said. It wasn’t really. It was a nice fall night, a mild cool.

She thought she heard him leave. Before she could think much, he came back with a blanket from his bed and shook it onto hers. He situated it at the foot of the bed, at the side she was not at, and then as he was bringing it up to her so that it would cover her, he stopped. He put an arm behind her, and lifted her just below her shoulders. He was about to bring the pillow under her head but instead he slowly brought her to his chest. His heart was beating fast. He was trembling.

He pulled her out of the bed and against the wall. When he took her head in his hands she knew her breathing changed. He put one hand through her hair and then pulled her head back with it, achingly slowly. He kissed her hard. Then he did something she didn’t want him to do. He opened the curtains. Pushed them back so streetlamps lit the room. He dropped his sweatpants, lifted up her nightgown, and moved into her, looking, looking so intently, in her eyes while he did. Each time that he went deeper, their looking and her one gasp, and her head against the wall were like something she had waited for too long, and she felt the quick of her heart pleading for him.

Chapter 28

28

What did he want to see in her eyes? A sign. Of what? Something unquestionable. He could feel she wanted him, and he knew he wanted her. In the past, those two things made the intoxicant, a thing so precisely without meaning as to give meaning to each touch, each time he put one finger against a woman’s neck or felt the butter-silk of skin or found in his hand a thing that surprised and could not be expected about her. But now, he was thinking, what was it he wanted when he said he wanted her? To feel his cock in the warm of her? To see how she would behave in their fucking?