With similar accuracy, she grasps his fear of seeming unworthy in his father’s eyes and, by extension, in the eyes of other male figures of authority. On their way in to a first meeting with his father at the George Hotel, she whispers to Rabih without preamble: “Just imagine if it didn’t matter what he thought of me—or, come to think of it, of you.” To Rabih, it feels as if he were returning with a friend in broad daylight to a forest he’d only ever been in alone and at night and could see that the malevolent figures which had once terrified him were really, all along, just boulders that had caught the shadows at the wrong angles.
There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.
At eleven at night, with one supper already behind them, they go out for another, fetching barbecued ribs from Los Argentinos, in Preston Street, which they then eat by moonlight on a bench in the Meadows. They speak to each other in funny accents: she is a lost tourist from Hamburg looking for the Museum of Modern Art; he can’t be of much help because, as a lobsterman from Aberdeen, he can’t understand her unusual intonation.
They are back in the playful spirit of childhood. They bounce on the bed. They swap piggyback rides. They gossip. After attending a party, they inevitably end up finding fault with all the other guests, their loyalty to each other deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.
They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.
They normally have to answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes “Teckle,” the Scottish colloquialism for great, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes “Sfouf,” after the dry Lebanese cake flavored with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square, and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.
Sex and Love
For their second date, after the kiss in the botanical garden, Rabih has suggested dinner at a Thai restaurant on Howe Street. He arrives there first and is shown to a table in the basement, next to an aquarium alarmingly crowded with lobsters. She’s a few minutes late, dressed very casually in an old pair of jeans and trainers, wearing no makeup and glasses rather than her usual contact lenses. The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.
Yet, once they’re out in the street afterwards, the tension dissipates. “Do you fancy a tea at mine—something herbal?” she asks. “It’s not far from here.”
So they walk a few streets over to a block of flats and climb up to the top floor, where she has a tiny yet beautiful one-bedroom place with views onto the sea and, along the walls, photographs she has taken of different parts of the Highlands. Rabih gets a glimpse of the bedroom, where there’s a huge pile of clothes in a mess on the bed.
“I tried on pretty much everything I own and then I thought, ‘To hell with that,’” she calls out, “as one does!”
She’s in the kitchen brewing tea. He wanders in, picks up the box, and remarks how odd the word chamomile looks written down. “You notice all the most important things,” she jokes warmly. It feels like an invitation of sorts, so he moves towards her and gently kisses her. The kiss goes on for a long time. In the background they hear the kettle boil, then subside. Rabih wonders how much further he might go. He strokes the back of Kirsten’s neck, then her shoulders. He braves a tentative caress over her chest and waits in vain for a reaction. His right hand makes a foray over her jeans, very lightly, and traces a line down both her thighs. He knows he may now be at the outer limits of what would be fitting on a second date. Still, he risks venturing down with his hand once again, this time moving a bit more purposefully against the jeans, pressing in rhythm between her legs.
That begins one of the most erotic moments of Rabih’s life, for when Kirsten feels his hand pressing against her through her jeans, she thrusts forwards ever so slightly to greet it, and then a bit more. She opens her eyes and smiles at him, as he does back at her.
“Just there,” she says, focusing his hand on one very specific area just to the side of the lower part of her zip.
This goes on for another minute or so, and then she reaches down and takes his wrist, moves the hand up a little, and guides him to undo her button. Together they open her jeans, and she takes his hand and invites it inside the black elastic of her panties. He feels her warmth and, a second later, a wetness that symbolizes an unambiguous welcome and excitement.
Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.
Her jeans are wide-open now, and both of their faces are flushed. From Rabih’s perspective, the excitement springs in part from the fact that Kirsten gave so little indication over so long that she really had such things on her mind.
She leads him into the bedroom and kicks the pile of clothes onto the floor. On the bedside table is the novel she’s been reading by George Sand, whom Rabih has never heard of. There are some earrings, too, and a picture of Kirsten in a uniform standing outside her primary school, holding her mother’s hand.
“I didn’t have a chance to hide all my secrets,” she says. “But don’t let that hold you back from snooping.”
There’s an almost full moon out, and they leave the curtains open. As they lie entwined on the bed, he strokes her hair and squeezes her hand. Their smiles suggest they’re not completely past shyness yet. He pauses in mid-caress and asks when she first decided she might want this, prompted in his inquiry not by vanity but by a mixture of gratitude and liberation, now that desires which might have seemed simply obscene, predatory, or pitiful in their unanswered form have proved to be redemptively mutual.
“Pretty early on, actually, Mr. Khan,” she says. “Is there anything more I can help you with?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”