‘I thought it was dead, Desi. Before you came I thought there was nothing left, not even ashes. When my father told me he would let you come, I was angry, that was all. I thought, it is over. What business does she have, to come to me now?
‘Then you came, and it was not what I expected. Anger was only the first of many feelings. I understood things I did not understand before.
‘Our love and its death has affected every decision of my life from that moment, every breath I took, every woman I rejected as a wife. I understand it now.’
‘God,’ she whispered. Her heart was choking her.
‘I want to free myself, Desi. My parents urge me to get married—for ten years they have wanted this. Now even I see it is time. But I can’t go to my future wife with such a burden of the past. Not now that I feel its weight.’
Her mouth opened in a soundless gasp as she took in his meaning.
‘It is time to leave this behind. We have a few days together. I want to finish with these broken hopes. I want to bury the past once and forever. I want to go to my new wife with a heart free and ready to accept her.’
She was silent, struggling with feeling. A sound like gunshot startled her as one of the flaming torches fell to be extinguished in the sand, and its dying spark shot skyward like a soul going home.
‘And how will sleeping with me for a few days free your heart?’ she asked at last.
‘I have been haunted by you, Desi, by the memory of lovemaking that moved the earth. Nothing has matched it, but it is because nothing can match it. You can’t match a dream. It is a fantasy, I know it, born from the fact that you were my first experience of love.’
She wanted to tell him how it had been for her. The tearing grief, the bottomless yearning for that souldeep connection, the determination to forget. Then Leo’s terrible betrayal, and afterwards, the emptiness, the feeling that that part of her had died. And the terrible shock, seeing Salah again, to discover that it might still be there.
‘I want that haunting to stop. Can you understand this? And I think—to put out my hand and know that it is you, and that the sex is what it is and no more—then I can close the book. I want to close it, Desi.’
‘You’re going to marry my best friend, feeling like this?’ she protested.
‘Don’t you see, it is not feeling? It is a memory, that is all.’
‘What if it worked the other way? What if this revived your love? Then what?’
Salah shook his head. ‘Do not fear for me, Desi.’
‘And what about my feelings? They don’t matter?’
He was silent, his eyes meeting hers. He didn’t believe she had any feelings to be hurt, that was obvious. And she just could not open her mouth to tell him. What would he do with such knowledge?
‘You’re sure this is not a disguised desire to punish me?’ she pressed.
‘How would this punish you?’
‘You might think I’m vulnerable. You suspect me of coming here to see you. What did you imagine I wanted?’
An odd expression crossed his face in torchlight. ‘What power do I have to hurt you?’
Before she could answer, one of the Bedouin came and spoke to him.
‘Our tent is ready,’ Salah said. ‘Come to bed.’
And in spite of everything, her heart kicked with cell-deep anticipation.
The interior of the tent was softly lighted in the glow of two hurricane lamps. The earth was covered with reed mats and carpets, the space was divided into two sections by curtains of mosquito netting. On one side there was a large basin and two jugs of water behind a curtain. The other side held cushions and a thin mattress spread with a clean striped cloth.
A small spade was placed discreetly by the entrance, and Desi picked it up and went out to walk into the dunes. When she returned Salah had washed and was behind the netting, zipping their sleeping bags into a double. He turned and looked at her, and suddenly she was remembering the night they had spent in a little cabin on the island. Then, too, they had lit hurricane lanterns.
Then, too, the air between them had been thick with anticipation, and her limbs had been heavy with it.
They did not speak. He got up and went out.
Desi got out her sponge bag and went into the little space to bathe. She had packed unperfumed soap, to avoid enticing insects, but now she wished she could risk using some scent. Nor could the cotton pyjamas she had packed be called anything but plain.
She knew she was being a fool. She was storing up heartbreak for herself.
But if for Salah lovemaking was a necessary way of coming to terms with the past, for her it was thirst in the desert.
All those years of telling herself it had been nothing to him. That if he had truly loved her, he could never have written what he did. What he told her this evening was like a firestorm in her. He had loved her.
If she had known that, would she have had the courage to write back, to shout at him for his despicable attitude? To fight?
But how could she have been happy with a man who harboured such alien, archaic views? Would he ever have treated her as an equal? A man makes love to a virgin and then calls her a slut? When she looked at it squarely, she knew she had had a lucky escape.
If only it felt like that.
When Salah returned to the tent, she was lying in the sleeping bag reading by the light of one of the lanterns. She looked up.
He stood gazing at her from the other side of the heavy netting, a shadowy silhouette, tall and powerful in a flowing robe, perfectly still. For a moment, as they stared at each other, the world stopped. There was no past between them, no future, the silence whispered, there was only the moment. Then he lifted the netting and stepped inside her little cocoon.
The little slow intake of her breath as she watched him was perfectly audible in the silence. Rivulets of anticipation coursed through her. She put down her book.
Lamplight caressed his curling black hair like melted gold. His desert cloak was open. She took in the vision of a flat, hard stomach, snug boxers, legs that were powerfully muscled. So different, and yet still there was the shadow of the eager young body that she had first seen so long ago.
A thin pale mark ran from his abdomen, over one hip and down his thigh almost to the knee. That was the line that marked the frontier between then and now: his battle scars.
He had a light dusting of hair on his forearms as well as a neat mat of chest hair. A delicate line of black curls tracing the middle of his abdomen gathered momentum as it reached his shorts. His flesh stirred as he looked at her.
It was unmistakably, primitively male.
And primally, powerfully erotic. She could not remember a time when the mere sight of a man’s body had affected her so deeply, drawing her irresistibly.
Salah shrugged off the robe and dropped it on the carpet. His shoulders looked even more powerful now. He sank down onto his haunches, and then he was beside her, his mouth searching for hers, his heat enveloping her.
Her hand went of its own accord to the flesh at his groin, and she stroked him hungrily as it turned to marble, drunk on the knowledge that her touch had such power over him. She had seen statues of gods with erect sex, and tonight she understood the primitive urge to worship such flesh.
His head fell back at the assault of pleasure, and she slipped her fingers inside the elastic of his waistband, to draw the black fabric down and off his body. Then he lay naked in glowing lamplight, his eyes watching her with a black fury of need that stirred her to the depths. Her hand enclosed him again,