by Sara Jafari
When she opened her mouth, she felt sick. She could never say it aloud.
She willed herself to, but just couldn’t. Her mum had always told her to tell no one; since she was a small child she’d been given that solemn instruction. It was different from having an alcoholic parent, more shameful somehow, more scandalous. She couldn’t imagine saying the words, didn’t want to have to act like it was OK when it wasn’t, didn’t want to see the way Magnus would look at her differently once he knew.
He turned his head to face her, as if sensing her thoughts.
She gave him a small smile instead. “Yeah. Family is messy sometimes, but they’re family. You’ll do anything for them. I get it.”
His eyes were warm as he smiled back. She noticed, too, the same look he’d had in his eyes at graduation. The vulnerability, the disappointment. They really weren’t so different, not really.
“I really am sorry,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s OK.”
She wasn’t quite sure if they were in fact OK, but the look of hope on his face made her heart beat out of time, and suddenly she wanted so desperately for it all to blow over, so she said it anyway.
“So, we’re friends again?”
She nodded. “Sure.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You really sure? You can have a go at me some more if you like? I deserve it.”
She shook her head. “If anything like that happens again, just give me a heads-up, that’s all I wanted.” The words felt foreign in her mouth, like she was asking a great deal of this man, even though she knew she wasn’t. She wasn’t sure if she should still be trying to play it cool, almost worried that she was coming across too invested in whatever it was they were, but she didn’t have time to overthink it because he smiled softly at her, and caught her hand in both of his.
“I promise.”
* * *
—
That evening they engaged in an activity that proved them to be more than friends.
His hand was around her waist. He drew it lower to the bottom of her stomach. Her pouch. Her smile faltered and she put her hands over his and lifted it higher to her waist.
“I don’t like my stomach,” Soraya told him.
“Well, I do,” he said, and pushed the duvet away, crawled down the bed, and kissed her lower stomach. She squirmed.
His hand was on her inner thigh, which stopped her short. She suddenly felt very, very warm. A chuckle escaped her lips; she was light and giddy. A stark contrast from the way she’d felt in the morning. “Every time you say you don’t like something about yourself, I’m going to kiss it, to make you accept that you’re perfect.”
Soraya let out a snort.
“What if it’s my personality? You can’t kiss a personality,” she said, between gasps as his fingers seemed to trail higher.
“Yeah, you can.” His lips pressed down on hers, gently opening them, and when their tongues met she knew what he meant.
She somehow ended up on top of him, his hardness pressing against her. In moments like these she felt confident, conscious of the way her long, curly hair tumbled down her back. He kissed her sides.
“Do you feel how hard I am for you?” he whispered, in a low voice.
His words sent shivers through her. She said nothing. His hand cupped her chin, making her look at him.
Being forced to really look at him, she was reminded of how different he was from all the other men in her life. He was both strong and soft. His pale skin, his lightly haired body, his freckles…it was all alien to her. In some ways she was made uncomfortable by how attracted she was to him. She knew there were countless articles written about dating white guys, and white savior complexes, but she didn’t care in that moment. She couldn’t deny the way her body reacted to his despite him being so completely opposite to her.
It made her realize how much she’d missed him when she thought they were over, and that was dangerous. More so, how easily she could forgive him after he ignored her for days, and how her mind was desperately trying to push that fact away.
“You’re always hard,” she joked.
“That’s because you’re so fucking sexy.” He grabbed her bum, and she blushed.
“Says you. You’re the hot one,” she replied quietly.
“What was that?” he said, relishing this conversation.
“I said, you’re hot, Magnus.” She rolled her eyes.
“Please tell me more…”
Soraya got off him and lay down beside him. Mimicking him, she began kissing his body.
She kissed his bicep, then his six-pack, trailing kisses lower and lower until she felt embarrassed. And completely clueless.
He saved the situation by swooping her up so she was straddling him again. He gripped her underwear with both hands and pulled at the lace of her pants with his fingers.
“I get the feeling you’re only after me for my looks.”
“Obviously.” She was smiling when suddenly Magnus grew serious. He looked at her, really looked at her.
“I’m glad we’re OK again,” he said, before kissing her long and hard. Then he was on top of her, making his descent down the bed, pressing his palms to either side of her upper thighs. His fingers tightened against her underwear as he pulled, ripping them apart. She barely had time to be annoyed because what he did next made her very, very happy.
Soraya remembered a conversation she’d heard her mum having with her khale. She wasn’t even meant to be listening, and didn’t suppose her mum thought anything of it at the time. She certainly doubted her mum would ever imagine that Soraya had thought about it ever since on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis, even though it had occurred just before she left for university, three years ago now.
“Poor girl,” her mum said in Farsi into the phone receiver. “Yes, but it will be better than her husband leaving her because she didn’t bleed.”
Then her mum laughed softly, though it wasn’t real, Soraya knew that. It was a trait she had inherited, a nervous tic when silence would be too telling. Another thing women needed to stop doing, but did anyway.
“I never said she won’t bleed, Rabeh. You need to relax. I’m the uptight one, not you.”
Her mum glanced up then to find Soraya watching her. She looked away quickly but continued sitting at the kitchen table, hearing nothing but her mum’s conversation and the low hum of the fridge-freezer.
Tyzer, their orange cat, jumped up onto the wooden table and Soraya stroked his rough fur. She leant in to his body, inhaled his weirdly warm smell before giving him a peck on his small head.
When her mum finished her conversation she shooed Tyzer off the table. “All this hair everywhere,” she muttered. That was the reason they were never allowed a dog; dog hair was considered unclean and would make praying difficult. Soraya often wondered why cats were considered different from dogs in this respect. One of many questions she never asked.
“What were you saying to Khale Rabeh?”
“Fatima’s wedding is in two weeks and she was worrying about all the preparations.”
Her mum sat down next to Soraya and began opening the letters on the table, shaking her head at the bills. “Stupid TV license.” She couldn’t understand why they had to pay for Sky, the television itself, the electricity it used, and the monthly TV license.
“Did you say something about blood?” Soraya’s Farsi skills were poor, but her understanding was much better than her ability to speak it.
“Yes, her fiancé’s family are very old-fashioned and want to make sure she’s a virgin, so they’re asking for the bedsheets from the wedding night.”
Soraya’s jaw dropped. She snapped it shut then opened it again to speak. “That’s still a thing?” She remembered in “The Bloody Chamber” Bluebeard joking about wanting to wave the bloody sheet around.
She thought it was something that happened only in ancient times or fairy tales.
“So they hand the sheet to his mum? Isn’t that really gross?”
Neda shrugged. “It’s just the way it is. She’s getting a test done by a doctor beforehand, just in case she doesn’t bleed, and then she’ll have a certificate confirming she’s a virgin. That’s what Rabeh was worrying about—your cousin is scared about the pain of the test.”
There was a silence until her mum said, “This is why it’s important to be a good girl.”
Soraya wasn’t sure why this was a valid reason—to have a painful test to prove you’re a “good girl.”
“You don’t say that to Amir. Does the boy have to have a test to see if he’s a good boy?”
Her mum laughed then and shook her head. “No” was all she said. It was as though she knew how ridiculous the double standard was but didn’t care. How could she not care?
And yet here Soraya was, having just done things that definitely did not make her a good girl with Magnus, a white atheist she would most definitely never marry. A man whose body count, if you will, topped most people’s at the university.
Could she imagine herself ever having sex with him? The thought terrified her. She imagined a splattering of blood, an inescapable sense of regret immediately afterwards. Once it was done there was no going back. That was the awful thing about losing your virginity; when it was gone, it was gone. But what even was virginity? How could something you weren’t fully conscious of be so important?
Soraya would be the first person to say virginity was a construct, that women weren’t objects to be kept shiny and new, and yet when it came to herself, she sometimes wondered whether she did indeed want that. Granted, her liaison with Magnus had left her feeling somewhat used—they had, after all, engaged in some sexual activity, even if they had not gone all the way. And then she realized how fucked up her own analogy was and pushed the thought from her mind, resolving not to think about it again until she really needed to.
It was only when they were together, when his hand trailed up her thigh and his breath was on her neck, that she wanted it to all be over. She wanted to give in and no longer think about whether she would go to hell, or whether she would one day be engaged to a Muslim man who would make her take a test, and whether she would feel shame after. But unfortunately, she could never quite let herself go to that extent.
It was impossible to forget what had happened on her wedding night, but in time Neda learnt to forgive, or at least told herself that was what she was doing. Hossein proclaimed his innocence, vehemently and unwaveringly. But the fact he had had a girlfriend before her and kept it secret displeased her. What went wrong? she had asked. We were too different, he replied. She was kind of crazy, he said another time. She didn’t have good morals, he commented later. She wasn’t you.
Neda presumed, and rightly so, that if she had had a boyfriend in the past, Hossein wouldn’t have wanted to marry her. However, it was unsurprising really that his expectations of men’s and women’s morals were vastly different. He was, after all, a man, no matter how different she’d once thought he was.
But he was still Hossein. The same man who unwaveringly rooted for her, no matter if she was trying out a new recipe or applying for scholarships to do a master’s degree. He always voiced his faith in her, made her feel boosted by his belief in her.
She couldn’t leave him; it would be humiliating. Not just for her, but for her family. And she couldn’t divorce him for no reason; only men had that power. Anyway, she wasn’t sure she wanted to lose him, despite everything.
In time she began to wonder whether it was right to judge someone based on their past. Whether she was no better for begrudging him something he did before he had even met her, if that was in fact the truth, which deep down she believed it was. Surely word would have spread sooner if Hossein had been with the girl while they were engaged? Their social circle was small and Neda knew all the gossip.
As they settled into their new life together, she began working as a medical laboratory assistant, and Hossein continued working at his uncle’s factory and coaching under-sixteens football.
It was once they were living together that Neda really noticed his slight limp. The way, every morning when he woke up, he carefully stretched his leg. He had never explained his injury to her in detail. It was only when she saw his prescription for painkillers that she understood the extent of his injury.
“My leg almost had to be amputated at one point,” he said, casually buttering himself a piece of bread one morning when she asked about it.
“What?” Her mouth was agape.
“My injury was more serious than my mother likes to admit. But I’m OK now, thank Allah.” He looked up, as though he could see him above.
Neda muttered, “Alhamdulillah.” Then, “But your mother said you might be able to play again?”
Hossein smiled, shaking his head, his eyes sad. “She wants me to be able to play again. The doctor has already said it’s over. I made my peace with it, but she…she had her hopes set on it. She knew how proud it would have made my dad.”
Neda looked at her husband across the sofreh. She saw him in an unaccustomed light, saw him as he was when she accepted his proposal, when she was so excited at the prospect of a new life with this man. He was the same man, the same good, kind man; he had just made a mistake. And that was when she finally forgave him, deciding he had suffered enough already.
The longer they lived together, the better acquainted they became with each other’s habits. At first it was awkward for them both; they had never lived with so few people in a house before, everything they did magnified, no longer masked by hordes of family members. They took it in turns to wake each other up for fajr prayer. And when they went back to bed, they snuggled into each other until they fell asleep.
Whereas Hossein liked to press snooze on his alarm for as long as possible, Neda woke up immediately to get ready for the day ahead. She always made them breakfast. In return, on the nights he wasn’t coaching, he would collect dinner from their favorite pizza shop on the way home from work.
And of course they engaged in the activity only married people could in a halal way. It was something she enjoyed, to an extent. But wasn’t sex always for the man, anyway? His body reacted in different ways from a woman’s, it was more obvious with its clear ending, the predictable release.
She thought back to their first time, a haze now. They did not have sex on their wedding night. That had been filled with awkwardness tinged with bitterness. Hossein slept in the living room without any argument.
It was weeks later, once the ice had thawed, that he had made her smile again with his boyish charm. All she remembered was the sudden haste, both his and hers. She had made the first move, and that was important. It had been drilled into her what would be expected of her, what she would finally be allowed to do with Allah’s blessing. There was fumbling and pain. A lot of pain.
“It’s like sticking a sausage into a needle hole!” her cousin had once joked, and her relatives had cackled. At the time Neda had been fairly young and hadn’t quite understood what was meant. But upon losing her virginity, the reference became clear to her. Hossein wasn’t quite patient. He was gentle, yes, but not patient. All Neda remembered of that night was being uncomfortable and shedding a tiny amount of blood. She had imagined a bucketload, a dramatic signifier of what they had just done; her passage into womanhood. But instead it was anticlimactic, a few watery drops.
The lack of blood made her panic.
“It’s so strange, I expected more,” she ventured to say to him the next morning.
“Everyone’s different, it’s normal.” He shrugged. The implication of his statement scorched her. She was reminded of his girlfriend, and a barrier was raised between them again.
“Really?”
“Az
izam, I know you were a virgin, don’t worry.”
Despite his words Neda felt her heartbeat quickening. She knew she was. “What about your mother?”
“There’s blood, isn’t there? If you weren’t a virgin, you wouldn’t have been that uncomfortable. Don’t worry, it’ll be better next time.” He brushed his hand across her bare stomach, causing shivers to run through her. And then suddenly his lips were upon hers, and there was never the chance for Neda to ask, both bitterly and boldly, how he had such wisdom.
It was on their first anniversary that Neda realized she was in love with Hossein. It was a peculiar feeling; a sort of bubbling, like a volcano, deep in the pit of her stomach. They were cuddling in bed, his strong arms gripping her midriff as he nuzzled his face into her hair. She relished this intimacy. They would hold each other for hours, with Neda rattling off any piece of information she could about her day while he would listen, commenting, asking for more. They would laugh about nothing for hours, until their neighbor hit a broomstick against the wall. This was what companionship truly was. She had tried to keep the words in, not say them, but human nature wouldn’t allow her that.
“I love you,” she said, in a small voice, partly hoping he wouldn’t hear, but she had to say it.
He curled his bad leg around hers and pulled her to him, impossibly close. “I’ve always loved you,” he said, bashfully.
“You often say these things,” she said doubtfully. “But why? How is that possible?”
“Azizam, you’re the smartest person I know, so caring, so good. Just being with you, I can feel your goodness. You forgave me when you didn’t need to.” He kissed the top of her head. “The worst thing you do is gossip, and I can tell you feel so guilty even about that. It’s cute. You’re cute.”
“I wish you and Baba got along.”
He sighed. “He doesn’t want to talk to me. He thinks he already knows me.”