Behind the Curtain

by BETH KERY

  “Again?” she asked.

  He cupped her sex warmly through the canvas pants she wore. A small puff of air left her lips.

  “It felt like you haven’t done this in a while,” he said. “Am I wrong?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you too sore?”

  “No.” The sound of her soft laughter made him smile widely. “I’m just amazed at your potency.”

  He matter-of-factly pushed back her hood and unzipped the sweatshirt she wore. He slipped it off her chest and then cupped her sex again. Gently stroking her, he tried to focus on their conversation. “Maybe it’s not a surprise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we were young, back there in Crescent Bay, we never had this. The freedom.”

  “Just to be with each other,” she agreed quietly.

  “For as long as we wanted. As much as we wanted.”

  He leaned down and kissed her mouth deliberately, savoring her.

  “So . . . how are you, Asher Gaites-Granville?” she whispered when their lips parted a moment later. “Have you been happy for the past eight years?”

  “I’ve lived. I’ve seen a lot.”

  “I’ll bet you have.” She reached up and touched his forehead. “Some of it was really hard to witness, wasn’t it?” His eyebrows arched in a query. “I can see it on your face. Your experiences have changed you. Matured you. Maybe hardened you,” she added softly. “Has there been room for happiness? Do you like your life?”

  He paused for a moment, considering. “I wouldn’t have changed anything, given what life has thrown me.”

  He wondered what she thought of his answer in the brief silence that followed.

  “How are you, Laila Barek? Have you been happy for the past eight years?”

  “I’ve lived.”

  She looked so beautiful to him in that moment, her face luminous even in the dim light. He’d forgotten how she shone in his eyes. Or maybe it had hurt him too much to remember. She stroked his jaw. “I’ve learned how to make myself happy. As happy as I can be.”

  He hesitated for a few seconds, but then he pushed past it. He’d worried about it for years, and then cursed himself just as many times for being stupid enough to anguish over it.

  “Did they give you a hard time? After that night? Your family?”

  Her stroking hand paused on his cheek. Had she heard the dread in his tone?

  “No, Asher. It wasn’t horrible. I mean . . . it was difficult, of course. Stressful. I won’t lie. There were some epic yelling matches, especially between my mom and me. She was very hurt by my dishonesty. But my mom’s emotions operate in explosion mode versus low boil. That situation may have taken longer to get out of her system than most, but she got to a point where she could forget it more easily. My dad was more . . .” She shrugged slightly, her expression a little sad. “Things were strained between him and me for a while, but we sort of reached an equilibrium. That is, until . . .” Something flickered across her expression.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Zara left,” she said after a pause.

  “Your cousin? Where’d she go? Her leaving didn’t have anything to do with Eric, did it?” he said, frowning when she didn’t immediately respond. He hadn’t had to say his cousin’s name for years while he’d worked in the Middle East, and it had been great. Since returning to Chicago, he’d been forced to say it way more often than he’d like.

  “No. Not directly, anyway. But that summer in Crescent Bay was behind her leaving. The start of it all. But as for actual contact, I think Zara and Eric only texted for a few weeks after we went home to Detroit that summer, before he—”

  “Dropped her like a hot brick.”

  “Yeah,” Laila said. “Things didn’t go as well for Zara and the family after that summer as they did for me. Not that they went smoothly for me, by any means. But Zara has always been more rebellious than me.”

  His hand shifted off her sex. He cupped her hip instead. “You mean she resisted her parents’ attempts to bring her into line?”

  He thought she tensed beneath him. She started to say something, but only air puffed past her lips.

  “That wasn’t what I meant. Not exactly,” she said after a pause. “Zara started fighting more and more with my uncle Reda and aunt Nadine. She always had a chip on her shoulder. She never wasn’t angry. It was like all of us were responsible for her losing Eric, even though that wasn’t true. Didn’t Eric get married three or four years ago?”

  “Yeah. To some toilet paper heiress from Newport. Fitting,” Asher said, his lip curling in amused disgust. He recalled his parents’ anger and cold disbelief when he told them during a phone call once in Damascus that there was no way in hell he was flying to the States to attend that weasel’s wedding. His parents still didn’t know about Laila, or Eric’s betrayal.

  His mom and dad still didn’t know Asher had gone past despising his cousin to grinding his teeth in white-hot hatred at the mere mention of his name. His mother had kept calling and needling him persistently about the wedding. He’d finally lost control. He’d informed his mom bitterly over the phone that the last time he’d seen Eric in Crescent Bay, he’d been beating his pretty face to a bloody pulp in a hotel room. He’d gone on to tell her he very much doubted Eric was going to lose any tears over Asher not being at his fucking fake-ass high-society wedding.

  He’d ended up feeling guilty for being so tactless and insensitive with his mom. But she had stopped mentioning Eric and his stupid wedding.

  “Anyway, about nine months after Crescent Bay, Zara packed up her things and walked out,” Laila continued. “My uncle Reda and aunt Nadine don’t say her name anymore, and we don’t speak it in front of them. But Tahi and I have looked for Zara over the years, without our parents knowing about it. Apparently, she’s been working as either a waitress or a maid at places all over Detroit. She’s always moving on. Tahi and I have never seen her, let alone spoken with her. It’s like she’s always staying two steps ahead of us. We haven’t been in contact for seven years.”

  He heard the crack in her voice. He sensed her sadness. The largeness of the issue, the far-reaching impact of that golden, supposedly carefree summer, hit him unpleasantly for the ten-thousandth time in his life. He rolled onto his back and came down beside Laila on the bed. For several seconds, they just stared silently up at the ceiling.

  “You still think it, don’t you? That I didn’t show any backbone. That I wasn’t rebellious enough,” she said softly. He rolled his head on the pillow and met her stare in the semidarkness.

  “No. I don’t think that. Logically, I understand why you did what you did,” he could say honestly.

  She nodded once. “But you feel it.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you to become like Zara, if that’s what you mean. Cut off from family and friends. If it weren’t for your family supporting you and giving you a home those years while you were in college, you might not have turned out so well. I’m sorry. I know how close you, Tahi and Zara were. It must hurt.”

  “You have no reason to be sorry. You never did anything to Zara.”

  “No, but a white guy with the same last name as me did. My cousin did. That’s how your parents and your aunts and uncles saw it. Isn’t it?”

  “They don’t know you, Asher. They never did. I tried to tell them.”

  He swallowed back the bitterness that had risen at the back of his throat. He stared back up at the ceiling. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  She didn’t reply immediately. He knew his weary, indifferent act hadn’t fooled her.

  “You’re still angry with me.” Her voice clung in the still air and echoed around his head. He couldn’t admit to her that what she said was true. He didn’t like to admit it to himself.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said levell
y. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

  “It’s okay. I understand,” she said. He blinked, taken aback by her earnestness. He rolled his head on the pillow. Her eyes glittered with fractured light. Reacting entirely on instinct, he reached and touched her soft cheek. She smiled, but she looked so sad. “I’m still mad at myself too.”

  “You are?”

  She nodded. A single tear wet his caressing finger. “Not for telling you I couldn’t see you while my parents forbade it and I lived in their home. But for cutting off all ties with you. For giving up entirely. Or at least for giving up in my head,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “My heart didn’t let go so easily. I told you about it. In the e-mail I sent,” she said after a pause where her quietly uttered words vibrated inside him. Finally, her final sentence penetrated his consciousness.

  “What e-mail?”

  She rolled over on her hip, facing him.

  “I wrote to you,” she said. “Six months after Crescent Bay. I told you I’d realized I’d made a mistake. I asked you if you could forgive me . . . if we could keep in touch. You never wrote back.” Her mouth fell open, and he realized she was reading his blank, stunned expression. “I thought you didn’t write back because you were too mad at me. Or that you’d just realized it was all a mistake. An infatuation. A summertime indiscretion better left in the past. I assumed you’d moved on.”

  “I never got any e-mail,” he assured her, rolling toward her and propping himself up on his elbow.

  “I tried to call you and text too, but—”

  “I changed phone numbers when I moved to L.A.,” he interrupted. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

  “When I couldn’t reach you by phone, I looked online to see if you had an e-mail listed at the Times. You did, and I wrote there.”

  Bitterness washed over him. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  He fell back on the pillows. “Nothing. It’s just always one thing or another.”

  “Asher?” He heard her confusion.

  “About three months after I started at the Times, the paper was bought by a different company. All of our e-mails were changed.”

  “Oh.”

  He hated the sound of her shaky sadness. He rolled off the bed.

  “I think I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

  He’d startled her. He could tell by her tense expression and big eyes as she pushed herself into a sitting position.

  “Maybe I should go,” she said.

  “No, don’t.” He cursed under his breath when he saw her start at his emphatic denial. He raked his fingers through his hair and strained to calm himself . . . to tamp down his anger. “I’m just pissed,” he admitted.

  “At me.”

  “At you. At me. At the whole damn situation. But don’t go anywhere. I just need a minute. Please?”

  She nodded, but he didn’t move. He felt awkward in the ensuing silence. Stupid, for having exposed his vulnerability so abruptly, like a lightning strike from the blue. Finally, he forced his feet to move. He spun around when he reached the corner of the bed.

  “I lost my phone soon after I moved to L.A. I could have gotten a replacement with the same number on the new phone. I just figured it didn’t matter, though, you know? Why not get a new number? I wanted to wipe the slate clean. I could tell my friends and family the new number. No one was going to try to reach me that I hadn’t given the new number to. You certainly were never going to try.”

  She remained utterly still. He had the impression she didn’t even breathe.

  “I’d like to call it fate,” he said with a harsh laugh, “or bad luck or wrong timing on our part. But the truth is—at least in this instance—it was my own dumb-ass pride.”

  • • •

  When he came out of the bathroom five minutes later, pulling a clean T-shirt down over his chest, he froze on the threshold. The blood seemed to drop out of his head in a free fall. The bedroom was empty.

  He stalked down the hallway. “Laila?” he called. “Laila?”

  “I’m in here.”

  Relief rushed through him, the distilled form of it leaving him light-headed. He entered the kitchen. She turned to him as she pulled two cups out of his cabinet. She was heating a kettle on the stove.

  “I thought you’d left. I’m glad you didn’t,” he stated bluntly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things.”

  “Why not?” she asked, her smooth, calm voice both soothing his agitated state and increasing his bewilderment.

  He threw up his hands. “Because I don’t want you to go, that’s why.”

  “You were just being honest before,” she said, opening another cabinet and looking inside. “I don’t expect you to walk on eggshells around me. Where’s your tea?”

  “Laila,” he said, frustrated because her face was blocked by the cabinet door.

  She looked around the edge of the door. He started to speak but paused when he saw the compassionate expression in her beautiful eyes.

  “I know you’re angry, Asher. I know you’re mad at me for walking away back then, after I’d told you I’d fight for us. I’m plenty mad at myself too. But I can’t go back and change it. I only have right now. I know you’re mad at yourself, and at the world a little too, when it comes to all of it. But—” She dropped her hands from the cabinet and faced him. “The thing of it is—don’t take this the wrong way—but—”

  “What?” he asked, taking a step closer.

  She gave him a helpless glance and shrugged. “Part of me is glad you’re mad. Part of me is happy that it still hurts,” she said, touching her chest with her fingertips. She noticed his dubious expression. “Because it means we still care. Doesn’t it?” she added, a shadow of anxiety flickering across her expression.

  He stepped into her, holding her face with his hands. His mouth closed over hers. He lifted his head a moment later. Her smile sliced right through him.

  “All I know is we’re together right now,” she said tremulously.

  “All I know is there’s no place in the world I’d rather be,” he said, leaning down to taste the miracle of her again.

  • • •

  When he finally got around to showing her where the tea was located, she exclaimed happily when she saw some Moroccan mint tea.

  He smiled at her reaction. “It’s my favorite, actually.”

  “Really?” she asked him in amazement, grinning. Excitement shone in her eyes. “Did you ever go to Morocco, like you hoped to?”

  “Three times, actually. Did you ever go?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been twice with my family and Tahi’s parents.” She saw his eyebrows knit together.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

  “It’s just . . . back then, one of the reasons you said you hadn’t gone to Morocco yet was your grandmother’s illness.” She saw the question in his eyes and understood.

  “Mamma Sophia died six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I know how much she meant to you.”

  “She did. I miss her every day. And thank you,” Laila said.

  They talked about their experiences in Morocco while she made them a pot of atay. Afterward, they sipped the tea at the kitchen table and talked about everything and anything. They had eight years to catch up on.

  He told her about his routines as a foreign correspondent in the digital age, explaining how he constantly had to balance being tied to his phone and computer to keep abreast of breaking news with getting out into the field, interacting with colleagues and sources in order to work original and unique stories.

  “Aren’t you going to miss it?” she asked him at some point. He’d already told her about his future job in London. She’d felt a little melancholy, thinking of him leaving, but she couldn’t help but feel proud of him too when he spoke
about his career with such calm confidence and purpose.

  “Probably,” he admitted. “But I’ll still be able to do some reporting. It’s just that now, I’ll have a team helping me investigate leads and writing. Besides, I felt like I’d reached the peak of my learning curve, being a correspondent. As the bureau chief, I’ll be responsible for directing a team of American and European reporters in several countries. I’ll be traveling a lot still, mostly between the U.K., France and Germany. I’m nervous about starting, but it’ll be a new arena for making a difference . . . for learning about another side of the newspaper business . . . for gaining a bigger perspective on getting a story out to the public.”

  “A whole new learning curve. You never were afraid of trying something new. Even when you were young, you told me that we didn’t grow unless we stepped into unfamiliar territory. ‘That’s how you know you’re growing, when things get a little uncomfortable.’”

  He grinned slowly, his teacup wavering in the air.

  “Did you just quote me?”

  She laughed at his incredulous amusement. “Oh, I remember all sorts of things about you. You’d be shocked if you knew.”

  “If it’s anything close to the details I remember about you, I doubt it,” he said, giving her a hooded, smoky glance that made her heart give a little jump.

  She had the impression that his mother or a decorator had furnished the elegant, luxurious condominium, including purchasing the dishes. It felt strange to Laila to use cups, and not the pretty, fragile glasses with which she was used to drinking Moroccan tea. The teacups and saucers they used were fine china, the muted floral pattern hardly one she’d imagine Asher ever choosing. But she loved the way he held the cup in his big hand—not by the delicate handle but with his fingers cupping the bowl. There was something sexual about it: his masculine handling of the delicate, feminine cup; the way he brought it to his firm, well-shaped mouth; the vision of his strong throat as he swallowed.

  His hair had still been wet when he’d come into the kitchen. The strands had dried spiky and mussed. After his shower, he’d put on a pair of black cotton pajama bottoms and a simple white T-shirt that molded his powerful torso. She liked to look at his strong forearms sprinkled with dark hair and long, blunt-tipped fingers.