Chapter 19: Her Night

My sister has narrated this whole book, and she will take it back in the next chapter, but this one night is mine, and she has given me the pen for it the way she gave me the night itself — completely, without conditions, insisting. So it is Parisa telling you now. Just for this. Just for the night that was only ever going to be mine.

Hussain’s house had a room prepared for us at the top of the stairs, away from everything, and when Brent opened the door I understood that the women of the family had been in it — rosewater in the air, candles already lit and steady, the bed turned down, a low bowl of pomegranate and figs on the table by the window, and the window itself open a hand’s width to the warm Tehran night and the last far sounds of a city that had watched us marry. Someone had thought of everything. Someone always had, in this family, for my whole life, and now the someone included him.

He closed the door. And then it was quiet, and it was only us, and for a moment neither of us moved, because four years had led exactly here and we both knew it and there was no need to rush the one thing we had waited longest for.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said back, and my voice did the thing it never does, the small unsteady thing, and he heard it, because he hears everything, and he crossed the room to me.

He did not reach for the gown first. He reached for my face — both hands, the way Great-Aunt Pari had held it, except nothing like that at all — and tipped it up, and looked at me for a long moment in the candlelight, at all of it, the scar and the eyes and the twenty-two years, and he said, “I have wanted to look at you like this, with no one else in the room and nowhere either of us has to be, for a very long time.”

“Then look,” I said.

And he looked, until I felt it change from being seen to being wanted, the two things sliding into one, and then he bent and kissed me — slow, unhurried, the way he had kissed me the first time on a cot in a nurse’s office when I was a wrung-out girl who did not yet know she was allowed to be wanted. But this was not that kiss. This kiss had four years under it, and a contract, and a whole night on the other side of it with no bell to ring and no sister’s footsteps to listen for and no line we were not allowed to cross — because the line was gone now, dissolved in honey and gold that afternoon, and we both felt the exact moment we remembered that, and the kiss deepened, and my hands found the front of his shirt and simply held on.