Uzma Khan - Trespassing

He was silent, she felt, for two heartbeats too many. Finally, ‘It certainly made things simpler.’

Too casual. What things? She let it go.

They heard a slight rumble: lightning further west. ‘Perhaps it’ll rain,’ Daanish mused.

They said little else till the cove, although Daanish never released her hand, even when the road narrowed and steering required both, even when a tanker pushed in front of them and nearly ended everything right there.

At the cove, she bit her lip, recalling reports of beach huts being raided and women raped. This hideout didn’t even offer a hut to duck into. Dia’s mind swam with newspaper accounts of women being killed by their uncles and brothers for doing less than she already had. She looked around with trepidation, she, the product of a country where self-consciousness was basic survival. Where a woman’s reputation was the currency that measured her worth.

Would being discovered here be the end of her? What would her brother Hassan turn into? She barely knew him after all. And did she know her mother? In their last argument, Riffat had toed the party line. She’d told Dia that she too would have to think about these things someday. You’ve no idea how hostile society gets if you challenge it. She’d pledged loyalty to Dia and yet, at the last, imposed her own will on her. Nini’s plaint — my parents’ image is my headache — tormented Dia now. What if Riffat was the same?

But Daanish began massaging the knot that had been building inside her ever since their first tryst. The pain of lying to those she loved, doubts about Daanish, terror of becoming the thing Khurram or Salaamat chuckled over with their friends — some of that slowly left her. It was like shedding half her skin. The old half looked quickly around, wondering if they were being watched. She didn’t think she could ever completely slough this layer off.

Or maybe she could. Daanish’s fingers probed expertly. She was twenty years old and ready to be something more than the repository of her family’s honor. She was twenty years old and ready to be loved.

The sea was swollen and raw, rising above her waist as they headed for the sandy enclosure between the boulders. Jellyfish lined their path. They dodged them while scurrying, occasionally spotting other life blown to land: a baby sting ray, its tail wagging in the surf, and any number of shells.

The cove was as sublime as it was worrisome, she thought, leaning into Daanish as he leaned into the rock. The sky was a solid slab of gray. It growled, very softly, as though her head rested on its hungry belly. ‘You’d think others would have discovered this place by now.’

‘I keep fearing that,’ he answered, wrapping his arms around her from behind. ‘People attract people. The minute a crowd passes through, I’ll lose my childhood paradise.’

She kissed him lightly on the neck. ‘Green apples,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what you’re made of.’ Her arms rested on his. His the color of ochre, hers a shade lighter. Copper. His carpeted with hair. She smiled, recalling how this had elicited minus-points the first time she’d examined him. Brushing his lower lip over her lanuginous upper one, he said she wasn’t exactly hairless herself.

He wore shorts, and this made reclining against him all the more intimate. She ran her hands over his long, lissome legs: shaggy, even along his inner thighs, and wonderful to tug. She tasted his collarbone, where the necklace hung. The shells were salty and damp. Her nose rested against a small one he called a Venus Clam. It was milky white with thorny black v-shapes sprawled across its front. The back was smooth, as bone ought to be.

‘Any idea why it’s called that? Venus Clam? After all, you have others more beautiful.’ With anyone else, she wouldn’t have asked. But Daanish was as intrigued by the origins of things as she was. It was what had united them. They’d begun with a beginning, as she liked to think of it.

‘No idea. Guess away.’

‘Well, she’s said to be born in a scallop. So I’m wondering if the scallop’s cousin, the clam, got the name by mistake?’

‘That’s weak.’ He licked the bend of her ear.

‘You know Venus, or Aphrodite, wore a girdle that smelled so bloody good even land-locked gods found a way to get to her. That much I know. It’s why we call intoxicating scents aphrodisiacs.’

‘Um,’ he bit the other ear, hard, ‘in the case of this particular goddess, the magic appears to be right here, in this peculiar organ on the left side of her head.’ He pulled her closer to his chest, breathing loudly.

She was getting that feeling on the soft flesh of her cheeks. It was sweeping down to the cups of her breasts. She wanted, more than anything, for him to touch her there. But she pulled free. ‘Come on, Daanish. Humor me. Tell me more about your shells.’

He looked at her. Then he tilted his head toward the ocean, as if to say, Look at where we are, and how alone we are, and how rare this is. We can talk any time, but we can’t always do this.

She hung her head, ashamed.

But then he rubbed his thumb against her cheek and asked, ‘Do I make you nervous?’

And all she could do was nod.

So he pulled her back against him and talked. He spoke of the link between mollusks and mythology. Venus was not the only god or goddess to have shells named after her. There was the New England Neptune. Triton’s Trumpet …

She loved his voice. The medley of accents, the American slang interspersed with proper English. Mere and come about one minute, whoa and bucks the next.

‘Hindus also value a particular shell. It’s said the Vedas were stolen by a demon that hid them in a left-handed chank. Vishnu dove deep into the sea and salvaged them. These days, a left-handed one can fetch a hefty price. Couple thousand bucks I’m told. By the way, I used to have a right-handed chank. No idea where it went.’ He went on.

Remembering Sumbul’s warning, she loved him all the more fiercely and cut in, ‘Take your shirt off.’

Again, that quizzical look. But he pulled the T-shirt over his head. ‘Anything else?’

‘No.’ She rested against his bare chest now. ‘Continue.’ She pierced the flesh under his necklace with her teeth and rubbed his taut, spherical shoulders, thinking, These are the first I ever kissed. And with each caress, she repeated it: the first earlobe, the first cleft of a chest, the first slope of a stomach.

He started to remove her kameez, but she bit him, hard, on the scant bulge of a love handle, and pushed his hands away. ‘Don’t touch me till I allow it.’ She licked around his silken nipple, flat and swirling, her tongue a needle reading a minute musical record. The tiny crater in the album’s center rose, and the tune was the shudder running down his gut. She was a microscopic particle caught in the spin and it didn’t matter if she eventually blew away. She moved to his thighs, where his smell was strongest, and touched him through his shorts. It thrilled her that he’d stiffened even before their first kiss.

He was on precious shells now, uttering names like the Glory of the Seas, like Junonia, between gulps and pants. ‘The Glory was so rare …’

She tapped the cold metal button of his shorts, and released it.

They met every other day, always following the same pattern — a tense, silent drive followed by giddy love at the cove. Even when lying under him, she found a way to peer out at the needlelike rocks rising on the opposite end of the beach, waiting for a shadow, a gun, a pirate flag flapping on the horizon. The more she loved, the more paranoid she became. She held Daanish the way she’d held herself when her brothers had forced her to shower alone in the dark.