Chapter 109

[ 909 words ]

Julian’s POV

“You’re staring,” she said, without turning around.

“I’m observing,” I said.

“There’s a difference p>

“Observing is professional p>

She turned. Those dark eyes, steady and direct. “And what are you observing professionally p>

“The way you listen,” I said. “Most people wait for the translation. You listen to the original p>

Something shifted in her expression. Small. Careful. The thing she did when something had landed and she was deciding what to do with it.

She turned back to the vendor and said something that made him laugh.

The Gold Souk was three minutes from the Spice Souk on foot – the covered arcade of it, the specific concentrated glitter of more gold in one place than seemed reasonable, and the vendors calling from their stalls with the practised ease of people who had been doing this for generations and had no particular anxiety about whether you bought anything.

Katia moved through it differently than the Spice Souk. More carefully. Her eyes taking inventory in the specific way they moved when she was doing something other than just looking.

She stopped at one stall. A necklace, old work, not the modern commercial pieces that dominated the souk. The vendor produced it with the care of someone who knew what he had.

I watched her look at it.

“It’s Yemeni,” the vendor said. “Very old. The work—” he indicated the filigree with a careful finger, “this style, you don’t find it anymore p>

She held it. She turned it. She put it back with a care that said she had understood exactly what it was and respected it.

She moved on.

I bought it and I did not tell her.

The abra was a small wooden boat – the traditional water taxi that had been crossing Dubai Creek since before the city existed in any form that would be recognisable today. Six dirhams. The boatman didn’t look at either of us. He looked at the creek, which was his job, and managed the small engine with the practised ease of someone for whom this crossing was simply a fact of his day.

The creek was wide and brown and busy — cargo dhows, other abras, and the specific working waterway energy of a place that had never stopped functioning regardless of what the city around it became.

Katia sat at the prow. I sat beside her. The abra was narrow enough that our knees were almost touching, the navy abaya and the white kandura side by side in a wooden boat on an ancient creek in a city that was simultaneously a thousand years old and fifty years new.

She was looking at the water.

“Why did you bring me here?” she said.

“WEG cultural hospitality programme,” I said, but that’s a lie, I wanted time alone with her, withthe woman who suck my cock like nothing matters.

She looked at me sideways. “Julian p>

“Katia p>

“No team,” she said. “No Zane. No Sam. No regional directors.” She looked at the water again. “Just you p>

I said nothing for a moment. The boat moved across the creek. The boatman didn’t look at us.

“I wanted to show you something real,” I said finally. “Dubai gets performed a lot. The towers, the hotels, the scale of it.” I looked at the water. “This has been here longer than any of that. It’ll be here after.” I looked at her and then went on. “I thought you’d appreciate the distinction p>

She was quiet for a moment.

“I do,” she said.

The abra reached the far bank. We disembarked. The boatman took his six dirhams and pushed off without ceremony and went back to the business of crossing.

We stood on the Bur Dubai side of the creek in the morning sun, the traditional district around us, the old wind tower houses visible above the souk rooflines.

Katia looked at the city on the far bank — the glass towers just visible in the distance behind the traditional buildings, old and new existing in the same eyeline without apparent contradiction.

“It’s the same city,” she said quietly. “Both of them p>

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me.

I looked back.

The morning sun was doing something specific to the light on the creek, the particular gold of early Dubai that existed for about forty minutes before the heat became absolute and the light became simply white. In that light, in the navy abaya, with the creek behind her and the old city around her, she looked like something I was going to spend a very long time trying to forget and failing at completely.

“The desert this afternoon,” I said. “Sunset p>

She held my gaze. “Is that the WEG cultural hospitality programme too p>

“That,” I said, “is a Windsor invitation p>

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she smiled. Not the boardroom smile, not the managed professional warmth — the real one, the sudden one, the one I had heard before I had seen it at the Calloway Club and that had undone me then and was doing exactly the same thing now in considerably better light.

“You’re going to be very difficult to say no to this week,” she said.

“That’s the plan,” I said.

We walked back through the old souk toward the waiting car.

The Yemeni necklace was in my jacket pocket.

I would give it to her at the right moment.

I was good at waiting for the right moment.

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