Chapter 108

[ 934 words ]

Julian’s POV

The sight of her—damp, pink, and completely exposed for me—broke whatever shred of professional restraint I had left. I buried my face between her thighs, my tongue finding her pussy with a feral hunger. She let out a choked scream, her fingers digging into my hair, pulling me closer.

I was relentless. I sucked the small, hard bud of her clitoris into my mouth, my tongue flicking with a rhythm that had her hips bucking against my face. The scent of her—aroused and sweet—filled my lungs. I wanted to consume her. I wanted her to carry the mark of my mouth for the rest of the week.

“Julian… please,” she sobbed, her back arching off the stone.

I ignored the plea. I slid two fingers inside her, feeling the hot, tight squeeze of her muscles as she came, the vibrations rolling through her body and into mine. I stayed there until she was spent, my face slick with her, watching the way her eyes rolled back in her head.

I stood up, breathing hard, my own ache a physical weight in my trousers. I adjusted her dress, the red silk falling back into place as if nothing had happened, though her eyes were glazed and her lips were bruised from where she’d been biting them.

“Seven AM,” I said, my voice thick. “The desert p>

She looked at me, her chest heaving, the red dress clinging to her damp skin. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.

She left the terrace twenty minutes later. I watched her go, the red dress a fading spark in the dark, with the composed attention of a man who had finally stopped waiting and started taking.

Tomorrow was going to be interesting.

She was there at seven.

I had not been certain she would be. Not because she had said no – she hadn’t said anything, which with Katia was its own kind of answer – but because the night before had been what it had been, and mornings had a way of clarifying things that evenings made complicated. I had been standing in the hotel lobby at six fifty-five with two traditional kanduras arranged by the WEG concierge and the specific controlled patience of a man who had learnt to want things without showing it and was finding that skill increasingly inadequate.

She walked out of the elevator at seven exactly.

She didn’t bring Sam. She had come alone, which meant she had decided something before she got dressed this morning, and she had decided it without consulting anyone, which was the Katia method; internal, final, and not open for renegotiation once made.

She looked at the lobby, then at me. At the garment bag I was holding.

“You actually arranged traditional attire,” she said.

“I said I would p>

“I thought it was a figure of speech p>

“I don’t speak in figures of speech p>

She looked at the garment bag for a moment. Then she took it from my hand without further comment and went back to the elevator. She returned eleven minutes later.

The abaya was deep navy — I had asked the concierge for something appropriate, and he had, apparently, understood the assignment. It was silk, floor-length, with delicate gold embroidery at the cuffs and collar. It covered everything and revealed nothing and made her look, in a way I had not anticipated, like someone who belonged to a world older and more permanent than the one we usually occupied together.

I was wearing a white kandura, the traditional Emirati robe that the WEG team wore for cultural events. I had worn it before. It had never felt particularly significant.

Today it felt like something else.

She looked at me for a moment. Something moved across her face — there and gone, the specific quality of an expression she had decided not to finish.

“The car is outside,” I said.

We went to the car.

Old Dubai was forty minutes from the hotel and a different world entirely.

The new Dubai — the Dubai of the Burj Al Arab and the Palm and the glass towers — was what the city showed to the world. Old Dubai was what it was before it decided to be extraordinary: the creek, the souks, and the narrow streets of Deira that had been trading since before the towers existed and would be trading long after. The abra boats crossing the creek. The smell of the spice market carrying over the water.

I watched Katia in the Spice Souk.

She moved through it the way she moved through everything — with complete, unhurried attention, stopping where something caught her interest, asking questions of the vendors in a mix of English and the three words of Arabic she had apparently acquired at some point without mentioning it. Saffron, cardamom, frankincense — she held things, smelled them, put them back or didn’t. She was not performing interestingly. She was actually interested, which was the thing about Katia that I had catalogued and kept returning to: she was never anywhere she wasn’t fully present.

One of the vendors offered her a small glass of tea. She accepted it. She asked him something. He answered at length. She listened.

I stood three feet away and watched and thought about the terrace last night and about the way the navy abaya moved when she walked and about the specific impossible fact that this woman — this precise, extraordinary, complicated woman — had been in my life for months, and I still felt like I was only seeing the edges of her.

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