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He was right. I was a totally fucking fool and never more so than after the wild, crazy spurts of pain and delirium on this day. But all I could manage was a meager, “Shut up, darling.”
I don’t know who started ripping off whose clothes first. Within nanoseconds we had climbed the stairs like two animals, leaving every trace of the day behind.
We fucked like I’d never fucked in my life. There was no foreplay and no after-play; we left it all on the field. He stayed hard forever, and I stayed dripping wet as he punctured every orifice and devoured every piece of willing flesh.
We collapsed on the bed as if we’d just survived a nuclear attack.
“Hey, Amir.” Maybe it was the afterglow speaking.
“What is it, princess?”
“I say we let Nurse Teapot blow it out her ass.”
He let out a chuckle. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t want to stop seeing you. Do you want to stop seeing me?”
“No, sweet girl. I want you in my arms like this forever.”
“So, then it’s settled. We’ll just have to manage to keep a very, very low profile.”
With that, he kissed me on the forehead and rocked me to sleep.
20. A Home-Cooked Feeling
Friday night, Amir invited me over to keep him company while he studied for his annual in-service exam. Equipped with my own study materials—board review book, see-through white teddy, K-Y—I drove for the first time to his apartment. He lived on the border of the city, the line dividing the uber-wealthy and urban poor. He liked it that way, he said; a reminder of his home, his youth.
I parked my Jeep on a side street around the corner from his building and walked across pavement strewn with chalk and paint graffiti, used cigarettes, boxes housing the homeless. I smelled cheap wine and beer and heard disgruntled mumbling.
Surgical residents’ incomes hovered around the poverty line, and with no financial support from his parents, Amir was living modestly. In fact, I had learned that he sent a portion of his already-meager paycheck back to his parents in Karachi each month. On his current path, Amir would be wealthy one day. How he would handle an exponential increase in his earnings—would it change him? Would he even notice the extra zeros on his paycheck?
Amir’s buzzer blared. I ascended the two flights of the walk-up, thankful that Amir was safely tucked away on the second floor, with no direct access from that fault line of a neighborhood below. From behind his closed door emanated a delicious smell, and music I had never heard—exotic keyboards and rapid rhythms. Amir opened the door wearing jeans, the classic Rolling Stones tongue-and-lips T-shirt, and his glorious black hair loose and wild without his gel.
“Who is this playing? I like it.” I began shaking my hips.
“Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan collaborating with Peter Gabriel. They featured this song in your American psycho movieNatural Born Killers. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is considered the king of kings of qawwali music, the devotional music of the Sufis, the inner mystics of Islam.” I watched Amir’s lips move above the T-shirt’s lips. “You’ve heard of Sufism, the esoteric dimension of Islam, haven’t you?”
I shook my head. I was too mesmerized to be embarrassed by my ignorance.
“You haven’t heard of Sufism? Not even Rumi, most famous Sufi poet to have lived?” That mouth. Amir pointed to a quote embroidered on muslin, beautifully framed, hanging on the wall adjacent to the refrigerator: “What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.— Rumi”
“I thought you Americans from your Ivy League schools smoked weed and pondered the meaning of life as a matter of course,” he chuckled.
I shook my head. I had missed Coolness 101. I glanced at the quote again, and thought of the past several days.What hurts you, blesses you...
“My ignorant American woman. Rumi was a famous Sufi mystic. Dance, music, poetry—they’re all necessary guides on the path toward God. You’re not listening,” he chuckled.
“Yes I am! But I’m distracted by that divine-smelling dish you are cooking. What is it?”
“It’s just a basic lamb biryani.”
I approached him, grabbed his arms, perfect mounds of muscle below the T-shirt, and delicately licked a tiny spot of sauce from the corner of those angel lips.
“Go give yourself the apartment tour while I finish here.”
“Can’t I help you with anything?”
“I’ve got it.”
