Letting it happen.
“Jesus, they’re just as bad as they were in Crescent Bay. Worse,” someone said loudly next to them. “Get off your ass and ask the girl to dance, Ash.”
Laila blinked the sunlight out of her eyes and saw Rudy and Tahi standing over them. A ballad resounded around them. Tahi grinned down at her knowingly, but her eyebrows were arched in a silent query. She and Laila hadn’t had much of an opportunity to talk in private since they’d pounced on Tahi in the condo earlier. She was curious about what was happening between Asher and Laila. She wasn’t sure she had a great answer . . . or at least, not an easy one. What happened between her and Asher had always been inexplicable. Undeniably powerful. She watched as Rudy and Tahi began to dance and talk once more. They moved away from them.
Asher stood swiftly, startling her. Still shielding her eyes from the sun, she looked up the considerable length of him. She noticed his somber expression. He put out his hand and she took it. He pulled her up, and she fell against his chest with a thud and a bark of laughter. His arm went around her waist, holding her tight against him. He grabbed her hand. They immediately began to dance to the modern song the band now played.
“We’ve never danced before,” she said after a few seconds. Something about his stark honesty before, the bright fall sunlight, the brilliant fall foliage, the plaintive ballad and the feeling of moving so intimately with him had left her dazed.
“There’s a lot of things we’ve never done before,” he said.
Keeping her body pressed against his, she reached up and removed his sunglasses. She tucked them into his jacket pocket and put her hand back in his. “There. That’s better,” she said, looking directly into his blue eyes. They were fierce and smoldering, just like she’d known they would be. But she caught a hint of expectation in his narrowed gaze, as well. He was still waiting for her answer.
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll spend every minute with you that I can. Because you always make me feel a way I’ve never felt in my life. So full. So happy I feel like I’m going to spill over with it.”
He bent and kissed her hard on the mouth, moving her in double time to the music for a few bars of music. When he broke their kiss, she realized he was smiling down at her. She smiled back and shook her head.
“What?” he asked as they spun to the music.
“The song,” she said hesitantly. It was Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.”
“People fall in love in mysterious ways,” she echoed the young man singing on the stage.
She watched as Asher’s eyes darkened and his smile vanished. Regret instantly filled her. She shouldn’t have said that loaded word. He’d recognized the lyric as well, heard the echo of their feelings in it . . . their history. For a second, she recalled it vividly, the moment she’d looked up from bathing nude in the secret lake and seen him standing there on the shore. His stare had gone through her like an arrow.
He pulled her tighter against him, lowering his head and pressing his lips against her neck . . . hiding his expression from her. There was so much more she wanted to express. All the words and feelings swelled inside her until she felt like she’d burst.
She had sacrificed the right to speak so intimately to him when she’d walked away eight years ago. Was that what he subtly told her in that moment? She’d hurt him badly. She understood if he wanted to protect himself, at least in part, from her. This time, he’d be the one to walk away. Maybe she owed it to him, to carry out their short affair with as little drama and heartache as possible?
The last thing she wanted was to hurt him again.
Neither of them said anything else for the remainder of the dance. Laila suspected he didn’t want them to speak . . . to make things messier than they already were.
Yes, they’d agreed to spend their time together before Asher left the country, to enjoy their uncommonly strong connection to one another. But Laila recognized that the uncertainty of their future and the heartache of their past prevented them from risking saying that single haunting word: Love.
• • •
She was determined to live every moment with him to the fullest, despite her rush of doubt. Asher treated the four of them to dinner at Oriole that night. Afterward, they all went to Laila and Tahi’s condo. Laila had them sit at the cozy booth in their kitchen while she prepared tea. After a few minutes of moving around furtively at the counter, trying to hide what she was doing, she turned and headed toward the table, carrying a plate of Moroccan donuts and cookies in one hand and a large slice of orange cardamom cake with a lit candle stuck in it in the other.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a whole cake, but this one is still fresh,” she told Asher. She started to sing “Happy Birthday.” Rudy and Tahi joined in as she set the slice of cake in front of a nonplussed Asher.
“How did you know it was my birthday tomorrow?” he asked Laila once he’d blown out the candle at the end of the song and Laila had sat down next to him in the booth.
She reached to pull the single candle out of his slice of cake. She sucked the cake off the end between a playful smile.
“I told you before. You’d be shocked at the details I remember about you.”
• • •
Asher and Rudy inhaled the cake, cookies and donuts, both of them repeatedly saying how good they were, both of them amazed that Tahi and Laila had made them.
“You don’t get anything about being a Moroccan female if you don’t believe we could have made these things blindfolded by the time we were twelve,” Tahi teased.
They sat at the table long after all the sweets were done, drinking tea and then decaf coffee. Rudy had a collection of entertaining stories about celebrities he’d photographed, both as a hired photographer and as a member of the paparazzi. Tahi milked every detail about some of her favorite celebs. Asher talked some too about his work overseas. But the stories he relayed were light and humorous, anecdotes that hardly began to explain the shadow that fell over his face at times over the topic of his coverage in the Middle East, especially Aleppo, or the hint of sadness in his eyes as he recalled certain memories. She knew he’d experienced some horrors there. She felt the difference those years and those tragedies had created in him. From reading his stories, she understood he’d witnessed both unimaginable terror and incredible moments of kindness and humanity. Instead of becoming aloof in order to deal with what he’d seen, he’d grown tougher—true—but also more compassionate. She didn’t need him to spill every detail of his ordeals in order to know that.
She leaned over to kiss him when it turned midnight. “Happy birthday for real, this time,” she whispered, smiling against his lips.
“Let’s go back to my place and celebrate for real,” he said quietly, just for her ears.