‘Do you come out here often?’
‘I used to.’ The sun was so close to the bottom of the horizon, and the sky was now at its finest. Vibrant pink streaks flew towards them, spectacular against a mauve sky with diamond-like stars beginning to shine.
‘Not any more?’ She looked towards him.
‘I have less time now.’
‘Right. The whole sheikh thing.’ She banged her palm to her forehead, feigning forgetfulness. ‘If I were you, I think I’d come here every day, regardless.’
Her sigh made him smile. ‘What do you like about it so much?’
‘The history.’ She answered automatically. ‘The tangible connection to the past. When you described the purpose of each of the buildings I felt generations of people come back to life.’
‘And you like history?’
‘I like the lessons it can teach us,’ she said without missing a beat. ‘Nothing we do is new. It’s important to remember the way things have played out in the past, otherwise humanity will keep making the same mistakes over and over again.’
He studied her face thoughtfully. ‘Such as war?’ he prompted.
‘Well, yes. Such as war.’
‘And yet, regardless of the fact we know what war entails and how badly it always ends, we keep finding ourselves in that state. Perhaps it’s simply inherent to human nature to want to fight?’
‘And assert our dominance?’ She pulled a face. ‘I’d like to think we can evolve beyond that.’
‘There is a lot of evidence to the contrary.’
‘We’re in a state of evolution,’ she retorted, a smile on her lips.
‘And you are a hopeless optimist,’ he remembered, and just like that, the first night they’d met was a binding, wrapping around them, making it impossible to forget a similar exchange they’d once shared.
‘I’m not really. I think I’m a realist who looks on the bright side wherever possible.’
‘Ah.’ He made a sound of having been corrected. ‘And I’m a realist who doesn’t look on the bright side?’
‘You’re just a hyper-realist.’ She smiled at him, an easy smile that morphed into something like a grin and then slowly began to fade from her face as the sun began to drop towards the horizon, so close to disappearing. She angled her face towards it, wondering why she felt as though she’d run a marathon, why her breath felt so tight in her lungs.
‘From here, you can see all the way to the mountains in this direction.’ He lifted his arm towards the north. She followed and nodded, her throat thick with feeling. ‘And in this direction, the palace—though it wasn’t there when this was built.’
‘No,’ she agreed, the words just a croak. The sun was a fireball in th
e sky, burning close to the horizon. The colours emanating from it were magnificent. Amir’s falcon circled overhead and Johara’s eyes followed its stately progress, each span of its wings spreading something before her. Magic. Destiny. A sense of fate.
She wrenched her gaze back to Amir’s. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’
That same muscle throbbed low in his jaw. ‘Don’t thank me. My reasons were purely selfish.’
‘Oh?’ It was just a breathy sound. ‘You’re not planning on throwing me off the tower, are you?’ She strove for lightness, something to alleviate the suffocating tension that was tightening around her.
He shook his head slowly. His hand lifted to her hair, touching it so gently, so reverently, that she pressed her head towards him, craving a deeper touch.
‘I wanted to be alone with you, as we were in the maze.’
Her stomach swooped and dropped.
‘You were right the other night.’
She didn’t say anything.