Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold(8)
He shrugged. ‘What do you want me to say, Scheherazade?’
I rolled my eyes. He was so dramatic, no Scher, no familiarity. He needed the full length of my name to maintain his distance. He was talking to me as if I was one of his students trying to flirt with him. He might as well have called me Ms Shirvani.
He worked in a university as a professor and researcher, the youngest in the faculty, and the most eligible in his faculty. He taught Iranian politics and history (the right amount of grit and softness). He looked (too) storybook, (too) fairytale; he looked like a prince who had maidens swooning in the market. He had an auric nobility, with his crown of thick wavy hair, a sunrise smile and caramel skin that almost gleamed gold. He looked so pure and perfect that it was uniquely satisfying to watch his sweet eyes darken with passion when he was about to kiss me, to rumple his hair as I ran my fingers through it, to make his calm voice lower into an uncontrolled growl as my teeth nipped at his neck.
Right then, however, his tone remained even. It was highly irritating. ‘You’re being really passive aggressive right now, Shahryār.’
He smiled and genially speared a forkful of saffron rice and herby stew into his mouth. His eyes were bright.
‘I’m being passive aggressive? You don’t think confessing you hooked up with your ex-boyfriend at a mutual friend’s birthday party over ghormeh sabzi is a little more passive aggressive? You know it’s my favourite meal . . .’
Oh, he was good. Better than I’d anticipated.
I shook my head and took a sip of my wine. ‘I wasn’t confessing. Confessing implies that I think I did something wrong. I just thought you would like to know. But sorry. Would you have preferred I told you over pizza?’
Shahryār nodded. ‘Yes. I would, actually. I would prefer it if I didn’t think about you fucking your pestiferous ex-boyfriend whenever I ate ghormeh sabzi. Pizza, though? Pizza, I could do without. I think I’m lactose intolerant anyway.’
‘Pestiferous? Pestiferous! Who says pestiferous? Also, we didn’t fuck. We just made out. With tongue. There was like two, or maybe three boob grabs, tops.’
I’d almost lost it with my questioning of his use of such a pretentious word, but I was proud of how I’d brought it back and gained ground. That ‘pestiferous’ really pissed me off. How did he have the presence of mind to use the word pestiferous when I’d just told him I’d got with my trash ex-boyfriend, who I’d once referred to as a budget Wolf of Wall Street (Coyote of Canary Wharf, Shahryār had laughed)? Did he just not care? How was his brain so relaxed that words such as pestiferous were so easily accessible? He was maddening.
Shahryār looked at me for three long seconds, before he nodded, the corner of his mouth flicking up. He scooped another forkful of food into his mouth and chewed slowly, his gaze fastened on to mine, leaden with something that slowed down time and quickened my heartbeat. It shot a spark through me, and I took a large gulp of wine in an attempt to drown it, but all it did was fan the spark into a flame.
I forgot that he knew me. I was so used to being with men who didn’t. I was so used to making sure it was a certain way that I’d taken Shah for granted. I’d made the mistake of taking my unknowability as an immutable fact. I’d become too reliant on it for protection.
Shahryār and I had been seeing each other for three months at the point of our first fight. We’d met at a political luncheon; him as a researcher and community organiser and me as a strategist, sent to control and quell people like him. I’d spotted him while my client – a promising middle statesmen with ambition and drive – was giving a speech. I was sitting in the crowd as I always did and perusing who was sitting around me when our eyes caught. He released a small smile. An angular, sharp and knowing smile. It was at odds with how he looked; sweet, handsome, charmingly affable in his plaid shirt, soft sweater and chino combo, with chic tortoise-shell glasses. You would assume the most threatening thing he could do to you was check your references in a last-minute paper. That smile during the speech had a texture I found appealing, a taste I couldn’t quite place: it had an umami to it. It whet an appetite I didn’t know I had. During this stage, I’d thought that my curiosity was purely professional: locate a potential problem and deactivate it before it detonated.
After the speech I’d approached him where he was sitting in the coffee shop of the conference centre with a laptop. My leather, finely crafted bag was a statement, and so I placed it firmly on the table to make one. He slowly raised his gaze to mine.
‘Fine. I’m going to let you buy me a coffee.’
His brows hitched. ‘That sounds like a command.’
I smiled. ‘Only sounds like it? Let me try that again . . .’
Shahryār leant back in his seat and ran his eyes across me, taking me in. I was in my formal gear: pencil skirt, blouse, court shoes, dark hair up in an intricately tied ochre scarf. And I wore a deep autumn-brown lipstick, despite it being summer. But that was not why he was looking at me.
‘Scheherazade Shirvani.’
I held still. He knew who I was. My job was hinged on the fact that near nobody knew my job unless they needed to know who I was. I was in the business of discretion. I was a storyteller and a world shaper. I was behind the scenes of the great cultural and political performances. I cleaned up messes, I anticipated messes, and, if needed, I manufactured messes. At thirty-two, I was one of the greatest strategists in the city, going toe to toe with the biggest predators. My story was rather pathetic: motherless, would-have-rather-been fatherless, unloved, unwanted, and so I wrote my own and conjured myself up from nothing. I stayed in libraries till closing time and put myself through school. I spun gold from dirt. Soon I discovered that the dirtiest places were the gleaming glass towers of the city, and so I made them my business. Those in the glass towers needed their narrator to be invisible for their new stories to work.