The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Sex and Love
For their second date, after the kiss in the botanical garden, Rabih has suggested
dinner at a Thai restaurant on Howe Street. He arrives there first and is shown to
a table in the basement, next to an aquarium alarmingly crowded with lobsters.
She’s a few minutes late, dressed very casually in an old pair of jeans and
trainers, wearing no makeup and glasses rather than her usual contact lenses. The
conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect
with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were
back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her
father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch
her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to
imagine she may have changed her mind.
Yet, once they’re out in the street afterwards, the tension dissipates. “Do you
fancy a tea at mine—something herbal?” she asks. “It’s not far from here.”
So they walk a few streets over to a block of flats and climb up to the top
floor, where she has a tiny yet beautiful one-bedroom place with views onto the
sea and, along the walls, photographs she has taken of different parts of the
Highlands. Rabih gets a glimpse of the bedroom, where there’s a huge pile of
clothes in a mess on the bed.
“I tried on pretty much everything I own and then I thought, ‘To hell with
that,’” she calls out, “as one does!”
She’s in the kitchen brewing tea. He wanders in, picks up the box, and
remarks how odd the word 
chamomile
looks written down. “You notice all the
most important things,” she jokes warmly. It feels like an invitation of sorts, so
he moves towards her and gently kisses her. The kiss goes on for a long time. In
the background they hear the kettle boil, then subside. Rabih wonders how much
further he might go. He strokes the back of Kirsten’s neck, then her shoulders.
He braves a tentative caress over her chest and waits in vain for a reaction. His
right hand makes a foray over her jeans, very lightly, and traces a line down both
her thighs. He knows he may now be at the outer limits of what would be fitting
on a second date. Still, he risks venturing down with his hand once again, this
time moving a bit more purposefully against the jeans, pressing in rhythm
between her legs.
That begins one of the most erotic moments of Rabih’s life, for when Kirsten

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feels his hand pressing against her through her jeans, she thrusts forwards ever
so slightly to greet it, and then a bit more. She opens her eyes and smiles at him,
as he does back at her.
“Just there,” she says, focusing his hand on one very specific area just to the
side of the lower part of her zip.
This goes on for another minute or so, and then she reaches down and takes
his wrist, moves the hand up a little, and guides him to undo her button.
Together they open her jeans, and she takes his hand and invites it inside the
black elastic of her panties. He feels her warmth and, a second later, a wetness
that symbolizes an unambiguous welcome and excitement.
Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the
result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not
so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of
acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.
Her jeans are wide-open now, and both of their faces are flushed. From Rabih’s
perspective, the excitement springs in part from the fact that Kirsten gave so
little indication over so long that she really had such things on her mind.
She leads him into the bedroom and kicks the pile of clothes onto the floor.
On the bedside table is the novel she’s been reading by George Sand, whom
Rabih has never heard of. There are some earrings, too, and a picture of Kirsten
in a uniform standing outside her primary school, holding her mother’s hand.
“I didn’t have a chance to hide all my secrets,” she says. “But don’t let that
hold you back from snooping.”
There’s an almost full moon out, and they leave the curtains open. As they lie
entwined on the bed, he strokes her hair and squeezes her hand. Their smiles
suggest they’re not completely past shyness yet. He pauses in mid-caress and
asks when she first decided she might want this, prompted in his inquiry not by
vanity but by a mixture of gratitude and liberation, now that desires which might
have seemed simply obscene, predatory, or pitiful in their unanswered form have
proved to be redemptively mutual.
“Pretty early on, actually, Mr. Khan,” she says. “Is there anything more I can
help you with?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Go on.”
“OK, so at what point did you first feel, you know, that you might . . . how
can I say . . . well, that you’d perhaps be on for . . .”
“Fucking you?”

---

“Something like that.”
“Now I see what you mean,” she teases. “To tell you the truth, it started that
very first time we walked over to the restaurant. I noticed you had a nice bum,
and I kept thinking about it all the while you were boring on about the work we
had to do. And then later that night I was imagining, stretched out on this very
bed that we’re on right now, what it would be like to get hold of your . . . well,
okay, I’m going to get shy now, too, so that may have to be it for the moment.”
The idea that respectable-looking people might be inwardly harboring some
beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies while outwardly seeming to care only
about a friendly banter—this strikes Rabih as an entirely surprising and deeply
delightful concept, with an immediate power to soothe a raft of his own
underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten’s late-night fantasies
might have been about him when she had simultaneously seemed so reserved
and so upright at the time, and yet was now so eager and so direct—these
revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih’s life.