Chapter One
Ayşe Meral had been in Istanbul for two weeks and hadn’t had a single moment to herself since the day she’d landed. Cousin this and uncle that, every relative who’d once been only a name and avatar on social media sites now proved to be an all too real person. And each one seemed to have nothing but free time and a boundless desire to make sure Ayşe didn’t miss out on a single cultural event or historical landmark. Her older relatives ensured she visited every must-see destination, her younger cousins vied with each other to take her out to the trendiest underground galleries and clubs, and both generations plied her with as much local fare and avant-garde cuisine as she could stand before she exploded.
Family members, touristy sites, endless meals. She wasn’t ungrateful, but on the long flight out from Montreal she’d developed a secret hope that something—no, someone—exciting would come along. Now, with little more than a week of her trip left to go, and her grandmother on the phone every day rounding up more of the clan, Ayşe had resigned herself to an interesting, but in the end unromantic, holiday.
She’d spent that morning walking around the venerable Nişantaşı neighbourhood with elderly aunt Gülsel, who tried on clothes in one boutique after another. All the while, she repeated to every shopkeeper and not a few of the other customers, “This is my youngest niece, Ayşe, who lives in Canada. She hasn’t visited in nearly ten years, since she was sixteen!”
Everyone seemed to know only two things about Canada: it was cold (“you’re close to Alaska, right?”) and overrun by deer and moose. Ayşe didn’t even bother trying to explain that she’d never seen a moose in her life, except the stuffed specimen at the Redpath Museum on the McGill University campus. To keep herself amused, she exaggerated the cold, only slightly, for her listeners’ benefit. “Minus 30, and that’s without the wind. Snow up to my waist!”
Then it was on to the next shop, and the next, until she was finally able to break away from her aunt. Not that she was free to explore on her own yet. She hopped on the metro to the Levent neighbourhood, where she’d arranged to meet Uncle Engin, her father’s eldest brother, who’d deemed that she could not leave Istanbul before she’d been treated to the best köfte in the city.
All the running around, obliging her relatives, wasn’t that far off her part-time work at the hospital. When she started her residency on her return to Montreal, she’d have all kinds of experience in being polite, anticipating people’s needs, and rushing from one hot spot to another.
Maybe.
Pushing aside the nervousness that came with every reminder that she’d finished school and was about to, at the end of the summer, finally embark on her career as a surgeon, Ayşe focused on seeking out her uncle in the crowded restaurant.
There, at the back. He looked exactly like she expected her father might, ten years from now. The same Roman nose and high forehead—which she’d inherited—but with a few more wrinkles about the eyes, and hair that was more white than salt-and-pepper. She wove past chairs of raucous lunchtime patrons, and nearly collided with two men heading in the same direction.
Her uncle joined them, and the next few minutes were a confusion of apologies and introductions. An older man and a young son. An attractive young son. She’d thought emerald eyes were the stuff of romance, but here they were, gazing at her with an eager interest, sparkling in a way that dimmed everything and everyone else in the vicinity.
She caught the younger man’s name, Hakan Güler, and then suddenly they were sitting down at the same table as her and Uncle Engin. More relations?
She’d missed the explanations, her heart thudding in her ears, as Hakan—all tanned skin and defined muscles under his polo shirt—took a seat next to her. His jean-clad knee was a bare inch from hers, where her skirt was rising up, as if issuing an invitation on her behalf.
He’d better not be related.
“Hakan lives in Canada, too,” Uncle Engin announced.
“Yeah, in Ottawa,” Hakan said, in English. “I moved there a couple of years ago, from Montreal. You’re from Montreal, too, Ayşe?”
“Ye—Yes.” She couldn’t speak properly. What was wrong with her? Top of her class, valedictorian, she was used to leading others and commanding a room. But one line from Mr. Faraway Eyes, and she was undone. “I, uh, just graduated from McGill,” she managed to add.
It was her name on his lips that had affected her. All her life, classmates, teachers, friends, everyone had had trouble pronouncing it. She’d learned quickly to tell people that calling her “Aisha” was fine, but it was always a challenge, especially after she’d begun dating, because she really didn’t want a new name, a new pronunciation. Her name meant “one who lives with comfort and peace,” and she wanted to hear it spoken well, by someone who wished her exactly that. It had been a year since she’d broken up with her last boyfriend, when he’d moved to Vancouver, but the way he called her “Eysha” to rhyme with “geisha” still rankled.
Hakan, meanwhile, pronounced her name perfectly, at the end of his otherwise unaccented English sentence.
“Ayşe is a doctor,” her uncle said proudly.
“So is Hakan, here,” the other man said.
Hakan gave her a half smile, head tilted to one side, as if making fun of the two boasting men. “Are you doing the rounds of the relatives, too?” he asked, inching closer. Ayşe couldn’t keep from breathing deeply of his musky cologne. “It’s been nonstop for me.”
The waiter came around, then, before she could give a self-deprecating reply—if she could think of one—and the discussion turned to food. The older men had distinct ideas of which plates were superior, and which specials were too good to pass up. If it had been just her and Uncle Engin, she might have gotten away with a simple dish. Now with the two friends trying to outdo each other in hospitality, their table was soon teetering under all kinds of meat and salads, rice and breads. She kept half an ear on the banter between the men, distracted by the rumble of Hakan’s voice as he added his opinions to theirs. Finally, she got the relationship straight without having to ask outright: Hakan’s father was close friends with her uncle, with neighbouring villas on the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.
“How long are you visiting for?” Hakan asked, eyes on her over the rim of his cup of ayran.
“It’s never long enough!” Uncle Engin interjected with a smile.
“I’m here for another week,” she clarified. Hakan kept moving dishes along for her to try. If he was doing it to touch her hand with each slice of pita or olive that he passed over, well, she was doing the same to him. She waited a moment, till her uncle was distracted by a remark from his friend. Then she handed a plate of vine leaves to Hakan, but wanted to send a message as well; she raised her other hand and slowly licked the olive oil off her thumb and forefinger, with a gentle flick of her tongue between parted lips. From his sudden, sharp inhalation, it seemed he’d received her message loud and clear.
“So am I,” he said, and his voice had dropped lower. The back of his hand brushed hers as he accepted the plate and handed her another. “But I might have to travel down south for a bit,” he added in a normal tone.
She glanced over at Hakan’s father, who was shaking his head. “Very dangerous,” he muttered.
“Why, where are you going?”
Hakan poked a spoon into a bowl of yogurt, ladled some onto his plate before answering. “It’s safe enough. But safety’s not the point. I took some leave last year to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders. I was posted in the southeast, working in the Syrian refugee camps.”
She took the spoon from Hakan, adding a dollop of yogurt to a wedge of pita. “And you’re back again this year?”
“No, my contract is up.” He caught a bit of yogurt as it dripped off her finger. “But I’ve got a few loose ends to take care of that can only be done in person. Shame,” he added, and his knee bumped hers under the table. “Bet there’s at least one corner of Istanbul you haven’t been dragged to yet.”
It was hard to concentrate on his words with that leg pressed against hers and his fingers lingering longer with every new dish they sampled together. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been attracted to someone this quickly. Hakan was easily the most striking man she’d met, with high cheekbones in a round face, and black hair that curled at the nape of his neck, just touching his collar. Beneath the fabric, his skin seemed a shade lighter than on his sun-darkened arms. And those eyes—green as sea-polished glass, shining bright, as if she was the first to uncover him on the sand of a secluded beach. More than that, his talk of volunteering echoed thoughts she’d had throughout her studies, a belief that once she entered the field, she should give as much of herself as she could.
She’d been staring at him. Ducking her head, she tried to think of something witty to say to cover up her lack of manners and obvious infatuation. “I hear residency’s pretty draining. How’s your fellowship going?”
I’m such a dork.
But Hakan didn’t seem to notice. As her uncle and his father argued politics across the table, he told her all about his work at the Children’s Hospital in Ottawa. He’d started there directly after his residency, he said, having considered applying to various hospitals in other provinces or down in the States. Without her prompting, he admitted that, having no other ties, he’d wanted to at least stay close to his parents and brother and sister. He’d heard of the work of Doctors Without Borders in Turkey through some of his patients, and signed up as soon as he could wrangle a few months of leave from the Children’s.
“I had no seniority or anything, but pulled every string I could. I feel like I should be everywhere at once,” he added, with another half-grin, as though acknowledging that he was a doctor barely out of his training, not a superhero. “I want to learn more, help more, and there never seems to be enough time.”
The same calling that she felt; if she told him, he wouldn’t shrug her off as others had done, certain that the years of work ahead would erode her altruistic ambitions.
Yet she’d barely begun to reveal some of her own aspirations when, all too soon, the plates were empty, and the two men had gone up front to argue some more, this time at the register over which of them should foot the bill. The restaurant had cleared out, all the larger groups and families gone. A few seats here and there were still occupied by clusters of men, dessert plates and tea glasses cluttered on the tabletops before them.
Hakan took up his own tea, and leaned back, throwing an arm across her chair.
She leaned closer, gripped by the sudden idea that he might kiss her, regardless of who might see. Her blood thrummed loud in her ears. His lips might be sweet from the sugar in his tea. She wanted to taste him and find out. “I was just wondering...” she drawled.
“What is it?” His fingers grazed her shoulder.
“How come I haven’t seen you around in the last few weeks?” She dipped her little finger in the powdered sugar off a cube of Turkish delight and drew a slow circle on the rim of the dish. “Maybe we’ve been at the same clubs every night.” Lifting her finger to her mouth, she watched his breath hitch as she slowly rubbed a bit of sugar across her lower lip.
“Maybe we were,” he said. He drew slow, suggestive circles on her shoulder, just on the edge of her shirt collar, echoing on her skin the trails she’d teased him with, her fingertip in the sugar. “Maybe we were down by the shore together, at the same restaurants in Arnavutköy or Ortaköy.” He drew his hand away as the older men began to head back to their table. Under cover of the noise as her uncle and his father returned, and they scraped their chairs back and rose, he added quietly, “Maybe we crossed each other in the dark, and I smelled your hair.”
Gorgeous, and altruistic, and flirting with her.
They piled out of the restaurant together, her uncle apologising that he wasn’t able to take her anywhere else that day, as he had to return to his office. Ayşe tried not to show her relief at the thought of an entire afternoon with no family obligations or anywhere she had to be beyond someplace she might choose for herself.
Hakan’s hand lingered on her shoulder as they gave each other the two-cheek kiss farewell. And then he was gone, striding away beside his father, and she set off for the metro station on her own, debating which direction to travel in.
He hadn’t even asked for her phone number.