Chapter Four
Too late to call myself a dork now, Ayşe thought, as the bus pulled into the Iskenderun station on the following morning. She’d decided. On the strength of her feelings, on the breathless tone of his voice, choosing to hear it as hope—and she had done it.
There’d barely been time the night before to explain things to her grandmother and send off a two-line email letting her parents know her destination. She’d kept quiet at dinner, and only told her grandmother later that evening at home. That made it easier to pretend her sudden need to travel to the site of a medical NGO was part of a career prospect, without too many questions from other family members. If it came to naught, no one would know of how she’d fallen for Hakan. And if he proved true—well, she wouldn’t think too far ahead.
She’d thrown a few clothes and toiletries into a duffel bag yesterday morning, hopped into a cab, and bought a one-way ticket on the afternoon into overnight bus.
Grimy and dishevelled and sleepless, Ayşe tramped off the bus in the dim predawn light, and lined up with the other passengers off to the side, where the driver was passing luggage out of the hold. Everything was rather muffled and subdued. The passengers huddled together next to the concrete bulk of the station. It seemed very quiet after the bustle and energy of Istanbul. A mourning dove cooed in the distance.
She caught sight of her bag and reached for it, but a pair of arms came around from behind and grabbed it for her. Hakan’s strong arms.
He was dressed in cargo pants and a button down shirt. There was dust on his shoes. He might have blended in with the other men milling about the place, if not for his bearing—tall and confident. And his eyes—all their sparkle was set on her. She felt less conscious of her own height around him, and stood taller when he was near.
He shifted the duffel’s weight easily onto one shoulder, and slipped his other arm around her waist, drawing her away from the crowds, around the side of the station, before burying his lips into her hair. “So glad you came,” he murmured.
“Couldn’t stay away,” she admitted, and was rewarded by his smile against her cheek.
A pink light grew in the sky as he led her through the parking lot. He tossed her bag in the trunk of a dented, dust-covered 4 by 4, and came around to open the door on the passenger side, stealing a kiss as he did so.
“I’m hoping today’ll be my last day at the camp,” he said, as he shifted gears and pulled out of the lot. “I’ll introduce you to some of the doctors, if you like, but before that I want to show you something of the view first.”
She couldn’t keep from touching him, and rested a hand on his leg, feeling the muscles move beneath her fingers as he drove. A shimmer lay on the dry grasses in the patches of land between the concrete apartment blocks they rode past. Hakan’s musky cologne mingled with the dusty heat beating through the windows.
So he hadn’t called; she was with him again now, and the twenty-four hours she’d spent doubting already felt like the distant past. She felt like she was starting a brand-new vacation. One where she said yes to every risk, for as long as she could, and shook off all her obligations with no thought for the consequences. She’d be returning to her focused, dedicated work soon enough. Yet she’d be wise not to expect too much from Hakan, and not to project too far into the future. She had one week of adventure before her, to store up for the long winter, if she did not see Hakan beyond summer’s end.
Hakan drove smoothly through the crowded streets, wending in between cars and tractors and rattling pickups, then pulled off onto a side road that gradually climbed up into the high hills she’d spotted as the bus lumbered into town. He told her to look back, and she leaned against his shoulder as she turned her head to look out the rear windshield, down over the rooftops of village houses, past the scraggly palms and pines, to the blue bay of the sea. The sunrise gave the scene a burnished glow, so that even the ugliness of concrete high-rises was muted in its coppery light.
They parked on a grassy bank outside a village at the top of a steep hill, and Hakan came around again to open her door. He pulled her into his arms, and she expected a long, lingering kiss, but he slipped aside, taking her hand and leading her along a path in between the spiny, spiky maquis plants. The scent of pine and lavender permeated the air.
“Don’t look up until I tell you,” he said, so she kept her eyes on his elegant fingers, twined in hers, until he stopped beside a ring of tumbledown stone walls.
“Where are we?”
“The remains of an old fort.” He embraced her from behind. “You can look now.”
She raised her head, and he slowly spun her about by the shoulders, so that she could see everything at once. The sun had long since broken the horizon, and its yellow-white light banished the pink from every house and hilltop. The dust had turned golden brown, and everywhere in between the green leaves there were tiny hints of pink and blue and red flowers. Far, far below, the sea glowed in the rising light.
“I used to come here alone a lot when I’d been working all night,” Hakan said softly, his cheek resting against hers. The cloudless sky was an endless blue above their heads. “It’s a long drive when you’re tired, but that highway down below is near the ancient Belen Pass. Alexander the Great came through here with his army, when he passed over these mountains. I’d watch the sun come up and think about the history of this place and the work I was doing, and feel a part of that history.”
“That’s part of why I want to do it, too,” she said. “Whenever I was tired or couldn’t study one page more in a textbook, I’d think of all the scientists and physicians who’d toiled their lives away without half the knowledge that we have. Hundreds of years without even a microscope to hand... I’d feel much wiser, and then I’d attack the textbook again. I thought...”
He kissed along her jawline, to the space behind her ear. “What did you think?”
“I thought I wanted a holiday away from it all, but every time I talk our work over with you, I realise it’s part of who I am.” Even as she said it, she realised she’d already started thinking of being with him in future again. A holiday romance might give her some blazing memories come the lonely winter, but maybe the fire between them didn’t have to be as fleeting as the summer. There was a satisfaction in how well he understood their calling, as though he saw into her soul, and shared what he saw there. She had friends who didn’t understand or, worse, some whose advice she’d sought who’d discounted her ambition as only youthful idealism. Unlike them, Hakan carried the same weight.
She tilted her head, seeking more of his touch, and he flicked his tongue where his kisses had landed.
Kissing her all the while, he pushed her backward along the rocks, until they came to a narrow opening. “Got caught by the rain once,” he murmured against her cheek. “Found this space.” And he pulled her inside.
There was barely room to stand side by side, but his body was firm against hers, and there was space enough as long as they clung together. He found the zipper of her tunic and tugged it all the way down, till the fabric slipped off her shoulders and pooled at her feet. His hands roamed across her bare skin as she buried her hands in his hair and brought his sweet lips to hers. Her breasts were tight, aching for his touch, but he kept his hands on her hips, tracing the waistline of her leggings with maddening slowness, until she thrust against his hips and, with a growl, he pushed down her clothes and drove a finger far inside.
Her legs were growing weaker, and weaker still as he kissed his way down her chest, suckled her nipples, then moved further down. She made a vague noise of protest, remembering the long bus ride, but he told her to be still, and then his mouth was on her, tongue flicking back and forth, even as his finger, now joined by another, continued its slow rhythm deep within.
She called his name, over and again, holding on as best she could with her hands on his shoulders, as a throbbing pleasure soared through her. He rose up, hoisted her easily against a rocky ledge, and in a moment had dropped his jeans and torn a condom from its wrapper. She reached for him, for the pleasure of touching his own heated centre, and was encouraged by a moan as she guided him in. She inhaled, long and slow, drawing up both him and the summer scents all around, and clutched him around the waist. He filled her completely. His lips found her nipple once more and he sucked in tandem with his slow drive in and out, until she began to melt around him. One final thrust, and he let go, collapsing against her with a groan that reverberated in the rocks all around.
“So glad you came,” he said on a breath, and she had just enough strength left to raise her arms and wrap them tight around his shoulders.
* * *
They rode out of the hills and down the highway, then on the narrow roads near the border, towards the camp. The desert grew more pronounced as they went, with dust and sand blowing across the asphalt, and it was already hot, even at that hour of the morning.
Two low concrete buildings with narrow windows marked the camp entrance, behind which were arrayed rows and rows of tents and trailers. A straggle of little boys tossed a soccer ball back and forth in an open space. Further off, a group of women were huddled over a flat pan set on hot coals, baking dough.
Hakan gripped her hand tight as they went up the steps of the larger of the buildings. He was biting the inside of his cheek, as if afraid some emergency might have cropped up in his absence. His various pass cards and badges clanked on a lanyard around his neck. There were bits of spiky green plants clinging to his jeans and shirt, and to her leggings, from when they’d been puddled on the ground in the rocky hollow. She tried to surreptitiously pick off a few of the larger burrs by her knee before they went in.
A gangly young guy looked up at their approach, from behind a counter covered in pamphlets for Doctors Without Borders, the Red Crescent, and other aid organizations. “Hakan, brother! I was wondering where you’d gone. Doctor Nadjari is asking for you, and Nurse Roslyn is—but who is this?”
Skirting a couple of tattered chairs, he ambled over to them, and Hakan introduced him as their clerk and receptionist, Murat. Without pausing, he added, “We have to be going now, Murat. I’ve got to check on Nurse Roslyn.”
“But what are you going to tell—”
“I’ll figure it out, thanks,” Hakan called, already leading her out another door and down a further set of stairs.
“What was that all about?” she asked, glancing back at Murat’s crossed-arm stance in the doorway.
“Nothing. He likes making trouble.” But he was biting his cheek again.
They continued between two rows of tents, past the soccer players, until Hakan stopped abruptly before a water pump. He opened his mouth to say something, and then they both heard Murat calling him back.
“I’d better go deal with him,” Hakan said darkly. “D’you mind waiting here for a bit?”
“‘Course not.”
He kissed her cheek, to whoops of glee from the soccer players, then loped back the way they’d come.
He was hardly in the building before a head poked out from the tent flap closest to her.
“Gone has he?” It was a woman probably about Ayşe’s age, but seeming older, with her hair all matted and knotted about her face, and bloodshot eyes. “I saw him kiss you. Come in here, so I can look at you.”
She had no desire to disappear before Hakan returned, but the woman seemed to be looking for help, so she peered around the flap and stepped through. The woman had perched on the edge of a cot, covers tangled up in her lap. There was a mosquito net pulled back on one side, and a crate for a bedside table, littered with bottles and cups, but otherwise the space was empty.
“Do you need help with something?” Ayşe asked at length, after she’d borne the woman’s staring silence for as long as she could stand.
“Not me, you. I assume you’re his latest conquest? He’ll leave you in the lurch, you know. You’ll end up like me. Good old easygoing Nurse Roslyn. About to become a mommy.” She spat the last word, and pushed aside the covers, revealing a heavily pregnant belly. Suddenly she curled her hands into fists, pushed against her arched back. She lumbered to her feet and, with noisy exhalations, began to pace the dirt floor before the cot.
“You—he—” Ayşe couldn’t find the words to frame a question. She had no real claim on Hakan, it was true—he didn’t owe her anything more than what they’d already shared, and he had made no promises. “I’ve never been this impulsive before,” he’d said. Not exactly a lie, but certainly an omission.
Perhaps she’d been lulled by his intensity into imagining that he felt the same quickening that she did. The same desire to explore further, to continue being together, to learn all about each other. He had echoed so many of her deeper thoughts.
Yet perhaps he wasn’t made that way. He might be too focused on work to commit to anyone, and could be strewing encounters behind him as he moved from station to station. Maybe his ability to give of himself easily was open to everyone, and not something only she evoked in him. Still—she had hoped.
She didn’t want to say Hakan’s name out loud. That would only start to make Roslyn’s accusation all the more real.
The other woman had no such qualms. She stopped pacing and faced Ayşe, holding up her full belly in both arms. “Hakan and me, that’s right. We worked together at the camp last year. I wasn’t supposed to come back this summer, but then I heard he’d be in Turkey, and I thought, why not show up on my own dime, and have daddy the doctor deliver his own child?”