The Course of Love Read Online Free Page A

preamble: “Just imagine if it didn’t matter what he thought of me—or, come to think of it, of you.” To Rabih, it feels as if he were returning with a friend in broad daylight to a forest he’d only ever been in alone and at night and could see that the malevolent figures which had onceterrified him were really, all along, just boulders that had caught the shadows at the wrong angles.
    There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.
    At eleven at night, with one supper already behind them, they go out for another, fetching barbecued ribs from Los Argentinos, in Preston Street, which they then eat by moonlight on a bench in the Meadows. They speak to each other in funny accents: she is a lost tourist from Hamburg looking for the Museum of Modern Art; he can’t be of much help because, as a lobsterman from Aberdeen, he can’t understand her unusual intonation.
    They are back in the playful spirit of childhood. They bounce on the bed. They swap piggyback rides. They gossip. After attending a party, they inevitably end up finding fault with all the other guests, their loyalty to each other deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.
    They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.
    They normally have to answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes“Teckle,” the Scottish colloquialism for great , which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes “Sfouf,” after the dry Lebanese cake flavored with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square, and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.

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 tothe 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.
    â€œI 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