Shared Vows

The key card didn't work the first time. I slid it again, heard the click, and pushed the door open onto a room that smelled of jasmine and something metallic, like rain about to fall. Ashraf stood at the window with her back to me, still wearing the navy dress from dinner, her hair pinned up the way she did when she was angry. Or thinking. With her, it was hard to tell.

"Mohammad," she said, without turning. "What is this place?"

I set my satchel on the chair by the door. The room was small, too small for the price they'd charged, with a single bed pushed against the wall and a lamp that cast more shadow than light. Through the window, I could see the courtyard below, lit by lanterns strung between palm trees. Couples moved between the tables like slow water.

"It's a club," I said.

"I know it's a club." Now she turned. Her eyes were the same dark brown they'd been the day I met her, twenty-three years ago, in a bookshop in Tehran, when she'd reached for the same copy of Forough Farrokhzad's poems and our hands had touched. "I asked what kind."

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sank more than I expected. "The kind where married couples come."

She waited.

"To share each other," I said.

The words sat in the room like a third person. Ashraf didn't move. She had a way of going very still when she was deciding something, her whole body becoming a held breath. I'd seen her do it before surgeries, before difficult conversations with her mother, before she told me she was pregnant with Leila. That stillness had always frightened me a little.

"Share," she repeated.

"Yes."

"And you brought me here."

I looked at my hands. The calluses on my fingers from years of turning pages, of gripping pens, of holding maps against the wind in places where the wind wanted to take everything. "I thought you might want to see it."

"See it." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You thought I might want to see it."

The lanterns in the courtyard flickered. Someone below laughed, a woman's voice, high and free. I wondered if Ashraf heard it the way I did, as a sound from another world, a world where people did things we only whispered about in the dark.

"Remember what you said last year?" I asked. "In Isfahan. At your cousin's wedding."

She turned back to the window. "I said a lot of things at that wedding. I'd had three glasses of champagne."

"You said you wondered what it would be like to be wanted by someone who didn't know you. Someone with no history. No expectations."

Silence.

"You said you wondered what it would feel like to be a stranger to your own life."

Her shoulders rose and fell. In the lamplight, I could see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the ones that had appeared the year Leila left for Canada, the year Ashraf stopped sleeping through the night. She was still beautiful. More beautiful, maybe, than she'd been at twenty-two, when I'd first seen her in that bookshop. Beauty that had been worn into her by time and disappointment and the ordinary weight of staying married to a man like me.

"I was drunk," she said.

"You weren't."

She turned. Her face was unreadable. "And you? What did you say?"

"I said I'd give you anything. I meant it."

"Anything except the one thing I asked for."

The words hit me in the chest. I knew what she meant. The year before, when she'd asked me to stop traveling, to take a job at the university in Tehran, to be home for more than three months at a time. I'd said yes, and then I'd taken one more trip, and then another, and the yes had dissolved into the desert air somewhere between Damascus and Aleppo.

"I'm here now," I said.

"You're here now because you want to watch me."

"No."

"Then why?"

I stood. The floorboards creaked under my weight. I crossed to her, close enough to smell the jasmine perfume she'd worn since our honeymoon, close enough to see the pulse beating in her throat. She didn't step back.

"Because I want to know if you'll choose me," I said. "In a room full of people who could have you. I want to know if you'll still choose me."

Her breath caught. Just slightly. Just enough.

"That's cruel," she said.

"I know."

"You're a bastard, Mohammad."

"I know that too."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached up and pulled the pins from her hair. It fell to her shoulders, black streaked with gray, and I remembered the first time I'd seen it loose, in that bookshop, when she'd shaken her head at something I'd said and the pins had come undone and she'd laughed, embarrassed, gathering it back up. I'd fallen in love with her in that exact moment. Not before. Then.

"The rules," she said.

"What rules?"

"Of this place. There must be rules."

I pulled the folded paper from my pocket. The woman at the front desk had given it to me with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "No touching without consent. No pressure. Couples may observe or participate. Safe words honored. No photographs."

Ashraf took the paper. Read it. Read it again. Her fingers trembled slightly, or maybe I imagined that. When she looked up, her expression had shifted into something I couldn't name.

"And you want to observe," she said.

"I want to watch you decide."

She folded the paper carefully, creased it along the lines, and placed it on the windowsill. Below, in the courtyard, a couple had begun to dance, slowly, to music I couldn't hear through the glass. The woman's head rested on the man's shoulder. They moved like people who had known each other for years, or like people who had just met and were pretending.

"You think this will fix something," Ashraf said.

"No."

"You think it will break something."

"I don't know."

She stepped closer. Her hand found mine. Her fingers were cold, always cold, even in summer. "I'm afraid," she said.

"I know."

"Of what I might do."

"I know."

"And you're not afraid?"

I looked at our hands, joined, the way they'd been joined a thousand times in a thousand places. Airports. Hospitals. The doorway of our apartment in Tehran, the first night we'd moved in, when we'd stood there with boxes everywhere and laughed because we had nothing, nothing at all, and it felt like everything.

"I'm terrified," I said.

She kissed me. Not gently. Not the way she kissed me at home, in the kitchen, in passing. This was a kiss from another life, a kiss that tasted of jasmine and champagne and the question she hadn't asked yet. When she pulled back, her eyes were wet.

"Then let's go down," she said. "Before I change my mind."

I picked up my satchel. Old habit. Wherever I went, the notebooks, the maps, the small artifacts I'd collected from dead cities. I didn't need them here. But I carried them anyway, the weight familiar against my shoulder, the weight of all the things I'd chosen over her, over and over, until I didn't know anymore if I was the man who loved her or the man who'd spent twenty-three years learning how to leave.

At the door, she stopped. Her hand on the frame.

"Mohammad."

"Yes."

"If I choose someone else tonight. If I let someone touch me. Will you still be here in the morning?"

The courtyard below had gone quiet. The lanterns swayed. I could hear my own heartbeat, loud and wrong, like a drum out of rhythm.

"I don't know," I said.

She nodded. Opened the door. The hallway beyond was dark, lit only by a single bulb at the far end, and somewhere below us, the club was waiting, with its rules and its strangers and its promises of things that couldn't be taken back.

She walked through first. I followed.