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He's been dreaming of it for weeks, ever since Zaf got back and told him about all the old places and new faces, and he realised it's been two years since he's been abroad. Two years! He hasn't been that long in one city since – well, ever. Let alone somewhere where it hails in summer and the new paint on the bedroom wall is getting wetter rather than drier.
He comes home to find her scraping at it with a butterknife, the extent of her reach up the wall mapped in corrugated scratches. The paint, swollen with humidity, is coming away tacky and elastic. She smiles up at him in cheery accomplishment. There are flecks of paint on her cheeks like pale freckles.
He rubs the rain from his face onto his soaking sleeve. 'Let's go on a holiday,' he says.
She brandishes the knife. 'There's an umbrella by the door for a reason, you know.'
'It was fine when I went out.'
'Oh darling, don't tell me you're still falling for that one; it's the oldest in the book.'
'The weather stopped playing by the book a long time ago,' he mutters darkly, staring at the puddle he's making on the floor. She raises an eyebrow to match the curve at the corner of her lips, which plainly says that her mess of the wall beats his puddle hands down, and anyway, she'll quite happily start on the ceiling if he wants to make a competition of it. He toes the water ineffectually and gives in with a sulky smile.
'Holiday,' he repeats. 'A proper one. No motives, no results, no legends – well legends obviously. But just us.'
'Let me guess. Somewhere it's not raining?'
She yields to his arms around her waist and he leans in close, her hair tickling his face. 'Let's go,' he whispers, 'to Damascus.'
He used to be in a different city with every season. He used to call her for phone sex three times a day – sorry ma'am, I wasn't sure if it was six o'clock my time, your time, or Greenwich Mean Standard – never mind that he'd be lucky to get it once, and never mind she never really told him where she was. He used to lie in the back room of a colleague's auntie's friend's house (god bless Her Majesty's budget), picking the sand from under his fingernails and imagining her in the snow, or dancing with a Russian diplomat, or laughing in someone's kitchen. All his memories of travelling are also of being without her, except for one city.
Neither of them remember if the need for a way out and a way up was the excuse for falling in love, or the other way around. He tells himself it doesn't matter. They wielded it like a weapon – her husband, his superiors – who could stand up to something so hot and cold, so primal and practical?
He knows that the woman he married in a church never turned back into the little girl her father believed her to be as he walked her down the aisle, won back from that godforsaken tinderbox of a country as if it was just a childhood phase. He's been dreaming of it for weeks and he knows she has too. He can read every line of her body and he can't fathom why now she's drawing away, lowering her gaze.
'Don't you miss the desert?' he says, 'Amal?'
She turns to look out the window, at the rain dashed against the glass and spraying from the blocked gutters, folds her arms across her chest and says, 'No.'
When she's frightened she flirts, just like when he's jealous he makes jokes about getting rid of her, because there's an honesty in blatant lies that both of them find easier. This fear is manufactured; a shield calculated to blind him with protective instinct.
'We can't be naive, Adam, not any more.'
It comes to him, uncertainly, that she is still thinking of Danny, or perhaps the fear is for Wes. It never crosses his mind that it could be for him. He hesitates, and concedes.
'Maybe I'll have to go with Zaf, then,' he says, and when the joke doesn't work he tries the first words he ever said to her, but the Arabic defeats him and he stumbles.
A smile. She brandishes the knife again, pressing the cool blade to his cheek. 'You're getting rusty.'
He thinks of knights in shining armour; of dust and sand and heat. He leans in to kiss her and suddenly she's kissing back with such passion that he is momentarily surprised. He thinks he tastes salt, but she won't let him pull away.
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Note: Thank you for reading! If you review, please don't spoil me for series 7 as I'm in Australia and haven't seen it yet. Thanks.