Other Side

∞ | Nothing New

"I HATE ARABIC."

Talia liked to leave the moments between Zaid and Elias to be just that—private—but Arabic lessons were a whole different story. This past summer had been a nightmare, ever since her husband had decided that the ripe age of five was the perfect time for their son to finally be capable of more than a few babbled phrases in spoken Arabic.

No, he needed to read and write the language that had taken her over ten years to barely master, and his patience was a mere smattering of that of her professors in college. So, she always loomed in the background, offering a few words when necessary, usually benign and encouraging, but sometimes reproachful, depending on which of one of her two loves had instigated a war.

"Don't say that," Zaid urged softly, running a soothing hand down his son's back. When Elias slumped farther against the polished desk, releasing a sigh of frustration belonging to someone two decades older, Zaid pulled him back and cupped his soft cheek. "Tell you what. If you can write your name and the date correctly on the paper, that will be more than enough for Baba."

Bug-like brown eyes stared back at him, the innocent version of Talia's gaze. "Do I have to write the dots, too?"

"Yes, habibi," he replied, though the endearment lacked some of its usual sweetness. Glancing out the window overlooking the harbor, he grumbled to himself, "I only wonder who made you think otherwise..."

Shooting her husband a steely glare, Talia readjusted her position on the leather armchair, pulling a knee up to her chest. Before Zaid and Elias had once again begun another fruitless language lesson in this study, she had already holed herself up in there, engrossed in Voltaire's Zaïre.

There was no way she now read for fun.

"I won't spoil how it ends," Zaid had told her the other night, while he discarded his wrinkled dress shirt, a tactic he'd first employed to help her actually finish the books she started. Now he only used it to get a rise out of her. Climbing up onto her body, he smirked and finished, "But don't get too attached to the plot line. It's essentially a Frenchman's Oriental fantasy à la Romeo and Juliet."

"You always do this," she seethed, tossing the book to the other side of the mattress as he kissed her neck. "Can't I ever be surprised?" Through a moan as he tugged at the skin with his teeth, she lied, "I'm no longer entertained."

Spoiled ending or not, she'd always go back to reading when he wasn't looking.

Talia sought refuge in this study more nights than she wished, unable to cure her intermittent insomnia after five years of a PhD and then the hell of being a new parent, even long after Elias was no longer an inconsolable newborn. Zaid had eventually grown used to the dip in the mattress that always occurred between three and four in the morning, the wretched time of day when she used to feed their son and before that, her favorite hour to work on her dissertation. He no longer clung to her waist as she pulled herself out of bed, aware he'd always wake up to her nestled against his chest anyway, stealing his breath in more ways than one.

A love for a different play rose with the sun on each of those cursed mornings. Those types of works were just riveting enough for her wandering mind, but still devoid of the scrupulous attention to detail found in most novels of the same era. What she liked the most, however, was that she could finally appear just as sophisticated as he did when he talked about literature, no longer relying on online study guides to shape her scholarly opinions.

So, fittingly, in a bookcase twice as large as the one housing textbooks on math, economics, and engineering, existed a small row of the books passed down to him from his great-grandfather, some of classical poetry, others of winding tales of history, and the rest tattered religious texts, a wrinkle for each prayer they had heard. These works had once occupied the highest shelf of this bookcase; now it was adorned by a collection of stories printed on thick cardboard, pastel blues and yellows and reds painting a funny contrast against the expensive mahogany.