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It's a sunny day, warm enough for most people to forgo shirts entirely, even in the shade. The heat is consuming but not humid, and there's a lazy mood all over town.
Sasha is perched in the open window in Zolf's kitchen, looking down into the courtyard where Zolf is digging holes for raspberry bushes, and Wilde lounges on a bench in the shade, surrounded by hollyhocks. Both of them are wearing matching, wide-brimmed sun hats.
She smiles over them, fond to hear them bicker quietly and with no more heat than the weather provides. Zolf is complaining about being the one doing all the physical labour around the house, and Wilde, sly as the orange cat curled up on his shoulder, purrs that Zolf is just so good at it.
She sees Zolf drive his spade into the ground and turn to lean his forearms on it, saying something so quietly that Sasha can’t hear. Wilde’s laugh rings out through the courtyard in response, clear and musical, and Sasha thinks that they really are very good together, the two of them.
They seem so content in each other’s company, and she’s glad of it. It wouldn’t do to leave them here if they weren’t, not really, and it’s not that she intends to leave them here for good, but there’s a pyramid in Cairo she never got the chance to look at, last time around. And Hamid and Azu, of course, but they’ve already passed through London while she’s been here, and the pyramid calls to her. She has a gut feeling about it.
Zolf trudges over to Wilde in the shade, and sits down on the bench. Wilde touches him on the shoulder, and for a moment the teasing mood between them turns into something soft and sweet. Sasha thinks she shouldn’t watch, and retreats into the flat, running her fingers over the bookshelves, the furniture, the piano.
It’s a proper house they’ve set up, she thinks, a home that has its value not in trinkets but the gentleness that lives there. She knows they don’t show it to just anyone, because they’re like that: secret with their softness, private. But they have room for her.
The guest room—Sasha’s room—looks out over the alley, and one can, with a little bit of agility, get in and out of the window, instead of using the front stairs. It’s small, just enough room for a bed and a dresser and the smallest possible desk and chair, leaving about a square metre of free floorspace. She likes it for its cramped atmosphere, likes the pictures mounted on the walls. There’s a shelf of books in there, poetry and novels and travelbooks from before everything, and she has been studying accounts of cities that might now be different from what they were, but which she’d like to see regardless. So much of the world yet to experience, in this time or another, before her legs give up on her completely.
For now, though, she’s content with staying here, planning her travels. She plans to come back, after that, if Wilde and Zolf will let her. She likes it here, likes her little family that lets her come and go as she pleases. She lies down. The light is just right for a nap.
She expects the knock on her door before it comes, counting the footfall in the hall outside leading up to the soft sound of knuckles on the wood.
“Yeah, I’m up,” she calls, and Zolf pops his head in, garden dirt on his face and a grin on his lips.
“Mornin’,” he tells her, though he should know as well as her that she’s been up early. “Thought we’d go out, maybe find a place to get a swim. Wanna join?”
Sasha nods, sitting up again. It’s good seeing him like this, peaceful and shirtless and covered in the dirt from his carefully maintained garden. They’re close to the same age now, but where Sasha is starting to feel it, Zolf seems to be shining with it, strong and immovable.
As they walk the streets in the sun towards the public swimming pool, she links arms with both of them, only habitually concerned with keeping a careful eye over her shoulder now and again.
Neither of them truly feel like going in, once they’re there, but Wilde rolls up the legs of his trousers and sits down on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, while Zolf goes off to buy ice cream for them.
Sasha takes off her shoes and socks and sits down next to Wilde, cool water lapping at her toes.
“So,” she says. “Should we prepare some puns?”
“Oh,” Wilde says. “Yes, let’s pool our resources.”
“Might have to water them down for Zolf, though,” Sasha says.
Wilde grins and nudges her with his elbow. “Look who’s been practicing.”
Sasha splashes water at him.