Anjali's Red Scarf Ch. 12

But it was only half an hour later that my phone chimed with her reply. Yes. If the timing works, I would very much like to do that.

* * * * *

At the end of a PhD, it's customary to do a presentation on one's work. In some countries that happens as part of a viva voce, an oral examination where a panel of expert reviewers interrogates one—sometimes for hours—aiming to identify every possible flaw in the work. That kind of peer review is important, but for those who don't think well on their feet (like me) it can be a terrifying prospect.

In Australia, the process is a little gentler. The real peer review is commonly done by correspondence, so the candidate gets to answer criticisms without the pressure of time and a live audience. But it's still expected that we'll give a lecture. For Anjali that meant presenting to an audience of approximately a hundred of her colleagues, fellow students, juniors, and anybody else who happened to show up. Like me, for instance.

Through truly heroic efforts and some ruthless editing she'd managed to submit a draft on her thesis on the afternoon of the last day of February. The seminar was a week after that, just enough time for her to put a presentation together.

I'd taken the morning off work and showed up a little early to give her moral support. It shouldn't have surprised me to find that she'd made herself a new dress. This one was less ornate than some of her creations, a simple cut in canary yellow, but it framed her perfectly and set a cheerful tone for the occasion without being distracting. After wishing her well, I found myself a seat up near the back of the auditorium and waited for the coordinator to introduce her.

Anjali had long ago passed the point where I could keep up with her research, and it wasn't the most polished of presentations; she was nervous and spoke too softly and too quickly. But as she went on, flipping through slide after slide of algebra and simulation plots, I could see her beginning to forget the audience and hear the joy creeping back into her voice.

Anjali spoke about stars almost massive enough to collapse into black holes, and about their atoms being crushed together into iron nuclei and then crushed further into a gigantic ball of neutronium. She talked about how she'd measured the spin of her dead stars to detect quakes as their material settled, and from there how she'd estimated where the border lay between the iron zone and the core.

I only understood about a tenth of it, but there was no missing the rhapsody in her words as she spoke. I stole a glance around the auditorium to see if anybody else was moved by it as I was. Many of the listeners wore a politely glazed expression, but a few of them were nodding enthusiastically. I recognised her advisor Professor Cheng, and a couple of her friends who I'd seen on her Facebook at one time or another.

Halfway through, the door bumped open behind me and a late arrival snuck in. He'd picked my row so I wriggled over a couple of seats to make space for him. He was a handsome young Indian man, and he nodded thank-you to me then did a double-take, just at the same time I was thinking he looked familiar. But I couldn't quite place him; just as with Lucy a year earlier, I didn't have the right context.

"Sarah?" he whispered.

"I'm terribly sorry, I'm bad with faces..."

"I was a lot younger last time we met."

"Oh! Mahesh!" Anjali's brother! He would have been a gangly fifteen-year-old when I'd seen him last. "She'll be so glad you could make it—hey, aren't you getting married soon?"

"Next week." Then somebody shushed us and we watched the rest of it in silence, Mahesh filming the talk on his phone. But after the talk, while one of the emeritus professors up the front was offering an unnecessarily long "this is more of a comment than a question", Mahesh leaned over to me. "I'm just up for the day, the parents don't know I'm here."

"Well, they're not going to find out about it from me. I'm kind of persona non grata with them for the moment." For a very long moment.

"So I heard."

To everybody's relief, the emeritus professor eventually finished his not-a-question and the host congratulated Anjali. As most of the audience started to leave we worked our way against the flow to where she stood at the podium packing up her laptop.

Anjali caught sight of me first. "Hello S—MAHESH!" She pounced on him and hugged him hard enough to lift him off his feet. "You came! You didn't tell me you were coming!"

"I didn't want to let you down if I couldn't make it. But I owe you for all the times you helped me with my physics homework. So proud of you, big sister. Or is it Doctor Anjali now?"

She hugged him again, and when she pulled back her eyes were suspiciously wet. "You're my favourite brother." An in-joke; he was her only brother.

The three of us went to lunch together. Anjali peppered Mahesh with questions about his wedding arrangements, and he promised to send her photos of everything. Then he asked, "So you're really going?"

"I am, baby brother. Five days to pack everything up and then we're flying out."

"Both of you?" He looked between me and Anjali, and she nodded.

"Sarah has work stuff to do in Amsterdam and she wanted a holiday anyway. So we're visiting Iceland for a couple of weeks, and then she goes on to the Netherlands and home, and I go on to Switzerland. With luck, my things will have arrived by then."

This was all true, although the idea of visiting our Schiphol partners had been very much an afterthought. I had originally suggested Germany, but Anjali had balked: "You speak the language much better than I do, and you've lived there. If we're doing this I want to do it together, not you as the host and me as the guest." So we'd settled on somewhere equally foreign to both of us.

"Not that it's any of my business," Mahesh said, "but are you..." He trailed off, then shook his head. "You know what, never mind."

"Hmm?" said Anjali.

"I just remembered that what I don't know can't be tortured out of me. So I'm not going to ask. But I hope you have a terrific time. Any idea when you'll be back?"

"Probably not for years," Anjali said. "I'm sorry. I'll miss you, baby brother, but—you know how they are."

"Then maybe I'll come visit you some time..."

"Oh, I would love th—"

"...like next time I have a physics problem."

"Brat." She swatted the air in front of his face.

* * * * *

We flew economy, because work wasn't paying for this one. Anjali, who had been flat out for days getting her stuff moved and her flat cleaned for final inspection, fell asleep on my shoulder before we'd even taken off and slept through most of the first leg. We changed flights in a country where kissing one another could have had us jailed—hooray for travelling while queer—and then it was my turn to sleep cuddled up to Anjali.

We had another change in Copenhagen, where we learned that our flight onwards to Keflavik was to be delayed by a massive storm, leaving us with eight hours to explore the airport. While I hopped online to let our B&B know we were delayed, Anjali explored the airport's Lego shop to find a souvenir for Mahesh, which left us about seven hours to kill.

Anjali had been wearing her scarf all along; I'd registered the fact but not really noticed it until we were browsing through a chocolate shop together, and then I suddenly thought: I can do this. I am allowed. Nobody here knows us. I took a deep breath, reached down, and clasped her hand in mine. Just for a moment she stopped what she was doing—surprised, I guess—and then she slid her fingers between mine and squeezed, and I felt my heart jump a little.

I spent the next few hours with what I assume was a stupid grin on my face. We were holding hands in public, where anybody could see, and it was okay! Later, while we were sitting at a cafe, she rested her hand on my knee, and I felt giddy. It had been a very long time since I'd been able to tune out that voice that says what if somebody saw you?

We flew in through the remnants of the storm, and the last few hours were alarmingly bumpy. Anjali and I held hands again through the worst of the weather, and I couldn't tell you whether it was for her sake or mine. But we made it to Keflavik in one piece, as did our luggage, and after one last shuttle ride to Reykjavik we made it to our B&B somewhere around eleven at night. A kindly old lady showed us up two flights of stairs to a small but cozy room and there we crawled into a double bed to sleep the disordered sleep of the badly jet lagged.

We spent the first couple of days exploring Reykjavik, taking it easy while our body clocks adjusted, clomping around town seeing the sights and getting a feel for the weather. We visited the Icelandic Punk Museum (yes, that's a thing), and the Parliament building (it's a Thing), and the Phallological Museum (lots of things), and at that point I had to tell Anjali that there would be severe penalties for any further "thing" jokes. For some reason this did nothing at all to dissuade her, and I was regretfully obliged to deliver several spankings once we were back in our lodgings.

Once we'd settled in a little and our body clocks had adjusted, we began to explore further afield, taking a coach tour of the Golden Circle and then hiring a car to drive east through gravel and lava fields to Jökulsárlón where ice floats and cracks unquietly in a glacial lagoon.

You'll find better descriptions of Iceland elsewhere; I'm a mathematician, not a travel writer. But what I remember most about it (the thing I remember most about it, Anjali would have said) was contrasts. The black rock and the white snow; the pure glacial water that ran from the cold taps, and the sulfur-stink from the hot; warm and welcoming people, descended from murderous raiders and their slaves. I come from an old continent where the earth fell asleep long ago; in Iceland, the land is still growing, sometimes violently so.

The sweetness of having Anjali-Lily with me, all day and every day. We discovered new things together, we marvelled at waterfalls and geothermal plants and handcrafts, we huddled together against the wind. In the nights, and occasionally in the mornings, we—made love? Fucked? I am not sure what to call it. I could not remember being happier.

And as the days ticked by, and I counted down our remaining time, I could feel my heart hurting with the anticipation of losing her: verlustangst, the Germans call it. Every now and then as we lay together, or as we talked, it would sneak up on me, and I would try to hide that sudden twinge from Anjali.

But she noticed.

Two days before the end, we visited the Blue Lagoon. It is a cunning piece of work: a large pool in the rock where silica dissolved in heated water colours it blue, and for a sum of money you can bathe there. From reading the brochures, it would be easy to come away with the impression that it is some miracle of nature, but the truth is rather more prosaic.

Nearby is a power station, which draws up superheated steam from deep in the rock and uses it to spin turbines. In the process, the water cools to a modest eighty-odd degrees Celsius, and some of that is piped down to Reykjavik to provide hot water and to de-ice the roads. But the rest needs to go back into the water table, so what do you do? You dig a big pool, and fill it with the waste water, now cooled to human-friendly temperatures, and let it soak back into the ground.

And if you are a very shrewd businessman, you charge tourists to soak in the pool and sell beauty products based on the silica. The advertising doesn't lie, but it doesn't exactly emphasise that one is paying to bathe in power station runoff.

I knew, but didn't mind at all. The water was no less warm and relaxing for that, and I admired the efficiency of it all. We soaked in it for hours, soothing muscles tired from a hard drive the day before—not a long distance, but it had been snowing hard and I'd had to slow to a crawl. The snow was still falling, and we had flakes in our hair, so we sat there with just our heads sticking out, averaging a very pleasant temperature indeed.

There was a poolside bar, where one could buy drinks without leaving the water, and at one stage Anjali went off to get cocktails for us both, returning to catch me in a pensive moment.

"You're sad," she said, handing me my glass and then slipping her arm around my waist.

"I am. Just thinking that it's almost over. I keep wanting to do stupid things. Ask you to marry me and stay with me. I know that's not the answer, I know that's not what you want, I don't think it's even what I want. And there's Lucy. But...god, I'm going to miss you, Anjali."

"I will miss you too." She pulled me in close, head on my shoulder, and after a few seconds I felt a wetness on my skin that was neither snow nor volcano-water but something of more human origin. "I hate that things have to end. But..."

"I know they do." I settled my drink on a rock by the poolside, but it was uneven and more slippery than I'd allowed for; the glass toppled and spilled. "Shit. I don't...I'm not asking you to stay. I know it can't happen. But I do love you, Anjali. You'll always be important to me."

She set her own drink aside, with more success than I had achieved, and hugged me tight as she kissed me on the lips. "You too," she murmured. "I don't—I don't love you like Valentines and wedding rings, not that kind of love. But I love you, Sarah. I hope you know that."

"I do." We held one another as the volcanic heat seeped through our bones, and the tangled ball of all the incompatible things I wanted and the ones I couldn't have...well, it was still a tangled ball of complications that I might never fully unravel. But I started to feel that perhaps it was something I could lift, and take with me to wherever I was going next.

For now, though...I was tired, and verklempt, and vaguely aware that people were probably staring at us. "Is it okay if we go soon?"

"Of course."

That evening, back in our room after dinner, I was still moody and down. I'd stripped off and crawled under the quilt; returning from her evening shower, Anjali slipped in behind me and cuddled up against my back.

"Once upon a time," she whispered, "there was a fairy named Lilabel, daughter of the Dandelion King, who was perhaps not as sweet and innocent as people thought her to be. And there was another fairy, Lady Tanglespine, who was perhaps not quite the villain that people thought her to be."

"Oh?"

"One day it happened by accident that Lilabel fell into Lady Tanglespine's clutches. Or, who knows, perhaps she allowed herself to be ensnared? Perhaps she had grown tired of her father's court and wanted to see the world beyond his realm? Perhaps she was curious enough and bold enough to wonder just what Lady Tanglespine would do to her?"

Her hand was a light presence on my hip.

"However it may have happened, she found herself bound to Lady Tanglespine's service for seven years, during which time she learned a number of very interesting things, and I hope I may say that Lady Tanglespine was satisfied with my—with her service."

She paused, and I felt her lips brush the back of my neck. Her fingers were circling slowly at my hip.

"Sometimes that seven years felt like an eternity, and sometimes it felt like the blink of an eye. But eventually it came to an end."

Her fingers slid over my back, coming to pause at the base of my spine; if I'd been a cat, she would have been stroking me just above the tail.

"At the end of the seven years, Lady Tanglespine told her, 'You have served me obediently, and you have acquitted your debt to me. You are free to go.' She led Lilabel to the border of her land, and the great thorn-bushes parted in front of her, and Lilabel stepped out towards the daylight. But when she had one foot across the threshold she looked back, and she saw Lady Tanglespine was weeping. So she turned, and said, 'If you wish it, I will stay one day more. Not as your servant, not as the Dandelion King's daughter, but as the one who has shared your bed these seven years.' Then she walked back into Lady Tanglespine's keep and the thorns closed behind her."

Her fingers were stroking my arse and she broke off talking to nuzzle at my shoulders, her lips warm and alive and mine, not forever but for now. I reached back with my foot to nudge hers, bending one knee to allow her better access. She accepted the invitation and began to caress the sensitive skin at the inside of my thighs, and then she slipped her other hand under me and around to stroke my face. Her fingertips traced my forehead, my cheekbones, dallied on the tip of my nose, circled my lips.

I didn't know whether I wanted to reciprocate or just to lie there and be pampered. I settled for stroking her hands as they moved over me and wriggling backwards to snuggle myself against her body. Her fingers pressed against my mouth, inviting my kisses, and her other hand now brushed through the fuzz of my mons in an exploratory pattern that gradually shifted downward. By the time she reached my vulva I was eager; I squeezed her hand tight against me and arched my head back to nip at her fingertips.

She stroked me slowly and gently, gradually increasing the pressure. It was very pleasant and moderately arousing, but it was only taking me so far; she was working left-handed and the rhythm wasn't quite right. Or perhaps my head was too full. After some time she noticed that we weren't getting anywhere—not that we were in a hurry, mind—and she paused, and said, "What would you like, my darling Tanglespine?"

I rolled over to face her. "What would you like, Miss Lilabel?"

"I'd like to make you happy." She swept the hair out of my face. "A girl could get used to taking orders from you."

"A girl could get used to bossing you around." I slid one hand around the back of her neck, like scrumming a kitten, and her eyes rolled back as I took charge. "Show me that you know your place."

"Yes, Mistress." She gave me a quick peck on the lips and slid off the bed to kneel beside it, gazing up at me, ready. I swung my legs around to bracket her, ruffled her hair, and then pulled her into me. Her tongue was first, swirling, worshipping, and the warmth of her cheeks between my thighs, and the tickle of her hair over my knees; she'd tied it back but now I pulled it loose, teasing it out to spread like a blanket.

I think perhaps that was always the magic of it for me: not just the feeling of taking her, but the knowledge that she'd given this to me, that no matter how far down I took her, I'd always bring her back again.

"Good girl...ah...good girl." Her fingers were in me now, curling gently, rhythmically, and she had her other hand on my thigh. I took it in my right, lacing my fingers between hers, and with my left I began to stroke my own breast, pinching my nipple, letting those little twinges of pain run down my body and collide with the slow lapping ripples of pleasure Anjali was giving me, merging together to form something that filled my body to bursting point. I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed mine, and the closer I got the slower and the gentler she went, bringing me to the edge and backing away, again and again, until I muttered "please?" and she wriggled her fingers and her tongue gave a little squirmy twist that brought me over the edge. I threw back my head and stuffed the back of my hand in my mouth to muffle the sound.

At length, when I'd regained some semblance of composure...I made her do it again. And when she was done, I pulled her up to me, all rumpled and sticky-faced and smelling of me, and I kissed her and threw her on her back and paid her back, biting at her breasts, leaving toothmarks on her skin as my fingers jerked her to a series of little paroxysms, and this time it was her turn to shove her hand in her mouth.