Karak and Questions

The tea shop was smaller than Mia expected, tucked behind a curtain of hanging lanterns, three plastic tables, and the smell of cardamom thick enough to taste. Rashid ordered without looking at a menu, said something to the old man behind the counter that made him laugh and glance at Mia with open curiosity.

"What did you tell him?" she asked.

"That you nearly drowned me and I'm making amends." He slid into the chair across from her, loosening nothing about his posture, though his eyes had softened considerably since the fountain. "He thinks I should ask for your number instead of tea."

"Bold, for a man I met ninety seconds ago."

"I've been told I make decisions quickly." Something crossed his face — amusement, maybe regret. "It isn't always a virtue."

The tea arrived thick and sweet and impossibly good, and Mia found herself talking more than she meant to — about the lost hotel, the ruined afternoon, her sister's insistence that she needed this trip like a diagnosis. Rashid listened with a focus that unsettled her a little, the way he seemed to actually weigh her words instead of waiting for his turn to speak.

"And you?" she asked eventually. "What do you do, Rashid-with-no-last-name?"

"I work for my family," he said, which was true, and vague enough to be almost a lie. "Business. Development, mostly. It keeps me indoors more than I'd like."

"Is that why you're wandering souks in the middle of the day?"

"I needed air." The dark look from the phone call flickered back across his face, gone as fast as it came. "A meeting went badly. I find crowds easier than silence, some days."

She recognized that — the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people and still alone in it. She didn't say so. Instead she asked him to recommend what she should see before she left, and he produced, unprompted, an entire itinerary — not the postcard version, but a local's Dubai, a hidden breakfast spot in Al Fahidi, a rooftop that faced away from the crowds, a stretch of beach where the fishermen still worked at dawn.

"You could just take me," she said, half-joking, already regretting it.

He didn't laugh it off the way she expected.

"I could," he said slowly, like he was surprising himself. "Tomorrow. If you'd let me make up properly for the fountain."

Mia looked at him — at the plain white kandura, the watch that was probably worth more than her rent but worn like he'd forgotten it was there, the careful way he held himself like a man used to being watched and tired of it. Every sensible instinct told her this was how vacation romances started and, more importantly, how they ended: badly, or not at all, over an airport gate ten days from now.

"Okay," she said anyway. "Tomorrow."

Something in his shoulders loosened, as if he'd been braced for refusal.

"Ten o'clock," he said. "Wear shoes you don't mind getting sandy."

He walked her back toward the main road himself, bought her a working phone charger from a stall without being asked, and left her with nothing but his first name and a time. It was only after he'd disappeared back into the gold-lit crowd that she realized she still didn't know what he actually did for his family's business — and that, strangely, she hadn't minded not knowing