Barakah

- My Beginning, Your End

Notice: firstly, Ramadan Mubarak! I've been gone for a minute due to school and life. My schedule is about to sky rocket with my upcoming exams but I wanted to give you guys a notice as well as a chapter. I honestly do not know if I'll be able to update this book during exam season (exams lasts like two months!) but this time. I am informing you guys.

What has your favorite chapter been so far?

And prepare to be oppressed because I was too while writing this.

2/4/2023.

.   .   .   .   .   .   .

Tulum, Mexico.

The town east facing, with skies that expansed against sea. One great force of nature laid out against another. The awe was in a breath that had gathered in her chest from the terrace of the beach house they were renting. It was their second day on the Caribbean coastline of Mexico. She hadn't seen much of the town on their first day. Not even the kick of exploring another entire part of the world could demure how tired they were.

They travelled for more than a day and by the time they had arrived through the Cancun airport, Jalal had rented a car and they had bought street food—tacos—on their way to their temporary home. Because a glance towards each other was enough confirmation that they wouldn't be stepping out until the next day.

The wind serenaded her bare skin and she could feel the weather on herself. The waters beyond her swayed, it was too early to see the body of water glisten and all she really intended for by leaving their bed so early was to catch the sunrise, to perceive the salt and seaweed and imagine how very soon, her feet would be plunged into the dunes as the waters cajoled the land.

"No sneaking out of bed. Don't you know you're the first thing I want to see when I wake up?"

He had dragged them out of bed for Fajr and had practically jumped into bed right after to realize she never made it back into bed in the first place.

"It's for something worthy," She kisses him on the mouth once, "Look." She beacons over her shoulder that she notices his eyes stray a moment on. Greedily taking in her entire collar bone too before she raises his chin at the ideal moment as the first rays of light pour into the waters there first colors of the day.

"Isn't it breathtaking?" She's buzzing with excitement now.

"It is." But it sounds like he's just flattering her and she's too enamored by how the world before her is being illuminated steadily to confront him immediately.

When the moment finally draws its curtains, she faces him.

"You didn't sound so appreciative."

"I didn't. There's little I can appreciate when you're in front of me, rested and genuinely happy." He's tugging on the sleeveless arm of the small top that barely reached her navel with little to no effort as she braces herself against him. Her arms sliding over his chest. The heady ardor between them reaching a point of no return the moment he had gotten rid of her top and she could not really make sense of when or how they ended up back in bed for entirely different reasons. Just that by the time he was done with her and she was done with him, life shifted as discreetly as it usually did, but altered profoundly between them.

All the waiting had halted that morning, in a seized moment of time. And in the sinking, intemperate (because he was only gentle when it really counted and all her inexperience was only soothed from the novels she had read and the movies she had watched unlike him) and immense gratification that coiled and buried them to an extremity that they would be no going back from this. From them. Ever.