Fic: The winds long to play with your hair (LMOTP)
Title: The winds long to play with your hair
Fandom: Little Mosque on the Prairie
Disclaimer: I, as per usual, own nothing. I just borrow and wreck havoc.
Spoilers: Season Three
Summary: She doesn’t know why she still says ‘if’.
Pairing: Rayyan/Amaar with some token Rayyan/J.J.
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran
She has the afternoon off from the clinic and J.J. is in town for a few days before heading back to the city for meetings, so, on a whim, they decide to bike down along the path by the river. J.J. takes her dad’s bike - a once shiny, gazillion-speed bike with more bells and whistles than even an engineer can comprehend but which has been ridden, and Rayyan is certain of this, only once. Her father had ridden it into their car. In the drive way. It’s been relegated to the garage ever since.
Rayyan rides her old, red bike, the one she used to ride to and from school every day in the spring and the fall, the one she used to polish all winter long as she waited for the snow to melt. It has a white basket on the front and a silver bell which, even now, makes her smile when she rings it.
“It’s cute,” J.J. had said, seeing her fawn over it but clearly, clearly not understanding how she could prefer it to the high tech allure of her father’s abandoned bike.
They ride down to the river, winding through town, J.J. almost getting hit at an intersection by Mrs. Humphries who is 96 years old, blind as a bat, and still insists on driving her ancient Cadillac everywhere. The locals have learned to watch out for her, to stay out of her way, and, so far, it’s been a viable solution. J.J., when she tells him this, says that’s absurd.
“They should take her license away! It’s ridiculous, someone could get hurt.”
“Just outsiders who don’t know to watch out for her,” Rayyan reminds him.
“Like me!”
“But you’re fine. You lived to ride again and besides, now you know one of our local secrets,” she smiles.
“I know that you live in a town that shelters dangerous homicidal old women,” he grumbles, but smiles just the same.
It’s a hot day and they decide to pause for a moment once they reach the river. They both drink thirstily from their water bottles and Rayyan uses the back of her sleeve to brush the sweat off her forehead.
“You know, the weatherman said it was going to hit 30 today but I think it might be - ”
“Cover yourself,” he hisses, suddenly interrupting her and pointedly looking away, “I can see your hair.”
“Oh,” Rayyan reaches up, pulling her hijab forward to cover the inch or so of hair it had slide back to reveal when she’d wiped her forehead. “Done,” she chimes brightly, forcing a smile when he turns back to her.
“You should be more careful,” he says, softly, but still chidingly. “Anyone might have seen you.”
Rayyan bites her tongue, bites back any number of sharp retorts which spring to mind, bites back the terribly inappropriate question, which it suddenly seems so important to have answered: don’t you want to see it? She wants him to respect her but, and she’s just starting to realise this, she wants him to want the things that are denied to him. She wants for him to walk too close to her, to time his gait to hers so that, as if by accident, their hands might brush. She wants him to want to see her hair, even though she knows she would never show it to him. Or rather, she corrects herself, won’t show it until they’re married. Sometimes she forgets that is what all this is leading up to.
She thinks that if she works at it long enough, she’ll fool herself into believing that isn’t a problem.
She knows she’s contrasting J.J.’s behaviour with someone else’s, knows exactly who that is, and, she can admit it to herself, knows why she does it. Rayyan has never been good at making life decisions. When it had come time to pick a university, she’d made lists. Night after night of sitting at the table, chewing off the end of her pencil while she tried to make, what was then, the most important decision of her life. She had finally made her decision, sent in her forms and residence deposit, before she realised that that wasn’t what she had really wanted. She’d pulled out, losing her $500 deposit, and enrolled at U of A instead. It had been the right choice in the end, even though her lists (her dear, slaved-over lists) had misled her.
She tells herself she better at making lists now, that she won’t make the same mistake again.
J.J. comes off well in the comparisons. At least that’s what her twelve lists entitled “J.J.’s Pros and Cons” tell her.
And yes, there have been twelve. Most written after the engagement.
The other list, the one for him, is hidden in her closest, in a shoebox with actual shoes. It’s much less precise that the lists for J.J. It’s crumpled and scribbled on and her writing is atrocious on it - large and dark when she wrote in anger, slanted and tight when she’d written things she wasn’t ready to admit, even to herself.
Cons: he’s arrogant. He’s from Toronto. He smirks too much. He’s patronizing. He’s a lawyer. He’s (usually) scared of Baber. They always fight when they’re together (except when they don’t). He is the world loudest (and really, she means loudest) eater.
Pros: He’s smart. He’s articulate. He’s (sometimes) charming. He helps people without being asked. He’s cute. He genuinely cares about other people. He takes his faith seriously (obviously). He’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes in. She can make him blush. His smile - his real, genuine, ‘you are amazing’ smile - turns her to mush.
When she’s angry with him, she revises the list, adding to the cons, striking out many of the pros. But then, a day or two later, after he’s apologized, she adds them back, smiling as she does so.
J.J’s lists are never revised. She just starts over, hoping that a blank page will inspire her to find some new, inspiring trait. Something, though she tries not to think it, that could make her love him, this man she has agreed to marry.
The river before her, alongside the path, is barely a trickle. It’s late summer now and it’s been a dry one. Last summer, last spring, a lifetime ago, she and Amaar had come here to eat their lunches when the river was high. He’d been sprawled out on the grass, shoes and socks discarded, pant legs rolled up to reveal surprisingly scrawny calves which she had, of course, teased him about.
“You know, it really is pretty here.” Amaar had said, sounding surprised by his own observation.
“You mean you don’t miss the smog and the concrete jungle?” Rayyan had retorted.
“Not on days like these. No rivers like this in Toronto, no opportunity to sit barefoot in grass that hasn’t even been sprayed by 1001 pesticides. At least I hope it hasn’t. It hasn’t right? Right?”
“‘Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet.’” Rayyan said, ignoring his paranoia, thinking instead of how her father used to quote Gibran on the summer nights when she would return home after running barefoot through the neighbourhood with all the other kids to face her mother’s frown, a small tub of hot water, and a coarse brush that rubbed the bottoms of her feet red.
“‘And the winds long to play with your hair.’” Amaar completed the quote but the way he said it, the way he looked at her, made her think not of the wind in her hair, but his fingers and what they would feel like winding through the heavy strands.
Secretly, despite the embarrassment of the horrible evening in her kitchen months later, she’s still excited by the knowledge that he has seen her hair. She should be ashamed, even indignant, but instead she is warmed by their shared secret. It’s not something that can be taken back, it’s a moment of intimacy that they shared, something that can’t be taken away even if she does marry J.J.
She doesn’t know why she still says ‘if’.
“Come on, slow poke!” J.J.’s voice interrupts her thoughts. She looks up, disoriented for a moment. J.J. is seated on his bike, about ten metres up the path from where she’s standing, looking out at the river. “I promised your parents we’d be back for dinner.”
Rayyan feels about ten years old right now, about to speed off for home on her bike, pushing herself faster than she should, to get back in time for her father’s Lebanese meatballs but mostly, mostly just to feel the wind slide past her body, the roar in her ears. There are pictures of her doing that just, with scraped knees pumping and two ratty braids streaming out behind her.
“Race you!” Rayyan calls, climbing back onto her bike, and pushing off towards J.J. She passes him, her violet hijab flapping as she picks up speed.
She hears him call for her to slow down, but she pushes forward, pedaling faster. The wind roars in her ears, drowning out his voice, and she grins.