Osama steered carefully around the soccer game, smiling to himself. He enjoyed her laughter and let it wash over him. He had never been bothered by her forwardness, the sloppy way she wore her hijab, or the simple banter that sprang up between them on the rare occasions they went on interviews together. With a different woman these things might have seemed like efforts at seduction, but with Faiza they were as natural as air and sand and stone. She was older, at thirty-seven just reaching the age where immodesty was forgiven, where women passed into the sanctuary of perceived sexlessness. Yet he found her attractive in a simple, old-fashioned way; the flat, broad gestures of her hands, the way her shoulders shook when she laughed, and the plainness of her features, which—on the occasions that he saw them—she wore with unabashed frankness. She was wholesome and comforting precisely because she had no idea of her own sexuality, and he suspected that this had been as much the case with her at sixteen as it would someday be at forty.
