Coastal Retreat
"His grandmother dies. His step-grandmother remains—alone in the beach house, mourning, and needing comfort only he can provide. Some women age like wine. Bibi Zahra aged like fire."
Bibi Zahra isn't my real grandmother.
My grandfather married her when I was ten—his third wife, forty years his junior, a scandal that rocked the family. She was thirty-five then, already widowed, already considered unmarriageable by proper society.
He saw something they didn't.
Now he's dead, and she's alone in the beach house at Malindi, and I'm the only one who visits.
"They all think I'm waiting to die."
She's sitting on the veranda, watching the Indian Ocean, massive in her mourning clothes. At sixty, she's still beautiful—two-fifty of curves that time has only softened.
"They don't think that."
"They do." She doesn't look at me. "Your aunts. Your uncles. They're waiting for me to fade away so they can take the house. Divide the estate. Pretend your grandfather's third marriage never happened."
"I'm not waiting for anything."
"No." Now she looks. "You're the only one who comes. The only one who remembers I'm human."
"You're my grandmother."
"I'm your grandfather's widow. There's a difference." She stands, moves inside. "Come. I've made dinner."
We eat together on the veranda.
The house staff has been dismissed—she sent them home when the mourning period started. It's just us now, in a beach house meant for a family, with only the sound of waves for company.
"You should remarry," I say.
"To whom?" She laughs bitterly. "I'm sixty. Overweight. The widow of a man everyone disapproved of marrying in the first place." She sips her juice. "No one wants me, Omar. Not anymore."
"That's not true."
"It's exactly true. Your grandfather was the only man who ever saw me as beautiful. Now he's gone, and I'm just—" She stops. "Just an old woman waiting to disappear."
"You're beautiful."
"You're kind."
"I'm honest." I set down my fork. "I've always thought so. Since I was a teenager, when I shouldn't have been looking at you at all."
She's quiet for a long moment.
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that if you want to be seen, I see you. If you want to be wanted, I want you." I hold her gaze. "I've wanted you for twenty years. I just couldn't say it while he was alive."
She doesn't respond immediately.
The ocean fills the silence. The stars come out, one by one, over the Malindi coast.
"You're my grandson," she finally says.
"By marriage. Not blood."
"By law. By family. By every rule that matters."
"Rules matter less than feeling." I move closer to her. "And what I feel isn't grandmotherly."
"Omar—"
"You said no one wants you. I'm telling you someone does." I take her hand. "Someone who's watched you for twenty years. Who came to this house every summer just to be near you. Who cried when my grandfather married you because I was ten and couldn't understand why I was jealous."
"You were jealous? Of your grandfather?"
"I was something. I didn't have words for it then." I lift her hand, kiss her palm. "I have words now."
She stands.
For a moment, I think she's leaving. Rejecting me. Doing the sensible, traditional, appropriate thing.
Instead, she pulls me up with her.
"Not here," she says. "Inside. Where no one can see."
Her bedroom was my grandfather's bedroom.
The bed where he slept with her for twenty-five years. The sheets she's been lying in alone for six months. She leads me there now, and I try not to think about whose place I'm taking.
"I haven't—" She stops. "Since he got sick. Years."
"I know."
"I'm not young. I'm not beautiful. I'm not—"
I kiss her.
Cut off the objections. Pull her close and show her that everything she's saying is wrong. Her body softens against mine, years of tension releasing in a single moment.
"Show me," she whispers. "Show me what you've wanted for twenty years."
I unwrap her slowly.
Layer by layer, the mourning clothes come off. Beneath them, she's everything I imagined—and more. Sixty years old, two hundred and fifty pounds of soft, neglected flesh. Heavy breasts that hang to her waist. A belly round with years. Thighs thick and powerful.
"This is what you wanted?" She sounds disbelieving.
"This is exactly what I wanted." I kneel before her. "Since I was old enough to want anything."
I worship her from the floor. Kiss her belly, her thighs, the space between them that's been neglected for years. When my tongue finds her, she gasps.
"Omar—Omar—I haven't felt—"
"Feel it now."
She comes standing.
Her hands grip my shoulders, her legs shaking, her voice crying out my name. I hold her through it—this woman who raised me, who fed me summer dinners, who taught me to swim in this very ocean.
"Bed," she manages. "I need—I need to lie down—"
I carry her there. Lay her on the sheets my grandfather slept in. Claim her the way he no longer can.
When I enter her, she weeps.
"I thought I'd die alone," she confesses. "Thought this part of my life was over."
"It's not over." I move slowly, carefully. "It's just beginning."
"With my grandson?"
"With someone who loves you." I thrust deeper. "Someone who's always loved you."
She wraps her arms around me, pulls me close. Her body is soft beneath mine, welcoming, hungry after years of starvation.
"Then love me," she whispers. "Love me until I believe I'm worth loving."
I love her until dawn.
Days become weeks.
I tell my family I'm staying to help with the estate. To comfort the widow. To handle affairs they don't want to handle themselves.
They're grateful for my sacrifice.
They don't know the truth.
The truth is that I've claimed my grandfather's wife.
That every night, in his bed, I give her what he couldn't give in his final years. That she calls my name now, not his. That she's stopped wearing mourning black and started wearing colors.
"They'll notice," she says one morning. We're on the veranda, having coffee, watching the ocean. "Eventually. That I'm happy."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's suspicious." She smiles. "A widow isn't supposed to be happy. Not this soon."
"Then pretend to be sad in public. I don't care what they see."
"What about what they'll see eventually? When the mourning period ends and I'm still here, and you're still visiting, and—"
"Then we tell them." I take her hand. "Or we don't. We have time."
"We have time," she repeats. "I never thought I'd have time again."
The mourning period ends.
The family gathers to divide the estate—except there's nothing to divide. My grandfather left everything to Zahra. The beach house. The investments. The life they built together.
They're furious.
"She manipulated him," my aunt hisses. "At the end. When he was weak."
"She loved him," I correct. "And now she's alone."
"She should be alone. That's what widows are supposed to be."
"Maybe widows deserve better."
I move into the beach house.
Officially, I'm the estate manager. The one who handles the properties, the investments, the affairs that Zahra is "too grief-stricken" to manage.
Unofficially, I'm her husband in everything but name.
"We could marry," I say one night. "Legally. Make it official."
"The family would disown you."
"They already ignore me. What's the difference?"
"The difference is you'd be married to your step-grandmother." She laughs. "Can you imagine the wedding invitations?"
"I can imagine spending the rest of my life with you." I pull her close. "The invitations are secondary."
We marry quietly.
Just us and a willing imam, on the beach at sunset. No family, no witnesses, no one to object to the sixty-year-old widow marrying her thirty-year-old step-grandson.
"You're sure?" she asks as we sign the papers.
"I've been sure for twenty years."
"And when I'm seventy? Eighty? When I need care instead of—"
"Then I'll care for you." I kiss her. "The way you cared for him."
She cries.
Happy tears, this time. The kind she thought she'd never cry again.
Bibi.
Grandmother.
But never really mine by blood.
Only by love.
And love is what matters.