Free The Night Counter by Alia Yunis Page A

every night at eight-thirty A nine-hour time difference necessitated planned, rather than off-the-cuff, communication. As a result, business was at a peak, and he often wondered what heights their personal relationship would have reached with more scheduled talking.
    “Hi, sweet … I mean Zade,” Giselle said from Dubai. “I signed up twenty new clients at a mixer we cohosted with a local radio station at the Jumeirah Beach Club. I wish you could have seen the crowd. It rocked.”
    “That’s great,” Zade said. “But check this out: Today a Qatari guy came in looking for an American second wife. He’s some business associate of my sister’s husband, so I had to listen to him talk about olives in Jordan.”
    “Hey, we should get your sister to find him some American woman working in Qatar,” she screamed over the buzz on the line. It was not the outrage or laughter he had sought. “I’m flying to Qatar tomorrow, anyway. Your sister’s going to interview me about the business on TV Cool, huh?”
    “Okay, then I should give the Qatari dude the five stages of love the next time I see him,” he said.
    “Attraction, uncertainty, exclusivity, intimacy, and engagement,” she responded, quoting one of the dating tips she, with his help, had spent a day acquiring from the back covers of relationship books. Then she got quiet. “Oh, and guess what. I met the most amazing guy today.”
    He had practiced various reactions to this inevitability many times. “Hey, cool,” he began, forgetting all the more sophisticated words he had planned for this moment.
    “This guy is handsome, rich, and talented, and guess what?”
    “What?” he answered, starting to sweat.
    “He so wants to meet your gay actor cousin,” Giselle shouted from Dubai. “Maybe if your Tayta Fatima saw how handsome this guy was— and an Arab guy, no less—she’d accept the whole gay thing. Or at least your mom wouldn’t be so angry at me for going all global because I’m doing her mom a good one.”
    “Huh,” he responded. It wasn’t his mom who was truly angry. But just as with the Qatari and his money, just when he was hoping he could learn to despise Giselle, she was reminding him of why he couldn’t help loving her.
    “And I think I found someone for your Aunt Lena,” she went on. “He’s divorced, but I think divorced is better for her than never married.At her age, it’s better to be with a guy who has some experience with the long run.”
    It wasn’t easy to stop loving someone who still loved you, even if it wasn’t the way you’d like to be loved. Suddenly, he wanted to compliment her on how good she was with other people’s relationships, and that made him laugh uncontrollably. Nadia walked out of the back room just as Zade’s laughter climaxed.
    “Giselle, I got to go,” he said. “My mom’s here.”
    He hung up, and Nadia crossed her arms.
    “You know what they say in Middle East negotiations when no happy solution can be found?” Nadia said. She pointed to the Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc., poster and pantomimed ripping it off the wall. “They say let’s tear down those old maps and look at the world anew.”
    “Giselle found an Arab guy for Amir,” he announced, and waited while she thought up a diplomatic response to Giselle’s overture.
    “What the hell is wrong with Giselle?” Nadia screamed instead. “We’re only pretending to look for someone. For my mother’s happiness, not his. And we’re pretending to look for a woman. If Giselle loved your family, she’d find someone for Lena, not Amir.”
    “She did,” he said, glowering. “Without us even asking her to.”
    But Nadia had no gratitude. “Then why don’t you let her help you? She has signed up at least thirty-eight new women you could date since she left. Perhaps, just perhaps, you could stop being so lazy and make an effort to date some of them.”
    “Dating is a numbers game, Mom,” Zade said, quoting from Aladdin and Jasmine,