Some hours later, night having fallen over Lisboa, It was Clara who sat in the loveseat while Ta'ra was asleep. Simon kept graveyard hours, partly from work, partly from an ingrained watchfulness that only ever left him in the small hours before dawn. So it was a usual occurrence for the two woman to sleep and wake and find him still active and awake, cooking or writing or at work, sometimes just staring aimlessly at the skyline of the Almafa. Clara was speaking of her loves and loyalties to him, no guitar for her though. Her gifts were the brush and her voice, both of which had always held a power over men. Her life had been one of passions only half felt, half lived, an object to be possessed by those she enraptured with a whisper in the ear or a sketch on a napkin.
"You speak of passion with such...disdain. As if it's something one could do without and be better off..." He looked up at her from the tile floor of the balcony where he was sitting crosslegged like some aesthetic. She smiled her full, rich smile down at him and then turned away, knowing this was a man she had tried to conquer, and failed. She had known he couldn't be swayed the way most were the first night in Tangier while waiting for the ferry. It had been her intention to barter passage from him for what most men think of as passion. Instead he brought them both to his apartment here as roommates, gotten papers for them, helped them start a life that wasn't that of a hunted thing. "Passion is a weakness that brings us away from ourselves, and presents us to someone else's lusts and wants and needs. In the end, we give all we have, and are emptied of life," she whispered, more to herself than Simon. He sighed as one who isn't sure whether he should speak or not. "You say that, and yet I'm attracted to that word, its implications, its many meanings to us. What you think of as passion is so different from what I think of it as, or Ta'ra for that matter." Clara gave a sharp ha! as response, as if she could divine something we mortals were ignorant of. "Isn't that what you two share," he asked, "passionate love? For eachothers' bodies? Your souls? I hear the two of you, envy it sometimes you know. I haven't been lost within someone completely like that in a very long time." Turning back and staring at him hard before speaking, she slowly and precisely told him that he would never understand what that really was between the two women, because he was a man.