I plopped down cross-legged on the barstool and took a bite, nearly ascending on the spot. “Okay, wait. How did you learn to cook like this? My brothers have never cooked anything morecomplex than toast. Maybe an egg,once, and it ended in disaster. Not that I’m one to judge.”
He kept cutting. And cutting. The silence stretched awkwardly until I was sure I’d pushed somewhere I shouldn’t have. Disappointment pricked, small and stupid.
Then, quietly, he said, “I started cooking after my mom got sick. I didn’t want her using her strength.”
My fork paused midair. “What about Amina?”
He shrugged, eyes still on his plate. “I didn’t think the responsibility should fall on her. Besides, she’d just started university. I wanted her worrying about classes, not taking care of us.”
I forced a swallow. “How old were you when she got sick?”
“Twenty-three,” he said, like it was a weather report. A fact that had already happened and therefore didn’t need sympathy.
My chest pinched anyway. “You’re a good son, Khalifa.”
He looked at me for a second, eyes wide, like no one had ever said that to him without strings attached, withoutexpectation, then pivoted so fast I almost whiplashed.
“One of the professors in the history department plagiarized Wikipedia,” he said, clearing his throat. “Bold choice, considering the student who caught him was supposedly born to be a Supreme Court justice.”
I speared another bite, syrup threatening structural collapse down my chin. “If you’re going to risk your entire career, at least aim higher thanWikipedia. Commit to the bit. Forge a primary source. Invent a lost diary.”
A tiny, flustered snicker bubbled out of him. Somehow, the night turned into him spilling the most unhinged gossip about his coworkers—well, unhinged for a person whose blood type was sepia ink. Apparently, someone had also nearly quit mid-lecture after a student corrected him on the date of the FrenchRevolution, and another insisted on using “Kind Regards” in emails like it was a mic-drop.
I laughed until my stomach hurt, until the bitterness of the evening had thinned into something softer. And somewhere between his dry one-liners and the sound of forks clinking, I realized I’d stopped thinking about Malik completely.
Chapter Ten
WE HAD CONSTRUCTEDa routine, Khalifa and I. A strange, lopsided kind of rhythm that didn’t resemble marriage so much as...cohabitation with a particularly difficult cat I didn’t like. The kind that only emerged at night, silently judging you from the shadows, and then occasionally dropped a dead mouse at your feet, as if to say,Look. I provide.
We weren’t friends. Not even close. Friends confided, conspired, and sent each other poorly timed voice notes at three a.m. Khalifa was the type of person who would look at your phone lighting up at three a.m., and ask if you’d considered therapy. We were something else—roommates bound by rings, by circumstance, by a bargain we’d begrudgingly agreed to.
And yet, in our own weird, fractured way, we worked.
He was clammed up, reserved, and soannoyinglysecretive. I didn’t know his favorite food, or what song he listened to when he was alone, or who had hurt him enough to make not speaking his favorite language. But he knew things about me—small, stupid things I’d given away. That I had a sweet tooth. That I hated sleeping with the door shut. That sometimes I left the faucet running because silence made me nervous. And unfortunately, he knew real things too because I was an idiot with no filter. I talked when I shouldn’t have, filled every pause with confessions no one had asked for. I let him see the parts of me I usually kept wrapped up and hidden: the insecurities, the sloppy edges, the pieces that didn’t photograph well. Now those details lived in him, tucked away somewhere I couldn’t reach,and I hated that he carried fragments of me so carelessly—like he didn’t even know they were mine to break.
He was rude and bossy and perpetually condescending. But he also cleaned my messes without complaint, stocked the fridge with foods he didn’t eat becauseIliked them, and made coffee exactly the way I wanted. He irritated me in ways no one else could, but there were moments—brief, slippery ones—where I caught myself wondering if irritation was the whole point.
Because irritation was easier than intimacy.
And intimacy was the one thing I couldn’t afford.
The ceiling had become a cruel clock, each passing hour carving a hollow space in my chest. By two a.m., I’d stopped pretending sleep was coming. My body was buzzing, restless in a way no amount of tossing or repositioning could fix.
After a moment of hesitation—long enough that I nearly talked myself out of it—I swung my legs over the side of the bed and padded across the hall. My fist hovered over his door, uncertain, before I knocked.
Silence.
I pressed lightly on the knob, and the door gave way, creaking just enough to feel incriminating. The light from the hallway pooled into his room, and for a moment I just...stood there.
His room was everything mine wasn’t—neat, boring, personality scrubbed away like he was afraid of leaving fingerprints on the world. He slept on the far left side of the bed, spine straight, one arm tucked beneath his head. The right side of the bed looked like an untouched showroom mattress, sheets crisp and perfect.
I scoffed under my breath.Of course. The man didn’t even mess up a bed in his sleep.
“Khalifa?” My voice was a whisper, but it felt like a flare in the quiet. “Are you awake?”
There was a long pause. Then, finally, low and rough, “No.”
A reluctant smile tugged at my mouth. “I can’t sleep.”
