There was a beat of silence, a small rustle of blankets, and then the sound of him standing. My breath caught when the bed dipped beside me as he sat down, careful to stay above the covers, a safe ocean of fabric between us.
We lay there for a while, staring at nothing, the air pulsing with that exhilarating, impossible tension that refused to die no matter how hard I tried to ignore it.
“I finally figured out the answer to another one of my questions,” I said.
His voice was amused. “What question?”
“Your secret hobby.”
“Oh, really? Enlighten me.”
I squinted at his silhouette in the dark. “Model ships.”
“That’s not a secret hobby.”
“You can’t just let me have this one thing?”
That earned an actual laugh, warm and deep and completely unguarded.
“A real laugh,” I said, smiling. “That’s two now. We should have sleepovers more often.”
“Wait—anotherquestion. What else do you know?”
“You,” I said, with exaggerated seriousness, “have a chocolate addiction.”
He scoffed. “No, I don’t.”
“I saw the mountain of wrappers in your office, hidden away in the trash like a shameful secret.”
He didn’t say anything, which only made me smile wider.
“Dr. Khalifa Nasser,” I said, drawing out his name for effect. “Dark and hard on the outside, sweet as sugar on the inside.”
He made a sound somewhere between a chortle and a groan. “I’m not sweet as sugar.”
“No, you’re right. You’re more of a seventy-percent-cocoa kind of man. Brooding, complex, occasionally bitter, but still—” I pretended to think. “—dangerously addictive.”
He laughed again—softer this time, a little rusty from disuse—and for a second, it didn’t feel like we were in a house full of grief and goodbyes. It just felt like we were two people who didn’t really know what to do with each other, but were tryinganyway. Maybe it was selfish, but something like pride bloomed in my chest becauseI’dmade him laugh.Him, of all people.Him, who’d probably spent his entire life walking around like he was carrying the weight of his family on his back, too proud—or too tired—to ever set it down.
After a long moment, his voice cut through the night. “You can ask me.”
I turned my head toward him, though I couldn’t quite see his face. “Ask you what?”
“Your questions, whatever they are. I might not answer them all, but you can ask, Lillian.”
I hesitated, his mother’s words flickering in my mind—be patient with him, habibti. Love him. A hundred questions were sitting on my tongue—what he’d been through, what broke him enough to build walls so high. But it wasn’t the right time, not when the ache in the air was still so new, so raw.
And if I was being honest, there was a part of me that wanted him to tell me those things because hewantedme to know them—wanted toconfidein me—not because I’d cornered him into it.
So instead, I asked, “What’s your favorite color? Wait—can color-blind people even have a favorite color?”
“I’m not color-blind.”
“Mhm. That’s why you neededseverallabeled diagrams to tell the correct difference between yellow, orange, and red.”
A beat. Then, deadpan: “It’s green.”
“Green,” I repeated warily. “Very original. I bet you also like oxygen and gravity.”
