“Chill, you can have him.”
I dropped the bag I’d been holding and upended it onto the living room floor. Cat toys spilled everywhere—feathers, little mice, a bell thing that started jingling.
He smiled and reached for his phone. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he swiped it awake, thumbs hovering out of muscle memory. He was halfway through tapping in his passcode when he stopped. His gaze lingered on the glowing screen a second too long before he exhaled and slid it back into his pocket.
“What’s wrong with your phone?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just going to call my mom and tell her that I got another cat.”
Oh.
My chest folded in on itself. I swallowed, but it was useless—emotion had never once respected my dignity. A tear slipped out before I could intercept it.
He turned, eyes widening. “Are you—are you crying?”
“No,” I snapped, swiping at my face. “It’s a side effect from that mini monster.” I jerked a thumb at Steve, who was now batting a plush mouse with murderous focus. “Highly toxic.”
I didn’t give him the chance to say anything else. I spun on my heel, fled to my room, and shut the door with more force than strictly necessary. The second I was alone, I threw myself onto my bed and let it happen.
And as much as I hated to admit it, that stupid cat actually worked—because after that day, something had shifted. Khalifa was still Khalifa. Still infuriatingly punctual, still correcting my broken Arabic under his breath, still sighing dramatically when I left a perfectly charming trail of chaos behind me. But he smiled now. Sometimes just a flicker, a ghost of amusement that teetered on the brink of his mouth when I said something sarcastic. Other times, it lingered, as if he were slowly relearning what it felt like to let the world see him happy.
He laughed, too, and not just that low, dry chuckle I’d gotten used to, butactuallaughter—warm, unexpected, and sometimes so messy it startled him. I regretted the moment I made it my life’s mission to make this man laugh, because now that I’d heard it, I craved it like oxygen. And his smile,God, his smile was its own kind of gravitational force. He had the nerve, the breathtaking audacity, to flash that lovely thing at me whenever I walked into a room. Or spoke. Or existed.
I told myself not to let it mean anything. That the pull I felt when he brushed past me in the hallway, or the quiver in my chest when he asked if I wanted dessert, was nothing more than proximity, familiarity, residual grief, maybe.
But every night, as I lay awake listening to the faint murmur of his voice through the wall—talking to his coworkers, his family, sometimes no one at all—I could feel it. That moronic, fragile, wholly problematic crush swelling inside me, growing roots where I didn’t want them.
Sometimes, when the silence stretched too long, and all I could hear was the steady whoosh of the wave machine I’d bought him the day we came back, I’d grab his published history text from under my pillow and flip it open like some kind of masochist. It was, without question, the most boring, soul-sucking, magical cure for insomnia I’d ever read—and yet, just knowing the words had come out of his head, that the sentences had been typed by his fingers, made it the most fascinating thing on Earth.
Of course, as soon as I caught myself imaginingbaby-professor Khalifa writing it at midnight—curly hair adorably tousled, smexy glasses crooked over his stupidly pretty nose, surrounded by half-drunk mugs of coffee—I’d get irritated at myself, mutterget a grip, Lilly,and chuck the book across the room.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be convenient, cordial, uncomplicated.
And yet, somewhere between his sorrow and small, impossible smiles, I’d started to care. It was crawling beneath my ribs, burrowing deep and making a home there entirely out of my control.
“Your six o’clock is here,” Kevin said, breaking through the fog of my thoughts. He was leaning against my office doorframe, a coffee cup in one hand and that insufferablyknowinggrin on his face.
I blinked, dragging myself out of the haze that had been my own head—and, if I was honest, the orbit of Khalifa that I seemed incapable of escaping lately.
“My what?” I asked, realizing too late how dazed I sounded.
He raised an eyebrow. “Your six o’clock. The patient you were supposed to seeten minutes ago—ringing any bells, Dr. T?”
Right. Work. My actual life. The one that didn’t revolve around a man who drove me to the brink of madness and then had the audacity to make me dinner afterward.
I straightened in my chair, shoving the lingering warmth into a dark corner of my mind. “Send her in,” I said, pretending like I hadn’t just spent the last five minutes daydreaming about my husband’s laugh.
He stayed, sipping his coffee, eyes glinting. “You good?”
“I’m fine,” I said, a little too quickly. “Why?”
“You were smiling.”
“I wasn’t smiling.”
“Oh, you were,” he said, backing away, grin widening. “Which means either you got good news, or you were thinking about your rude, stubborn, and emotionally unavailable husband.”
“Kevin,” I warned.
