Please, Find Me

Chapter 26

"What the fuck!"

Mikaeel staggered into the lounge, wiping his eyes just to make sure he was actually awake and that he really was seeing a huge-assed bat perched happily on the broken heater while Faheem stood at the window with a cloth in his hand trying to pry open the window latch.

What the fuck.

"Jurre! I woke up and that fucker was right next to me on my fucking pillow!" Raees said from the counter on the furthest end of the lounge. All the boys had slowly trudged into the lounge in various stages of sleep-deprivation and each of them struggled to actually connect the bat on the heater to there actually being a bat in the room.

"Why is there a bat in the lounge?" Muhammad came strolling out of the kitchen, yawning widely as he scratched through the packet of sweets in his hand.

"How the fuck must I know?" Raees shouted at him, glaring at Fayaaz who seemed to have slept through the entire debacle without a care in the world.

"Don't bother." Faheem said, catching Raees's look. "He sleeps like a rock." He wrenched the stiff lever up before he pushed the glass forward.

"He slept through Raees's girly shriek too? That's a miracle right there." Talha laughed, stretching out the kinks in his neck as he watched Faheem move the thin voile over to the side. "What do they teach you in med school?" He was vaguely fascinated at Faheem's almost weirdly calm demeanour as he brushed right past the bat joining the others, waiting for him to fly out the window.

"They sent me to Limpopo for 2 months." He said casually as if it explained everything.

"So?"

"So if I had to scream like Raees every time I saw a bat, I'd have busted my voice box a long time ago."

Raees only gave him the finger before he skulked back to the sleeping couch.

"Why are you even going back to sleep?" Umar asked. "It's already Fajr time. We might as well pray our Salaah first." He gestured at Fayaaz, still fast asleep. "You'll need to wake that one up though to make Imaamat."

"Here wait," Mikaeel caught a faint trace of smoke as Riyaadh walked past him towards a dead-still Fayaaz. They all watched as Riyaadh leaned down and smacked his brother right across the ear.

"What!" Fayaaz bolted up. "I'm up. What happened?" He looked around, stopping short when he caught everyone's gaze on him. "What happened?"

"Nothing at all." Riyaadh replied drily. "It's Fajr time though."

"Oh... right." He yawned before he stumbled out of bed and shuffled past his cousins- completely ignoring the look of astonishment on their faces.

...

"Hey man." Riyaadh walked over to the wooden picnic bench with a cup of coffee in his hands.

"Hey." Mikaeel looked up from his phone to greet him back before he looked back down at his emails.

"I heard about your friend's wife." Riyaadh said quietly once Mikaeel pocketed his phone. "I'm sorry to hear about it." He moved his feet that were resting on the bench so that he could sit cross-legged in the table.

"I'm sorry too." Mikaeel mumbled. "You knew though, right? That she wouldn't make it." He asked, propping his feet up on the table as well.

"Ya." Riyaadh took a sip of his coffee. "How's your friend?"

"He's doing okay." Mikaeel replied though he didn't have a clue at all. He couldn't face going back to the hospital again. Not after that day. He didn't give a shit that Ihsaan was just projecting his own guilt onto him. He didn't need Ihsaan telling him anything. He still felt the guilt clawing through him as if it were an itch he couldn't scratch. It had lessened over the week but it was still a niggling sort of pain that clutched at the back of his mind and stayed with him no matter how much he tried to distract himself.