Zaid slept like a baby.
For the ten minutes before he'd knocked out, Talia had remained immobile, willing her mind to stop clouding with unseemly thoughts. When his breathing had slowed, and his hand had stopped dancing across the bedsheets—always an inch shy of her own—she'd rolled over and stared at his peaceful form.
She admired his eyelashes for a few moments, noting how they appeared almost longer than hers on this angle. Then, carefully, she extended a hand and brushed away the two strands of hair drooping over his forehead, finding the surface a little warmer than usual. She held in her breath, not wanting to stir him awake, and trailed her fingertips down his cheek, meeting smooth skin and then thick black stubble.
She retracted her hand and stared at her palm, as if he'd left an indelible mark. Collecting herself, she pushed herself off the bed and debated covering him in the blanket lying at the foot of his bed. The fear of rousing him loomed, so with one last look at his passed-out body, she scurried out of his room and to her bathroom down the hall.
Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it and took in a few deep breaths, wondering how she felt more affected by that close interaction than she had by their kiss a few days ago. Maybe she was less of a complicated romantic than she'd once thought; some cocky humor, a culture, and kempt facial hair had really gotten her.
She sighed and perched herself on the corner of the marble countertop, deciding to pluck her eyebrows for the first time in a month. They resembled two caterpillars when unbrushed and left to their own devices, yet they worked with her face, framing it far better than the perpetually straightened hair that barely hit her ribcage.
Plucking her eyebrows was a rather therapeutic event, done after a long week of mind-numbing classes or one too many social interactions gone wrong. She wasn't sure if it was the early exposure to hair-removal methods that had desensitized her; after all, by eleven years old, she'd already tried shaving, plucking, and waxing various parts of her body. By middle school, she knew body hair was some practical joke from the universe. If she had to have dealt with endless taunts by her male classmates about her suspiciously fuzzy arms, she could have at least had a natural tan.
Too bad Zaid had won on that one.
"Crap," she hissed.
She'd pulled out that one hair that somehow balded the front corner of her eyebrow, and nothing could fix it, save for a touch of brown pencil later. She groaned, settling with the tamer look, and hunted around for a face mask to forget what she looked like.
As she plastered the sheet onto her cheeks, her phone buzzed on the other side of the counter. She wiped her hands on a towel and fumbled with the screen for a second, hoping, just for a second, that it was her mother calling.
It was Calvin.
"I swear to God, Talia, I'm this close to booking a flight to Boston and dragging you back to California with me."
She burst into laughter as she made herself comfortable on her bed, holding her phone to her ear with her shoulder. Her rose-water face mask struggled to stick to her face, already sending small droplets to her thighs.
"What the hell happened, Cal?"
A door clicked shut on the other end followed by the squeak of chair against tile. "Not only have I put on ten pounds in about five days from consuming my body mass in knafeh, I realize I'm going to be missing eight days of school all to have my Arabic criticized every day by seven new relatives I didn't know existed. And, yes, Mama keeps pretending like I still have no reason to be annoyed." Sighing, he added, "I'm so jealous of you right now, Tals. Hell, I'd take a blizzard and a six-hour calc class over this."
Talia rubbed her temple, unsure how to console him—since her reasons for staying behind were the ones he'd described writ large. "Hey, kid, look on the bright side. You were scrawny as shit last time I saw you, so maybe the ten pounds is actually a good thing."
"I'm not scrawny," he bit back. She imagined he was beefing up his shoulders, as he always did to seem brawnier. "I simply run cross country."
"Which is exactly why you're scrawny. If it makes you feel better, Zaid is enough for twenty Arab relatives."
"You know, at this rate, I've probably met twenty of Zaid's relatives." Calvin chuckled and paused before asking, "Say, how does he even know our grandparents again? I'm more confused by that than I am by your sudden taste in men from the homeland and not the hometown."
She replayed that sentence in her head, unable to deny that he had a point, but she wasn't letting him off the hook so quickly. "First of all, where did you gather that I'm into Zaid from the three seconds you saw him on FaceTime the other week?"
"He was in your room, right?"
"Yeah, to tell me to shut up," she scoffed, keeping up the act. "And to answer your question, Zaid is the grandson of one of Sido Fouad's closest friends, Nabil. He and Teta are playing host family while he studies in Boston for the year, but honestly, you'd think they were his family more than ours at this point."
Calvin let out some combination of a snort and a chuckle. "You mean to tell me Mama threw a fit over you being in the same house as Teta's literal adopted grandson?"
"She was mad?"
"For like an hour. She got over it when Baba reminded her your other option was coming with us for a daily marriage proposal from a random auntie on behalf of her thirty-year-old son who may or not be our cousin and whose only redeeming quality is that he's a muhandis, of course."
"Is it a bad time to mention that Zaid's an engineering major?"
Calvin sucked in a breath and spoke rather wryly, "Hate to burst your bubble, Talia, but he very well could be a long-lost cousin at this point. Wouldn't get too attached before digging into the family tree a little."
She squeezed her eyes shut, wanting to laugh out loud and punch him through the screen at the same time. "I'm going to pretend half of this conversation didn't happen and go back to my pamper session, so feel free to hang up." She racked her brain for a moment, wondering why they were still talking. "Actually, go to bed, Cal. Isn't it, like, two in the morning?"
"Are you really gonna ask why I'm up this late?"
"Oh right, the peace and quiet," she mumbled, knowing how little of it he was getting. "Well, try to sleep sometime, kid."
"Thanks, big sis," he said. "And Talia?"
"What?"
"Say hi to my brother-in-law for me, when you get the chance."
She hung up.
***
The evening had taken a very different turn.
Talia migrated downstairs almost every day after nine p.m. to join her grandparents for their unofficial nightly routine of pistachios and the news, the latter of which she usually tuned out, as rarely was it good.
This time, the bad news had come to their doorstep.
"Oh no, how long were you friends with him?" Talia lowered herself to the couch next to her grandfather and wrapped her arms around his torso. "I'm so sorry for your loss."
He let out a sigh from the depths of his chest and planted a hand on the top of her head, patting gently. "Since college, Talia, which was what—over fifty years ago? Feels like just yesterday we met, and now..." He trailed off and flicked his undereyes, wiping the smallest of tears. "You don't realize that once you grow old, all the weddings you used to complain about become funerals, and you'd do anything to go back to those better days..."
She winced, unable to bear the grief-stricken look on his face. At just the right time, Teta Salma hurried over from the kitchen with a small cup of tea, the cure-all for sadness in her book. Fouad took it from her with a thank you and held her hand as she lowered herself to the armchair across from him.
"Did you know him, Teta?"
She sent her a small smile, one that didn't quite meet her weary eyes. "Any of your grandfather's friends were my friends, Talia, but Tony was someone special, almost like a brother to us. He and his wife were there for any milestone in our life, including the births of your father and both your uncles."
"At least he's in a better place now." Fouad tried to console himself through a small sigh and eyed the muted TV. A meteorologist was gesticulating over a zoomed-in map of the Northeast, half obscured by a moving deep-blue and green cloud. "I'm just worried about us traveling down to New Jersey for the funeral, Salma. This storm looks like it's going to be a big one."
"Oh, you know how those weather people are, hayati. They let us drown in fear for days over the 'storm of the century,' and then barely half a foot of snow falls, if even."
Barely?
Fouad sighed and bent over, elbows to his knees. "You may be right. And besides, it looks like the area outside New England will be left pretty unscathed. We'll just have to head out tomorrow before the storm begins, but still..." He darted his eyes between her and Zaid, who had just materialized in the living room doorway, drowning in a black sweatshirt two sizes too big. "I don't know how I feel about leaving a Californian and a Jordanian alone in a nor'easter."
Zaid furrowed his brow, taking a couple heavy steps into the living room. "Why would we be alone, Fouad?"
Talia winced and shot him a look, not wanting an innocent question to reopen the subject from the beginning, but he'd already made it to the ground before her grandparents. She spoke on their behalf, knowing they were both struggling to maintain their composure. "A friend of theirs...passed away, Zaid. They're concerned about traveling to the funeral in this weather."
As soon as the words left her mouth, his entire demeanor changed. His shoulders tightened and his breath seemed to lodge itself in his throat, the news suffocating him as if his own friend had passed, not one of their own.
"I'm so sorry," he breathed and reached forward to hug them both. Her chest constricted at their shares of affection, lasting around ten seconds each, before Zaid offered her grandfather his condolences in Arabic. "Allah yerhamo."
He murmured something back and pulled Zaid into another hug. Patting his back, he said, "Your father as well, may he rest in peace. I know it's still tough on you, Zaid."
His father? Talia froze in her seat, realizing he'd never come up in any of their conversations. Hearing about his death in passing like this made the thought of it even more painful, as she could witness Zaid's reaction in its rawest form. He stiffened in her grandfather's hold and pulled away with a small nod, eyes glazing over.
"You both should pay your respects to your friend," Zaid said after a quiet moment, almost robotically. He flickered his hazel-brown eyes to her face for a moment, and she sent him a small commiserative smile. "Whatever ends up happening here, I'll take care of it. Talia is in good hands with me."
Fouad looked like he wanted to question that claim, clamping Zaid's shoulder with a firm hand. "As of now, I still trust you with my granddaughter, and keep in mind, that is no small responsibility. There is only one of her, after all." He squeezed and let go, beginning his path out of the living room and leaving them with an ominous warning, "Just don't make me change my mind."