"Okay, Mama. No, of course, mafi mushkila. Tell Nadine I say hi. Bye—" Zaid paused and gripped the nape of his neck, squinting as his mother continued reeling off on the phone. "Saif? No, I haven't seen any of his messages. No, I'm not ignoring him... Okay, talk to you soon. Love you—bye."
Talia appeared in the kitchen's doorway and wrapped her pink duster cardigan tighter around her body, watching Zaid stare at his blank phone screen. He brushed a hand through his hair and let it fall to the table with a slight thud, startling a prying Talia.
She cleared her throat and took a step onto the cold hardwood, feeling the chilled surface through her thin socks. "I'm going to offer an all-encompassing apology for eavesdropping, Zaid. It expires in exactly eight days."
Her awkward humor always earned a goofy smile from him, smoothing the lines in his forehead. He turned his head all the way to the right and motioned for her to sit diagonal from him at the kitchen table, in her unassigned assigned seat, one he dared never sit in, even in her absence.
"I'm not sure if it's eavesdropping if you couldn't hear half of the conversation." He smiled and brought his steaming cup of coffee to his lips, adding, "But apology accepted, ya Talia."
She hid her satisfied smile and tried not to think how much had changed since the first time she'd listened in on his phone call with his sister, when he'd almost given her a heart attack awaiting his reaction. Lowering herself to the seat, she freed her cardigan from the artificial seal of her three fingers. It revealed her long, freshly shaven legs, visible to the thigh, skin barely covered by loose cotton shorts. Zaid flickered his eyes to her exposed upper legs for a moment, barring his gaze from dragging down their length.
"Is Saif your brother?" she asked, voice dry. She grabbed the coffee pot from the middle of the table and poured half a cup into the mug next to his. He pushed the carton of milk towards her to temper the fiery liquid, but she needed something to cool her blushing face, melting as those tender hazel-brown eyes shed their warmth on her cheeks.
"Yes," he said and glanced at his phone face up on the table. A single text blinked on his home screen. "I suppose that snippet you heard sums up how I feel about each of my siblings."
"You're not very close with him, are you?"
He shook his head slowly. "We started to drift apart when he left for college at Brown, but our father's death four years ago cemented our distance. I don't think I've seen a genuine smile on his face since..." He sighed and drank the last of his murky-brown coffee, color hardly changed from the drop of milk he preferred. "I guess a personality like that comes with responsibility. He's been back home managing our father's engineering consultancy for the last year and a half, and I'm... Well, I'm here avoiding, aren't I?"
He stood up and eyed the backyard through the glass, before deciding to crack the door open. Instead of a gust of bitter wind, mild and humid air met their faces, the kind that invited songbirds in late spring, not January. Perhaps the calm before the storm was much more than a myth, something Talia wanted to live out before the rain and snow imprisoned them both.
"Maybe you're where you're supposed to be," she murmured, trying not to find it funny that she was speaking to faded green grass and wiry trees. She rose to her feet and stood behind him, tempting to comfort him with her touch. "It can't be a coincidence that we're from opposite sides of the world and ended up in a suburban Massachusetts home together for three weeks. I've never even visited my grandparents in winter before, Zaid."
He turned around and cupped her cheek, tilting her head up. "If it was, Talia, you'd be my favorite coincidence. And maybe that..." He trailed off and dipped his head lower, his fingers skimming her side. "Maybe that's a problem right now."
She sucked in a breath as he gripped her waist. "And why...is that?"
Zaid pulled her towards him, arm snaking to her lower back and his mouth meeting ear. "Because, Talia, we're alone in this very big house, and you're wearing very tiny shorts." He flicked away the edge of her cardigan, revealing the full length of her leg again. "And your grandfather trusted you for three days with me: the nice, conservative Arab boy with his sole precious granddaughter."
"Nice and conservative," she hummed, tracing a couple patterns over his white shirt. "Which adjective would flatter you more if I claimed either of them to be true?"
"Neither," he said and brushed away the lock of hair over her eye. "The only thing I'm conservative with are my compliments, yet somehow I can think of one-thousand-one ways to inflate your ego right now."
She looked away from his intent eyes, hiding a coy smile. "Don't you think you'd need much more than that to equate their sizes?"
"I'd need the vocabulary of the entire Arabic language for us to get to the point. But it'll take a lot more than eight days to get through all twelve-million words—which we don't have."
"We do have the now," Talia said, trying to reignite some optimism. "It's something, at least."
He took a step back, leaving his hand on her cheek. "As much as I'm tempted, I gave Fouad my word." He swept his thumb over her bottom lip before dropping his hand. "And being this close to you right now is a recipe for disaster."
She pulled her cardigan over her body and headed back to her seat at the table, remembering some of her values. Hiding her face behind her mug of coffee, she watched him busy himself with the buttons on the stove, back facing her now.
"What if we were close outside the house?" she suggested. "We still have nine hours 'til this storm hits, right?"
He turned around, skillet in tow. "Eight, actually." She narrowed her eyes, and he added through a smile, "Just teasing. We can go out after we eat."
"You're cooking breakfast?"
Adding oil to the skillet, he replied, "Only so much unseasoned food you can stand before you learn to make your own meals. I hope you like shakshuka."
She didn't mention that she'd probably like anything he'd make and sat back with a complacent smile, wondering if she finally had him wrapped around her finger.
***
The sweatpants had to go.
Talia's true fashion sense teetered somewhere between minimalist and business casual, but ever since she'd arrived in the land of eternal cold, she'd almost forgotten that clothing other than cotton loungewear existed.
Hands planted on her hips, she stared at her reflection in the mirror, clad in blue straight-leg jeans and a black bra. She was unsure how to elevate her favorite pair of pants, resorting to recalling memories of Zaid's stylish monochromatic outfits over the last few weeks. She could have easily made her way to his room and asked for his opinion on her choice of sweater, but he found her first on his way up the stairs.
In her fashion-induced frenzy, she'd forgotten to close her door, affording him a full view of her half-topless self. But, with the last sense of abstention that either of them possessed, he ducked his head down, made his way up the stairs, and slipped into his bedroom.
Heart thumping out of her chest, she leaned against her door and closed her eyes, willing all of the not-so-holy thoughts out of her mind. All it took was remembering her last kiss with Logan, and she was as emotionless as a piece of cardboard.
Muttering to herself, she tugged on a chunky tan sweater and let her makeup and hair do most of the talking. After lining her eyes with kohl eyeliner and dragging enough mascara through her lashes to double their length—but keep the dead-spider-leg look at bay—she finally had enough motivation to straighten her unruly hair.
With one tug of her hand through the silky strands, she felt like a new woman.
"Oh God, not this again."
Both she and Zaid emerged from their rooms at the same time and discovered the first few raindrops were already trickling out of darkening clouds. In some areas, the sky was all but an ominous dark gray, warning them to stay away. Yet in a cruel paradox, the empty home urged them to flee, devoid of the lively spirits of her two grandparents.
"It's just light rain on and off 'til seven," Zaid said, looking up from his weather app. One corner of his lips tugged upwards when he got a good look at her done-up face. "But...we can still go out."
She played with the ends of her frizz-free hair. "I guess if we head somewhere indoors..."
"That's possible," he said and took two steps down the stairs. He turned around and leaned against the bannister, face level to her chest. "Do you have any places in mind?"
"You're the one who goes to school here now, right?" He nodded. "I'm leaving it up to you then, buddy."
"Fine," he conceded, hiding a smirk, "but if you hate my pick, that's on you."
She rested her elbows on the other side of the bannister, bringing her face closer to his. "I liked your breakfast, so what makes you think I'll hate your choice of outing?"
"Well, Talia," he said, looking up at her through those long lashes, "I was thinking of taking you to a nice, antiquated bookstore, where we'll sit for hours on end in silence, sifting through novels hundreds and hundreds of years old. And then after that, we'll go out for lunch and order two massive plates of Baba ghanoush and moussaka and eat them outside on a bench while drenching ourselves in the cold rain. How does that sound?"
At first, he had her heart sinking to her stomach, his suggestion to go read ancient literature together seeming almost plausible. But then she remembered moussaka had eggplant in it, and how much she hated the cold—and how much of what she hated Zaid had remembered.
"Gosh, you have a good poker face," she said through a bout of laughter, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. "I almost believed that."
Zaid didn't blink, lips set into a firm line. "What about that sounded like a joke to you?"
"Y-you can't be serious...right?"
At the slight panic traveling across her face, his mouth morphed into a wide grin, and she could finally breathe a sigh of relief. She made her way to the other side of the stairs, ridding them of the wall separating their bodies.
"Let's get going to where I had in mind," he said, voice dropping as he added, "before I get any other creative ideas."
***
Zaid's idea was still pretty creative—an art museum.
Perhaps the finest creation of all stood deep in thought beside her, chiseled jaw working back and forth as he took in the glass-encased exhibit before them. Zaid observed every painting, every sculpture, every mere artifact, no matter how rusted or indiscernible, with the same keen eye a surgeon directed to a wound, an almost scientific curiosity in the pure embodiment of the humanities.
Talia frequented museums in the same way she did libraries: not to admire any of the pieces of works on the walls, but to walk around a bit, stop and stare ever so often, and then sit down, having absorbed nothing but a few aesthetically pleasing views. She hadn't expected this winding, intricate building would be one giant history lesson, each gallery tailored to a specific time period or past civilization. With each glance at a date ending in B.C., the growing recognition of her irrelevance in humanity's existence rattled her more.
Zaid was enamored.
"How aren't you amazed that this statue we're staring at is quite literally over four-thousand years old?" Zaid brushed past two tired parents trying to calm their spinning and babbling preschoolers. "Can you imagine how many hours of architectural ingenuity went into its creation, all for a twenty-first human to glance at it once and then bury her nose into her phone?"
She blinked and looked up from her glowing screen. "That was poetic shade at me, right?"
He folded his arms over his camel-colored overcoat. "Yes, you. That four-year-old over there looks more interested in this exhibit. Granted, I'd have gotten a shahata thrown at me later if I'd ever dragged myself across the dirty floor like that in public." He directed a confused look at the little blond boy lying at his father's feet, patting his palms against the hardwood. No flying shoes for him. "American parenting is...fascinating."
"It's disastrous," she said and drew closer to him. "But I suppose you're right. I just haven't been able to shake off this weird feeling ever since we arrived here. I mean, I thought I'd be staring at pretty Renaissance paintings, not thinking about the fleeting nature of our existence. I bet one day a sculpture of a girl texting is going to be enclosed with glass, while holographic people stare and wonder how we once lived so archaically."
At the thought of texts, her phone vibrated in her hands. She breathed a sigh of relief when she read the message from her grandfather, informing her that he and her grandmother had arrived safely in New Jersey after a two-hour traffic delay. Zaid fished his phone out of his pocket at the same time. When she peeked at his screen, her heart warmed at the realization Fouad had sent a similar-sized message to him, but in Arabic instead.
"I was growing kind of worried, but then again I'm not much of a stranger to traffic." She thought of the hellish jams that were a regular part of living in the Bay, and apparently the Northeast even more so. Sighing, she added, "I just hope they get through the next two days..." Worried about changing the mood, Talia linked their arms and pulled him closer to her front. "How about we go explore a different gallery? I'll focus this time, Zaid."
He quirked a brow. "You promise?"
"Cross my heart and—"
"No need to finish that phrase," he murmured.
With a pensive smile, he pressed his hand into the middle of her back and led them to his next object of curiosity a floor below them, while she simply had to look up, as hers was already in her hold.
***
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- G.