Other Side

11 | In Good Hands

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."