Other Side

22 | Alf Laylah

When Talia heard Zaid come home later that night, long after her grandparents had retired to their bedroom, she forced herself back to her room, realizing that maybe he'd just wanted some space today.

Besides, she had a crappy Spanish drama to get back to, which was like watching the off-brand version of Zaid, if he could actually act...(humble).

Despite the comfortable temperature of her room, she'd overheated in the shower, discarding her Sherpa sweater and tucking herself under her sheets in just a cropped tank. The cool of her sheets felt so strangely good on her bare skin, making her eyelids droop the moment she opened the lid of her laptop and typed in Netflix.

It was easier to stay awake when the episode dove into the action right off the bat, opening with the police banging on the main couple's front door. After a few seconds, the noise grew strangely multidimensional, until she hit her spacebar and realized someone was tapping their knuckles against her door at the same time.

Drawing her sheets up to her neck, she uttered a cautious come in, even though she knew who it was. It could only be Zaid, waiting for the night: the only time of day where the world felt like their own and no one else's.

"Your grandparents are asleep, if that helps."

He said these words before doing as much as look at her, knowing her abundant caution, which that morning's conversation with her grandparents had somewhat attenuated. Still, his reassurance calmed the beats of her heart, which she knew would always work a little faster in his presence.

"I missed you."

Talia didn't bother throwing in a snarky comment to prove her point, as that was his expertise. He slouched into the wall across from her bed, hands in his pockets, head tilted back, at just the perfect angle to study every feature on her face but nothing farther down, as her sheets had slipped in her utter absorption in him.

"It might be better not to from now on," he said coolly. Though a small wince followed, he steeled himself. "We have to build up to the distance, don't we?"

"I'd rather take the blow all at once. You can't ease into three-thousand miles."

"Seven-thousand-four-hundred if I'm at home," he said, throwing another brick at her face, "and you are, too."

"Was quantifying it supposed to make me feel any better? Because while I love math, I can't solve this problem myself."

"God, I wish I could solve it," he murmured. "You've somehow made going out boring for me. Because the entire time today I was thinking, 'How much better would this be if Talia were here?'"

"Oh, come on, you didn't actually think that."

No way he was that whipped.

He scoffed, "Trust me, ten hours with Paul did make me think that—about fifty times."

She threw her head back in laughter, despite the tiny part of her that still felt bad for the guy. "Fine, I believe you. Lying is beneath you anyway."

"Lying may be," he said, now just a foot away from her bed, "but sometimes I wish you were."

Finally, he convinced her he was as much of a man as any other, because his eyes stopped there. They rotated between the upper half of her face and her chest for a few moments until he realized that he didn't just have to stare.

He could have climbed into her bed and pulled her into his arms, and all she would have asked was for him to hold her tighter.

But he stayed still, just using a single finger to trace a small path down her cheek. Her heart twisted, hating her mind for where it was going, that rational portion that told her to count the moments like these they had left.