Chapter Twenty-Two
WE HOPPED ON A PLANE that same night.
Nothing had really changed since we’d been back. There were no grand gestures, no confessions, no declarations under starlight—yet things between us felt different, softer, threaded with something unspoken.
His grief lived with us now. It didn’t slam doors or make speeches; it just settled in like a giant third roommate who never paid rent and never left.
Other than the thirty-minute hug we’d shared in his childhood bedroom (thirty whole minutes—still couldn’t believe he’d let me hold him that long), he’d packed the rest of his feelings neatly out of sight, boxed and labeled and stored somewhere I apparently did not have a key.
So I helped in ways that didn’t involve prying those boxes open.
I picked up after myself (well—more than usual).
I attempted to keep my spontaneous attitude flare-ups to a respectable minimum (emphasis on attempted).
I even half-heartedly tried cooking dinner tonight, but he took one bite, chewed, then slowly went a little green.
The fork clinked against the plate as he set it down.
“This is...terrible,” he said gently, like he was breaking bad news to a toddler. “Seriously, please don’t ever make food for anyone. I don’t want to have to bust you out of prison for involuntary manslaughter.”
My mouth fell open, ready to be offended on behalf of my culinary masterpiece, but he held up a hand and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s wrong with you? You’re being so...quiet-ish, and you keep ‘cleaning,’ but you’re really just shoving things into the couch cushions, and—” He glanced at the plate again. “—this cannot legally be called cooking.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, heat crawling up my neck. “I’m just...your mom died, and I know I can be...too much. I thought if I dialed down the Lilly, it would help you deal with your imaginary feelings or whatever.”
He stiffened for a second, clearly not expecting that. “Well, that was your first mistake.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you assumed that being yourself was ever a problem.”
The flutter in my chest went absolutely feral.
Before I could stumble out a reply, he was already standing, stacking plates, dumping the evidence of my crime into the trash.
He rolled up his sleeves—forearms, veins, the whole devastating situation—and reached for the pink apron I’d bought for myself, the one I’d worn exactly once, and was probably banned from ever wearing again.
He slipped it over his head and tied it behind his back like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Can I at least help?” I asked, hovering beside him uselessly.
He snorted as he grabbed a knife and started chopping with terrifying competence. “God, no. Can you just...sit there and tell me about whatever pointless celebrity breakup just happened, or what that nurse you hate—Tina, right?—said to Dr. Chen after he booted her from the OR?”
My eyes brightened. My spine straightened. My entire soul perked.
“Oh,” I said, sliding into the chair like a queen reclaiming her throne. “I mean, if you insist.”
His mouth twitched, just barely.
So I talked while he cooked. About Tina and Dr. Chen and celebrity breakups and every other inconsequential thing my brain could scrounge up.
I filled the air the way I always did—words as bubble wrap, cushioning whatever might hurt if we looked at it too closely.
But a part of me wasn’t fully in the kitchen.
A portion of my mind was still back there—two minutes ago, exactly—replaying the moment he’d implied (no, stated, plain and simple) that the thing everyone had always made me feel was a problem, a flaw, a caution label taped to my forehead—my personality—wasn’t a problem at all.
I was still determined to make him feel better. Which was why—against every rational instinct, every allergy warning label, and the tiny, sensible voice in my head that had begged me not to—I made an impulsive and probably extremely stupid purchase.
The apartment door swung open, and I stepped inside with a fuzzy gray cat cradled in my arms like a sack of poorly contained chaos.
“Welcome home,” I announced.
The cat hissed.
“The feeling’s mutual, furball.” I kicked the door shut with my foot and raised my voice. “Khalifa?”
A minute later, he stepped into the hallway, hair slightly rumpled, confusion already forming between his brows.
The cat wriggled out of my arms, hit the floor running, and skidded straight to him, immediately weaving around his legs like he was her long lost owner.
She rubbed her face against his ankle. Purred. Posed.
“Unbelievable,” I scoffed.
He froze, then slowly crouched down. The cat leaned into his hand as he reached out, tail flicking in clear delight. “Who,” he asked carefully, “is this?”
“That’s your cat, but I already named her because there is no universe in which I live with a creature named Trash, or Rubbish, or Sewage. Her name is Steve.”
“Steve,” he repeated warily.
“Yup. I refuse to share my home with another woman. Calling her Steve helps me forget she has opinions.”
“You’re allergic.”
“I am allergic,” I agreed cheerfully, shaking the little antihistamines bottle like a maraca. “But I am also prepared.”
He let out a short laugh, still scratching the cat’s chin as she melted dramatically onto the floor. “No way, Lillian.”
Except he said it while tickling her stomach, and she flopped onto her back. My mouth curved before I could stop it. “You’re already obsessed.”
“I am not obsessed,” he said, very seriously, while Steve pawed at his hand and he let her.
I snorted.
The cat chose that exact moment to turn her head and hiss at me again.
“Chill, you can have him.”
I dropped the bag I’d been holding and upended it onto the living room floor. Cat toys spilled everywhere—feathers, little mice, a bell thing that started jingling.
He smiled and reached for his phone. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he swiped it awake, thumbs hovering out of muscle memory.
He was halfway through tapping in his passcode when he stopped.
His gaze lingered on the glowing screen a second too long before he exhaled and slid it back into his pocket.
“What’s wrong with your phone?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just going to call my mom and tell her that I got another cat.”
Oh.
My chest folded in on itself. I swallowed, but it was useless—emotion had never once respected my dignity. A tear slipped out before I could intercept it.
He turned, eyes widening. “Are you—are you crying?”
“No,” I snapped, swiping at my face. “It’s a side effect from that mini monster.” I jerked a thumb at Steve, who was now batting a plush mouse with murderous focus. “Highly toxic.”
I didn’t give him the chance to say anything else. I spun on my heel, fled to my room, and shut the door with more force than strictly necessary. The second I was alone, I threw myself onto my bed and let it happen.
And as much as I hated to admit it, that stupid cat actually worked—because after that day, something had shifted.
Khalifa was still Khalifa. Still infuriatingly punctual, still correcting my broken Arabic under his breath, still sighing dramatically when I left a perfectly charming trail of chaos behind me.
But he smiled now. Sometimes just a flicker, a ghost of amusement that teetered on the brink of his mouth when I said something sarcastic.
Other times, it lingered, as if he were slowly relearning what it felt like to let the world see him happy.
He laughed, too, and not just that low, dry chuckle I’d gotten used to, but actual laughter—warm, unexpected, and sometimes so messy it startled him.
I regretted the moment I made it my life’s mission to make this man laugh, because now that I’d heard it, I craved it like oxygen.
And his smile, God, his smile was its own kind of gravitational force.
He had the nerve, the breathtaking audacity, to flash that lovely thing at me whenever I walked into a room. Or spoke. Or existed.
I told myself not to let it mean anything. That the pull I felt when he brushed past me in the hallway, or the quiver in my chest when he asked if I wanted dessert, was nothing more than proximity, familiarity, residual grief, maybe.
But every night, as I lay awake listening to the faint murmur of his voice through the wall—talking to his coworkers, his family, sometimes no one at all—I could feel it. That moronic, fragile, wholly problematic crush swelling inside me, growing roots where I didn’t want them.
Sometimes, when the silence stretched too long, and all I could hear was the steady whoosh of the wave machine I’d bought him the day we came back, I’d grab his published history text from under my pillow and flip it open like some kind of masochist. It was, without question, the most boring, soul-sucking, magical cure for insomnia I’d ever read—and yet, just knowing the words had come out of his head, that the sentences had been typed by his fingers, made it the most fascinating thing on Earth.
Of course, as soon as I caught myself imagining baby-professor Khalifa writing it at midnight—curly hair adorably tousled, smexy glasses crooked over his stupidly pretty nose, surrounded by half-drunk mugs of coffee—I’d get irritated at myself, mutter get a grip, Lilly, and chuck the book across the room.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be convenient, cordial, uncomplicated.
And yet, somewhere between his sorrow and small, impossible smiles, I’d started to care. It was crawling beneath my ribs, burrowing deep and making a home there entirely out of my control.
“Your six o’clock is here,” Kevin said, breaking through the fog of my thoughts. He was leaning against my office doorframe, a coffee cup in one hand and that insufferably knowing grin on his face.