Chapter Thirty-Six
SINCE I NEVER GOT A honeymoon, we decided to take one now. I took three weeks off from delivering babies, Khalifa took three weeks off from yapping about historical conquests that only a herd of blushing, undergrad girls cared about, and together, we went absolutely nowhere.
We skipped the beaches, the passports, the awkwardly posed photos in front of fountains we didn’t care about.
Instead, our slightly-too-small, perpetually sun-drenched, questionably clean apartment became its own kind of paradise for two emotionally unstable, not-so-newlyweds having one never-ending sleepover.
It wasn’t glamorous. There weren’t any matching robes or breakfast trays with roses.
There was limited clothing worn, takeout eaten in bed, mismatched mugs of coffee gone cold, and a pile of laundry begging for attention while we pretended not to see it.
But there were also lazy mornings tangled in sheets while he catalogued every inch of me with sultry eyes, gentle hands, and slow kisses, afternoons spent talking until our throats were sore, and a bubble of tender silence that only existed between two people who couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other long enough to remember basic human survival needs.
It was messy and imperfect and completely ours.
I felt possessed. I was physically incapable of being away from him for more than a few minutes without going into some sort of Khalifa-shaped withdrawal.
My parents were never touchy-feely; their arranged marriage had stayed firmly in the “arranged” column, all polite silences and efficiency conducted from opposite ends of a sofa.
I didn’t realize it could feel this good, that being in love could feel this good.
My whole body felt completely rewired with butterflies, like it had finally caught up to what my heart had been yelling about for months, and now that it had a taste, it refused to shut up.
It was borderline absurd. I’d gone thirty-plus years perfectly content with my organs minding their own business, and suddenly my nervous system had turned into a lovesick teenager with a caffeine problem.
It was all Khalifa’s fault. Obviously. We already knew I had poor impulse control and a “do first, apologize to my future self later” attitude.
He was supposed to be the responsible one—the calm, collected professor with discipline made of steel.
But apparently even steel melted under the right conditions, and judging by the way he’d been attached to me for the past three weeks, Khalifa Nasser was a full-blown puddle.
“This was the best vacation I’ve ever had,” he said on our last day.
“That’s...honestly kind of sad,” I told him, perched on his lap while I smoothed a cold, slippery sheet mask over his face.
He chuckled softly. “Maybe. But it’s true.”
We were tangled together on the couch, abandoned takeout containers crowding the table, his hands playing with the strings of my silk cami shorts, tugging and teasing.
Every so often, he skimmed the hem, slipping a fingertip into the gap.
I tried to keep the mask from shifting, failing spectacularly at maintaining a straight face at how serious he looked beneath the cartoonishly glowing skincare.
“You’re so pretty,” I murmured before I could help myself.
He snorted under the mask. “Pretty?”
“Sorry,” I said, fighting a grin. “I meant...handsomely pretty. Very masculine. Extremely rugged. Like a lumberjack who moisturizes.”
His eyes crinkled around the damp cutouts. “That’s better.”
I traced the outline of the mask, fussing it into place around his eyebrows. “Thanks for letting me pamper you. I know you hate this.”
“I do hate how this gross, slimy thing feels on my face...but I love you.”
I blushed, reaching for my phone and setting a twenty-minute timer. As soon as I put it down, he shifted, hands sliding up my waist, maneuvering us until we were stretched out along the couch. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me.
“What kind of doctor did you want to be before you dropped out?”
His thumb paused mid-circle on my shoulder. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter. “Cardiovascular surgeon.”
I tilted my head up to look at him, surprised.
He gave a small, sombre smile. “Ironic, right? I wanted to fix hearts for a living, but I couldn’t keep my brother’s from stopping.”
My chest tightened. “How did you guys get into a car accident?”
He exhaled, long and steady, like he’d been holding that breath for years.
“It was raining,” he said. “One of those nights when the road looked more like a mirror than asphalt. We were driving back from our cousin’s wedding—he was teasing me about my speech, I was teasing him about his dancing.
Then the headlights came out of nowhere.
A truck ran a red light.” He paused, his jaw clenching.
“I remember the sound first—metal twisting, glass shattering, the world folding in on itself. When I came to, the car was upside down. He wasn’t moving.
” His voice faltered. “I crawled out, dragged him onto the road. There was blood everywhere. I called for help, but no one came fast enough.” He stared past me, like he could still see it.
“I tried to save him before the ambulance arrived. I shoved my hand against his chest, counted the compressions out loud, over and over, but then...I felt his heartbeat just stop, right there, under my palm.”
The silence that followed felt like it belonged to both of them—him and the brother he couldn’t save.
“They told me later there wasn’t anything I could’ve done, but that doesn’t change the fact that my hands were the last to touch him alive.”
“I’m really sorry, Khalifa,” I whispered.
He nodded once, like he’d prepared himself for this part but still had to force it out. “I think...I think some part of my father wishes it were me who died instead. And I think he hates himself for feeling that way, and the only way he knows how to deal with it is to—” He swallowed. “To blame me.”
Something tore inside me, severe and sudden, like an organ being pulled loose. The idea of him not existing—of a world where I never met him, never sparred with him, never loved him in all the reckless ways without meaning to—hurt with no words to translate it.
And then another pain layered over it, deeper: that he’d had to grow up under the weight of that impossible grief, that impossible guilt, carrying a burden he never should’ve been handed.
“Your dad is the worst person ever,” I said, my voice shaking with an anger that didn’t have room for eloquence. “I should’ve thrown my fork at him.”
A surprised chuckle escaped him. “I have never seen someone stand up to my father the way you did.” He paused, eyes flicking to me, something tender and wrecked passing through them. “Keenan would’ve liked you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not into the whole brother love triangle thing. I probably would’ve ended up choosing him.”
He dipped down, biting my collarbone lightly in retaliation.
The sheet mask immediately slid lopsided across his face like it was trying to escape.
I burst out laughing. He did too, while I tried to wrangle the mask into staying put with bossy fingers.
The sound—his low, throaty laugh mingling with mine—cracked the heaviness.
I was beginning to realize that the closed-off, unnaturally calm Khalifa I first met was only his topmost layer.
A decoy. That his practiced nonchalant way of moving through life was a product of sheer self-preservation, and beneath that surface, there was a man who craved.
He craved pancakes at midnight, the last bite of ice cream, a few too many chocolates after dinner.
He craved to be asked, to be heard, to be understood, to be held, to be protected, to be kissed, to be loved, to be chosen.
He craved it all, even the things he’d never allowed himself to imagine having, and somehow, I found myself wanting to give him all of it.
“Why weren’t you ever close with your brothers?” he asked, yanking me back from my musings.
I looked at the ceiling as though the answer might be written there.
“I think because of the huge age gap,” I said after a moment.
“It was hard to get close. Our ages never overlapped to a time when we could really understand each other. It was just the four of them for so long, and then when I was born, I was this strange pink bundle they couldn’t figure out what to do with. ”
He smiled faintly. “A pink bundle.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was civil, for a while. Just your typical sibling shenanigans—them telling me I could never beat them, and me nearly killing myself trying to prove them wrong. But as I got older, I started noticing the differences in the way our mother treated us. The warmth she withheld from me, but wrapped around them like a blanket.” I paused, feeling the words catch in my throat.
“And it wasn’t their fault. I know that now.
But when you’re a kid, logic doesn’t matter.
All you see is that they get her smile, her affection, her pride—and you don’t.
I started to resent them for it. A part of me still does. ”
He watched me, eyes soft. I could tell he wanted to say something, but didn’t. Maybe he knew there wasn’t anything to fix. Maybe he just understood.
“Do you ever feel like your family wrote a story about you before you even had a chance to exist in it? And no matter what you do, you can’t rewrite it?”
His hand slid into mine, fingers lacing through. “Yeah. Every day.”
“I love that you and your sister are close. You’re a good brother, Khalifa.”
He let out a short, disbelieving laugh, his thumb brushing over my knuckles as though the compliment didn’t have a designated shelf in his brain yet. “You think so?”