Their Save-the-Date Charade, page 16
“It’s my fault,” he whispered, the silence in the room amplifying his quiet voice and making his words crash as loud as thunder.
Both his mother and father snapped their heads to him.
Closer to him, his mother set the album aside and took his hands in her own. But Alwan pulled his hands away from her, unable to take her comfort without his culpability choking him completely. And before that happened, he needed to tell them everything—
All of it.
“I’m the one that you should blame. Not each other,” he said.
“Alwan,” his mother said, reaching for his hands again and holding on tighter this time, “your abu and I don’t blame each other. And we would never blame you. What happened with Hashim, his sickness, it was not his fault either.”
Alwan shook his head slowly, his eyes downcast and filling up. “It is my fault though. I’m the reason that Hashim is gone. I am why he isn’t here with all of us now. I… I helped him escape. It was me. He called me and he asked if I could come to get him. I understand now why he had to go to the treatment center, but back then all I thought was that he needed me and I had to help him.”
He then told them how he took the car, drove with only his learner’s permit to the treatment center and picked his brother up after Hashim had snuck out of the building.
All these years and it just came pouring out of him, the dam completely broken, his vision swimming as he blinked free the first of his tears. At the end, having run completely dry of words, Alwan squeezed his eyes shut and covered them with a hand, crying quietly.
His mother embraced him, her warm bakhoor fragrance taking him back to all the times he’d skinned his knees and needed her comfort to ease the pain. Only this pain was burrowed so much deeper and had lived with him for so much longer.
Pulling him back by the shoulders eventually, his mother cupped his chin and forced him to look her in the eye.
“Alwan, we know,” she said with a tender smile.
Shock swept away his shame and he stared wide-eyed back at her.
She lowered her hand from his chin and squeezed his shoulders. “We’ve always known, ya habibi.”
Alwan looked between them, his father now sighing and resting back in his armchair.
“How?” he breathed.
“The treatment center caught you both on their security cameras. They told us the same night they reported that Hashim had left.”
Alwan couldn’t believe his ears. All this time he’d been hiding what he thought was some big, dark secret—all these years of worrying that he’d hurt them, and all he’d been doing was torturing himself. “W-why didn’t you tell me?”
His mother gave him a pained look and patted his hands now. “We thought that it was for the best. That if we said anything, you’d blame and never forgive yourself. But it seems we inflicted the very harm we were trying to avoid.” She hugged him again, squeezing him so tightly his ribs hurt but in a good way. “We’re sorry, habibi. We should have said something from the beginning.”
Alwan nodded and held still as his mother kissed him on the cheeks.
“Your yumma is right, Alwan,” his father said, his expression softer now. “Put it out of your mind that it’s your fault. It’s no one’s fault. Your brother simply made his decision to move on without us. If he ever chooses to return, then we’ll welcome him. He is after all our son.”
His mother beamed and squeezed Alwan’s hands. “Now do you feel better?”
“I do,” he said with a small smile. He did feel better without the weight of his secret about Hashim, but he was instantly reminded of the real reason he’d come over when his mother gave him a long look.
“And was that why you came over, or is something else bothering you? Because I had another reason for looking at these photo albums. I was seeing if there was room for more pictures once you and Luula get married.”
Hearing Lulu’s name had him tensing all over once more.
Especially when his mother said, “I haven’t seen her in a while.”
He opened his mouth, fully prepared to divulge his other secret. But before he could tell his parents that his and Lulu’s engagement was a fabrication, his mother frowned at him.
“Alwan, have you done something to upset her again? Because if you have, I already told you that apologizing and communicating are very important to marriage.”
If he knew that a simple apology would fix everything, Alwan would’ve already been down on his knees in front of Lulu a long while ago.
“She’s just busy,” he lied.
His mother didn’t look like she believed him, but she slowly nodded. “Very well. But you bring her along with you next time, and tell her that we miss her.”
I miss her too.
Two weeks without seeing and hearing from her was breaking him. After he left his parents, he sat in his car in their long, cobbled driveway and replayed that last night with her. Only now he realized that he hadn’t given her a chance to talk. She’d been silent, yes, but he had jumped to the conclusion that she was rejecting him.
And maybe she wasn’t, he thought, hope budding in him.
Maybe it’d be like with his parents, when he’d been so certain that they’d resent him for the role he’d played in Hashim’s disappearance and the exact opposite was true.
Sitting up straighter, Alwan started his engine and sped off onto the busy city streets, already mapping out a game plan on how he’d try and shoot his shot with Lulu again.
And it either worked this time…
Or I let her go forever.
* * *
“Should I text him?” Lulu asked Blue, brushing a comb down his back in smooth, gentle strokes. They were sitting in the middle of her bedroom, her legs crossed and Blue dozing off in front of her. He opened his eyes and gave her a big yawn.
She sighed. “You’re right. It’s probably a bad idea.” But even as she said it, Lulu’s mind wandered over to Alwan, just as it had every day for the past two weeks. Not only had he become her waking thought, his face was the last thing she saw when she drifted off to sleep every night. And she wasn’t even counting the dreams she’d been having of him lately. Dreams she wished she could say were pleasant, but were mostly variants of the same event: the night he confessed to her.
If that wasn’t enough, Lulu had replayed that evening over and over in her head since then and still cringed at her reaction every single time.
When Alwan had told her he loved her, she’d just frozen up. There was no other way to describe it except that she had become a human statue. She didn’t think she’d ever been that mortified in her life. Especially when Alwan asked her to say something and all she could do was stare at him like a deer trapped in headlights.
It’s not like it’s my fault. He surprised me.
She hadn’t expected him to tell her that he loved her.
Sure, there had been the confusing electrical undercurrents of something that felt a lot like unbridled attraction and desire between them. But lust wasn’t love. It wasn’t the passion she heard in his voice as he’d said those three words to her, the reverence in his dark eyes as he looked at her, and it most definitely wasn’t the heartbreak on his face when she hadn’t given him a response.
Not even the barest reaction. No wonder he hasn’t even messaged…
Lulu bit her lip, her frustration at the situation tangling up with her guilt. She was so caught up in her emotions, her brushstrokes snagged over Blue’s fluffy white coat. No longer relaxed, he yowled at her immediately, batting his pink toe beans at the comb before bounding up onto all fours and prowling away from her, his tail raised indignantly.
“Sorry,” she murmured after him, setting the comb aside and drawing her knees up to her chest.
She wasn’t in the best control of her emotions as of late. It felt as if Alwan’s confession had flung open the doors on the long-sealed part of her that had sworn off of romantic relationships and love in general. Because of him, now—after all this time—he had her wondering “what if?”
What if Lulu told him that she reciprocated his attraction?
What if she had said that these past few months faking an engagement with him had been the most thrilling of her life?
But most of all, she wondered what if she had said and done anything but the nothing she’d ended up doing.
Lulu’s gaze drifted to her bed, knowing that the suitcase underneath was a good part of the reason she had gone silent when Alwan had told her that he loved her. Before she knew it, she had moved there and pulled it back out.
Smoothing her hands over the hard shell, she remembered why she’d held on to the suitcase all this time.
First it was a symbol of her loss, but then it had become a reminder of why love was dangerous and why she shouldn’t give herself the hope of ever trying for a family again.
But now, when Lulu looked at it, it just felt like it no longer belonged.
Picking up her phone, she pulled up to sit on the edge of the bed and rubbed between Blue’s ears as she scrolled through to find the locations of the nearest donation bins. “I’m ready to let go,” she told him when he nuzzled her hand with his face, his wet nose and rough tongue scraping over her fingers. The peace she felt was inexplicable…and also short-lived as a text from Alwan pinged in her inbox.
Need to talk. Will you meet me here?
He sent a location pin, and Lulu was intrigued to see it was Ward’s Island, one of the Toronto Islands.
She already knew her response even before she sent it, but her excitement to see him melded with a trepidation over what he might have to say to her and how she’d react this time.
Figuring she could use a companion, Lulu peered down at Blue and asked, “Want to go on an adventure?”
* * *
Getting off the ferry, Lulu messaged Alwan and wasn’t kept in suspense for long.
He texted her back with a live location, and she followed it all the way to him.
“You came,” he said, standing in a break between trees at the sandy edge of the island. He looked nervous as he swiped his hands over his thighs and strolled up to her, wearing another of his handsome business suits. “I thought you might not, given how we left things last.”
She wasn’t surprised he’d said that. Just as Alwan hadn’t believed she would show up, Lulu hadn’t expected for him to text her, let alone with an invitation to meet up. Honestly, she wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d just ended the fake engagement and moved on. The fact he hadn’t and that he appeared happy to see her uplifted her mood and gave her some hope that, maybe, this wasn’t the end after all…
From inside his carrier, Blue meowed loudly and insistently until she let him out and strapped him in his harness and leash.
Alwan chuckled softly.
“I should’ve known you two would come as a package,” he rumbled above her, shocking her when he crouched down next to her. Though she didn’t mind him being so close, Blueberry bared his fangs and hissed at him. “After all this time, he still doesn’t like me. Is it because I didn’t invite him?”
Stifling a grin at the adorable pout on Alwan’s face, Lulu played along and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe.”
“Okay, fine, my ego’s taken a hit. But one of these days, I’ll win him over,” he vowed, smirking at her.
It was the conviction in that promise that had her heart juddering faster. Because it sounded awfully like he was planning to see her cat again.
Which means he’s planning to see me.
Hope washed through her as Alwan slowly rose up to full height and offered his hand to her. Grasping it gently, Lulu blushed when his fingers squeezed hers and lingered after he’d helped her up.
When he did eventually let her go, he rubbed at his bearded jaw, the edginess she’d felt from him earlier rushing back.
“First, before I say anything, I want to apologize for my behavior on our last night together,” he said with a frown, his brow lined with tension. “I… I should have been more understanding to you after I’d said what I said.”
After he’d told her that he loved her, he meant.
The pressure over Lulu’s chest pressed down harder, her guilt intertwining with the same pining she’d endured the last two weeks being apart from him. She opened her mouth to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. That he’d shocked her with his confession, and that she’d been so confused, so unable to accept that he could care for her.
That he could love me.
But before she could utter a word, Alwan moved on.
“I should have let you understand what I was feeling and why. So, I’m going to fix my mistake and do that now. Starting with telling you the truth of what happened with my brother…and me. Because Hashim didn’t just run away on his own. I helped him.”
Lulu listened as Alwan told her about how his older brother had called him up and asked for a ride to leave the treatment center he was admitted to for his addiction. How after Alwan had shown up, Hashim had asked to be dropped off at the nearest train station.
“I didn’t know that he’d buy a ticket to the next departing train and never look back. I sat there waiting in the car for almost an hour before I realized that he wasn’t coming back, realized what he’d done and how he’d used me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents about the part I’d played once they found out that Hashim had left.
“I held on to that secret so long that I’d convinced myself they’d hate me if I ever revealed the truth, when all along my mom and dad knew what I’d done, and had chosen not to ask me about it as a way of protecting me. They worried that if they addressed it I would carry guilt and feel blame, not knowing that I did anyway.”
Alwan sighed heavily. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve only just realized in the last few days that I allowed what happened with Hashim to run my life. I convinced myself that I couldn’t trust anyone, and that I was better off being on my own. And it worked…until you. Being with you these last four months has opened my eyes to just how lonely my life’s become.
“Sure, I’ve got my career aspirations, but they aren’t enough.”
Lulu’s breaths came out shallow, sawing through her lungs as he stepped in closer to her and lifted his hands, his fingers hovering by her cheeks.
“Being with you has made me want something I thought I’d never want. But I also know what you’ve been through, so after all this, I’ll only say this one more time and respect your decision, whatever you choose.” He paused meaningfully for a moment before he stopped her world again.
“Lulu, I love you.”
Gazing into his eyes, she could see his yearning, adoration and the love he spoke of shining through clearly. Hear it catching deeply in his voice. It should’ve been enough to cast all her doubts away, but she still held on to one that kept her defensive. Clung to it like a lifeline as a little voice warned that they’d both end up being hurt if this continued.
“Why would you want to be with me?” she asked so softly she barely heard herself. Shaking her head numbly, she said, “I have nothing to offer you. Not the kind of money or prestige you might want in a wife, not even the ability to…to give you a family. I’m sure something’s long broken inside of me.”
“Lulu—”
“It’s true,” she said, speaking over him, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know if I could love again, and I don’t know if I’m ready to risk being hurt by someone I care for deeply. Do you know what it feels like to watch someone you love look at you like a stranger? See their love for you eroding before your eyes?” She blinked and freed her tears, let them track down her cheeks as she tipped her head back to look at Alwan head-on. “I’m broken.”
He framed her face with his hands, his gaze boring into her, his expression stern. “I don’t believe that.”
“You should,” she whimpered. “Have I told you why I called my cat Blueberry? And, no, it’s not because of his eye color.
“I got him the same week I found out I was pregnant. Seven weeks pregnant. My baby was just about the size of a blueberry…” Lulu let out a humorless laugh. “That’s why you shouldn’t want this. Want me. I can’t give you what you want.”
“What I want,” Alwan began, lowering his head and leveling their eyes, “is right here.”
“You don’t mean that,” she whispered.
“I do though,” he argued gently.
“Well, what if you want a family? I’m sure your parents or mine want grandkids to spoil rotten someday and if I can’t…”
“Then we don’t,” he said.
“Okay, but what if I decide I want to leave the city and travel some more?”
“Well, then I’d be willing to try a long-distance relationship.”
“But—” She broke off with a muffled moan as Alwan kissed her for the first time, his lips coaxing hers to respond, the heat between them as electric and consuming as she’d always known it would be. When he broke off, he stayed close to her, their noses touching, hot breaths mingling, and his love staring back at her, his arms now holding, comforting and reassuring her.
“Are you sure?” she asked, breathless and still floating from his kiss.
Alwan’s laugh melted her lingering doubt and stopped her tears.
“I’m certain that I love you, Lulu, and no matter how you think I feel or should feel, it doesn’t change that fact. Doesn’t change that I long for you. I. Love. You.” He punctuated his declaration with little soft kisses to her parted lips.
“And you’re sure you won’t resent me later?”
“Resenting you would be like resenting myself, and I could never do that to me, and most definitely not to you.” Then Alwan kissed her again, and Lulu felt it through her body, in her buzzing heart and head and right down to her soul.
* * *
“I can see why you like this place so much,” Lulu said, looking from their tangled fingers and over her shoulder to him. She was sitting between his legs, her back pressed to his front, and her curly hair tickling his face. It was the only place Alwan wanted to be right then.
