Page 20 of The Love Match

“Seriously,” he says. “Come here.”

My feet are rooted in place, my eyes huge. He hesitates atmy recalcitrance but holds a hand out to me. I glance between it and his uncomfortable expression, then set my hand inside it. It’s much bigger than mine and warmer than I would have imagined. His fingers close around my wrist. My pulse thumps in the clammy flat of my palm, but he doesn’t let on if he notices.

Instead he carefully lowers my hand into the terrarium. It quivers in his grasp, but I don’t snatch it away, even when the lizard—scratch that, thebearded dragon—darts a tongue out at us. My eyelids do, however, screw shut. Before I know it, my fingertips graze across Rab’s spikes. They’re not sharp at all, but rubbery, the scales beneath smooth.

Harun pauses our joined fingers above the rigid plastic of Rab’s tail. He remains close enough to me that I can sense the temperature radiating off his body and smell the minty toothpaste on his breath as he whispers, “I 3D-printed that for him after he got tail rot.”

Definitely no gingivitis.

I open my eyes at last, if only to sneak a peek at him through my peripheral vision. He’s smiling, but not at me. At the not-lizard,of course. But when he smiles, he gets a single, pokeable dimple in his right cheek. Not that I’m thinking about touching it.

“I guess it’s not so bad….”

Before I can decide whether I mean him or his not-lizard, Pushpita Khala calls up to us from downstairs, “Hurry up, you lovebirds, or dinner will get cold.”

As if her voice has broken some spell, Harun yanks himself away from me and rakes a frazzled hand through his hair. We circle each other warily.

“Look, Zahra, before we go down… You seem like a nice girl, but you know this is never going to happen, right?” He gestures between us. “We’re eighteen. Aren’t we supposed to be focused on normal stuff like, you know, college?” His voice dips lower. “Besides, even if I get married someday, I wouldn’t want to be arranged with someone interested in me for my family’s money. I don’t care that you’re a princess or whatever.”

I try to control the expression on my face so that the stinging rejection doesn’t show.

Obviously, I don’t want him, either, and I get where he’s coming from. Obviously, Iagreewith every single point he’s making and would have let him down gently by the end of the night myself. Obviously, while marriages of convenience are swoony in romance novels, I’ve never wanted to marry a guy I barely know—or become Zahra Emon of the House Khan, First of Her Name, Stepmother of Bearded Dragons—just because he’s rich.

But I also wasn’t expecting him to be so… blunt.

“Oh, trust me, dude,” I scoff. “It’sallll goood.”

A relieved smile dawns across his face, as if he couldn’t imagine anything more repulsive than having me for a wife, and for the second time, that maddening solitary dimple winks at me. “I knew you were too cool to go for this. We on the same page, then?”

He extends his hand again. I frown at it, then give it a brisk shake.

“Same page. After tonight, I hope I never see you again.”

For the first time, Harun laughs. Areallaugh. “I hope I never see you again either.”

Determined to present a united front, we return to the living room. Arif and Resna are gone, most likely banished to Harun’s game room, but our parents sit together, chuckling and chatting like one big happy family. They turn to us simultaneously upon realizing we’ve come back, and I stiffen at their matching self-congratulatory expressions, suddenly feeling like we’re a pair of defenseless deer that have wandered into a tiger ambush. While tigers aren’t known to hunt in groups, when theydo, you’re pretty much screwed. Deader than dead.

With innuendo in her voice, Harun’s mother says, “You two were certainly gone a while, eh?”

“It’s wonderful to see you getting along,” Amma adds.

Before we can convince them otherwise, Harun’s father pounces. “We’ve discussed this long and hard and… we believe you two are a perfect match. Inshallah, we’ll be moving forward with this courtship with the hope that it someday leads to marriage.”

The pit in my stomach fractures into a yawning black hole. I can feel Harun’s gaze at the nape of my neck and venture to meet it. Just yesterday, I would have called it blank, even bored, like I did during our first date. But now I see the tic inhis jaw, the taut press of his lips, the trench between his thick, dark brows. I read the unspoken message in his obsidian eyes as clearly as the lines of my favorite Tagore poem.

Tell them!

I open my mouth to comply, but the rosy-cheeked joy on my mother’s face chokes the words in my throat. I haven’t seen her so happy in… well, more than two years. When I turn my pleading stare back to Harun, he meets it just as helplessly. Although my impression the night we met was that he didn’t care as much as I do about parental expectations, it’s clear he doesn’t want to dash his family’s hopes either.

My eyes narrow.You tell them. Unless you’re a chicken?

Me?his scream back.You’re the chicken!

The silence stretches on until Amma chimes in, “We couldn’t be more delighted,” beaming from ear to ear and rising to hug me. I hug back, watching Harun over her shoulder.

Being a Good Bengali Kid really bites sometimes.

Chapter7

---