Page 64 of The Love Match

They sound like Amma’s.

Chapter24

I set off down agravel trail, intent on finding Mr. Tahir and Nayim, but I’m so lost in my thoughts, I end up wandering farther than intended.

“Psst, Zahra,” someone calls.

I glance around the forest on either side of me, unable to hear past the faint strains of conversations in Bengali and folk songs blasting from faraway speakers. Nayim waves at me from under the tree he’s propped against.

“How’d you find me?” I ask.

“Once I helped him get ready, Mr. Tahir said I should go have fun,” he replies. “It sounded more like a demand, actually. Then I noticed you all by yourself and figured I should follow so you don’t end up getting eaten by a bear.”

I scoff. “A bear? Are you serious?”

He points at a sign I somehow missed that readsBLACK BEAR CROSSING. “Deadly.”

“My hero,” I snark, then bite my tongue when theconversation with the aunties rushes back. “Nayim, look, I—”

He closes the gap between us and takes my hand. “Whatever you have to say, it can wait. There’s something I want to show you first.”

“But—”

“We’ll be all alone,” he promises.

Reluctantly, I let the matter drop, since I’d rather not air my family’s dirty laundry in front of a hundred gossipmongers who’ll never let us live it down.

Running with his hand in mine is a familiar comfort. I try to write this moment into memory, despite Amma and the aunties warning me that I’m dooming everyone I love just by letting myself feel anything for him.

Nayim’s breathless, “Ta-da!” stirs me from my waking nightmare.

He’s shepherded us outside the barred-off entrance of Lambert Castle, the private-residence-turned-museum formerly owned by silk baron Catholina Lambert, who ran a prominent mill in historic Paterson.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I hiss. “It’s closed.”

“Only the museum,” Nayim replies breezily.

He releases my hand and vaults himself over the wooden gate, then pitches a daring look my way—the same look that emboldened me to do things I never would have dreamed of until this summer. The look that always unleashes a dozen butterflies inside my belly.

Shaking off my nerves, I link my fingers with his and climbinto the granite and sandstone courtyard. Across from the stone lions that guard the arched doorway, facing a fountain, sits a wrought-iron bench. Rather than dropping ourselves onto it, Nayim lures me deeper into the castle until we reach the entrance to the observation tower.

Surprisingly, no one tries to stop us.

We’re alone here.

Any remaining opposition dies in my throat when I stare out past the narrow stone columns of the tower toward the city. All around us, the world unfurls itself, providing a panoramic view of Paterson framed by the New York City skyline.

I’ve never been up here.

A breath catches in my throat as I stray to the lip of the tower, but it’s the first note of Nayim’s song that makes me hold it. I swivel to find him clasping his guitar and realize that’s why he’s brought me here, so he can play for me at last.

Before I can utter a single word, his enchanting voice permeates the gazebo. “Zahra, tumare sara zara zai tho nai.”

The lyrics echo off the pillars surrounding us, cascading over me with such love and yearning that my eyelids fall shut of their own volition. Every other sound dies away, stripping the world empty of anything but Nayim and his assertation that he can’t bear to be apart from me.

“My north star, to you my heart like a compass always guides.”

His song is the most bewitching thing I’ve ever heard. On his perfect lips, my name is a prayer. Even in my wildestfantasies, I could never have imagined someone wanting me the way he claims to. It’s an invocation in English and Bengali, at once only for me, and something he proclaims to the world.

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