Page 73 of The Love Match

“Too bad,” he muses to himself. “You’d be cute in bunny slippers….” His head shoots up the second the words sink in. Both of us flush in the awkward silence that follows, until Dalia coughs to remind us of her presence. We whip toward her like two guilty kids caught with our sticky fingers in the mishti batta. Harun sputters when she snaps a picture of him. “Wait, what are you doing with that?”

“Safety reasons,” she chirps, then turns to me. “You trust him, and I trust you, but you’ve never been alone together, right?” Aside from that time when Sammi left early, and in the car, I suppose that’s true. I nod. “Thought so. Share your location with me in case.”

“Yes, Mom…”

Dalia scrunches up her nose, but the clever rejoinder never comes. Instead she leans in to give me a hug, whispering, “Have fun. But not too much fun.”

“Yes, Mom,” I say again, this time with more affection.

As she moves to enter her car, Harun blurts, “You can stay. Um, if you want. And Zahra wants.” His voice softens when his gaze flicks to me. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“That’s sweet,” Dalia says, “but I need to go home and pray before I let Paul Hollywood stare reproachfully into the depthsof my soul while I’m trying to re-create this week’s GBBO technical challenge.”

I nod to let her know I’ll be fine. “Nadiya’s cooler.”

“Fair,” Dalia concedes.

Harun peers between us. “I have no idea what that is, but it sounds scary.”

Dalia smiles beatifically. “So am I. Don’t forget.”

Blowing one last kiss at me and anI know where you livesquint at Harun, she drives off. I watch her go, feeling insurmountably grateful. Dalia, my beautiful, protective friend, has often told me that she wants to focus on herself until she graduates from college, but when she does seek out love, she’ll do it the traditional way, which a lot of modern Muslims call halal dating.

It’s similar to what Harun and I weresupposedto be doing, with chaperones and the chastest of contact until we agreed to a formal commitment. Now I’m sneaking around with a boy again, but Dalia doesn’t judge me for doing things my own way.

It means a lot when so many others harbor nothing but judgment for me.

I move to the front passenger seat of Harun’s BMW and click on the belt. After a beat, he says, “I mean it. I can take you home if you’re not comfortable.”

Iam, though. I feel safe with him. I always have.

Not to mention, I’m dying to find out what he has planned. Rather than lay my heart bare, however, I shake my head.“Nope. I was promised an adventure and an adventure I will get. Besides, Amma would hound me until I confessed all my sins if I came home early. She’ll think my friends and I are fighting.”

We start driving.

As we travel toward the highway, I ask Harun what he’s been up to since we “broke up,” and he hesitantly admits he’d been helping his father plan a surprise party for Pushpita Khala’s birthday, then frowns at my wolfish grin. “What?”

“No, it’s just, you’re legitimately precious,” I reply. “Mama’s boy.”

He scowls. “Stop calling me that. You’re lucky it’s over between us oryou’dhave been the one she force-fed sugar-free, gluten-free cake while my dad took a bunch of embarrassing photos to post on Facebook.”

“Note to self,” I say as I pretend to type into my phone, “make a Facebook just to add Pushpita Khala on it.”

Regardless of his insistence that he didn’t enjoy it, his veritablepoutonly confirms that he’d do almost anything to make the people he loves happy. I do my best not to laugh at his ruffled feathers, until he cracks a tiny smile.

The rest of the drive is like Harun himself: unexpected and quiet, but enjoyable. I watch New York City slowly come to life across the Hudson River. Once we reach the George Washington Bridge, Harun appears to come alive as well, spouting off facts about its history and construction.

Perhaps it’s a trick of the lights strung on the arches ofthe bridge, or those flickering in the many windows of the city’s skyscrapers, but Harun practically glows beside me, dark brown irises sparkling like the night sky flecked with stars.

When he catches me staring, he cuts himself off. “Sorry. Was I talking too much? I get overenthusiastic about engineering sometimes.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him excited aboutanythingother than Rabeardranath Tagore. I shake my head. “Don’t apologize. I like this side of you.”

His eyes snap toward me, then back to the road. “You don’t have to pretend.”

Something about thesmallnessof his voice fires up my protective instincts. Have others made him feel like his interests were boring before? Or is it because our relationship has been built on so many lies and little hurts? “I’m not. I feel like you know so much about me because I’m always the one yammering on and on when we meet up.”

“I like listening to you,” he says. “And you’re surprisingly good at saying a lot while sharing very little, general.”

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