“No problem.” She leaned her head back against the wall next to her door.

“Why don’t you come inside for a bit,” he said. “You look beat. I think you need a cup of tea or something.”

Smart man. Reena smiled and followed him into the apartment. She fell on the old green armchair immediately and removed the too-tight boots. She wanted to remove the too-tight jeans, too, but decided it best to save that for her own apartment.

Nadim went straight to the kitchen, put the leftover food away, then filled his kettle. “So,” he said, once he’d joined her in the living room. “You think that went okay?”

She sighed. “Yeah. Really well, actually. You were a natural. And I know Shayne will do an amazing job editing it.”

“Yeah. I’m excited to see it. The production value will at least be better than what we did alone.” He sat on the sofa across from her, watching her face intently. “Reena, why do you seem, I don’t know, sad? We have it in the bag, right?”

She bit her lower lip. She couldn’t explain her moodiness, at least not to him. She couldn’t explain how things going well in one part of her life had always coincided with things going spectacularly wrong in others.

The other shoe always dropped. No good came without a crushing bad to chase it away.

“No, I’m fine.” She smiled. “Just sore feet.”

He raised a brow. “I’d offer to massage them for you, but, well, I’m not sure you’d want that. What with my … you know.”

She sat up straight. “Your what?”

“You know. My thing.”

Their arranged marriage? Their fake engagement? Why would any of those mean he couldn’t give her a foot massage?

“What thing?” she asked again.

He ran his hand through his cropped hair. “I told you, remember? This is awkward.”

Yes, awkward was the right word to describe this conversation. Was there another big-bad thing Nadim hadn’t told her? Worse than when he told her their parents had arranged their marriage, or that he had slept with the kindie teacher? Worse than telling her he might have given her lice? At this point she didn’t just expect the other shoe to drop, she expected the whole blasted shoe museum downtown to fall on her head. What the hell was he trying to tell her?

Her shoulders fell, resigned to the pain that would no doubt come. “Nadim, just tell me.”

He sighed. “I told you this. I … I have a thing for, you know, a thing for, er … feet.”

She blinked. “Feet.”

“Yes.”

Reena’s eyes widened. Feet? Really? “Is that why you’re always looking down at your feet?”

“It’s not my feet I’m looking at—it’s yours. You have lovely arches,” he said.

Reena stared at him for several long seconds before bursting out into full-body laughter. “You have a foot fetish?”

His brow furrowed. “It’s not a fetish. I just think women’s feet are … sexy.”