Over the meal, Nabeel had teased her. “Aliyah said to tell you she and the other girls are mad at you.” Reema blushed: she hadn’t seen Nabeel’s sister, or Hanan and Nadia, in months. Everyone knew that Reema wasn’t doing much over the summer in terms of “real” work. She was in the final two years of the PhD, progressing with her dissertation—a collection and study of eyewitness accounts of war. It had reached one hundred and four pages by the end of June, when Nabeel called her for lunch. June 16th, in fact. She remembered the date because she hadn’t touched the dissertation, or any of the books stacked beside her desk, since then.

Now she spent all her time with Alex. Even when she wasn’t with him, she found herself too high-strung to actually sit down and shape the draft. The words had simply lumped on the pages, unformed and incoherent, but she lacked the strength these days to chisel them into significance. Should she focus on just the stories of women, or of all war survivors? Should their stories be left “as is,” or incorporated into the historical context? And what about tracking people down? Her NGO connections did not seem to be panning out, no matter how many emails she composed and sent. The dissertation was spinning out of control, and her advisor would not be happy at next month’s update meeting.

However, all thoughts of it disappeared when she was around Alex. At 6 feet 3 inches, he had to lean down to kiss her, and it seemed as if his arms could wrap around her twice. He had pale blue eyes, flecked with a deeper blue, and his black hair was long and curly, flapping behind his ears like raven’s wings.

When she first saw him with Nabeel, he’d paused before saying “Hello,” and she sensed the attraction. Like the “thunderbolt,” Michael Corleone experiences in The Godfather, or the “seizing of the heart” her own grandfather used to say he felt upon meeting her grandmother. She could not suppress her smiles, and she felt goofy and sexy all at once.

“I can’t believe Nabeel didn’t introduce him to me. Bastard,” Aliyah said.

Reema sat on the couch of her apartment with a bottle of glittery copper polish, her feet on the coffee table. She had called Aliyah after such a long time to talk about Alex, and it felt good to share secrets again, like they had when they were little. “Well, Nabeel has always thought of me as his sister too, you know,” she teased.

“Habibti! Is that right?”