Page 60 of Angels Are Falling

“How many languages do you speak?” he asked, as if his private investigator hadn’t already unearthed this information. I decided to let it go and played along, given that I’d been an asshole about his parents earlier.

“English, Arabic, and French.”

“That’s a lot of languages.”

I shrugged. “Lebanon’s super diverse. My family is Christian. Our next-door neighbors were Muslim. We considered ourselves Arab, while others at our church identified as Levantine. But at the end of the day, we are all Lebanese.”

“And everyone speaks multiple languages?”

“Not everyone. Arabic is widely spoken, but the French Mandate left a big impact on Lebanon. We belonged to the Maronite Christian community, and French is ingrained in our culture.”

“Hence the name Amelie Valentine. It’s French, I assume.”

I nodded.

“Do you miss Beirut?”

My chest tightened at the question. “I miss it so much,” I replied in a small voice. “Especially the food.”

“There’s Lebanese food in California.”

I made a face. “Habibi, let’s not talk about how they butcher tabbouleh at restaurants here.”

I pressed my lips shut. Kai didn’t react, but his expression said he was pleased I had called him that. I looked back at the water. It was the first habibi I had dropped since moving back to Darster. It wasn’t exactly a term you threw around in sunny California in a community that was eighty percent white. People rarely expressed interest in my Arab background, so I always put it aside. They asked about my heritage in a vague, polite way that meant they just wanted to place me ethnically. Kai asked as if he genuinely wanted to know the answer.

The serene moment was shattered by a shrill, insistent blare coming from my phone. I inwardly cursed, realizing it was the timer I had set on my phone. I forgot to turn it off after finding out about Kai’s parents.

Stupid.

Stupid.

Stupid.

How much more insensitive could I be today? I fumbled to silence my phone, heat rising in my face. When I risked a glance at Kai, the fragile openness I’d glimpsed earlier had vanished, replaced by an unreadable gaze. He didn’t acknowledge the timer. The silence grew as he watched me, and my anxiety with it.

“I’ll drive us home,” he said finally, his voice a soft monotone. No accusation, but it wasn’t tender, either.

My face flushed. Just as Kai was starting to bare a sliver of his soul in the form of a childhood home, I had ruined it with my thoughtlessness. I wanted to explain that I’d set the timer before I understood the magnitude of what he had lost and his choice to share with me. I wanted to take back the moment I had set that timer in the first place. But I had a feeling that Kai didn’t care for meaningless excuses.

The best I could offer was something he wanted—my time.

“Um. We can stay a little longer if you want.” My words sounded brittle, forced, even to me.

There was a slight shift in his expression at my unprecedented words. I had never offered to extend our time together. He knew it, too.

“You set a timer on your phone, and now you’re offering to stay longer.” He held my gaze this time, and I could see he was suspicious of my offer. Perhaps he didn’t believe me capable of showing him human decency. I couldn’t exactly fault him. I had pushed him away at every turn.

I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, ashamed of my insensitivity throughout the day. “We drove all this way.”

In the near dark, the details of his face were harder to read, and I found myself trying anyway. I half expected him to withdraw into his fortress. Instead, he rose from his chair in one easy motion, and for a second, he stood over me, backlit by the last of the evening light.

“Let’s go inside.”

I stood, my pulse racing as he stood and I followed suit, entirely unsure what I had just agreed to.

Chapter

Nineteen