AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looked down into her empty bowl. One day, he’d learn how passionate she was about him.
“I won’t ask you to quit.”
“But you’re notnotasking me.”
“I care about you, Raina. I care about you more than I can tell you, and that includes caring about,” he stroked her temple with his thumb, “here. And,” he tapped the left side of her chest, “here. Protecting your mind, your body, your heart, and your soul? Those are important to me.”
She swallowed.
“You’re not happy.” He took her hand. “Look, I have experience living a lie. My past? All of it’s bullshit. All the articles, the podcasts, the interviews? Lies.”
“So what’s the truth?” she asked, raising her head.
“The truth is, without that lie in my back pocket, a woman like you would have intimidated me.”
“Despite your ego?”
He kissed the back of her hand. “My ego is no match for you. Baby, you’re gorgeous. You’re intelligent. You’re accomplished. Your entire family is accomplished. Your father’s a one-percenter. My mother was a maid up until she died. Any money I gave her, she gave to my siblings. My father was a roofer.”
“Was it a shame thing? Is that why you lied?”
“Oh, one hundred percent, but I wasn’t ashamed of being Muslim, specifically. I was ashamed of being ‘different.’ Of bringing food from home that smelled like spices I never smelled in our lunch cafeteria. Other kids had sandwiches, but not Lucas. Lucas had dumplings stuffed with lamb and seasoned rice wrapped in grape leaves.”
“I would have been your friend,” she said.
“You would have eaten my grape leaves?”
“And your dumplings.”
He stroked her knuckles, the smile on his face going from faint to bold but never entirely disappearing.
“Food was only one part of it. People made fun of my accent, but it didn’t bother me until they made fun of my mother’s. Or her hijab. And because I understood English better than she did, I knew when people were talking about us. I’d feel like she was being taken advantage of since she’d still be nice to them just because she didn’t understand they were poking fun at her.”
“So rather than embrace your culture…”
“It felt safer to hide it,” he finished. “Then my siblings Americanized pretty quickly, even my sister, Marianne, who’s only a year younger. Things got worse when my father left, and that’s when my best friend, Khalid, entered the picture. He was born in Uganda. The clinic that I run now? His father used to run it. Back then, it was mostly geared toward immigrant families, primarily those from Muslim backgrounds, since the population was so large. Now, it’s more socioeconomic based, but the demographics haven’t changed much.”
“Where’s Khalid now?”
“He passed away during our senior year of high school. He had cancer. A fairly curable type. If they’d caught it the first time he went to a doctor about his symptoms, he would have had roughly a ninety-five percent chance of survival. But by the time he met a doctor who would listen…”
“I’m sorry, Lucas.”
He planted another kiss against the back of her hand. “We were supposed to marry each other’s sister and start a biotech firm.”
“You dated his sister?” she asked.
“From sophomore to senior year, but she lost her twin brother, and I lost my best friend. Nothing would have kept us together. We officially ended things right before graduation, but we’d already been pulling apart by then. She went on to Rice University. High school was like playing catch-up for me, grades-wise, so I was shocked I even got into the University of Maryland. I figured they had some kind of foreign kid quota.”
She squeezed his hand. “Lucas, you’re brilliant. You know that, right?”
“Raina, Istruggled.”
“That doesn’t negate your brilliance.” She pushed aside her empty bowl. “So, how’d you become ‘Lucas Saraci’ then? The brand, I guess, that encompasses the man.”
“My mother’s faith was strong, and even she toned it down for a while after 2001. By then, I was already pulling away from religion, but 2001 gave me more of a push to…start over, in a sense. Soon, my surroundings changed. The people around me changed. Somehow, I went from Middle Eastern-ish to Mediterranean, and being Mediterranean was like a protective film. It came with privilege. From there, my mother went from housekeeper to professor. My father went from roofer to businessman.”
“The façade kept you safe.”
