"This is Zain," Fajr announced to the girl who was staring in bewilderment. "He's been drooling over you for the past hour!"
"That is not true."
"Um...I'm Sura." She reached out her hand and Zain shook it slowly, feeling the softness of her skin and...
The two spent the entire day indoors. They slept in late since they spent half the night locked in a bookshop.
Zain roused before Sura, though. He smiled groggily at the sight of her. Sura's mouse-brown hair cascaded over the pillow, falling into her sleepy eyes as she turned on her side. She tucked both her hands under the pillow, hugging it as she slept.
Carefully, he pulled himself away from the covers and walked over to the window. Through the crevice in between the curtains, Zain squinted at the cloudy sky and his stomach lurched.
It's raining, he realized, looking over at Sura who adored rain. She'll be ecstatic when she wakes up to this weather.
Ever since he was a boy, he hadn't been particularly fond of rain. It had always been a nuisance for him, he didn't like getting wet anyplace besides the shower. So normally, he would have despised this kind of weather but imagining the look on Sura's face made it all worth it.
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Sura stirred as Zain opened the curtains and the room turned grey with the rainstorm outside. She sat up and instantly her lips peeled into a grin.
A yawn escaped her as she crept up behind Zain, who was sitting with his face towards the large window. She wrapped her arms around him from behind, catching him by surprise although he didn't mind. Instead, chills worked their way up his back and he turned scarlet when she started running her fingers through his trimmed hair.
"Man, I love this," she mumbled into his neck.
Zain cuckled before responding, "Are you talking about me or the rain?" "Err...both?" she suggested, hurriedly getting up to go use the bathroom.
While Sura got dressed for the day, Zain went downstairs to the basement. Before Sura moved in, he had moved all of his books in a room downstairs which–combined with Sura's book collection–had become a mini library.
Sura always brought novels in bulk after one of her shifts at the bookstore. And often, she would just leave them lying in their bags and over the couple of weeks they had piled around the place and Zain had begun finding room for them on the shelves.
Some of them had broken spines, torn or misprinted pages and some of them had notes left in the margins by previous owners. Zain would've never bought a used copy. Even though Sura had gotten into the habit of annotating, he preferred clean and smooth pages.
"Find anything good?" Sura whispered, standing in the doorframe. She was wearing loose white pants with a green sweatshirt and stacks of rings on her fingers.
"Are you going somewhere?" Zain said as soon as his eyes shot up to her hijab, which she didn't normally wear at home.
Sura gulped, her mind contemplating. "The rain has come down to a drizzle all of a sudden," she said, iddling with the end of her headscarf. "And, I was wondering if we could go for a drive?" "To the other side of town?" Zain added, already knowing her answer. Sura copied his grin.
