Accepting You

Chapter Forty Three

Yusuf returned home around 9:00 pm, holding an overweight bouquet of flowers against his chest. 

He smiled at Asiya expectantly from the door and waited for her to take the flowers from his hands as though only her action would melt his frozen body into movements.

Asiya abandoned the white prescription bag she had been staring at for Yusuf, and Biscuit followed.

"What are these for?" Asiya asked as she took the flowers from him with a small smile.

Freed, Yusuf dropped his bag onto the floor and smushed his lips against her forehead. "I read somewhere, or someone must've said a rose belongs in a garden, with other roses."

Yusuf's words tickled into Asiya's skin and caused her to squeak out a short, shy laugh. "Am I meant to be a rose?"

"Shush." Yusuf delicately moved his finger over Asiya's lips. "It doesn't sound romantic if you make me explain it, you know," he said in a silky voice.

Asiya's eyes crossed onto Yusuf's finger as her heart wheezed to a brief stop. 

She lifted the bouquet and used the flower heads to gently brush away Yusuf's fingers from her heating skin.

They had been married for nearly four months.

 While that wasn't a ground-breaking length of time, they had already shared and seen so much of each other that Asiya hadn't expected to still feel the intense flush of a fever whenever Yusuf did something romantic or did anything really.

Her cells were misfiring, popping out of turn, making everything inside of her feel wonderfully wrong, and Asiya was sure this was translating onto her face, so she glided the bouquet under her nose, hoping Yusuf would find her act of trying to smell the light scent coming from the flowers convincing.

He didn't and sent her a sly smile as he sauntered to the sofa.

"Oh yeah." Yusuf picked up the prescription bag Asiya had left on a cushion and walked back over to her. "How did everything go at the GP?"

Biscuit performed wheelies around Asiya's feet as her warm, sparkly feelings quickly bowed away and were replaced with cold and distressing ones.

I don't want to talk about it, was what Asiya almost said before she remembered the physical result of her appointment was what Yusuf wanted to know. The pills were the only thing he—they—had expected to come out of her appointment.

Asiya pushed her feelings down into a deep part of her, nearly snatched the paper bag from Yusuf's hands, unboxed her prescription and explained the package and pills to him like an influencer recording a YouTube video.

When she finished, Yusuf swivelled in an island chair, kicked one foot onto his knee, and lifted the corner of his mouth into a smirk. "Do you know what I heard? I heard we can now have some real–"

Asiya's hand lifted into a stop sign. "I don't want to know what you took from this, thank you! I guess it probably wasn't much anyway."

Yusuf sent Asiya a crooked smile.

"Oh, Yusuf," Asiya sighed as she fondly brushed her thumb along his cheek.

I pushed too hard, Asiya said to herself, because once she touched the mature contours of Yusuf's face, her suppressed feelings bounced against a memory and trickled into her throat. Asiya pulled her hand back and turned her attention to the unboxed pills.

Yusuf had changed.

His smile reminded her of his younger self, but it wasn't his current smile, his real face.