Best Friend For Life

Chapter 19: Confessing the truth

A/n: happy 500 reads guysssss🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳 and sorry for not updating on time😬

Sahl's POV

Here's what happened. I kinda knew her friend, is Halima what they call her? At some point, that Halima always came to the store and I'm sure it's mostly so she could see me 'cause she'd always say hi and be all chatty when she does. She stopped showing up all of a sudden though, until lately. Then I remembered. That girl Halima, the day she saw me with Meenal, she was probably disappointed. But she still tried to still be flirting with me and even trying to play with Meenal. Unfortunately Meenal didn't like her. So she slowly stopped showing up.

The next time she'd come would be with Baila. Baila was somehow hiding behind Halima, as if I had horns on my head or something. That was what caught my interest. I wondered. A lot of girls are dying to see me, but she, she was even avoiding me. She gave me a condescending look as if I was just dump. I was suddenly determined to make her speak. But all she did was scowl at me. I was in shock throughout that day. I couldn't believe that I would come across a girl who'd have zero interest to see me.

For the next few days it totally escaped my mind. Of course, I'm a busy man. But that spark of interest soon ignited again when I saw her for the second time.

You know they call me a Quran-aholic. Because once I'm alone, unless I'm very preoccupied with something, some ayahs from the Quran would just automatically be moving out of my mouth. Sometimes even when I'm doing mudane stuff like pressing my phone or just any minor thing, you'll definitely hear me if I decide to be audible. Even if I don't decide to be audible you'll still hear me humming or whispering.

Quran has just become part and parcel of me you see and wallah it's my biggest form of therapy. It just hurts so much that I can no longer assist Bilal with my memorized Quran knowledge. It hurts that ever since he died, no one from the external world has benefited from my Quranic knowledge because I do tutor my siblings at home by the way. They have to present hardah to me every Friday evening. They didn't get to memorize it with our father, but we must pass on the legacy. Nadeen does faster than Shams and she'll probably complete hers before she get married insha Allah.

At first I didn't really care, infact I didn't even want to be recognized because of it, since it's probably the most special thing that'll shine me. I've always been a low-key person and I loved it. I let Bilal be in the spotlight. He was more suited for it.

But after I agreed to be accompanying Bilal to sermons, I realized that something was giving me joy. I discovered that it was the fact that- even though I'm just helping as Bilal is doing most of the work by doing the Tafsir which is the main thing, I enjoyed that we were impacting knowledge to the mass. I found myself smiling whenever I would imagine that someone would tell another person about something they've learned from one of our sermons and they'll mention our names that they heard it when they went there. It gave me genuine joy.

But now Bilal is gone and I can't have that privilege again. I can't just fathom coalescing with anyone who's not my brother in this aspect. I didn't need him to tell me when I needed to start an ayah, I didn't need him to tell me when I needed to stop, I didn't need him to tell me when he needed an additional quote from another Surah, etc. I could read his mind whenever we were at Tafsir. Unfortunately, it's all gone now.

So that day, I was sitted on the back of my car. I knew I was reciting the Quran, but I didn't realize that I had gotten carried away and I was reciting it very audibly and emotionally. It was one of those surahs that gave me a hard time when we were memorizing under our father, and it tend to give me all of those bittersweet memories.