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"Why," Muriel hisses, "am I here."
Asra grins, but his fingers fidget uneasily in his lap, a nervous habit Muriel easily recognizes.
"It's a family dinner," Asra says, like that explains everything.
"So why am I here?"
Asra's smile turns warmer; sweeter. Softness creeps into the corner of his mouth.
"It's a family dinner, Muri." He lays a light hand on Muriel's arm. "Of course you're supposed to be here."
Family dinner. Muriel understands those words individually. But he's not quite sold on the concept of family, and even less so on the concept of dinner. He's fairly certain he left his family so they could keep having dinner, and so this whole affair is . . . alien, at best.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Aisha calls, sweeping into the room with a bowl of rice, fragrant and yellow with strange spices. Salim follows close behind, setting some kind of stew on the table.
Asra hums, breathing in the wafting steam, and shoots his mother a genuine, if bashful, smile. "Khoresh?"
Aisha's answering smile is beatific. "Yes."
"I remember I loved it as a kid."
Softly: "I know."
There's a stilted moment where all their lost years hang suspended in the air, heavy like a gathering storm, before Aisha breaks the tension with an awkward kind of laugh.
"Come," she says, "you two must be hungry."
(Muriel's always hungry. It's nothing new.)
There's a flurry of hands and plates; of Please pass me that bowl; of Here, let me pour you some tea. Muriel isn't sure where he fits into it all. He's not sure he fits, period. He never has.
But—
"Go ahead, Muriel," Aisha says, gentle and warm. "You can have as much as you like."
Sounds fake, he thinks, but holds his tongue. He very tentatively takes the rice bowl and spoons a bit of it onto his plate. Asra nods at him, encouraging, and Muriel takes a bit more until about a third of his plate is covered by the fragrant rice.
"Thank you," he mumbles, but Aisha beams at him as though he'd given her the highest of praises.
He ladles some of the stew onto his plate and begins eating, throwing surreptitious glances at Asra to make sure he's doing things right. Spoon on the right, fork on the left. Okay.
He listens to them talk while he eats. The conversation is . . . going. That's the best he can say, really. It stops and starts, with awkward pauses and stilted laughter, skipping from beat to beat like a broken music box with missing keys.
Not that it's his place to help with that.
(Not that he even could. )
So he keeps quiet, popping a chunk of meat into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. The tang of tomato sauce floods his tongue first, followed by the bitter citrus of lime and the earthy sweetness of the yellow split peas. He follows it up with a spoonful of rice and—
—and it's warm, and rich, and probably what food should taste like, instead of the bland dinners he makes for himself back at the hut.
(And it tastes, weirdly, like warm fires in winter; like an ancient story told in a deep, even voice; like laughter and life and light. Like a family forgotten. Like home. )
He eats, spoonful by spoonful, slow and methodical. He savors the last bite, chewing carefully, letting the flavors melt over his tongue before he finally swallows, leaving one last spoonful of rice on his plate like Asra had said.
Done.
Beside him, Asra's finished too, pushing around several split peas aimlessly with his fork.
"Are you two finished already?" Aisha asks, delicately patting the corner of her mouth with a napkin.
"I guess," Asra says, eyes flicking toward Muriel in a silent question. Muriel just shrugs, so Asra continues, with a joking half-smile, "Well, we can still go back for seconds later, right?"
Aisha laughs. "True. Let me bring out the dessert, then. Lend me a hand, my love?"
Salim and Aisha duck through the kitchen doorway, prompting a beat of silence, before:
"You could eat more," Asra says, low. "You barely had anything."
Muriel shrugs again.
"You don't like it?"
(Why does that matter?)
"It's food," Muriel rumbles. "I ate it."
Asra sighs like he's said something tragic, brows furrowing even as his mouth curls up at the corners.
"But you're still hungry."
Muriel grunts.
Softly, softly: "You don't have to be."
Muriel shifts in his seat, the wood creaking beneath his considerable weight.
"You know I don't . . . like . . . eating."
"I know."
The blurry spectre of his mostly-forgotten past looms between them, and Muriel doesn't want to talk about it. Instead he deflects, "You didn't eat a lot, either."
Asra grins that little feline grin of his, but it trembles at the corner, just a bit. "Mmmaybe I'm saving room for dessert?"
Muriel stares, unimpressed.
"Oh, I don't know," Asra caves with a sigh. "It's just— weird." He spears a split pea on his plate with his fork, turning it this way and that, before he puts it back down untouched. "The food's the same, but . . . I'm not. Neither are my parents, even though they're trying to pretend they are. Should they be trying? Should I?"
Muriel mulls this over, before he offers, tentative, ". . . You can't, though. Not really."
"I know!" Asra says, then worries his lip. "I know. It's— seventeen years. How could anyone be the same after that?"
A pause, before Muriel bumps his foot against Asra's beneath the table.
Softly, softly: "You don't have to be."
A moment of stillness, a quiet sigh, before the tension in the air melts like spun sugar and Asra grins, sweet and sincere, just as Aisha and Salim return, carrying forks and plates and a kind of glazed cake.
"Asra said you preferred sour foods, Muriel," Aisha says, and when Muriel glares at Asra he's looking too smug to be believably innocent. "So I prepared something that wasn't too sweet."
Muriel accepts his slice from her, mumbling a small thanks, and takes a tiny bite. The cake is moist and soft, bursting with spices, and the glaze vibrant with the tang of lemon. He swallows, and smiles.
And he says, honest, "It's good."
Aisha beams. "Help yourself to as much as you like."
Muriel eats and listens to Asra talk around his dessert, chuckling when Aisha scolds him lightly for talking with his mouth full. But Salim asks Asra excited questions about the city with one cheek still bulging, and Muriel smiles.
He finishes his cake, and reaches for another slice.