Chapter Text
Years later during her wedding speech, Najma would gush about their adorable “love-at-first-sight Meet Cute.” In the moment, Jamil only saw a disembodied hand snatching the last crucial ingredient for his dinner. The last bright red bell pepper glistening from the misting sprinklers–seized by the pale, crooked fingers of an evil crone plotting his utter torment and dooming him to a meal of incomplete curry.
The disconnected, logical portion of his mind snorted at the dramatic dialogue he conjured, but logic had been shoved to the back of his conscience hours ago. Logic would have fractured his mind when Jamil had to talk Kalim down from purchasing an entire circus of elephants with Asim corporate funds because it would “be fun for when we hold board meetings in the summer!” Logic wasn’t needed to assemble a grocery list for a dinner of curry and rice, which he made often enough to have the recipe and ingredients memorized.
Logic wasn’t present when he pursued the woman attached to the crone hand that had snatched his perfect dinner from him. “Excuse me.”
The woman spun and nearly whacked him with the green plastic basket hanging off her elbow. Large brown eyes silently blinked up at him in confusion. Jamil pointed at the pristine red bell pepper sitting neatly on top of a stack of tuna cans and three bottles of hot sauce. “That’s mine.”
She blinked again before her eyes followed his finger. She lifted her basket to grab the bell pepper. “This?”
“Yes.” Jamil thought the answer was enough to prove his ownership, but a lengthy pause where she simply blinked at him urged him to elaborate. “I was reaching for it when you reached around me and grabbed it.”
Her eyes darted between his face and the vegetable in her hand. “You hadn’t touched it yet.”
That little voice screamed at him not to answer the non-question, but Jamil did anyway. “Not yet, but–”
“And you haven’t paid for it,” she continued. She slowly lowered the bell pepper into her basket. Her brown eyes now drilled into him with a focus that made the back of his neck warm. “And it’s in my basket.”
“Look, I don’t want to start a fight.”
“Good.” The woman turned on her heel and continued through the produce section. She looked over her shoulder. “I hate it when my evening supermarket trips turn into impromptu MMA matches.”
Jamil stood gaping at her back. The little voice in his head snickered at his lack of response. He shoved it back deeper. He retreated in the opposite direction to the beeping registers. He banished the image of her brown eyes looking back at him one last time, twinkling with some kind of internal golden light, and the concerning flip it caused in his chest even as he was counting his change.
All he had wanted was a damn bell pepper.