anything.
She wasn't gonna deny that she had really, really liked their time together.
Before Alejo was sent to work in Timbuktu.
Before she and Cail had headed out to Rabat.
She’d felt so close to Alejo then, but now everything felt weird. Wara hadn't seen Alejo in so long, and the only reason he was now in the Fez airport was because Wara's ex-boyfriend had shown up out of the night like the Terminator and nearly killed her.
"Here," Cail snapped, scaring the crap out of Wara. Cail tossed a white rectangular package at Wara’s chest. "You can carry this."
Wara fumbled and caught what she realized was a dented pack of Starbucks dark roast. She and Cail had talked about bringing a welcome back present for Alejo, because they knew he and the guys hadn't been drinking coffee on assignment in Timbuktu. The whole area was full of Al-Qaeda fighters and no coffee had been getting in. Alejo really loved his coffee, strong and black.
"You bought this?" Wara blinked, feeling rather crappy that Cail had remembered to get the coffee and she hadn't. Cail would have had to visit that crowded warehouse on the outskirts of Fez to get this coffee, rifle through tattered boxes of imported foreign groceries you had to pay big bucks to buy.
"Yeah, I bought it," Cail said. "The guy has been through a lot.”
Wara scrambled out of the car and hurried after Rupert and Cail towards the squatty airport terminal. The smooth shells on her sandals pulled at her ankles and made a sucking noise as she trekked across the asphalt. Her fingers dug into the loamy pack of coffee.
The guy has been through a lot, Cail said.
Wara hadn’t been able to get Alejo to tell her anything over the phone about the school burning down. But it must have been awful. Her shoulders sagged a bit as the electric doors whooshed open around Rupert, letting them into the lobby.
Of course Alejo was upset. He and his team were supposed to be guarding the Christian school from the Islamist extremists who wanted to hurt those kids. Alejo would feel responsible for every one of the children who were killed.
Suddenly, she just wanted to wrap her arms around him. She had wanted to be right next to Alejo for days, because the whole thing with Lázaro had freaked Wara out so badly all she wanted to do was feel him by her side. But now she wanted to see him , to know if he was alright.
Wara could not wait for her best friend to clear customs. It didn't matter if Rupert, the match-maker, and Cail, her deadpan serious friend that didn't have a romantic bone in her body, were watching. Wara was gonna throw herself into Alejo’s arms and do one of those cheesy hugs from a movie, let him know that she was here for him, and was so, so glad he was here with her.
The line trickling out of the customs/baggage area was moving very, very slowly.
"We might as well take a seat," Rupert said. "Looks like it might be a while."
They dropped into a row of sad-looking chairs, chained together and covered in shredded gray vinyl. A majority of the Moroccan men in the airport almost did a one eighty as they walked past, craning their necks to gawk at the two foreign girls sitting on either side of the old white guy in a flannel shirt and outdated jeans. Most of Cail's spiky blond hair was stuffed up under her cap, and she was wearing a really long shirt over her jeans, like Wara. In Morocco, you had to at least wear something that covered your butt, or the staring would just get out of control. Moroccan guys loved to stare, and it was kinda hard to get used to.
Normally when the gaping started, Wara would be tempted to get the scarf out of her purse and throw it over her hair. Tonight, she was way, way too preoccupied. She slouched down farther into the ripped seat, crossed her arms protectively in front of her around the Starbucks coffee as if it were her baby.
Maybe half the people from the Bamako-Fez flight had already cleared customs and were racing toward the parking exit.
What was