Songs for Other Rooms

On Friday afternoon, Elena nearly decided not to invite him.

The thought came to her at 3:17 p.m. while she was standing in the side room of St. Andrew’s Community Hall in Brickfields, surrounded by children in wrinkled recital clothes and the slow collapse of all orderly plans.

A seven-year-old boy named Aaron had misplaced one shoe and was insisting, with tears of moral outrage, that his cousin must have hidden it on purpose. Two girls in pale yellow dresses were arguing over whose hair ribbon matched the program cover more accurately. The rented keyboard had arrived fifteen minutes late and with one key sticking just enough to make every rehearsal sound faintly haunted. One parent was asking whether the children could stand closer together because her phone camera “captured emotion better” in vertical format. Another had shown up with an entire bouquet meant for the teacher, which would have been kind if Elena had not then needed to find a bucket, scissors, and some explanation for why flowers were being left beside the emergency exit.

The hall smelled of furniture polish, old hymn books, talcum powder, and the faint warm sweetness of Milo from the refreshment table in the back. The air-conditioning had given up trying to cool the room properly sometime after lunch, so the evening heat pressed through the walls in a damp, patient way. Beyond the double doors leading to the main hall, Elena could hear the murmur of parents arriving, chairs scraping, programs rustling, voices lowering in anticipation.

Everything felt one small inconvenience away from complete ruin.

Which, in her experience, usually meant the recital would somehow be beautiful.

She bent to help Aaron find the missing shoe beneath a folding chair and pulled her phone from the pocket of her skirt almost without thinking. The screen lit up with the last message Rayyan had sent that morning.

Don’t let the pedestrians suffer tomorrow.

She had smiled at it over breakfast and replied with a blurry photo of a child’s hand-drawn treble clef wearing what appeared to be a crown.

This one has leadership ambitions. Pray for me.

He had responded only after lunch.

That sounds worse than planning. I’ll keep you in my thoughts.

It was not much. Nothing in their thread was ever much when taken separately. That was becoming the issue.

Because now, with the recital an hour away and her nerves stretched thin, her first irrational instinct had been to message him–not for help, because there was none he could practically give, and not because she needed reassurance in any dramatic sense. Only because the thought of his quiet, dry answer arriving on her screen felt suddenly, dangerously comforting.

Which was exactly why she should not invite him.

There were good reasons, sensible ones. It was a small community recital in a church hall, not a concert. Most of the audience would be parents, cousins, uncles, bored older siblings bribed into attendance, women from the parish choir who never missed children performing anything, and two retired men who came to almost every event as if moral support were a formal appointment. Rayyan did not know these people. He did not belong to that world. Asking him to come would be unnecessary, intimate in a way that a bookstore or coffee stall was not.

And yet the words formed anyway.

If you’re free later, the children are performing tonight. Small recital. Nothing glamorous.

She stared at the message before sending it.

Nothing glamorous made it sound safer. As though downgrading the event could also downgrade the fact that she wanted him there.

She almost deleted the whole thing.

Aaron found his shoe in the corner behind a stack of folded risers and held it aloft like proof of divine intervention. Elena exhaled once, thumb hovering over the screen.

Then she pressed send before reason could organize a better argument.

For the next twenty minutes, she was too busy to regret it properly.

She pinned number tags to backs that wriggled away from her hands, retied ribbons, retuned the choir’s opening note on the stubborn keyboard, crouched to reassure a child that no, forgetting one line of a song did not mean the sky would fall in public. She kept moving because movement was the one way to stop nerves from settling into her bones.

When her phone finally vibrated in the pocket of her skirt, she ignored it through two parent questions and one near-disaster involving a juice box.

Only when the children were lined up in partial order and the pianist was seated did she slip into the narrow corridor beside the vestry and check the screen.

What time?

That was all.

Not an excuse. Not a polite refusal. Not unnecessary enthusiasm either.

Just the question that mattered most.

Elena leaned one shoulder against the wall, the cool paint pressing lightly through her blouse, and typed back.

7.30. But if you’re working late, it’s okay. Really.

The typing indicator appeared almost immediately.

Then:

Send me the address.

The corridor felt suddenly too narrow for breath.

She typed the address, then stood looking at the sent message as if it might explain something to her. It did not. Her reflection in the dark screen looked composed enough. Only her eyes gave anything away, and even then only if someone knew how to read that sort of thing.

“Elena!”

One of the mothers was calling from the main hall.

She locked the phone at once and returned to the room where everything needed her hands.

By seven-twenty, the chairs were full.

The children had reached that fragile state between restlessness and fear that existed only in the ten minutes before performance. Parents leaned into aisles with their phones already unlocked. A grandmother in the second row held the printed program as if it were sacred text. The flower bouquet had been relocated to a safer corner. Ceiling fans stirred the warm air above the heads of the seated crowd, though most of the noise now came from anticipation rather than heat.

The hall itself was modest: a low stage barely raised above the tiled floor, cream walls, a wooden cross mounted high at the front above the dark piano, a row of windows along one side already black with evening. Someone had strung paper stars across the proscenium in a hopeful attempt at festivity. The sound system, if treated gently, could usually be persuaded not to hum.

Elena stood near the side curtain with her clipboard pressed against her chest and looked once toward the back of the room before she could stop herself.

No sign of him.

Of course there wasn’t. It was still early. Traffic from the city would be bad. Maybe he would not make it after all. Maybe he had intended to come and then work had intervened in the way real life often did. That was fine. More than fine. It would be simpler.

She looked away and immediately hated the small disappointment that had already formed before she had any right to feel it.

The recital began.

The youngest children came out first, arranged in uneven rows, their little hands clasped too tightly in front of them. The opening song wobbled for the first verse and then somehow found itself in the second, the way children’s choirs often did–by trusting momentum more than precision. Parents smiled too broadly. Someone in the third row cried at once, though it was impossible to tell whether out of pride or nerves. Elena stood near the piano, conducting with small clear gestures, mouthing the words when the front row needed saving.

It went better than rehearsal. Then worse. Then better again.

A boy forgot his entrance and sang half a line late with utter conviction. Two sisters leaned into the same microphone and dissolved into muffled laughter. The keyboard stuck once during the transition and Elena compensated by clapping the rhythm slightly harder until the pianist recovered. One child waved enthusiastically at an auntie in the audience during the final note of a hymn and had to be turned gently back toward the front.

Through it all, Elena moved by instinct and training, holding the shape of the evening together with small signals, reassuring smiles, a lifted hand, a softened nod. When she was inside music like this, everything else usually receded. Time narrowed. The room arranged itself around sound and breath.

Tonight, however, some traitorous part of her awareness remained split.

She felt it first at the beginning of the second segment, when the older group took the stage for the folk medley. As she turned to cue the pianist, her eyes lifted briefly toward the back doors–and there he was.

He had come quietly, in the way he did everything that mattered.

He stood just inside the main entrance, one hand still on the door handle as though careful not to let it close too loudly behind him. He wore a dark charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and black slacks, clothes simple enough not to draw attention and neat enough to suggest he had come straight from somewhere that required the day to be taken seriously. The hall light caught briefly on his watch. He took in the room with one quick sweep of his gaze, found the empty chair near the back row, and sat without making anyone shift to accommodate him.

It should not have altered the hall.

It did.

Not in reality. The children continued singing. Parents continued filming. The pianist hit the right notes with heroic inconsistency. The wooden cross remained above the stage, unmoved and unembarrassed by human emotion.

And yet for Elena, the entire room changed dimension. Not because she was suddenly nervous in the dramatic way of heroines in films, but because the fact of him there rearranged her awareness of every object around her. The light on the stage. The folded programs in laps. The paper stars above the curtain. Her own pulse, which had no reason to do what it did.

She gave the next cue a fraction late.

Only a fraction. No one else would have noticed. But she noticed, and that was enough.

During the applause, when the children bowed with varying levels of solemnity, her gaze found him again. Rayyan was not smiling broadly the way the parents were. He watched the stage with the same attentive stillness he brought to most things, but there was warmth in the line of his face, a softening at the mouth she had come to recognize more by instinct than certainty.

He looked, Elena thought with a sudden ache, like someone listening to a room with respect.

By the time the recital reached the final hymn, the children had relaxed enough to sing properly. The voices rose fuller then–imperfect, brave, slightly sharp on the high notes, lovely in the way all sincere things were lovely. Elena stood a little to the side for the last piece, letting them hold more of it themselves. Parents leaned forward. A toddler in the front pew had fallen asleep against his father’s shoulder. Someone’s phone camera flashed accidentally and then lowered in shame.

At the last chord, the applause came all at once, generous and loud enough to cover the children’s relieved grins.

The room loosened. Chairs scraped. Parents surged toward the front with flowers and water bottles and declarations of pride that would be repeated later in family group chats. Children broke formation instantly, racing toward mothers and older siblings. The hall became noise again.

Elena stayed where she was for a few seconds longer, clipboard still against her chest, letting the end of the music drain out of her body. This, too, was part of her routine: the strange hollow tenderness after performance, when relief and sadness arrived together because something hard had ended, and beautiful things always cost a little to leave behind.

When she finally looked up, Rayyan was no longer at the back of the hall.

For one panicked second she thought he had gone.

Then she turned and found him standing near the side aisle, just far enough from the crowd to avoid obstructing anyone, waiting with the same unobtrusive patience that had somehow, over the past weeks, become one of the things she recognized most quickly about him.

“Elena.”

Her name sounded different in the half-emptied church hall. Softer. More careful.

“You came,” she said, which was not the most elegant sentence she could have offered but was the one that reached her mouth first.

“You invited me.”

Something in the plainness of that answer made her have to look away for a second. “It was small.”

“You said that.” His gaze shifted toward the children still flooding the aisle with flowers and badly folded programs. “You lied.”

She blinked. “About what?”

He looked back at her, and the corner of his mouth moved just slightly. “It was not nothing.”

The reply should have felt like praise. Instead it landed somewhere deeper, almost beneath speech. Elena became aware, very suddenly, of the clipboard in her arms, the dampness at the base of her neck from the hall’s failing air-conditioning, the cross resting warm against her collarbone.

“I need to survive ten more minutes of parents,” she said lightly, because lightness was the only thing holding the moment in place. “Then I’m free.”

“I can wait.”

There it was again. That sentence, in one form or another. So ordinary. So dangerous.

He stood to one side while she moved through the post-recital ritual–accepting flowers she did not know what to do with, thanking parents for coming, reassuring one mother that yes, her son had done wonderfully despite beginning the folk medley in the wrong key. Now and then, through the bodies shifting in and out of the aisle, she would glance up and find Rayyan still there, never impatient, never performing patience either. Simply present.

Mika would later have called that the most dangerous kind of man.

By the time the hall had thinned to volunteers stacking extra chairs and two children arguing over leftover cupcakes, Elena’s shoulders had finally begun to unclench. She tucked the bouquet more securely into the crook of one arm and walked toward him with the final scraps of applause still echoing faintly in her bones.

“Sorry,” she said. “You’ve now seen the least glamorous side of music education.”

He looked at the bouquet, then the glitter stuck inexplicably to one side of her skirt. “I don’t know. It seemed highly organized.”

She stared at him. “You are making fun of me.”

“Gently.”

“That’s still rude.”

“It’s observant.”

She laughed despite herself, tired enough now that the sound came out softer than usual. “What did you think?”

His expression shifted–not into solemnity, exactly, but into something closer to care. He glanced once toward the stage, where one of the smaller children was spinning in circles while her grandmother tried to put a cardigan on her.

“I thought they trusted you,” he said.

The answer caught her off guard so completely she went still.

Not that the children had sounded good. Not that the hall was charming. Not even that she had done well. He had noticed the thing underneath all of it, the structure that made any performance possible.

Elena looked at him for a beat too long. “That’s a very specific thing to think.”

“It was obvious.”

“No.” She adjusted the bouquet against her arm because suddenly she needed something for her hands to do. “Most people would’ve said they were cute.”

“They were also that.”

“Very politically careful.”

His smile was small, but fully there now. “I try.”

The warmth of the hall had become oppressive by then, the kind that clung to the back of the neck and made even breathing feel slightly overhandled. Outside the side entrance, evening had deepened properly. The windows reflected only the room now, not the street.

“Do you want to walk a bit?” Elena asked. “It’s cooler outside. Probably.”

He nodded once. “Okay.”

She left the bouquet with one of the aunties from choir, collected her bag, and followed him out through the side doors into the night.

The air outside was not cooler.

Only wider.

Brickfields after dark carried its own kind of humidity, a close dampness that lifted the scent of rain from old pavements even when it had not rained in hours. The road beyond the church compound was still busy with cars and scooters, headlights sliding over walls painted in fading colors. Somewhere down the row of shops, someone was grilling something over charcoal, and the smell drifted through the warm air in savory waves. Neon signs buzzed above convenience stores and tailoring shops. A cat slipped beneath a parked van with the confidence of a creature that paid no rent and feared no one.

They walked without choosing a destination at first, just along the side street beside the hall and toward the better-lit main road.

For a few moments neither spoke.

It was not an awkward silence. But it had changed shape.

Earlier silences between them had held teasing, or curiosity, or the simple ease of two people learning one another in pieces. This one carried awareness. The church hall was behind them now, but not gone. It remained between them like the echo of the final hymn–faint, lingering, impossible to pretend had not been heard.

“Elena Grace Joseph,” he said after a while.

She turned to him, startled. “What?”

“I saw your name in the program.”

The little folded booklet. Of course.

Heat rose to her face in a way she could blame only partly on the weather. “That sounds very formal.”

“It looked formal.”

“Only because the committee aunties think full names create dignity.”

He glanced at her. “Does it?”

“Not when I’m covered in children’s glitter.”

“That seems harsh. Glitter may be dignified in some contexts.”

She laughed under her breath. “So now you’ve watched the recital and judged the decor.”

“Quietly.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

The conversation should have settled them back into the easier rhythm. Instead, Elena remained aware of something taut beneath it.

Perhaps he felt it too. Perhaps that was why, a minute later, he said with deliberate casualness, “You didn’t mention it was at a church.”

There it was.

Not accusation. Not discomfort. Just the placing of a fact between them, finally visible from all angles.

Elena looked ahead at the wet-black road, at the chain-link fence glinting under a streetlamp. “Would that have changed your mind?”

Rayyan took a moment to answer. The pause was not long, but she felt every second of it.

“No,” he said at last. “I just would’ve known more clearly what I was coming to.”

She nodded once. The cross at her throat suddenly felt less like jewelry and more like speech.

He had seen it before, of course. On the train. At dinner. In every moment she had tucked it back beneath her blouse and then, later, forgotten to hide it at all. She had known he knew. In the same way she knew, from the halal cafés, the careful food choices, the surau in SS15, the name that had lived fully formed in her mind from the first day, that he was Muslim.

And yet they had allowed knowledge to remain ambient. Present without being spoken. Safe because it had no grammar yet.

Now it did.

“It’s where I grew up singing,” she said, before she had decided whether to explain. “Not this exact hall. But things like it. Small recitals. Christmas practices. Too many folding chairs. People bringing extra food no one asked for.”

His mouth moved with brief amusement. “That last part sounds universal.”

“It is.” She hesitated. Then, more quietly: “I almost didn’t ask you to come.”

He looked at her.

“Why?”

There were many ways to answer. None of them felt entirely survivable.

Elena fixed her gaze instead on the pavement ahead, where old rainwater had gathered in the cracks and reflected the streetlamp in broken strips. “Because it felt like… another room,” she said slowly. “A part of my life you hadn’t seen.”

“And?”

“And I wasn’t sure whether I wanted you in it,” she said.

The sentence was true in the most incomplete way. What she did not say was that she had wanted him there too much, and that had frightened her more than the possibility of awkwardness.

Rayyan was silent for a few steps. Not withdrawing. Thinking.

When he finally spoke, his voice was lower. “I’m glad you asked.”

The road noise seemed to recede for one impossible beat.

She exhaled carefully. “I’m glad you came.”

There. Nothing dramatic. Just the truth, set down without flourish.

They reached the corner where the side street opened onto the larger road. Across from them, a florist was shutting its metal grille. A convenience store glowed too brightly. Somewhere nearby, church bells rang the quarter hour–brief, clear, silver against the humidity.

Rayyan’s gaze lifted toward the sound almost instinctively.

Elena felt her own body register the moment with strange precision. The bells fading. The cross at her throat. His name in her mind. The remembered image of him slipping away during Maghrib to pray in a surau above a minimart in SS15.

Different prayers.

The phrase arrived in her with unwelcome neatness.

They began walking again.

“Do you sing too?” he asked after a while.

“Only when innocent people can’t escape.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“It’s modesty.”

“I’ll need evidence.”

She turned her head, startled by the line because it sounded, for a second, almost flirtatious. But his face remained composed enough that she could not tell whether he meant it that way or whether she had simply become too ready to hear more than was being offered.

“You came to the recital,” she said.

“That was the children.”

“That was also me trying not to let them collapse.”

“You looked like you belonged there.”

The sentence hit her harder than the earlier one.

Belonged there.

Under the cross. In the hall. Inside the shape of a life that had made her, and that she had never before needed to explain in fragments to someone standing just outside it.

“Thank you,” she said, though gratitude was not quite the emotion she meant.

They had reached the station road by then. Bright signs. Traffic. The city resumed its ordinary indifference around them. A group of teenagers passed carrying helmets and laughing over something on a phone. A bus wheezed at the curb and pulled away again. The night went on.

“It’s late,” Rayyan said eventually. “I should let you get home.”

She nodded. Sensible. Necessary. The right ending to an evening that had already gone further inward than it should have.

Still, when they stopped beneath the station lights, neither stepped away at once.

Elena adjusted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. Her fingers brushed the cross at her neck in the process, and she became aware of the gesture only after it was done. Rayyan’s eyes flicked there, then back to her face. Brief. Respectful. Impossible to mistake.

That was the moment the silence changed fully.

Not because anything new had been learned.

Because what had already been known could no longer stay abstract.

The church hall behind her. The surau in her memory. The names. The habits. The things each of them carried not as costume or preference, but as inheritance and truth.

Neither spoke for several seconds.

Elena could feel the whole conversation that did not happen standing between them–questions, cautions, practical consequences, the ugly mathematics of futures people did not yet have the right to imagine.

And beneath all of it, even more frightening, the simple fact that she did not want the evening to end with that conversation.

So she said the only survivable thing.

“Thank you for coming.”

Rayyan looked at her with that same attentiveness he brought to almost everything, as if care were his first instinct and restraint only the discipline layered over it.

“You don’t have to thank me twice.”

“I know.” She tried to smile. “But I want to.”

Something shifted in his expression then–small enough that another person might have missed it, but Elena had begun to notice the fraction of a second in which he let feeling reach his face before control settled over it again.

“It was worth coming for,” he said.

The station noise rushed in around the sentence. Train chimes. A motorcycle accelerating through the junction. Two women talking loudly near the ticket machine. Somewhere farther off, faint as memory, another church bell.

Elena held his gaze for one suspended moment too long.

Then she nodded, because speech had become unreliable. “Goodnight, Rayyan.”

“Goodnight, Elena.”

She turned before the air could ask more of her.

On the train home, she stood near the door and watched Brickfields recede in reflected fragments across the glass. Her own face floated faintly over the city’s lights–tired, overheated, not obviously altered. Only the eyes again. Only that.

She touched the cross at her throat once, lightly, the way she had when she was younger and trying to calm herself before singing alone. The metal was warm from her skin.

At home, Mika was in the kitchen cutting fruit with the gravity of someone performing surgery for no audience.

“How was the recital?” she asked without looking up.

“It didn’t collapse.”

“High praise.” Mika lifted a brow. “You look strange.”

Elena set her bag down on the table and exhaled slowly. “Rayyan came.”

The knife paused over the mango.

Mika looked up then, properly. “To the church hall?”

Elena nodded.

“And?”

There were too many possible answers. She chose none of them and all of them. “And now it feels different.”

Mika studied her face for a few quiet seconds. Not intrusive. Not pitying. Simply present in the way old friends sometimes were when they sensed the floor beneath a person had shifted slightly.

“Do you want tea?” she asked.

The gentleness of the question nearly undid her.

“Yes,” Elena said.

Later, in bed, long after the apartment had gone quiet, she opened her message thread with Rayyan and stared at the blank bar where words could be typed.

She could send something simple. Thank you again. The children liked having an audience. You were kind to come.

Every version sounded too small or too revealing.

In the end, she typed nothing.

She only looked at his name–Rayyan LRT–and thought how inadequate it had become, how the label belonged to the version of him she had met under rain and train lights, before coffee stalls and bookstore aisles and quiet dinners and church halls.

Before she knew what it felt like to have someone stand at the edge of a room made by your faith and make no mockery of it, no discomfort either–only a still, respectful presence that somehow hurt more.

Elena locked the phone and placed it face-down beside her pillow.

The room was dark except for the streetlight leaking through the curtain. Somewhere outside, late traffic moved in a distant, steady hush. The city had settled. She had not.

Because now the truth was no longer made only of attraction, or routine, or the sweet accumulating ease of shared days.

Now it was made of knowledge.

He was Muslim.

She was Christian.

Neither of those facts was new. But tonight they had stepped fully into the same room, looked at one another without disguise, and refused to leave.

When sleep finally came, it did so lightly, as if even rest understood there were some thoughts that could not yet be laid down.

And in the quiet hour before morning, Elena woke once with the ache of a sentence she had not said pressing against her ribs.

Not that she regretted inviting him.

Worse.

That she would do it again.