Page 31 of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

“Are there other houses nearby?” Feyi asked.

“Yeah, Dad has some staff who maintain the property, and they have their own homes not too far from here.”

“Ah, I was wondering who keeps the house up.”

“There’s a whole farm out there, and an orchard, even.” They turned a corner, and Nasir made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “And here’s the swimming pool,” he announced. “Check out the view.”

Feyi gasped. The pool was on the third floor of the house, an infinity edge with a stunning spread of mountainside beyond it. “Oh, this is going to look so lit on Instagram,” she said. “Joy’s gonna eat her fucking heart out.” She walked to the edge of the pool and dipped her toe in the water. It was, of course, perfect.

“Should we take a swim?” Nasir asked.

Feyi was about to respond when Alim emerged from the other end of the pool, water sluicing off his back, his hair soaked. He turned and lifted a hand to them, then stepped out of the water and walked over to a lounge chair, throwing a towel over his shoulder and checking his phone. Feyi tried not to stare at his slick body, the dark length of it, the way water ran down his cheek, his neck, his chest. Desire hit her with an oppressive weight, punching the air out of her and weakening her joints.

“Um, I think I need to go take a nap after all that food,” she said to Nasir, backing away from the pool. There was no way in hell she was going to strip down in front of his father. Nipple rings and skimpy bikinis aside, she just didn’t trust herself to be around him. It was too unstable, these feelings he brought up in her, the way they made her feel out of control, like she was someone else— someone different from the woman who’d fucked Milan in a bathroom and kicked him out, who’d tentatively begun to open up to Nasir—a woman who made all these deliberate choices. This mountain, this man she’d literally just met, they were turning her into a woman who wanted so loudly that it was drowning out the logic of a choice, and that terrified Feyi. That felt dangerous, fast and menacing. She had to get away from it.

Nasir showed her back to her room and, thankfully, left her alone. Feyi didn’t hit up Joy. She was too shaken by how insistent the want had become, how suddenly it had returned. Even when she tried to nap, all she saw behind her eyes was Alim’s torso, the ease of his hips as he walked, the trail of curls descending from his navel into the waistband of his swim trunks, the muscles of his thighs and calves, and the hunger inside her grew even more. Feyi tried to ignore it. It was just a crush. He was rich and famous and a culinary genius, but she didn’t know him. This wasn’t real. So what if she got wet as fuck each time she thought about his hands or his eyes or his mouth? This was Nasir’s father, for fuck’s sake. What did it say about her that her feelings for Nasir could be washed away so quickly? She was just trying to sabotage something good because she was scared, because this was easier than doing the real work with Nasir. Feyi picked up her phone and scrolled through it, forcing her mind to be somewhere else.

At dinnertime, she texted Nasir that she was feeling tired, and he brought her up a bowl of cucumber gazpacho.

“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

The soup was smooth and cool, and knowing that Alim’s hands had made it only turned Feyi on more. She took another shower and changed out of the slip dress into an oversize T-shirt that she’d stolen from Milan, but even then she couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t stop thinking about Alim. Finally, she flipped onto her back and started to rationalize it.

“Okay, bitch,” she said out loud. “Why is this freaking you out? Because you feel like fucking this dude? It’s not a real thing, y’all don’t know each other, it’s just attraction. So, what’s the big deal?”

The ceiling stared back at her.

“You want him,” Feyi said. “That’s fine. That’s normal. You want him.” As she said the words, a sobering thought occurred to her. “You want him … and he doesn’t want you.”

It was like being dunked in cold water. That’s what it was, this was coming from only her. He wasn’t looking at her like Milan or Nasir or most other men did. He was unavailable, down to the wedding ring at his throat. It was safe to want someone she couldn’t have; she didn’t have to follow up on it, she didn’t have to do anything except be drunk on her own desire. Feyi pushed away the irrational feelings of rejection (He doesn’t have to want you, she scolded herself) and focused on what did belong to her—this desire. This desire that pooled like traitorous flame, that wasn’t in response to someone else, that was coming from her and just her. She belonged to it, and it belonged to her, and that’s as far as it needed to go. How long had it been since she’d felt this on her own, with and by herself? All her timelines stretched back to a dark road covered in glass. It didn’t matter. She was alive, like her therapist had taught her, and it was okay to live.

Feyi reached under her pillow and pulled out the vibrator she’d stashed there while unpacking. She closed her eyes and reached between her legs. This was just hers, everything else was unreal, down to the picture that her mind pulled up, spinning it from memory and make-believe. Alim hovering over her in the bed, his palms leaving wet prints in her olive sheets, his eyes reflecting hers, full of hunger, inevitable, reckless.

When she came, her cry echoed through the room, against the glass of her window, and the night outside observed in silence. Feyi didn’t care if either or both of them heard her; she was herself again, and it was none of their business. They were just men; they could dream about her if they liked. She rolled over to her stomach and fell asleep.

• • •

The next morning, Feyi woke up to the wind gently rustling through the trees outside her window. The morning light was clear and clean, leaking in through the glass and falling against the white walls of her room. There was layered birdsong in the air, high-pitched cheeps over longer warbling calls. Feyi yawned and curled up some more inside the soft olive linen. It felt too early in the morning, like it was just her and the birds and the trees and the eager sun splashing against the textured walls. She wanted to take a picture of it, but she already knew half the beauty would die inside a camera lens and she’d never quite catch the edges of how it felt.

For a moment, she wondered what it would be like to wake up with Nasir’s head on the other pillow. The thought was surprisingly unwelcome—he’d want to share this morning quiet with her, he’d break it with his voice, with his hands. She felt possessive of herself, echoes of last night’s reclaiming, perhaps. Feyi rolled over to look at the little clock on her bedside table: 6:35 a.m. It wasn’t worth trying to go back to sleep. She threw off the covers and climbed out of bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in her T-shirt and stretching as she walked to the bathroom.

There was a cheep at the bathroom window, and Feyi looked over to see a small bird perched outside on the sill, with a black back, a yellow belly, and a white streak of feathers on its head. It hopped up and down for a bit, letting out short bursts of sound, then flew away. Feyi smiled—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bird that wasn’t a New York pigeon. It made her want to hurry down to see what the gardens looked like in the morning, to walk through the soft grass with bare feet and watch dew roll off leaves before anyone else woke up. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth before patting in a face cream and spritzing an oil sunscreen over it. Shaking out her braids, she tied them back into a bun and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a light kimono, not bothering with a bra, then unlocked her bedroom door and padded out into the hallway, making a quick left to the top of the staircase that led down to the ground floor.

The house was resplendent in the morning. Feyi stood at the top of the staircase and looked out at the soaring windows, the riot of green and sunlight and flower bursts of color, the gorgeous wood in the floors and frames, the sheer abundance of light that poured in everywhere. She let her fingers skim the banister softly as she came down the stairs, feeling a little dramatic, a little regal, like there was someone at the bottom gazing up at her adoringly, like the light was a carpet unrolling before her feet. Feyi held the edge of her robe so it could billow out behind her, then spun in a circle at the bottom of the stairs, giggling to herself. She already felt lighter just being there, being back to herself, being alone in this paradise of a morning.

It was clear that the house was too big to go wandering in alone, so Feyi made her way to the breakfast nook where they’d eaten lunch the day before, knowing she could enter a courtyard from there. To her surprise, the table was already laid out with breakfast, the smell of oven-fresh sweet bread in the air, bowls weighed down with fruit—papaya, guava, and mango. Nasir’s father was sitting at the head of the table, reading a newspaper with his glasses on, legs crossed at the knee, his feet bare. His toes were silver. He glanced up when Feyi came into the room, and she found herself stumbling over her own tongue, tugging her robe to hide the imprint of her nipples as they tightened under her shirt.

“Oh! Good morning, I—I’m sorry to interrupt? I didn’t think anyone else would be awake.”

“Good morning, Feyi. Help yourself.” He drifted a hand through the air in a vague gesture and returned to his reading. Feyi hesitated, then came up to the table, taking a small plate and filling it with a croissant, a blob of roselle jam, and some fruit. She snuck glances at him, but Alim seemed to be comfortable with the early-morning quiet, the pages of his paper rustling as he turned them, a cup of espresso at his elbow. Feyi stepped into the soft quiet and sat down, pouring herself a glass of pineapple-mint juice. The room felt companionable, relaxed. She looked out at the impossibly blue sky as she ate, at the banana tree leafing loudly above its deep red fruit, the jeweled pink of the bougainvillea flowers, and occasionally, the white porcelain of the espresso cup as Alim lifted it to his mouth. He took up so much more space in person than she expected from seeing him on TV. Even silent and sitting, he was loud. The room felt crammed with his energy, pressed into every corner, but Feyi didn’t feel out of place in it. Somehow, there was room for her, too.

She wondered if this aura of his was because he was famous, if there was just a level of assurance and presence that you couldn’t help once you got to where he was in his career. A brief pang of envy shot through her—so much of her time was spent in uncertainty, wondering if she could be doing more with her work, if she was just coasting while funded with blood money. It was hard to imagine Alim ever doubting if he fit into wherever he was. Maybe that’s where Nasir got his confidence, his ease in moving through the tech world despite all the spikes it threw at him, all the ways it told him that someone like him didn’t belong. Feyi’s parents were dif-ferent—sweet people, but they hadn’t understood why she chose the work she had, so when she talked about her impostor syndrome, they’d been loving but a little confused. Belonging was a thing they did, not a thing they thought about, especially not when it came to jobs. Her father had quoted Toni Morrison at her while explaining that a job was a job, you went to it and then you came home, and home was where you belonged.

“You’re awake already?”

Feyi looked up to see Nasir in the doorway, wearing only a pair of pajama pants. She pulled her eyes away from his bare chest and composed her voice. “Trust me, I’m just as shocked as you,” she replied. “How did you sleep?”

“Woke up because there was too much sunlight,” he complained. “Dad, would it kill you to invest in some blackout blinds?”