Page 4 of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

Joy raised her hands. “I was just wondering.”

“Mm-hmm.” Feyi looked out at the dark street and sighed. Time to come clean. “You’re gonna be mad, though.”

Joy stabbed a finger in her direction. “See, I knew this was too good to be true. What the fuck did you do? And if it’s nasty, say it quick, before the car gets here.”

Feyi groaned. This was going to suck. “Okay, so what had happened was …”

“Uh-huh.”

“We kinda sorta … didn’t use a condom.”

Joy choked on her cigarette smoke. “You what?”

Feyi gave a weak smile. “Heat of the moment?”

Her best friend clenched her jaw. “Tell me he pulled out. Please, Feyi, tell me he pulled out, at least.”

Well, fuck. “I have an IUD in, remember? It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Not that big of a—Bitch, have you lost your mind? You let him hit it raw and you let him nut in you?”

Feyi looked down and scuffed at the concrete with her toe. “I know, I know.”

“Clearly you don’t.”

“Hey, it was my first time since, you know. Cut me some fucking slack.”

She recognized the look on Joy’s face—her best friend was fighting between being sympathetic and cursing her all the way out.

“You know what?” Joy took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I am going to pop by the bodega because you are killing me with this shit. Stay right here, and if you see a white Hyundai, make him wait.”

“Aw, it’s like that? You’re just gonna dead it?”

“Oh, I’m not deading a goddamn thing. You and I are going to have a long conversation after we get home, once I stop feeling the urge to push you down some stairs, bitch.” Joy reached in her purse, hunting for some cash as she grumbled under her breath. “How you gon’ fuck up a perfectly good night by letting a nigga you just fucking met hit it raw?”

Feyi shrugged. “I take it you’re not buying my ‘heat of the moment’ defense?”

Joy cut her a look, and Feyi hid a smile. It was hard to play contrite when she really felt magnificent, when just thinking back to the bathroom was sending little aftershocks through her. Feyi sat on the stoop as Joy started walking away, then called out after her. “Hey, babe, can you get me some gum while you’re in there?”

Joy held up a middle finger without looking back. “Nope!”

The streetlights reflected violet off the sequins of her dress until Joy ducked into the store, and suddenly, Feyi was alone, except for the faint music from the house and the soreness of her inner thighs.

It didn’t feel that bad, to be on the other side of it. She took a deep breath and stared up at the sky, leaning back to rest her elbows on the steps. There were no stars, just a blurred moon hanging over the brownstones. Feyi could feel her pulse between her legs, a rhythmic reminder of the stranger with diamonds in his ears and bergamot on his neck. For a treacherous second, she wanted to tell Jonah about it, to hear his smooth laugh again. He’d ask her if she’d had fun. Feyi pressed her elbows against the brownstone steps to drive the thought away, hard enough to hurt. It was the start of summer, she was alive, and she was so fucking close to becoming what she wanted—someone who had moved on, someone who had a life that wasn’t dressed in black, someone who Milan had held like he was dissolving into her, like she was real flesh under his hungry hands, under a raging red light bulb. Someone who trapped pleasure in a small bathroom and pulled it out of herself, a roiling sweaty mess of alive on a bathroom counter. If she could do tonight, she could do anything—the rest of a life, for example.

“You got this,” Feyi whispered to herself, her voice catching, her cigarette dying and gray between her fingers. “You can do this.”

The music filtered down from the party, and there was no one to say anything back to her. Feyi stubbed the cigarette out and waited for their car to get there.

Chapter Two

The accident was an easy secret for Feyi to keep. What had happened on that cold night outside Cambridge was far enough in the past that the few scars she’d walked away with were unremarkable on her body—intermittent islands of hypertrophied tissue falling like stars down her left leg, a raised and jagged line across her palm, an everlasting bruise on her forearm from when they dragged her out of the car, scraping her across the road. When Milan called, like he said he would, and invited her over to his place in Bushwick, Feyi thought about telling him, but by the time he was opening his front door with a spilling smile, she decided not to. He would’ve thought it meant something, that it came with some responsibility. Feyi didn’t want him to touch her like she was fault-lined glass, or watch him fumble through the awkwardness of a forced intimacy when, let’s be honest, he’d only signed up for a fuck.

She felt okay with him, and that felt like enough—his body felt like enough, over and under and inside hers. They kept seeing each other for a few weeks, nothing serious. Milan was sweet but reserved, a city boy with manners his Southern grandmother would have been proud of. He didn’t want to crawl inside Feyi’s feelings and take a look around, which Feyi was grateful for. Letting someone touch her was already a big deal—it made her flesh real, just having it exist in his hands and eyes.

“I feel like I’m using him,” she told Joy one night, after they’d gone out for dinner, walking down Second Avenue as the city spilled people around them.

Joy laughed. “Babe, I don’t think he minds. He gets to fuck you, hello?”