Page 51 of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
Feyi laughed and hid her face in his shoulder. “I’m scared,” she admitted. She was two breaths away from panicking, to be honest, but she didn’t think it would be helpful to share that information. “Can’t we just skip the talking part?”
Alim kissed the top of her head. “I know, sweetness. But it’s always going to be there, isn’t it?”
“Ugh, fine.” She sat up and nudged his arm. “But you’re starting, not me.”
It was almost heartbreaking to see his eyes sober up. “Let me put on a shirt,” he said.
Feyi watched him walk into his closet and interlocked her fingers, squeezing them tightly to control her nerves. Alim pulled on a gray cotton T-shirt, then came back and sat next to her.
“So,” he said. “We need to talk about Nasir.”
Even though Feyi knew this was where they were going, where they had to go, her stomach dropped into a free fall. She wasn’t supposed to have gotten this involved, she’d had a whole plan to get out unscathed.
“It was just a kiss,” she said, too quickly. “Do you want to tell him?”
Alim frowned. “Was it just a kiss?” he asked, and something in his voice had gone tense. “Maybe we should be clear about that first.”
Feyi twisted her hands nervously in her lap, not sure what he wanted to hear. It could be just a kiss if that’s what he wanted it to be, but right now, she didn’t know what it was, or what it could’ve been if she hadn’t asked him to slow down, if she hadn’t gotten distracted by his room, if she’d pulled him down on top of her instead and given neither of them time to think. She should have listened to Joy. She should have gone with Nasir. She should have asked Pooja to put her up in the Hilton immediately, come up with some excuse.
“Feyi?”
She dragged her eyes up to meet his. “I don’t know, Alim. What do you want it to be?”
“You’re evading. Was it just a kiss for you?” When she started to answer, he held up a hand to forestall her. “And please, I only ask one thing—don’t lie to me. I will hold anything you tell me with care, just let it be the truth. Please.”
Feyi nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I just need a minute.”
“Of course.”
Feyi stood up and walked to the window, wrapping her arms around herself. If she pushed aside the fear, she already knew the answer—she’d known it since the conversation with Joy, when it hit her that she wanted to stay here, with Alim, even if his world was an escape. It was why she’d wanted to get out of it, before the spell sucked her all the way in, before she made the mistake of thinking an escape could be a real life. Maybe the whole appeal of it was precisely that it was an escape, which it would quickly stop being if they kept going down this road they’d started on.
Shit would hit the fan if Nasir and Lorraine found out there was anything going on between her and their father. How long would the fantasy last then? Even if they could deal with that, how long could they keep this going, whatever this was? Till she left the island? How would she tell her parents she was dating Alim? Did Alim even want to date her? It was a tower of questions, and Feyi knew the only way through it was to tackle them one at a time. She turned around, and Alim was watching her from the bed, his hands clasped loosely between his knees.
It took a while for her to arrange her words. All her sentences felt like they were kneecapped by hopelessness before they left her mouth. She thought of Jonah, of how the world with him always felt both like a dream and like the most real thing she’d ever known, at the same time. She thought of who he’d taught her to be.
“Everything I want seems impossible,” Feyi finally said, “and I don’t know what to do about it, so I told myself I couldn’t have it. I don’t know how to say what I want because it sounds mad. It sounds absolutely wild and like a thousand people are yelling at me in my head telling me how stupid and reckless and fucked-up it all is.”
“I know,” Alim said quietly.
She threw up her hands. “He’s your fucking son, Alim.”
A deep sorrow filled his gray eyes and spilled into the murky whites. “I know,” he said, and his voice was a thousand pieces of sharp glass stitched together.
“I mean, we’re not dating, me and Nasir, and we’ve never slept together, and I don’t—I don’t feel the same way that he feels about me.”
Alim’s eyes didn’t waver from hers. “I know.”
Feyi paced by the window. “Fuck. I tried so hard to avoid this, you know? I was so close.” She shook her head and pressed her hands to her face. “I’ve felt so wrong the whole time for feeling like this and even worse because I can’t stop, and now I’m terrified that I’m gonna say something and you’re gonna look at me like I’m out of my fucking mind, like how could I even think that, let alone say it out loud, and I’ll be horribly wrong about everything and feel like absolute shit.”
“Me too,” he said. “I’m with you.”
Feyi paused, surprised by the admission. Alim hadn’t moved, hadn’t looked away, and seeing how he looked at her made her want to burst into tears. She wasn’t even sure they’d be happy ones. It was as if what had just happened had broken a timeline and there was no way Feyi from the old timeline could handle this, so she had to become Feyi from the new timeline. Feyi who had kissed Alim Blake in his kitchen and shattered carrots over his floor. Feyi who he’d held as if he’d almost lost her. Feyi who he was gazing at like he was just a man, just a man at her mercy.
“Okay, so fuck it,” she said, throwing care and sense and any form of rightness to the wind. “It wasn’t just a kiss. It’s not ‘just’ anything. I haven’t felt this way about anyone since … since Jonah. I know it’s just been a few weeks. I know there’s a situation I need to handle with Nasir, and I really really don’t have any answers or solutions whatsoever, but I was talking to Joy this morning, which seems like a whole different fucking life, by the way, and I was telling her how much I love being here. With you. Like even if I still felt alone, at least I felt like I was alone next to your alone, like our alones could walk together. And you”—Feyi ran a hand over her face—“ah, fuck. You feel like the first time in a long time I can even wonder about a possibility of not feeling alone.” She folded her arms, panic still threatening steadily inside her. “So. Your turn.”
Alim was staring up at her, and Feyi couldn’t read his expression anymore.
“Was it just a kiss?” she pressed, making her voice harsh because that was the only way she could keep being brave. “What do you want from all this? Is it worth blowing up your whole fucking family? Because, just so you know, that’s absolutely what’s going to happen.”