Page 55 of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
Alim untangled his legs and moved to be closer to her, within reaching range but giving her enough space to be sitting alone, his gray eyes fixed on her face, the sun carving out the deep charcoal of his skin. “What made you keep going?” he asked.
“Ugh.” Feyi threw her head back and blinked the rest of the tears away. “Honestly, for a long time, I don’t think I kept going. I think I just … stopped. It was—” She hissed out a hard breath. “I don’t want to go back there. It feels like a place that could eat me up if I stopped by, even for a little bit, just by talking about it.”
“I know the place.” Alim was looking at her with a sober and sad smile. “If I didn’t have the kids, I would never have come out. Never. I would’ve ended up right in that water looking for Marisol’s current to take me as well.”
“Yeah … I couldn’t drive after the accident, I still don’t. For too long it was like, maybe if it happens again, maybe if I try again, I won’t be the mistake left behind this time.”
Alim ran a hand over his hair, letting out a deep breath. “I can’t remember how many years I spent looking at Nasir and Lorraine and thinking that those two lost the wrong parent.”
Feyi looked over at him. “We can wait, you know? If that’s the better way to do it.”
Alim frowned and she kept going.
“Like how you were saying the best way would’ve been to talk to Nasir first? We can pause everything and do that if you like, if it’ll make things easier between you two.”
Alim gave a short, strangled laugh. “Sweetness, nothing is going to make this easier at this point. You should see the way my boy looks at you when you’re not noticing. I’m not sure he’ll be able to find a way to forgive me for what I’ve already done, even if we did stop now.” There wasn’t much humor in his laugh or his words—he sounded like they were damned.
“You make this sound so bad.” Feyi groaned, hiding her face in her hands. “Remind me again how any of this isn’t totally fucked?” She kept her face covered as Alim slid in next to her, his arm coming around her shoulders.
“Tell me how you feel about me,” he said in her ear, and his breath sent goose bumps across her skin.
Feyi dropped her hands, and Alim’s face was inches from hers, the strong angle of his nose, his slurried eyes, his deliciously wide mouth. It was surreal to see him this close, the same man who warped the air in front of the airport when she first saw him, now looking at her with a gentle mischief, old black pigment smudged at the corners of his eyes.
“You just wanna hear nice shit about yourself,” Feyi retorted, because if she didn’t joke about it, she would just get overwhelmed all over again. “You don’t think we should stop? Wait to sort it out with Nasir? That’s cold-blooded, man.” She kept her voice light, but at the same time she was curious—wasn’t he worried about how that would go with his son?
Alim didn’t move his arm from around her. “I think a conversation needs to be had before this goes much further, yes, but what does stopping mean to you? What do the boundaries look like?”
Feyi sighed. “I don’t wanna sound like I keep rubbing this in, but he’s your son, Alim. I want to know what you’re comfortable with and how you’re thinking about it. My relationship with Nasir is new, it’s nowhere near as important as what you have with him, and quite frankly, if he’s going to feel betrayed by anyone, it’s going to be you way more than me, you feel me?”
He took his arm off her shoulders but didn’t move away. The sun was rising higher in the sky and outside the glass of the windows, everything sounded as beautiful as it always had, a pristine world untouched by this particular bout of human messiness. Feyi felt like she was sitting in a glass box and all their feelings were locked in there with the two of them, weighing on the polished floor, pressing up against the wood ceiling, out against the stretching glass. Was this what the world was made up of? Millions of boxes filled with people and feelings? Alim pulled his knees up and draped his arms over them, speaking slowly as he chose his words.
“I don’t think things will be sorted out with Nasir anytime soon, so stitching the timeline of us to the timeline of his heart seems … unwise. I think there is a pace to be found, but I very much want to respect your heart in this, too, which is why I’m asking about which boundaries feel comfortable for you. Was spending the night in my bed too much? What if I kissed you again?”
The very thought of it sped Feyi’s pulse into a gallop, but she kept her face steady as she listened to him speak. Alim was looking at his hands, twisting his fingers together and pulling them apart slowly.
“When I think about the ways I want to touch you, there’s no space for anything else. I am consumed, utterly. When we were alone in my kitchen and you did the thing with the foam, I was sure I had lost my mind. It took everything I had not to kiss you then, and it’s taking almost everything to not kiss you now.”
He tilted his head to look at her, and Feyi found that her breath had caught somewhere in her chest and wasn’t moving.
“But you’re asking about how I fit Nasir into this, if we should stop, and terrible as it might sound, when it is between you and me … I don’t fit my son into it. What we decide to do is ours, if you want it to be. I will come to terms with you, not with Nasir, because it will be simple for him—are we involved or are we not? The degrees won’t matter, the specificity, and besides, how could that be measured?”
“He’d care if we fucked,” Feyi blurted out. “I fucked his friend Milan before Nasir and I went on a date, and we were supposed to be taking it slow. What’s it going to look like if I fuck his dad so quickly, you know?”
Alim’s eyes darkened as his pupils dilated. “You talking about fucking me is going to end this conversation much faster than we planned, Feyi.”
She shoved him and laughed, but he wasn’t wrong. It would be too easy to lean in and stop talking, kiss him again, take that damn robe off and step out of these pajamas, into his bed, into his skin, into his mouth. Alim was staring at her, his gaze dropping to her lips, and the air had gone syrupy. Feyi pulled back and scrambled off the floor, her throat dry as she stepped to the window. They couldn’t just topple back into all that; there was still too much to figure out.
“I know there’s nothing we can do that wouldn’t hurt Nasir except not do this at all,” she said, keeping her gaze on the mountains, their dark rolling green. “But I think we can try to not make it any worse than it has to be, at least for now.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alim stand up and stretch his arms over his head, then fold his body over to brush his fingers against his toes.
“I agree,” he said, knifing back upright. “Perhaps we hold off on making plans with each other until we’ve had a chance to talk to him?”
Feyi turned around, relief filling her voice. “Real talk, that would make me feel so much better. Like, I know he and I weren’t dating, but I don’t want to start, like, dating you behind his back, you know?” She heard herself, and a flash of worry flared inside her— what if she was being presumptuous? Sure, Alim had talked about being with her, but he’d never said the word dating, and somehow that made it sound real, official, not the blurred vagueness of whatever she’d been doing with Nasir. Maybe she should’ve let Alim be the one to label it first. “I mean, not that I’m saying we’d be dating, I guess it depends …”
Feyi trailed off her backtracking as Alim broke out into a sharp grin. “I love the sound of you dating me even more than the sound of you fucking me,” he said, taking a step toward her. “Is there anything else you’d like to hold off on?”
He was moving honey-slow, a smile tucked in the corner of his mouth, and as he stopped in front of her, Feyi flashed to all the little moments they’d shared, from that first night in the garden when their hands had touched to the sunrise, his black-rimmed eyes looking at her through a forest of gold circles, and she wasn’t the girl who had pulled Milan into a bathroom or negotiated with Nasir. She was the one who’d sat under moonlight with an old grief and a dead husband, next to this stranger who had an even older grief and a drowned wife, and something that had been welded shut in Feyi since that dark road was cracking open by a sliver, just enough to terrify her.
She put a hand on Alim’s chest and waited for his heart to beat through the linen, reassuring and steady. “I can’t move quickly,” she said, her voice sober. “I mean, I could, but it would backfire, and I don’t want that. Not with this … not with us.”