Page 73 of You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

Chapter Twenty-One

The next several days dripped past in the steady trickle of a new routine. Alim woke up and went for a run each morning as Feyi slept in, then they’d have breakfast together before she left for her studio and he vanished into his test kitchen. Feyi invited Pooja up the mountain and handed her reams of soft chiffon.

“You said you wanted a piece of the madness,” Feyi told her. “I want a piece of yours in this. I’ll do it with you.”

Standing in the center of the studio, they screamed together, tearing the fabric apart with their bare hands, soaking it with anger and grief and all the terrible feelings that came with being alive. Pooja committed to it immediately, without hesitation, like she’d been waiting for a place to put all this. When it was over, Pooja dropped to her knees and wept, holding scraps of white chiffon to her face as her tears soaked into them. After she left, Feyi delicately lifted the fragments and added them to the painting, tears and blood and red paint, layers and layers of it. When she was alone, she sat with strips of linen in her arms and went as far back to that dark place as she could bear, all the missing of Jonah coming out in salt, caught in the linen, seized in the painting. Pooja came back twice, and the second time, she brought a small lace square.

“I cannot tear this,” she told Feyi, “but it belonged to Keya.” Her hands trembled as she offered it, and Feyi took the lace from her as if it were made of ash, like it could fall apart with a breath.

“Thank you,” she said, because there were no other words.

Pooja nodded and left without saying anything else.

When Feyi had dinner with Alim later, like they did every evening, she told him about the lace and the rending and the layers of resentful life she was putting into the painting. He looked at her the way he had at her exhibit, with something stunned scraping raw through his eyes.

“Would you like to see Marisol’s headstone one of these days?” he asked, and the question floated out over the table, thick and heavy.

Feyi wasn’t sure why the painting had made him think of that. “I’d love to,” she answered. “If you’re sure.”

Alim smiled at her and melancholy hung around his mouth. “I’m always sure,” he said.

The next morning, he asked if he could stop by her studio to drop off something. “I can look away from the painting if you’d rather keep it unseen until it’s complete,” he offered, but Feyi waved him off.

“You can see it in any stage it’s in,” she said. “I don’t care. I like showing myself to you.”

There was a tinge of something new in the air between them, as if they both understood without having to say it that once the painting was complete, Feyi would leave the island.

She’d known this as soon as the painting started making itself into a tangible thing under her hands, and even though she hadn’t told Alim, he seemed to know as well. Neither of them brought it up, but full silences started to follow them around, settling in their skins when they held each other at night, a ghost they weren’t ready to make real. Nasir and Lorraine were absolutely refusing to speak to Alim, and even though he was processing it with his therapist, Feyi could see the hollows forming under his eyes. He needed to resolve this, and Feyi knew she couldn’t be there in his house while he did it. They would have to give each other some time and space, so he could mend what was broken with his children without Feyi, so Feyi could go home and cuddle on the couch with Joy and perhaps that was the only way to know that this wasn’t a dream after all.

Alim came by the studio in the late afternoon, while Feyi was working one of the tear-soaked linen strips into the painting. Keya’s lace was laid out on a table, weighed down by a small pane of glass.

“Give me a second,” Feyi said, and Alim leaned against the doorframe, watching her hands move. Once the linen was secure, she stepped back and looked at the painting, then glanced over at him. “Hey, handsome.”

Alim’s eyes were slurried and hungry. “I’m beginning to understand why you licked my fingers in the kitchen,” he said. “It is incredibly sexy watching you work.”

Feyi laughed and wiped her hands with a cloth. “What did you have for me?” she asked. “I’ve been wondering all day.”

Alim pulled a short length of copper wire out of his pocket. It had a touch of patina to it and was bent into a loose spiral. He held it like it was made of a breath and a thought, so gently. “This was Marisol’s,” he said, and Feyi straightened as he turned it over in his fingers. “She used to wear it in her locs. I wanted to offer it to you for the painting, but I didn’t know if that was appropriate, if this was between you and Pooja.”

Feyi rested her hip on the edge of the table. “It’s my piece,” she said. “I can put whatever I want in it.” She gestured at the copper. “And I would love a relic from your heart in the painting, Alim. It’s so generous of you to offer.”

He glanced at the painting, then at the blood-soaked squares of chiffon Feyi had drying on a rack. “However it comes?” he asked.

Feyi frowned, but nodded. “Of course. However it comes.”

Alim looked down at the copper wire thoughtfully, then jabbed it into the soft of his thumb, drawing a swollen bead of bright red blood. Feyi inhaled sharply, but said nothing, watching as he coated the wire with his blood then held it out to her, his expression shuttered. Feyi accepted the piece of copper gingerly and placed it gently on the glass covering Keya’s lace, then took Alim’s thumb and brought it to her mouth, pressing her lips against the brief wound, a drop of iron coating the tip of her tongue. Alim hissed in a breath and wrapped an arm around Feyi, pulling her in close to him.

“I’ve missed your mouth,” he murmured, sliding his thumb past her lips and hooking it against her bottom teeth, applying slight pressure. It was enough to slacken Feyi’s joints with a sudden and loud desire, amplified by the trace of his blood against the inside of her cheek. She knew Alim had been taking it slow because she said she wasn’t ready, but in that moment, there was low-key nothing Feyi wanted to do more than sit on the edge of the table, hike the dress she was wearing up to her waist, and pull his wide dark mouth between her thighs. The visual was so clear and insistent that she stepped away from him, and Alim dropped his hand, leaving her mouth achingly alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and Feyi wanted to protest, but she didn’t trust herself to speak without saying too much. She grabbed his hand instead and squeezed it tight. Alim was so painfully beautiful to look at, not just his face, or his body, but the whole of him, the way he was relentlessly tender, the way he let pain pass through him like a current, the way he didn’t run from it or try to divert it into something else. The way he offered blood-smeared copper as a gift, a consecrated object, alive grief.

“Let’s watch the sunrise tomorrow,” she said. “From the peak.”

Alim raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Feyi cut her eyes at him. “What, you don’t think I can handle a little trek?”

“A little—” Alim chuckled and shook his head. “Sure, sweetness.” He looked at the painting again, the way it loomed against the wall. “It’s incredible, by the way.”