Chapter 58
Nia called to apologize. I forgave her easily, though the sound of her scorn bled into my dreams. I woke from them rattled, drenched in sweat and shame. There was also the whole me-sleeping-with-her-boyfriend thing, so I couldn’t be but so mad at her.
She sounded like she was pacing a grand hallway.
“I was distraught about the lecture cancellation stuff, I just, it wasn’t about you.
And then, I’m sure you heard, I mean, it’s been all over the news, Israel’s surprise strikes in Gaza, and now—” Worked up, breathless, “We have this disciplinary hearing. I just found out, because of the protests on campus.”
I’d read about the strikes but was initially confused.
I didn’t know you could just break a ceasefire like that, drop bombs in the middle of the night as though there’d been no agreement at all.
What was the point of it if it was that flimsy?
Or maybe that was the point, to show you could do whatever you wanted, grab people from behind in the dark.
Anwar told me he wasn’t surprised, that everyone had been holding their breath.
“A hearing about what?” I’d only heard of hearings in Congress where some senator presented a pie chart to stall.
“About the protest.”
“Why do you have to have a hearing? I don’t get it.”
“Me neither, but we have one.” She exhaled through the phone. “Are you coming to the studio?”
“I didn’t know you wanted me to.”
“Of course I do!”
I smiled after we hung up, happy to be in her good graces again.
She was holding a painting under the light, a portrait of a woman with green eyes.
“Who’s that?”
Turning over her shoulder, she tossed me a mischievous smile. “My ex.”
I knew what she expected me to say.
“I didn’t know you dated women.”
“You couldn’t tell?”
How was I supposed to tell? Her nose ring? “No.”
“I was so over men. I wrote it on a scrap of paper, ‘MEN ARE OUT IN 2024,’ and set it on fire.” She sighed. “But then, Tristan.”
I was treading too close to the sun, but I wanted to know. “Why him?”
She leaned against the desk. “You’ve met him.”
I coughed into my elbow. “I actually don’t know him that well.”
“He’s, he’s…” Her eyes traced the ceiling. “Smart, like we can talk for hours about anything. He has that touch of tormented-male thing. I hate myself for saying it, but I love it! Don’t you love it?” I nodded weakly. “But he’s nice too. He’s the nicest guy I know.”
I wanted to laugh. Tristan was smart, funny. But nice? This was the man who threatened to set my ass on fire when he was fucking me on his stove.
I began worrying that I was receiving some lesser treatment from him. Because I was unlabeled, like a missing package, it meant I required a different type of handling. I recalled his cool affect over the phone at Jay’s, the ease with which he turned us to strangers.
I glared at Nia, her supple, feminine features.
Upturned nose, full lips, tame brows, not wild and hairy like mine.
A challenge, her words. That’s why she wanted to paint me.
I bristled with agitation; it was always women like this who were conferred a certain kind of reverence.
Uncomplicated beauty, soft-looking even when hard.
Women like Nia didn’t have to bend to receive special treatment.
When I bent even a little, it felt like breaking.
“Does he know you like women?” I bit out.
She laughed brightly, oblivious. “We’ve slept with girls together.”
My breath halted. I stammered out, “I didn’t know you were open.”
Nia moved behind her canvas. “Oh, it’s not like that,” already abandoning the conversation.
She offered to drive me home. I was still thinking about her calling Tristan the nicest guy she knows as we walked through the parking garage.
The mysterious car I’d never seen her drive before was a black Acura.
It smelled of faded vanilla, dainty sweat generated from gentle yoga.
The leather bomber she wore when I first met her hung sadly on the head of her seat.
Candy wrappers rustled underfoot, her coffee from this morning in the cup holder, sticky around the rim.
She was absolutely filthy. I felt at home.
The sun shifted as we cruised Rock Creek Park’s winding roads.
This was my favorite feature of the city: how you could be on a main street, horns trumpeting, cars bumper-to-bumper, then turn a corner and be in the woods, spindly trees, crisp air, might even spot a baby deer, chin raised in high alert.
It was a hot day, finally April. Nia was a fast, distracted driver, nothing like Tristan.
She dropped the window, her hair floating above her like Medusa’s snakes.
I didn’t understand how she could see like this.
She was joking about how her nudes were more secure than the nation’s war plans when her phone rang.
Dad A.K.A The Devil. She didn’t answer, stomping on the gas.
In some impossible twist of geographical fate, we ended up near the Mall. Pale pink trees stood at attention, their candied reflections smeared along the river. The cherry blossoms had bloomed.
Seeing the flowers, Nia fumbled with the steering wheel, whipping down Independence Avenue. We almost hit a squirrel, but it skipped out of the way like a heartbeat on a monitor. Jerking backward into a parking spot, she said, “They might be gone tomorrow.”
“You know I live on the other side of town, right?” I said as we stepped out of the car.
She slipped a pair of sunglasses on her face. “I took a wrong turn.”
That we’d stumbled on the notoriously fickle trees while they were in peak bloom was astonishing.
I’d lived there my whole life but always missed them, arriving either too early (buds shut and green) or too late (petals strewn on the ground).
But today they were like the postcards: a true pink, not white as they sometimes were, quivering in the wind on thin branches.
When I was little, I thought the Washington Monument was a rocket ship. With its red blinking lights at the tip, it reminded me of one. We passed a flock of tourists riding electric scooters on the way to the water, which wrinkled with sunlight.
Nia’s expression was one I hadn’t seen before. “Tristan’s birthday’s in a few weeks.”
I pretended like I didn’t know this. “Oh, wow!”
She looked at me like I both amused and exhausted her. “I hope this doesn’t freak you out. I mean it as a compliment.”
“Okay.”
“I think he finds you attractive.”
I coughed loudly. Nia slapped my back, but it hurt instead of helped.
“Anyway, now that I know you’re poly, I don’t feel so weird asking you this.”
“Asking…?”
She smiled shyly, turning to look across the river at the Romanesque dome of the Jefferson Memorial. She picked a cherry blossom off the ground and grazed it with her fingertips. “I want to do something for his birthday.”
“Like a pizza party?”
“No. A threesome. It could be fun. I mean, we’re friends, aren’t we? And you know Tristan! Would you want to?”
I felt that dizzy, dreamlike vertigo you might experience a few times in your life, suddenly seeing everything with painful detail (the tiny hair on the beauty mark on Nia’s chin, the ant crawling in the vein of a leaf by my foot).
I’d felt this sensation’s inversion when my dad shot himself, that foggy filminess falling over the world.
I thought of Nia’s mouth on mine, Tristan’s hands on me.
There were worse fantasies to come to fruition.
But then: Jay. I had begun to face the fact that I might miss him more than I needed to act out being polyamorous, that maybe I could just live with it squirreled away inside me the same way people lived with noncancerous cysts or IBS.
There was also how Tristan had looked at me that last time we’d had sex, like I was an incarnation of his ego’s worst fears.
The silent horror I felt humming through his body when I refused to say what he wanted to hear.
Not only did he not understand me, he didn’t seem to want to, only wanted me in whatever narrow way suited his worldview.
Though what was stopping me from doing the same?
Nia tucked the blossom in her hand behind her ear. “You can say no, of course. But if we do it, I want it to be a surprise.”