Ahmed smiled. He liked them direct. What do you want? he replied.
More nights like that. You nko?
I want to give you what you want. Let me call you when I get back.
Okay. Where are you going?
He paused. Thursday was entering Crescent. They were nearing Ruqaiyyah’s house. What the fuck am I thinking?
Still in the highland. Talk later.
He turned off his phone. Thursday wound down his window and exchanged a few low words with the security officers, then the gate slid open. Ruqaiyyah’s car was parked against the wall, but there were no other cars there. She used a limo service for her parties, not Kalu’s because Ahmed had told her not to involve him.
They drove past the main house to the guesthouse in the back and Thursday killed the engine, then leaned his seat back. Ahmed sat for a minute before unbuckling his seat belt, wondering if this was really what he wanted to do. He hadn’t been thinking about it; it had been a reflex to come here, an escape when everything else felt like walls, when even Timi hadn’t been enough for whatever irritation was scraping inside him. The front door opened and Ruqaiyyah stepped out. She’d dyed her hair blue since the last time Ahmed had seen her, and it was in short bright twists sticking out of her head, her eyes black, her mouth a faded red under her doorframe. When she leaned forward, the white dress she was wearing hung away from her body, shadows milling about on her chest.
“Who’s there?” she called out. The car sat in the pale light of morning, and Ahmed sat inside of it, his hand trembling. Ruqaiyyah walked out into the driveway, her feet bare against the gravel. She wasn’t afraid, Ahmed realized, probably because she recognized his car. As she reached his window, Thursday wound it down from the driver’s side, exposing Ahmed’s face to her. Ruqaiyyah was tall, like a swaying palm tree, and she leaned both her arms on the ledge of his window, pushing her face close to his.
“So you finally found your way here,” she said.
Ahmed nodded and his car door clicked as Thursday unlocked it. Ruqaiyyah took the handle and opened it, then reached in and wrapped her hand around his trembling one. Her skin was cool, and Ahmed flinched at her touch. She tightened her hand on his and tugged on it.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Come inside.”
He swung his legs out of the car without looking back at Thursday, and Ruqaiyyah shut the door behind him.
“When should I come back?” asked Thursday through the open window.
“When we call you,” she answered. He started the car again as Ruqaiyyah led Ahmed into the house. Faint strains of highlife wound out of the open door as they walked through it, and Ahmed felt his hand relax inside the curve of Ruqaiyyah’s skin. She’d been inviting him to her guesthouse every full moon for the past year and a half. Regularly. With no impatience when he didn’t reply, when he replied and said he couldn’t make it, when he said he would come, then canceled at the last minute or never canceled at all, just didn’t show up. And now he was here, sweat dry on his skin and under his arms, his throat tight. He would’ve felt alone if it wasn’t for her hand that refused to release his. The door closed and Ahmed blinked, clearing his eyes for a morning that he knew was about to feel like a never-ending night.
four
Saturday, 3:07 AM
Ijendu’s mouth was a copper cave, a soft terror.
Aima reeled from her kiss, spinning in the back seat of the car as their entangled limbs slid over the dark leather. Ijendu’s driver, Godwin, didn’t even look into the rearview mirror. Briefly, Aima wondered how many other times this had happened, how many times her best friend had fastened her teeth to another woman’s neck and sucked on the skin there. Enough that Godwin knew not to blink. Did she care? Ijendu’s teeth were small bones scraping silver across her throat, and Aima closed her eyes to watch pinwheels burst behind her eyelids. No one had told her that godless places could feel like this. It felt like she had twenty hands, and Ijendu’s warm flesh was under all of them, the peach silk of her dress crumpled, shoved up and aside, a thigh thrown across Aima, a rocking hip bone.
The car took a turn with speed and the girls spilled against one of the doors, giggling as their shoes fell off. Ayra Starr was playing over the radio, loud and aggressive and sexy. Ijendu pressed her palm to the ceiling of the car and looked down at Aima.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Aima wasn’t sure if she could form words with her tongue, but she reached between Ijendu’s thighs and hooked the lace of her thong to one side, then sank two fingers into her up to the second knuckle (What color was lava? What texture?). She watched as her best friend gasped and threw her head back, stretch of dark brown neck, golden with body shimmer. Ijendu rocked against her hand and moaned loudly as the car pulled up in front of her house. Its windows were tinted, so at least the gateman wouldn’t be able to see what was happening inside. Aima wondered if Ijendu even cared. She was acting as if they were alone, as if the driver was unreal. It was an easy story for Aima to fall into, this unchecked reckless behavior, this open wantonness. Whatever restraints she usually wore bound tightly against her, they were broken open, loosened, almost as loose as she was. She’d been drunk before but never this drunk, never high, never this drunk and high. How could the world be a place? Maybe the driver was a man with spooned-out eyes and perforated eardrums, driving only by memory of how the road felt under the tires of the car, by the vibrations that passed along into the seat and steering wheel. Maybe that was why Ijendu didn’t care that her dress had fallen away to show the demi bra she was wearing underneath, that it was rucked up to show her ass and its rhythm as she ground against Aima (shards of bubblegum) even as the car pulled through the gate.
It was only when they parked that Aima saw Godwin look into the mirror. She wondered what his view was—Ijendu’s hair tossed against the headrest of his seat, her back like a symphony of hungry muscles? She was almost naked, the peach dress rearranged into a wash of silk around her waist. Aima reached her hands around, meaning to pull the dress down and cover Ijendu, especially now that the driver’s eyes were cool and unmoving in the glass (black water). When her hands brushed against the soft skin of Ijendu’s ass, Aima felt an unexpected and harsh desire to grab the flesh, seize it in her fingers, spread Ijendu open for the glass and the black water. Instead, she caressed it for a brief moment before tugging down the peach silk like a curtain. Godwin met Aima’s eyes briefly in the mirror, his gaze as flat as a lizard’s, then he spoke, addressing Ijendu.
“We’ve reached, ma.”
Ijendu giggled and flipped her hair as she twisted her torso around to look at him. “Thank you, Godwin.” He nodded and turned off the car, slipping out of it like a ghost. Ijendu slid off Aima like an otter (oil-slick purple), spilling back into the owner’s corner and rearranging her dress to cover her bra. Her cleavage still strained against the silk, and Aima wanted to lean forward and drag her tongue against the curve of it. Ijendu smiled at her. “Inside,” she said, every syllable crushed with promise. “Leave the shoes.”
They clambered out of the car, unsteady and holding hands, then snuck into the house on tiptoe with stifled giggles.
“Let’s not wake Dike them,” Ijendu whispered, as they climbed up the stairs and spun into her room, two warm bodies, planets orbiting into a collision. Aima felt a brief frisson of worry now that they were truly alone, now that it wasn’t a room of strangers and strobe lights or a rectangle of glass filled with blackwater eyes. It was just her and Ijendu, who was wriggling off the dress, leaving it in a puddle on the carpet, reaching her hands behind her back to unhook the bra. Aima paused, wondering if she was sinking too deep into something that would decimate her, but in that moment of hesitation, the half pill she’d taken before they left the club kicked in—a sweet and vicious riptide of iridescent bells and velvet orange. She sighed and spun around to float onto the bed. Ijendu looked down at her, naked except for her thong, and laughed.
“So, who’s going to take off your own clothes?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips. Aima stared up at her, following the curve of her belly up to her breasts and the clenched darkness of her nipples.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said, her words sliding into each other a little.
Ijendu smiled and jumped on the bed, straddling Aima and putting her face a breath away so she could look down at her. “So are you.” She brushed a few of Aima’s braids off her forehead, and there was a glimmer of memory, of Kalu’s hand doing the same thing in a different time, a different real. There was no space for him in this one, so the memory stuttered, became confused, and gave up, flew away. Aima was floating miles above her sadness; it had no chance of capturing her, locking her in its gutters. Ijendu was made of butterfly wings. “I always wondered about this,” Ijendu said, and Aima reached up a hand to touch her cheek (butter-yellow satin).
“Stop talking,” Aima whispered, and she didn’t say it very well; she meant stop because Ijendu’s words were too loud and real, too much of thought and not enough of blind feelings. But the way she said it sounded overloaded with desire, so Ijendu didn’t notice. She started to pull off the black shorts Aima had on, and together they helped her shimmy out of the gold blouse she was wearing, dragging scraps of lace down each other’s thighs until there was nothing between them but air, and soon, not even that, just wetness and heat and mouths, and Aima fell into the patterned wilderness spilling out of her mind and it was wonderland.
Saturday, 5:15 AM
Ijendu was asleep, her body scattered in the sheets and blankets, her hair strewn over her face. Aima had been lying next to her, eyes closed but still with a world whirling inside them. She could feel her pulse blooming in the side of her head and a slow pressure on her bladder that had her swing her feet off the bed and pad quietly to the bathroom. Ijendu snored behind her, light and peaceful rumblings. The air felt thick, as if she was pushing through it, and when she sat down to pee, it felt like the whole room was slowly but certainly rotating counterclockwise. Her body was sticky in places, wet in others, dried fluids plastered to her skin.
Aima ran the shower as hot as it would go and tied her braids up with shaky hands, then stood under the scalding fall of water and rubbed at her skin. She was too tired to find the soap or a washcloth, and the feel of her palm making circles as steam raised off her arms was almost soothing, almost another place to fall into. Eventually, the water started to cool, so Aima turned it off and climbed out, wrapping herself in a towel. She stood on the bathroom tile for a few minutes, trying to think, trying to hold on to images of the last hour or two, what had happened in the bed with Ijendu, but everything kept slipping. When she reached for Kalu, he slipped away too. There was only her and the bathroom tile, her body that had done things, and the way her nerves felt tight and gritty, enough to counterbalance her exhaustion.
Aima halfway dried herself and pulled on an extra-large T-shirt that was hanging behind the bathroom door. The cotton clung to her body as she walked through the bedroom quietly and slipped out of the door, then down the stairs to the kitchen, looking for some water. The lights hissed briefly when she turned them on, and the refrigerator hummed in a corner, metal and shiny and cool. Aima rested her forehead against it for a moment before wrenching the door open—everything felt thicker and heavier than it had any right to. She poured out a glass of water from a pitcher, then stood leaning on a counter as she drank, feeling the cold worm of it wriggle down her throat. The kitchen window opened out to the back verandah, and Aima noticed there was someone standing out there smoking, a red dot glowing in front of the person’s face. Curious, she opened the back door and stepped out, the warm night air swirling around her legs. Ijendu’s brother, Dike, turned quickly, but his surprise faded once he saw it was her.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. Dike was wearing basketball shorts and a white singlet, his muscles leaping out from under it. He was smoking a joint and sitting on the concrete verandah railing next to a row of hibiscus bushes.
“It’s just me o,” he replied. “Who else were you expecting?”
Aima shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. I thought everyone would be asleep.”
Dike cut his eyes at her. “With the kind of noise you and my sister were making? Are you serious?”
Embarrassment flooded Aima and blood rose heavily into her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her hand tightening around her glass.
