“Nile—”
“Just talk. Come on, K. We used to talk.”
So, with Nile propping up my stumbles, I swayed to an upstairs bedroom that smelled foreign, something I would later recognize as boy. We were sat on the bed and Nile seemed unable to tell me how much he missed me without rubbing the small of my back and it felt good, so good, and it was like he couldn’t tell me how sorry he was for what I was going through without pushing my braids behind my neck and whispering it against my throat, and it felt delicious, so delicious. Lips moving until they were so close to my skin that he was enunciating against it. He told me through low growls how much I deserved to feel good for once, because I’d been going through it, and when he said it, it felt like the truth, it felt right, even though something felt wrong.
He said he was sorry Rianne had been distant with me lately and he attempted to make up for the distance by proxy with his hand slipping ever so slightly up my top to rub against my waist, slowly and then quickly. He said, between too-hot neck kisses, as he began to push me down on the bed, body on mine, that she was jealous, because she knew he’d liked me first and she couldn’t handle it.
At the mention of Rianne’s name, I’d frozen; it pulled me back to dispassionate reality, yanked me out of the fantasy of forgetting.
“No. Nah, nah, Nile.”
I pushed him off. My hand was waving sloppily, reflexes weakened by cheap vodka. “We need to stop. We aren’t doing this. I’m not doing this. She’s my mate. That’s my girl.”
Nile’s molten eyes hardened to a blade, his smile stiffening, mask slipping. “But is she yours? You should hear the shit she says about you. Like how she thinks it’s mad that someone as blick as you could ever think you had a chance with me.”
My vision was blurry and I couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or the tears, or if maybe at this point my tears were pure ethanol, stinging their way out of my clumsily lined eyes.
“Shut up. You’re lying. . . . Stop chatting shit.”
“I’m the only one not lying to you, babe. You think Lysha and Yinda ain’t in on it? They talk behind your back, K. I’m the only one that’s real with you.”
I was at the edge of the bed panting, everything I had tried to forget rushing to the fore, my mum being sick now mingling with being called blick, like being dark-skinned was as pathological as what was happening to my mum’s cells, but even worse, a scourge, somehow, a sin. A sickness and a sin.
Nile posed himself as cure and absolution. He was kissing my neck again, and I turned my face so he could kiss the feeling out of me because I was feeling too much, and it didn’t feel like a first kiss, no fireworks, not a candle lit, rather it was like a tourniquet around a wound to staunch the flow of blood.
It wasn’t enough. Even as his hands slipped up my bra and squeezed and I let him, hoping he would squeeze all the feeling out, it wasn’t enough. It was wrong, so wrong. This experience wasn’t mine. It was his. He wasn’t mine, he was Rianne’s. None of what was happening belonged to me. I wasn’t in control. I pushed him off, for good this time, sloppily but stronger now, because even though his tongue hadn’t lapped up feeling, it had soaked up some of the alcohol and sobered me.
He was saying something about me not telling anyone, but I barely heard him and ran out of the room, out of the house, past Lysha and Yinda, all the way back to my home.
I’d texted Rianne the next day.
Keeks: I’m sorry, so sorry. Something happened. I don’t know how to say this. Can I see you? I was drunk and confused. He said things. I shouldn’t have done it. He said you said—no excuse—but did you say? Did you say that?
It was too late. News travels fast when everyone in your community is in possession of a small rectangular computer that fits in your back pocket. Nile got ahead of the narrative quickly. I got upset about my mum so he took me upstairs to get away from it all, he said. Brother type, no motives. I was drunk, sloppy, messy. I’d tried it on with him. I’d got upset when he rejected me—like, come on, did I expect that he’d be into me when he had Rianne. “LOL.”
Nile had got to Rianne before I did, that night apparently. He knew I would tell her. Rianne called me words I’d only just got the confidence to think, via text. I felt like I deserved them. Red hot rage in text bubbles and then an immediate wall of ice—I’d been blocked.
The school had given me a home-schooling option for that half of the term because of my mum. I’d never taken them up on it before because I felt like I needed the normality of school. Laughable. I stopped going to school. My grades were good enough, and we were at the stage of the term where everything was essentially exam prep. Aside from exams, I didn’t have to see anyone. Allegiances had been quickly drawn: Yinda defaulted to Rianne, understandably. Lysha too, on the surface, but she texted me a couple of times after a few weeks of radio silence.