Everybody thought Kazeem Kamais was a good guy because he wore these bullshit glasses and studied medicine and owned a weird amount of knitwear for somebody who wasn’t a thirty-six-year-old Lit professor, but really he was a dick, and the worst kind because he was a dishonest dick. Pyramus knew he was also a dick, but at least he was a truthful one. He never played girls. They knew what it was and what he was （in）capable of. It was boring, really: a mother who died during his formative adolescent years and a father who thought grieving should be a private, stoic process, which, in the end, made him seek controlled affection and attention （not too much: he wouldn’t know how to handle it）。 While he held women in deep reverence and respect and truly （on God） thought they were the superior sex, he was unable to form a lasting attachment to them, because: loss. It was textbook, and he knew this because he took a psych module and there was literally a chapter on his abandonment issues. He had highlighted it and the girl next to him had noticed and asked him about it. They had two great weekends together. She said he had great hands, soft but sturdy.
Women came to him for a good time, and he did his utmost to deliver. It was a mutually beneficial agreement, and any misunderstandings occurred only because, well, let’s be real, sometimes women liked to look beneath and behind words to try to find something that they would actually like to hear. He didn’t blame them, and he got it, but it did tend to complicate something that should have remained uncomplicated. Still. He actually liked women. Kazeem, on the other hand, was the kind of asshole who secretly hated them while he pretended to be this woke god who went to the black feminist bookclub, and tweeted ‘black women’ over and over again （nothing else, just ‘black women’）。 That was enough to cement his status as the Good Guy. He was going to be a doctor, after all, so why go through the stress of trying not to be an asshole? It didn’t matter how evolved they were – girls always harboured a primitive desire to date a doctor.
Anyway, Pyramus knew that his neighbour, Thisbe, had a 9 a.m. lecture in the morning, because he always woke up to the sound of her listening to some kind of women’s empowering mantra every Tuesday: ‘You are a queen. You are Lorde, Angelou, Simone, Walker, Hooks, Davis, Morrison, Knowles, Fenty, Robinson-Obama. You will shake the world, you will move the earth, you will be audacious with your essence, you will take up all the space, you will not stay in your lane, you will build new roads—’
Pyramus felt like a bad bitch by proxy now – a powerful, independent woman who don’t take no shit – he even found himself snapping when one of his boys called one of his tings ‘female’。 He felt empowered by Thisbe’s lectures, his world view shifting, but the main point was, if he knew that Thisbe had an early morning lecture the next day （he hadn’t thought his music would wake her, and he felt bad about that: he swore it was at a respectable decibel）， then why didn’t Kazeem? Pyramus didn’t know Thisbe, but he knew that she deserved better than Kazeem.
Pyramus put his headphones on, stuck on his own DJ mix and flopped back in bed. He preferred the music to fill up his room, surround him and envelop him, but this would do. He had only put it on to drown out yet another argument he had with his father over fuck-knows-what-maybe-everything. Through his headphones, Pyramus heard Kazeem drunkenly stumbling around the room. Kazeem was a dick.
Thisbe
Last night Kazeem had dropped in again. They’d had a fight. Actually, it was less of a fight and more of an awakening. Last night, when Thisbe had broached the question of why Kazeem only ever wanted to see her in the dark, unannounced, when in public all he did was nod at her and maybe discreetly grab her ass, Kazeem had said: ‘I want to keep us special, for now. Too much outside pressure will dilute what we have.’ Thisbe didn’t quite bite, because, what, did Kazeem think he was some kind of Hollywood heart throb whose marketability relied on his romantic accessibility? Thisbe wasn’t a dummy. Thisbe knew that she was rounder than the girls that preened around Kazeem and the ones that he flirted with in public. She knew that she was plump in thigh and thick in the hips, plush, dimpled. In the dark, Kazeem squeezed and caressed and sank into it. In public he preferred girls that he could run up to and lift and swing, girls he could fit his arms around easily, covering them completely. Thisbe had a sharp mind and a cushy body, and she couldn’t help but notice that Kazeem had no problem being openly affectionate with girls who were closer to the opposite. She found that they nodded more to the things he said, like ‘we need to redefine what it means to be black’。 One time, Thisbe had questioned why they needed to redefine their blackness and asked him why they couldn’t just be. He’d said that ‘being is too passive’， and when she started to question him further, he’d got his back up, tripping over and tangling his words, because Kazeem wasn’t used to being questioned. He muttered something about a previously non-existent morning lecture and ducked out.