Though my other roommate had approved of my dismissing Abdul, she was less than excited about my new romantic direction. She rolled her eyes at the increasingly tall stack of Pat’s notes I kept on my desk.
One Wednesday, when Keisha was away at Bible study, Roz warned me, this was dangerous. If I wasn’t careful, I’d get a bad reputation. I knew how vicious the gossips could be.
“You can’t be dating two Gammas on the same campus,” she said. “And definitely not line brothers.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Abdul and I broke up.”
“You know what I mean! Ailey, you have to leave Pat alone.”
“No, I don’t. I can do whatever I want to. I’m grown, and this is America.”
“All right, then. Keep on with it, with your American ass. You gone be at Bible study with Keisha and the rest of them Jesus-freak bitches who can’t get no man.”
“Keisha is gorgeous! She can date whenever she wants to!”
“But the rest of them heifers can’t. They ugly, and that’s why they saving it for the Lord.”
*
On Valentine’s Day, Keisha handed me a red envelope. Inside, there was a fancy card covered in velvet and a snippet of a poem by Léopold Senghor. She whispered, Pat was waiting for her in the library stacks, in case I wanted to respond. While she giggled, I scrawled quick, English words on notebook paper, and handed it to her.
Thirty minutes later, Pat and I met in the parking lot of the waffle place on the highway. When Pat drove up, he rolled down his window, signaling me to follow him. After another forty minutes driving toward Macon, he pulled off to a dirt road.
The trailer in the clearing belonged to his family, and so did the surrounding twenty acres. Pat’s grandfather used to go out there to clear his head. Since his passing, the trailer had sat there, unused. Inside was dusty, and though there weren’t any roaches, a few large, anonymous bugs of the woods had found their way in. But the baby-blue sheets on the double bed were clean. They were the thick, all-cotton kind you used to see in homes of the elderly, before they gained popularity with the wealthy.
I pulled him to the bed and stripped off my pants and underwear. Closed my eyes when he began to rub his face between my legs. He licked and hummed, and whispered, he wanted to live down there. I tasted so sweet. I tasted like candy. Then I watched as he pulled on a condom. His look of joy, his startled laughter as he entered me. When he declared that he loved me, I told him that I felt the same way. When he asked, was I really sure? Please don’t play with his feelings. Please, and I reassured him: I loved him so much.
Afterward, there wasn’t a television to keep us company, but we wouldn’t have watched anyway. We cuddled tightly, as Pat recited from memory the poem by Léopold Senghor he’d slipped into my Valentine’s card. He’d told me that it was supposed to be political, about Africa’s independence, but every time Pat recited the line in French about the nude Black woman, I’d get a naughty thrill. The way he rolled his Rs elated me.
My fears were not dispersed, though. That if I was seen with Pat in public, shame would be splashed on me. That I would be called a frat freak, hopping from one Gamma to the next, though Abdul had moved on since early January. He was dating a sophomore girl, but for weeks, I spent far too much on gas money, following Pat down the highway, instead of riding along in his car.
When Mrs. Stripling confronted me one morning, asking where had I been sleeping nights, I told her I was experiencing a family emergency. I produced a teardrop to lend my story veracity, and she took my hand. God was able, she assured me. He would work everything out.
One morning during spring break, I woke up in the trailer to find Pat lying beside me, a troubled look on his face. When I nudged him and asked what was wrong, he asked, was I embarrassed by him?
“I know I’m not like Abdul, all diesel and everything.”
“I don’t want him, Pat. You are way cuter than him, and you make a great cup of instant coffee. The coffee is actually why I dig you so much.”
“Don’t you make fun of me, Ailey. You want me to eat you out in private, but you’ll pretend you don’t know me in public.”
“That was such a rude thing to say!”
“You’re the rude one! You hurt my feelings, Ailey! You really do!”
Before we headed back to Thatcher, I told him, don’t turn right off the highway. Keep going and follow me. Since he thought I was ashamed of him, I had something to show him. At the front door of Uncle Root’s house, I introduced Pat as my new boyfriend, and the old man exclaimed, this was a lovely surprise.