Like a fool, I tried to hail a taxi from underneath the bakery’s awning. Then, when I finally spotted a yellow light, I dashed out into the street so fast I tripped and rolled my ankle on the curb and fell straight into the arms of a man with a sexy buzz cut and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. If it didn’t happen to me, I would swear I’d made it up. Maybe it was the sheer romantic absurdity of it all that sucked me in at first, because this stranger wasn’t my type. Shaun may have a taste for white girls, but I’d never even looked twice at a white guy.
He happened to be staying at the Hilton too, in town for a real estate conference. So we walked back, huddled together beneath his giant umbrella. He asked me to have dinner with him as soon as we made it through the revolving doors to the lobby.
“If I’m going to dinner with you, I’ll need to know your name,” I said, impressed with my attempt at flirting.
“I’m Corey, and you’re Riley.”
He met my confused and slightly panicked expression by pointing to the name tag pinned to my chest.
That night, we ate at a touristy diner in Greektown. There was something disarming and intimate about eating pancakes in one of those curved old booths, where you have to sit nearly side by side like you just ordered breakfast in bed. The whole time, I kept thinking that he must have slipped something in my drink. Otherwise, how could I account for how giddy I felt, bubbly even, drunk off the cheap sparkling wine, and why I kept telling him things, personal, embarrassing things—how I was jealous of Gabrielle’s trust fund and big salary working at Nike; how I say I’m fluent in Spanish, when really I’m passable at best; or how I like to act all worldly when I don’t even have a passport.
Corey had his own confessions, though they were more charming than embarrassing. He talked with a lisp until he was ten; he once failed miserably on an episode of college Jeopardy!; his first sex dream involved Maria from Sesame Street. His favorite movie was The Lion King.
“I cry every single time.”
“Who doesn’t?” I replied.
“Sociopaths,” he said.
With each question he asked, I was more disarmed—and he was full of them, like he didn’t want to waste time on small talk. After dinner, we walked through Grant Park, skipping straight to our romantic histories, six years with a college sweetheart for Corey, ended the year before; three underwhelming relationships for me, if you could even call them that: two lackluster flings in college with dudes who didn’t worry too much about me not letting them in—it was enough just to be a pretty light-skinned girl with long hair—and then Alex, a fellow reporter in Joplin. That yearlong relationship was maybe the closest I’d ever come to love, but that was still eons away from the actual feeling. Sometimes I wondered if I was even capable of falling in love. I actually said that to him. Out loud. I had never vomited up so much personal information to a stranger before. It was an out-of-body experience for me, even more so when we headed back to his hotel room, which at some point in the evening became an unspoken inevitability.
When Corey slipped his hand in my pants before we’d even made it to his room, we were both shocked at how wet I was. It felt like my own body had betrayed me with this evidence of my desire. I would have been embarrassed by how primal it was, I would have been concerned about the cameras in the elevator and who might be watching, reminding myself, Nice girls don’t do this—had I been capable of having any thoughts and feelings beyond This, now. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t even care that after two hours of sex I’d sweated out my blowout. The entire night, I was a stranger to myself, free of any and all inhibitions.
Even thinking about it now brings a stirring between my legs. I press a throw pillow into my lap as if to muffle any lingering lust.
When I’d woken the next morning in Corey’s suite, sore and spent, it had felt like waking from a fever dream, or what I imagine a heroin bender must feel like. I hobbled around, naked, to collect my clothes that had been scattered around the room, reaching under the bed for my bra, all while Corey watched me with this look, like he could see right through me. I didn’t want him to look at me like that. I didn’t want to feel the way I did. I didn’t want to date a white guy. I didn’t want a long-distance relationship. As I dressed, I explained that as best as I could （except for the white-guy part）。
“Okay, Riley,” Corey said, in a tone I couldn’t read. Playful? Resigned? Annoyed? “It sounds like you know best. At least kiss me goodbye.”
I leaned over the bed to give him a peck. Before I could pull away, he grabbed my face and drew me closer, his tongue probing mine, until I surrendered completely, too shaky and weak to resist. When I finally managed to tear myself away, I didn’t trust myself to say goodbye; I just flew out of the room. Not an hour later, after I’d showered away all the last traces of sex and chalked it up as a once-in-a-lifetime blip that no one needed to know about, I received a text.
I’m booking a flight to Birmingham. You can’t get rid of me that easily. We have to see where this goes.
I both loved and hated this about Core: his ability to proceed as if everything was going to fall into place for him, because it always had—the privilege of being a good-looking white guy from Connecticut. His confidence bordered on arrogance, and it was sexy as hell when it wasn’t infuriating. In any case, his Jedi mind tricks worked. Nine months later, I was introducing him to my family the weekend before Thanksgiving. God, how I had dreaded that visit. But then, there I was, watching Corey taking in our “Wall of Pride,” the long hallway between the front door and the living room, every square inch covered in family portraits and the requisite photo of Martin Luther King Jr., along with framed mementos of Black excellence and history: the New York Times from the day Obama was elected president, two poems by Maya Angelou, a poster with a listing of Black inventions, etc. I explained the origins of the wall, parroting Momma.
“The world outside may try to tell you that you’re less than, but as you come and go from this house, you’re going to look at this wall and remember who you really are and who you can be.” It was practically the family slogan.
Corey proclaimed the display “very cool.” I was busy wondering if he’d ever even been inside a Black person’s home before and why I’d never asked him this, when he leaned in for a closer look at the inventor poster.
“You know, it was a Black man who created the recipe for Jack Daniel’s whiskey,” Corey said. “Nathan Green, it was his creation.”
By this point I was used to Corey being a fountain of random facts, but this one endeared him to my parents, who were watching from the hall. I let myself enjoy the tiniest bit of relief that this might go well.
I hadn’t expected Corey to be so at ease at my family’s table, though he was, completely, gamely submitting to piles of food and some friendly ribbing. （“I bet you never had grits before, have you, son?” Daddy asked. He hadn’t.） I was the one on edge. I tried to calm myself by refilling glasses of iced tea and ferrying plates of food back and forth to the table. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with this picture, that I was doing something illicit, like the first time I drank under my parents’ roof or cursed or got my belly button pierced with Jen at that grimy shop on South Street.