Layla chews on her lower lip for a minute while she finishes removing her coat, giving me a second to run my gaze over her, checking for little things. She cut her hair again and straightened it so it flows down her back. She’s dressed conservatively in a modest gray sweater and black pants, but they don’t do anything to hide my girl’s beauty. You couldn’t hide it with a garbage bag.
My girl. I really need to stop calling her that. Problem is, I’m not sure if I can.
She hangs her coat on the rack by the door and starts toward me slowly, but soon picks up the pace so that by the time she reaches the bar she’s practically running. I’m grinning like an idiot, already off my stool, arms spread when she launches at me. Her arms lock around my neck as I pick her up in a tight embrace, swaying side to side. My heart squeezes as I bury my nose in her hair. There’s no other way to say it. I’m not really home until I have Layla in my arms.
We hug way longer than anyone who is “just friends” should, but slowly, eventually, Layla steps away, looking sheepish.
I push the brim of my Yankees hat up and smile. “Hey, baby. Goddamn, it’s good to see you.”
I’m rewarded with another grin, and for a second, we just stand there, grinning like idiots in the middle of the bar.
“Can I get you guys something?” Frankie, the bartender, asks.
Layla nods. “Um, sure. I’ll have a—”
“Whiskey diet,” I interrupt her. “And another beer for me. Thanks, Frankie.”
I toss a couple of bills on the bar, a pile of payments that Frankie will tally at the end of the night, just like he always did. Some things never change. It’s actually kind of a comfort.
Layla gives me another shy smile. “You remembered my drink.”
I tip my head. “Of course I do. I remember everything about you, sweetie. So tell me, how you doin’?”
She’s shy at first, but soon I get her to tell me about school, her classes, her job. She dances around the subject of her boyfriend, but that’s okay. I’m going to need another few drinks anyway before I can hear about that.
“That’s crazy,” I say when she tells me about some of the things she’s learning in her South American history class. “You mean they used to measure their heads and everything? Just to prove that black people weren’t as human as the Europeans?”
She nods solemnly. “I know, it’s horrific. We are learning about stuff like that every day. The teacher is kind of militant, but it’s really eye-opening. It’s part of the whole history of colonialism. You start to see how these things became so entrenched in our cultures.”
I have to smile. A year ago, even a few months ago, Layla wouldn’t have been using the term “our” like that. She’d mention her “dad’s culture” or “his country,” like the fact that he’s Brazilian was totally separate from her.
Layla sighs. “I think maybe that’s why my dad is the way he is. Maybe it’s why he never wanted me to learn about Brazilian culture. He’s always telling me how lucky I am that I look white.”
I stroke a finger down the smooth, pale skin of her arm. I can’t help it. She’s so lost in thought that she barely notices.
I’ve never met her dad, but I already knew this about him. I know so many like him, people who want to pretend like the native or the black parts of their heritage don’t exist. They talk up the fact that their ancestors came straight from Madrid or wherever, like they come from the blood of kings. Sometimes it’s little things too, like how K.C.’s grandma always calls Ma and my sisters “negra” as a term of endearment, but never her own kids. She means it kindly, but it was always a way to point out that they were different from her light-skinned family.
Layla taps her mouth, thinking. It’s distracting—she licks a drop of Coke off her top lip, and I spend a good minute and a half staring at the bar and thinking about Abuela before I can sit comfortably again.
She catches me looking and blushes. Fuck, she’s beautiful.
“You have to stop looking at me like that,” she says, turning back to the bar.
I want to hook a finger under her chin and turn her back to me, kiss that blush off her face, or maybe make it darker. I don’t want her to look away from me, ever. Still, she’s right. I shouldn’t touch her like that, or look at her like this.
My mouth, though, has other ideas.
“Did you know it’s an anniversary today?” I ask abruptly. “Ours, I mean. You and me.”
She looks up with wide, blue eyes. “I didn’t know you remembered.”
I scoff. “It’s easy to remember our first date since it was on Valentine’s Day, baby. But even if it wasn’t, I’d never forget that night.” I take another drink of my beer, lost for a second in the memories. “It was snowing, just like tonight, you remember?”
The blush on her face deepens. “I remember.”
I peek at her sideways. If I look at her straight on, she’ll see every dirty thought I have. “You remember how I kissed you in the snow? You had a snowflake on your lip.”
That same lip falls in response, like it’s waiting for me to kiss her again. This is so strange. I’ve never been next to Layla and not been able to kiss her. And yeah, that only makes me want to that much more.
She swallows and turns to her drink. I open my mouth to tease her a little more, but something on her face stops me. Her bright eyes are sad—a new kind of sad, but a sad I recognize. I’ve seen it in my mother and my sisters. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it puts me on edge.
“Your man,” I say softly, though my voice deepens. “Is he good to you?”
“Yes.”
Her voice is low and quick. She continues to study the bar. Call me crazy, but it’s not the most reassuring response in the world.
She looks up, and I freeze. Her eyes, always wide, always as blue as a summer sky, are glossy and bright. They flicker from side to side, like she’s watching for something. She reminds me of those tiny animals in Disney movies who are being chased by the big bad wolf. She looks...timid. Scared.
Immediately, I’m off my stool and reaching for her, but she leans away, like she’s scared of my touch. Like she’s scared of me.
“Hey,” I say. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” she murmurs down to the bar. “It’s just...I probably shouldn’t be here.”
“Why?”
She looks up, her face impatient and annoyed. “You know why.”
I chew on my lip for a second. Fuck it. If we’re already in forbidden territory, I might as well just lay it out there. It’s a kamikaze mission, but I never seemed to care about myself when it came to Layla. Why start now?
“I meant what I said, you know,” I say.
“What’s that?”
She’s trying so desperately to keep it cool and casual, but she’s also failing miserably. Her eyes keep drifting to my lips, and every now and then she sneaks a look at the tattoo that snakes down my arm. My muscles flex in response, as if they crave her touch.
“When I said I love you,” I rush on. “I know it was a long time ago, but I meant it.”
“W-why are you saying this to me?”
Why indeed. I don’t even know.
Yes, the fuck you do, you asshole.
“Because,” I say. “You should know if someone loves you, no matter what you want to do about it. And if that motherfucker you’re with doesn’t treat you like the princess you are, he ain’t worth your time, baby. He doesn’t deserve you.”
She stares at me, blinking for a minute. Her eyelids twitch—that’s how hard she’s thinking. I’d kill to be inside that beautiful mind of hers, to know where her thoughts are at right now. But before I can ask, decision sweeps over her.
“This was a mistake,” she says, pushing off her stool. “I have to go.”
“Layla,” I say, but she’s already winding her way out.
“I have to go,” she calls. She grabs her coat off the rack by the door, and in the space of five seconds, she’s gone.
Layla
“Fuck,” I breathe as soon as I’m outside. “Oh, fuck.”
The snow is falling even harder than before, and in the hour and a half that I was inside the bar, Park Avenue has been covered with an inch of white. The snow quiets the city, and I breathe heavily into the silence, lost in the muted sounds of the street.
What was he doing? What the hell was he doing in there?
The same thing he always does. Makes me fall in love with him. Reminds me of how well we fit. Causes that awful tug-of-war in my heart between what I want and what I know is right. But just when he makes me give in, he’ll leave me all over again.
It didn’t escape me that we had an entire conversation without bickering or getting angry. No hypersensitive accusations or vindictive, cutting remarks. Between Quinn and Giancarlo, it’s been months since I’ve had a conversation that didn’t devolve into some kind of fight. We fight and then we make up, like Giancarlo says. He always says makeup sex is the best kind of sex, but it’s not until I was sitting there with Nico that I realized how badly I wanted the other kind. All the other kinds. And not with Giancarlo, but with him.
Fuck. I’m a terrible person.
I lean against the brick building, still working to catch my breath. I wanted him so badly I could barely speak in there. I had to get out before I did something stupid. Giancarlo would kill me if he knew I was here. I don’t even want to think about what he’d do if he knew the thoughts that were going through my head.
The door to the bar swings open, and Nico steps out into the cold, looking frantically up and down Twentieth. He’s putting on his gloves, but stops and shoves them into his pocket when he spots me holding myself against the wall.
“Why did you do that?” he asks sharply as he bounds down the steps. “Why did you run away from me?”
“I shouldn’t be here,” I say, pushing off the brick. I start walking toward Park.
“Layla,” he calls as his boots pad through the snow. “Goddammit, will you stop?”
He snags my arm and tugs me to a halt.
“What?” I cry. “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything,” he says, but his voice shakes. “Just to see you. To make sure you’re okay. Call me crazy, but I just had this feeling I needed to check on you.”
There goes his gaze again, drifting down my body and up again, resting on my lips. But it’s not a lecherous look, not one that’s purely physical. It bears a hunger I recognize because I feel it too. And it’s only made worse because it’s like I’m standing in front of a buffet I can’t touch. I’m starving, but I’m not allowed a bite.
“Do you not understand how much this hurts?” I say. “How painful it is to see you and know it can’t work? To—”
Before I can continue, he pulls me into him and wraps me up in a kiss. It’s the kind of kiss I didn’t realize I had been missing, that I’d blocked out of my mind, papering it over as best I could with another man’s lips, another man’s touch. Nico’s lips are full and soft, his tongue is wet and firm, and his arms, wrapped securely around my shoulders and my waist, hold me steady, like he knows that without them I’d be lost in the euphoria that only he causes.
A few second later—or maybe minutes, I really can’t tell with him—he breaks away, leaving only a small space between our mouths, where our breaths, white and warm in the chilly night, still mingle together.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he presses his forehead to mine. His eyes close, in a pain that matches the cyclone whipping around my chest.
Finally, what I’ve done hits me. He’s with someone. I’m with someone. And here we are, making out like nothing’s changed. But everything’s changed. And it hurts. So. Bad.
I push him away, putting at least three feet between us.
“I have to go,” I choke out, taking one step back, and then another. “I have to go.”
This time, he doesn’t follow.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Layla
I walk longer than my leather boots can really take in the newly fallen snow, and eventually I end up on the subway, heading uptown. But that feeling in my stomach, that knot of tension that always seems to be there these days, has just doubled, and I don’t seem to want to go anywhere.
Quinn and Shama will both be at the apartment, avoiding the hordes on Valentine’s Day, and I’m tired of fighting with Quinn about my bad decisions. She’ll take one look at my face and know immediately I’ve been doing something I shouldn’t. And then she’ll open her mouth, and Shama will crowd in, and just the thought of it makes me feel claustrophobic.
He kissed me. After he said he wouldn’t. He said he loved me, and then he kissed me, and what’s worse, I kissed him back.
And it felt. So. Good. I hadn’t kissed him since Thanksgiving, since he broke my heart for the third time. I had imagined it plenty in moments of weakness, but oh, God, my imagination really can’t do justice to his mouth, the exact right pressure of it, the way he commands my body with every flick of his tongue. Even through his parka, I could feel his rigid stacks of muscle. It was everything I could do to keep from grabbing his bicep right there in the bar. It strained against the cotton sleeve, the black, tattooed lines just visible under the thin white fabric.
Right there on the train, I gasp at the memory, causing the man reading the New York Post across the aisle to look up, alarmed. Quickly, I switch my gaze to an ad for HPV testing. It features a couple smiling and embracing each other—a black man and a white woman. They look happy, his arms wrapped around her waist. My heart twists. I miss him still. I miss him, and I don’t want to anymore.
The train pulls to a stop at 137th and Broadway, and I get off without thinking, purely on autopilot. I’m staring at the mosaic sign, built into the tiled walls, and it occurs to me that I’m at City College. Well, of course I am. Giancarlo lives here. Still, I find myself walking up the west side of the street instead of the east, and I realize it wasn’t to Giancarlo’s apartment that my body intended to go.
I pause at the corner of 139th. I come up here all the time now, day or night. Giancarlo lives only a few blocks north, where the shops turn from selling quinceañera cakes and Dominican food to stereos and discounted ENYCE threads. Quinn still makes a face whenever I say I’m heading uptown—she thinks of Harlem as untouchable and dangerous, something out of a Spike Lee movie (so what if he mostly films in Brooklyn). She, like so many people I know at my school—like me only a year ago—didn’t really understand that wealth in New York exists on a spectrum, just like anywhere else. And that just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean you don’t have worth.
I look down the street where I used to spend so much time. Like most of the streets up here that jut off Broadway, 139th is poorly lit, with streamers of laundry flapping across the fire escapes like bats, even in the snow. I can just make out the familiar concrete blocks that arch over the entrance, welcoming me there. In my mind, I see the tiny elevator, the black and white tiled floors, the tagged walls of the lobby. I see the narrow gray apartment and the small white room where I spent some of the most contented hours of my life.
He might be there now. He might be sleeping on the couch or something, or in his old room if his sister or brother isn’t staying there right now. He might be there if I rang the buzzer, might forgive me for running away from him, might take me in his arms and continue what we started in the snow...and the hell if my entire body isn’t aching to do just that.
“Hey, ma! What you doin’ tonight, baby?”
A car blasting merengue drives by, and I cower toward a bodega entrance as a couple of guys hanging out the windows whistle. It’s certainly not the first time that’s happened, but there’s something alarming about the catcalls tonight. I feel like prey more than I ever have in this city.
“Move,” I tell myself. “You have to move.” I’m a sitting duck, just standing on the street like this, whether it’s in the middle of the West Village or up here. That’s
the number one rule of New York City: movement.
“NYU?”
I turn around, and there’s Gabe, exiting the bodega, a six-pack of Coke under one arm.
I smile and give a weak wave. “Gabe, hi.”
“Hey,” he says, all friendly as he gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. “You okay? You look lost.”
I shake my head. “No, not lost, just...anyway. I know my way around up here.”
Gabe nods knowingly. “Yeah, I’ve seen you around. Plus, Nico...”
I blush, even though I know I have no reason not to. It’s not just because I was making out with his brother maybe an hour ago, right?
“My, um, boyfriend lives a few blocks from here,” I say, shoving my hands into my pockets and nodding up Broadway. “I was just on my way there to wait for him until he gets off. He works at a club in midtown, I think.”
“Oh, I’ll walk you.”
“No, that’s ok—”
“Yeah, no,” Gabe interrupts as he hooks his free arm through mine and starts walking, fairly dragging me along with him. “My brother would kill me if I let you walk around by yourself at night.”
We walk in silence, letting the noises of the neighborhood replace conversation. West Harlem doesn’t get quiet until really late. It’s only about eleven now. Some of the curio shops are still open, with cheap suitcases piled on the sidewalk, although the owners are starting to bring them in. The big Dominican restaurant on 141st is still mostly full, and music echoes every so often from an opening door.
“So you know Nico’s in town, right?”
“I—” I open my mouth to say that I saw him, but then realize that Gabe would want to know where he ended up. “Yes, I know. He’s here to visit family, right? You guys must be happy to have him back for a little bit.”
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 56