“Are you okay?” he whispered against her neck before trailing it with his tongue. No, she was not okay. “Are you?” His hands wrapped around her and started unbuttoning her crisp, white shirt. She slowly whirled around before he could get the last button unclasped. She hadn’t let him finish that task, and he let out air, as if frustrated. Then he grabbed at the last button, quickly unhooking it while she faced him.
Brittany ran her palm up his cheek to look at him, feel him. On cue, his eyes turned toward the motion, but she moved his face back to look at him. He regarded her quietly. She assumed he was searching for clues on her face so she didn’t have to say yes or no. She was beginning to learn Jonny’s mannerisms too.
She stroked his cheek silently, heating it up beneath her palm. “Show me what you’ve learned.” As if unleashed from a cage, he tightened his hands around her waist and crushed her against him. His tongue swept into her mouth with slow, calculating strokes. Just the way she liked it. Just like he did back in Alexandria the first time they got together.
High in his watchtower, they wrestled for air, the world outside locked away. They started shedding clothes. First, her white shirt and pencil skirt. Then his T-shirt, which she helped him out of, leaving his hair in disarray. His mouth covered hers once more then traveled to her bare shoulder, his teeth lightly grazing its length. She murmured in response. His mouth continued along her collarbone.
“Show me what you want,” he said softly.
The words overwhelmed her like an anvil on her chest. She pulled back, forcing his head up to engage with eyes darkened by pupils twice their size. He was panting, and he searched her face, confused. Brittany twisted her lips, trying to hold back tears. Constant crying wasn’t going to make him go away.
“I’m sorry…” he began to say, but she reached her fingers up to his mouth to stop him.
“No,” she began. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“You keep crying,” he pointed out, a finger reaching up to wipe those droplets that kept sending him off course.
“No, I’m not sad. I really am not.”
“So, you’re happy?”
Those words had never crossed her mind with him, and she rebuked them immediately. This wasn’t how she’d imagined happiness could look. She made a mental note to call up her therapist once she was back in the U.S. Maybe she could help Brittany exorcise the hold Jonny had over her.
She never answered him. Instead, she pulled his head down for a kiss, which he hungrily accepted, fusing her lithe frame to his once more. Brittany gave him one more lesson to file away. She didn’t like to be talked to while in the moment, because it could cause tears.
Two hours later, Brittany announced she was starving.
“Oh shit!” Jonny popped out of bed, pulled on his boxer briefs, and padded out on tiptoe, trying not to wake any ghosts floating around. Brittany chuckled from beneath cotton-candy-soft sheets. She could wear this life comfortably. If only she and Jonny could lock themselves up in this watchtower forever while she taught, tested, and graded him.
A few minutes later, he came back carrying a tray loaded with their chicken and sides. He rushed back out to get plates and cutlery, and for the next few hours, Brittany told him about her life. Her family, her travels, her brief stint as a model, her dreams of becoming a fashion designer. He listened, smiling occasionally. For Jonny, it seemed, each smile was his brain hitting the “save” button. Jonny shared about his family. His parents had retired early. They buried themselves in charities and concerts, socializing with the rest of society’s upper echelon.
“You will like Svea,” he said, mentioning one of his sisters while sketching up and down her thigh with his fingers. “I think you two have a lot in common.” He dipped low to kiss the trail while she twirled his wheat-colored hair around her fingers.
“Really?”
He hummed positively against her thigh.
“And Antonia?”
“She scares me.” He laughed. “She’s the oldest. Fifty years old. Svea is forty-six. I was the mistake.” Right; Brittany remembered she was three years older than him—he was thirty-five.
“God, you make me feel like a cougar.” She snickered. He grazed her thigh with his teeth in response.
“I like this cougar.” His mouth worked its way up from her right thigh. Once it took a left turn inward, Eva’s plans for them that afternoon went to hell.
But dinner at Yamamoto, he would not compromise on. He wanted her to experience his favorite place properly, he said. She got up to shower, and he joined her. She taught him a few more things she liked under powerful sprays, and soon, they were dressed for dinner. He donned a black shirt and slicked wet hair off his face. Brittany pulled out a black wrap dress she always carried and threw on colorful beads. Once in the elevator, Jonny turned to her and pressed a close-lipped kiss to her mouth.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured against them, his forehead resting on hers. She received his kiss then cleaned red stain off his lips with her thumb, not wanting to leave a trace of her on him.
* * *
One week later, Brittany clasped her hands in front of her, cherry-red lips spread wide, boat hat perched, ready to welcome passengers onto her flight to Miami, Florida. Her jaw dropped when Jonny strode on board.
“I never should have given you my schedule,” she whispered between clenched teeth, giving his chest a light, playful punch. Jonny kissed her in front of her colleagues and the line he was holding up, enveloping them in awwws.
Brittany’s summer became a heady blur filled with Jonny in every sense. He had made it past his one-month infatuation period and now trailed Brittany all over throughout the month of June. Hopping on with her in London or flying to DC to meet her there if he couldn’t sneak a ticket on board her cabin. Besides his London inner circle of Eva and Frank, Brittany had begged him to keep their trysts under wraps. She wasn’t ready to go public, and he told her he would wait. He didn’t want anyone else but her.
He aced his tests, drawing on ways she liked to be pleased. In Alexandria, he’d learned how to taste her just right. In London, he’d learned how she wanted foreplay. In Miami, he’d perfected his rhythm against her. In New York, he’d learned how to scrub her back in a bathtub to make her purr like his cougar. Their joke. In Los Angeles, she’d demanded he show her what he liked, and he’d died a painful death from pleasure.
July brought more of the same, with longer stretches of listening. He told her about his childhood and how his quirks had caged him. His parents had assured him he was fine and that he should ignore them. His mannerisms and the other children’s mockery had threatened to eat him from the inside out until he learned his strengths and how to use them. He still couldn’t read people perfectly, but he learned Brittany. How to please her, pleasure her, and make her cry those happy tears again.
That was why he stared at her in confusion as she moved languidly atop him one Friday night in early August in London. Canary Wharf had turned into a blanket of glowworms in the dark night. She’d been sitting astride him, his hands locked on her waist, and he’d been moving against her just the way she liked. Slow thrusts with a small rise and back down again. This time, she seemed distracted, and he stopped, his mouth open, trying to catch his breath.
“What’s wrong?” His voice was labored. She sensed he was so close. She shook her head.
“Nothing.” The words barely came out. Brittany made a retching motion, sprang off him, and bolted toward the toilet.
She was cowering over the toilet bowl when she heard him softly push open the door. Her body convulsed in sobs as she held on to the lid for oxygen. They’d eaten the same sea bass for dinner, so she couldn’t have become sick so quickly. She wasn’t drunk either.
That was when she heard Jonny take in a deep gulp of air before softly muttering the words, “Oh, fuck…”
MUNA
The first night Muna slept in her own bed in that Tensta apartment, she’d woken up the next afternoon. Morning was long gone, along with both Khadiija and Yasmiin. Shock had initially swallowed her when she’d glanced at her phone. One twenty-three p.m. She had slept an entire morning away.
She heard a whizzing sound, quickly dressed herself, and dashed to the front door. Two white envelopes were lying on the floor in front of it. Picking them up, she read her name out loud.
“Muna Saheed.” Her mail. She was getting letters sent to her own place. And it felt so good. Both letters had been from Skatteverket, the tax authority, sending confirmation of her personal identification number and registration in her new district, Spånga-Tensta. They might as well have been handwritten love notes. She held them to her nose, closed her eyes, and savored their sweet paper smell.
Over the next month, Muna floated in a state of nesting. Her room became her cocoon, and she filled it with colorful knickknacks. She rarely ventured downtown. Downtown sucked money. She scraped decor together from secondhand stores, African shops, and Middle Eastern kiosks dotting Tensta.
Her first deposit from the social insurance agency—Försäkringskassan—had made her feel like a millionaire. About 6,800 kronor as her monthly benefit and 4,700 kronor for maintenance. Their apartment was already subsidized. The numbers—11,500 kronor—blazed from the page like neon lights. Wealth beyond her dreams.
When she received that first confirmation slip of the deposit, she rushed to her room and pressed her lips to the photo of a laughing Ahmed carrying the black-faced sheep on his shoulders. The picture was fastened onto the board hanging above her desk with a magnet. Next to it were photos of Caaliyah, Aaden, and Mohammed. Her desk now had textbooks for her Swedish class neatly stacked on it.
When she pulled back from the kiss to assess the magnetic board, her smile died. Everyone she had ever loved was dead, their smiles frozen in time. As she stepped back to assess it in its entirety, she realized her magnetic board of photos was a virtual graveyard.
Khadiija and Yasmiin became sisters to Muna more quickly than she had anticipated. As the youngest of the lot, Muna never wanted to be alone. She clung to Khadiija, the oldest at twenty-five, whenever she went shopping or went to the community center to relax and meet new Somali friends. She even hung around the Lebanese restaurant where Khadiija worked washing dishes and wiping up after customers.
Muna would follow Yasmiin, twenty-one, to the Ethiopian hair salon in the square where she worked as a hairdresser and did makeup. Their talk always revolved around men. This fine man. That hot man. Muna thought Yasmiin was obsessed with men. Then while massaging leave-in conditioner into Muna’s spongy Afro, Yasmiin confessed she’d met someone.
“I can’t share too much yet.” Yasmiin beamed at her sister-friend through the salon’s finger-greased mirror. “You will meet him one day…if I still like him.”
Khadiija and Yasmiin hadn’t gone into that space of complete trust with her. The space where pain flowed freely and despair suffocated them. They didn’t ask one another either. Their bedrooms felt like individual safe houses to Muna, off-limits to one another, and the living room stayed their communal place. Sisters when sitting in open spaces, strangers once locked behind each bedroom door.
Muna knew she would have to be patient with them. Dredging up memories and facing reasons people fled demanded time. The same way she’d waited months for Ahmed to hand her his life.
Khadiija and Yasmiin would do the same in due time, she hoped.
Once in a while, Gunhild with the kind eyes from the district checked in on her. Sometimes, they met up for lunch at the café at Tensta konsthall or took in an exhibition at the gallery. Other times, the woman dragged Muna on long walks, the younger woman struggling to keep up.
On one occasion, they met up for fika—a coffee break. Muna took a bite of her kanelbulle. Cinnamon bun. It tasted stale, but she continued chewing softly as she listened to Gunhild.
“I worry about you,” Gunhild said, abandoning her own bun after the first dry bite. Beyond getting an update on her weekly Swedish classes, Muna still hadn’t found a job. But it had barely been a month since she left Solsidan. She wondered why Gunhild was hurrying her up. After all, she was still basking in the fact that she had a home.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Muna replied, her eyes not quite meeting Gunhild’s.
“Of course I worry about you. You have no family here in Sweden.”
“I have been running for so long,” Muna said. “I just want to enjoy the feeling of standing still.”
July rolled around, and Muna slipped into a long funk. She missed sweeping around the verandah at Solsidan, a place now radio-silenced and parked in her memory, almost as if she’d dreamt it all along. As menial as the work had been, she’d had purpose. Holed up here in Tensta, she began to wonder if it would all end with her going up in flames too. Boredom was certainly rubbing at her, trying to spark a fire. She still moved in a daze. The trauma she had endured often manifested itself as quiet tears once she was locked in her room, staring at her graveyard of photos.
* * *
One day, while at Yasmiin’s salon, Muna let out a sigh before ranting about her boredom. She was sitting in the corner of the salon, resting her cheek on a palm.
“Don’t worry,” Yasmiin said. “I will help you.”
Two months later, she was sitting in Kungshallen, the underground food court opposite Hötorget in the center of Stockholm, where the family of a Turk named Yagiz ran a doner kebab stall.
“Hmm,” Yagiz mumbled as his dark eyes roamed over Muna. He had pulled himself from shearing thin slices of kebab. “Do you have to wear that gown? Is a hijab not enough now?” he questioned her in heavily accented Swedish. He was a handsome man with jet-black hair worn like a rooster and shaved at the sides. He also sported a handlebar moustache. “We’re in Sweden, for God’s sake. The freest place on earth!”
Muna wasn’t sure how to respond to him.
“Look.” Yagiz gave his moustache a quick stroke. “I want to help you, but this is an issue. The offices we clean are for rich businesspeople. You can’t be roaming around in your jilbab during the day when they’re having important meetings.”
Muna wondered if her brother in Islam had lost his faith.
“If you wear that gown, you have to work at night to clean the offices,” he explained. “This means going home at midnight. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“Do you want to be walking alone at night? Hmm?” Yagiz asked.
She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to be going home at night if she had other options.
“Good. Only the scarf, okay? I don’t want Allah’s wrath on me,” Yagiz said, attempting a joke. Muna didn’t smile. He pushed himself to his feet, wiped his hands on the apron around his waist, and summoned Muna to follow him. They walked back to his stall, where he ordered one of his workers in rapid Turkish to wrap up a doner kebab to go for Muna.
“Here.” He handed the warm paper bag to her. She thanked him.
“So, I will give you the day shift on Monday, Wednesday, Friday,” he said, pulling out his smartphone as well as a cigarette, which he hung between his lips in anticipation. He tapped, slid, and scrolled until he found his timetables.
“Tomorrow, go to this address at six a.m. sharp.” He rattled off an address. “You will meet the others at the front door. They’ll bring a shirt for you.”
She nodded. “How will I know them?” she asked.
Yagiz responded with a deep roar that vibrated between them, his laughter telling her all she needed to know.
“Remember, only scarf!” he stressed before turning to leave for a smoke outside.
KẸMI
When Kemi arrived back in DC after her May visit, she imm
ediately looked for a property management company. She planned to hold on to her condominium as an investment and rent it out until she fell out of love with Sweden and fled back. She also decided she would leave her car behind. Stockholm’s public transport had been impeccable when she’d been there. Plus, riding around on buses, trains, and ferries would give her an opportunity to explore and integrate quicker.
“That’s all!” David, a property manager she’d retained, grabbed the form Kemi had just signed and glanced over it one last time. “You don’t have to worry about a thing ’cause you’re in good hands.” The cliché slid off his tongue.
They had been sitting around her glass-top dining table in her condominium. Earlier, David had roamed around, clearly impressed. She wasn’t sure if he was floored by its size and decor or if he was confounded that she owned it. She suspected the latter, because he had double-checked the year she was born.
“This place will go like hotcakes with renters,” he continued, picking from his stash of boilerplate one-liners. “I mean, the location, the ridiculous size, the view, fully furnished…” His eyes swept the dining room before settling back on Kemi.
“So, what is it you do for a living again?” he asked. Anger brewed deep within her.
“You can read it on the form I just signed,” Kemi said tersely. David sniggered before getting to his feet.
“And it’s Sweden, right?” he asked, once on his feet.
“Yep.” She also got on hers and led him toward the front door.
Her whirlwind trip to Stockholm had been packed with activities and meetings. After her initial introduction to her new working team, Ingrid had pulled up a PowerPoint presentation and spent the next hour and a half detailing how they worked, their communications strategy, current projects, and where Kemi would fit in nicely to tie it all up with a rainbow-colored bow tie.
After which, Ingrid added, “Oh, you’ll be reporting to me, by the way.”
In Every Mirror She's Black Page 11