Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel

by Nia Forrester

  He is still struggling to make up for lost time with his son, after being out of contact for almost the entire time he was in San Quentin. Although they seem to have moved past it, there are times when it is painfully obvious just how long he was not around. There are friends, experiences, and references that Kaleem has to explain to him and get him up-to-speed on. It happens, not that frequently, but more often than Ibrahim likes. Kaleem has to tell him who a name he mentions is, or say that yes, actually he has been to that place, seen that movie, or heard a particular fact that Ibrahim is himself only just learning.

  That his son is a man, and not the boy he left behind when he went in still occasionally comes as a complete surprise. Like when Ibrahim hears his deep rumble of a voice on the other end of the phone.

  You hit the pavement today, old head?

  That’s the other surprise, the ease and comfort of Kaleem’s tone sometimes, the way he talks to him like they’re homeboys. Friends. The respect remains, but now there is a collegiality that sometimes takes Ibrahim aback. He doesn’t quite know whether to be happy about it, or feel that he has lost something, missed a developmental step in parenthood.

  He mentioned that feeling to Jada once and she shrugged.

  I’m just happy he speaks to you at all, Ibrahim, she said, ruefully. There was a time when I wasn’t at all sure he would.

  He hears her stirring in the bedroom as he opens and then shuts the front door behind him. He’s not sure whether it was his absence that woke her, or his return so he goes to the bedroom. He finds his wife lying atop the sheets, her smooth, dark brown legs fully exposed along with one bare butt-cheek. She is on her side, one arm extended beneath the pillow, her hair wrapped up tight in a purple satin headscarf.

  As he enters, she turns a little and surveys him.

  “Where’d you go?” she croaks.

  “Free Range.” Ibrahim sheds his shirt, toes off his sneakers.

  “Why?”

  “You were tossing and turning. Wanted to give you a little space.”

  “For that, you could’ve just gone out into the living room.”

  Grunting, he shrugs, then sits on the edge of the bed preparing to remove his pants. It’s still early, and she doesn’t look like she’s planning to get up anytime soon so may as well lie down with her. It’s rare that they get focused togetherness these days.

  “You sure that’s where you were?”

  Ibrahim turns to look at her.

  “Because …” She stops and bites her lower lip to stop herself from continuing.

  “Because what?” he asks gently.

  “Because you’ve been doing that a lot lately. Leaving me in bed asleep and leaving the house. Just going out without warning, and …” Her voice trails off.

  “What’re you askin’ me, baby?” he says, making sure his gaze holds hers.

  He waits, and she says nothing.

  She says nothing, but Ibrahim can feel her contemplating whether to speak her doubts out loud.

  Or maybe she’s wondering whether she really does have doubts. But there are very few reasons a man leaves his woman in bed to go elsewhere. And most of those reasons don’t bode well for a marriage.

  2

  Now

  “Nothing,” Jada says, shaking her head. “I’m not asking you anything. I just … You never seem to want to, I don’t know, be here.”

  Ibrahim is looking at her, reading her expression. He’s the only person in her life who has ever been able to do that, and then come up with precisely the right answers about what she is thinking, feeling, considering. With him, she is exposed.

  “Where else would I want to be?” he asks quietly.

  “I don’t know.” She sits up. “When the baby came and you went to Kaleem’s, it was like you didn’t want to come back. I called you and you seemed so comfortable there.”

  She stops herself because she’s sounding petulant now, childish. Like she has been storing up grievances. But it’s been more than a year since he’s been home, and she is beginning to despair of them ever being to each other what they once were.

  “I just wanted to spend as much time as I could with my grandson. It didn’t have anything to do with you. And you couldn’t come because you had work.”

  “I know.”

  Work. She didn’t even like to think about work, because it was one prominent but unspoken bone of contention between them. She was still the only one in the household with a job.

  It was hard, harder than either of them had ever imagined, for Ibrahim to get a job of his own. He was tall, he was handsome, and he was articulate. That always counted for something to get him past an initial interview and on a few occasions, even to the final stage of the process.

  There would be a few days of optimism, and certainty that things were about to turn around. Then came the disclosure of his criminal record, or the “routine” background checks. And after that, there was often silence. Previously enthusiastic prospective employers ghosted him or explained in a terse phone call that they “decided to go another way.” Some of the jobs were so menial, it was embarrassing that he even needed to consider them, and it was much more humiliating when he was passed over.

  Having another adult in the household since he had come home made things only marginally more expensive—mostly in food costs—and Jada worked more hours to make up the difference. The extra hours translated to missed dinners, late evenings and early bedtimes when she was home. Ibrahim picked up the slack, cooking, doing the laundry, and repairing things around the house until there was nothing left to repair. But Jada could feel his mortification. He didn’t want to be a house-husband. He was not that kind of man. In his eyes, that kind of man wasn’t a man at all.

  “It felt like you wanted to … These days it feels like you want to get away from me.”

  Ibrahim’s face softens. He slides a hand across the space between them and grasps her by the ankle.

  “I already spent more time away from you than I wanted to spend in this lifetime.”

  Moving closer, he rests a hand on her calf, then coming closer still, on her inner thigh.

  Jada holds her breath, anticipating and wanting more.

  They don’t have sex often enough, and the last few times, it felt like they were checking a box. While he pleasures her body, it feels like most of her husband’s mind is a million miles away. He gives her only those parts of himself that are necessary to perform the mechanics of the sex act.

  Here is where I touch her to make her moan …

  Here is where I kiss, lick, enter her …

  But now, he is looking at her, and seeing her. He turns, and kneeling, reaches forward to peel her underwear off from the waist, never losing eye contact.

  Part of Jada wants to stop him, because sex means they might not speak. And afterward, she may even fall asleep again, because she is still so damned tired, and this is her only weekend off this month. She almost always sleeps after Ibrahim makes love to her. If they do now, she will be physically sated, and completely wrung out.

  Is that what he wants? To placate her? To distract her?

  Lovemaking with Ibrahim does that. It is almost impossible to think anything but the most rudimentary thoughts.

  The first time after he got out was that evening. They filled the day with other activities first. He had been released very early, and Jada went to pick him up alone because Kaleem was still at school. When she asked what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to go to a park, any park.

  And he wanted to see the ocean. So that was what they had done.

  After the park, they ate at a place that one of Jada’s co-workers had mentioned, overlooking San Francisco Bay. It had a lavish buffet brunch with seafood cooked just about every way a person might think of, eggs made to order and a bounty of tropical and exotic fruit. She had always wanted to go but was too self-conscious to do so alone. Ibrahim ate with his attention divided between her and the view.

  They didn’t speak very
much.

  Later, after an entire day of sightseeing like tourists, they sat through a dinner, as awkward as breakfast had been, at a restaurant that boasted ‘Best Steaks in Oakland!’ because Ibrahim said he was craving one. He, who had barely eaten red meat before he went in, said all he wanted was a big, juicy, medium-rare ribeye. At the steakhouse, nervous as teenagers on a first date, they had trouble eating everything on their plates. Hanging over the meal was the knowledge that they had exhausted every other location they could think of and would soon be going home where the most fragile and pressure-filled part of their reunion would take place.

  Back at the house, Ibrahim walked through the rooms slowly, taking in all the changes, commenting occasionally on how nice she had made everything. Then he went to the bathroom where he took a very long shower, curls of steam escaping beneath the shut door.

  Jada fidgeted while he was in there, then paced, then finally undressed and waited for him in the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed in only a silk robe, trying to control her trembling.

  When Ibrahim emerged, it was only with a towel wrapped around his waist. Her eyes absorbed every detail of his new, yet familiar physique, and when she lifted her eyes upward, she saw his throat bobbing repeatedly as he swallowed.

  She patted the bed next to her and he sat.

  Wanted to wash the stink of prison off me, he said.

  His voice was hoarse and deep. It resounded off the walls of the bedroom. There hadn’t been a man there in so long.

  Jada nodded in response, finding that she could not speak. The words, whatever they would have been, were stuck in her throat. She touched his leg, and he tensed a little, then slowly leaned in to kiss her. He tasted like toothpaste, and Jada had to refamiliarize herself with his tongue and the way it moved inside her mouth.

  He took his time until they found their stride, and the kiss began to feel so good, Jada almost didn’t notice when he slid the robe off her shoulders and pushed her back onto the bed.

  He moved above her, removing the towel so she felt him hard against her stomach and gasped, reaching down to hold him in her hand. He jerked at that, and gently shoved her hand away.

  I want to be inside you, he said against her neck.

  He was slow, and tentative, the way he had been on their wedding night more than two decades earlier. Like he couldn’t trust himself not to be rough. Once he entered her, he was frustrated and embarrassed when he came almost immediately.

  But Jada had been relieved.

  She had heard stories from other women whose men had been locked up. There was a support group at her church, which had more than two dozen members—Partners of Incarcerated Men it was called. No one objected to the limited nature of the name, and thus, of the group. What of incarcerated women and their partners, after all?

  Despite that, there was no shortage of members. They met on Thursday evenings in the church anteroom and shared their struggles and triumphs. It had been a lifeline for Jada when Ibrahim was inside. She rarely missed a meeting.

  Since pastor made it clear that the group was a judgment-free zone, many of the concerns the women shared were secular, or sexual. Some confessed to sleeping with other men while their partners were locked up. Some just for the physical release, but others were in full-blown relationships, setting aside any thought of how they would handle it when their mate came home. Others indulged in risky, casual hookups, rationalizing that if the liaisons were temporary and occasional, they weren’t really cheating.

  And then there were the women whose men had already come home, who spoke of knowing, just knowing by the way their men had sex with them, that they had probably “had relations” while they were in prison. The women used lots of veiled language and references to explain this, but the implication was clear—sexually speaking, men often returned from prison different than they went in, and in ways that women couldn’t always anticipate, and might hesitate to broach with the men themselves.

  So, Jada had harbored a little secret worry, wondering whether the Ibrahim who came out, might be someone she didn’t recognize.

  But he had been just about the same. Just a little hesitant. And the way he reacted to being inside her was adequate reassurance that there was nothing she needed to know about what he might have done to satisfy a sexual urge while he was locked up. Afterward, she felt guilty for even thinking it. Ibrahim as she knew him was disciplined and had a will of steel. Mindful that he was a married man, he would have chosen celibacy in a heartbeat.

  Now, he is no longer the tentative and cautious lover he was when he first came home. He tosses aside her underwear and pulls her even closer. Jada’s knees are slightly bent. Ibrahim rests her legs over his shoulders and lowers his head between them.

  At first contact, she pulls air between clenched teeth and lets her head fall back, pressing it into the bed. She is surrendering all thoughts of the conversation they need to, but still have not had.

  Ibrahim has always owned her body. From the very first time he touched it, it belonged to him. And it belongs to him still, even as sometimes, other parts of her seem poised to drift away and leave him behind.

  That thought, of leaving Ibrahim behind, causes her to gasp again but this time from the unexpectedness of that idea, rather than from the pleasure his tongue is giving her. But she can ignore it all she wants, it is still there, the growing emotional gulf between them. It is an active fissure that will take some active effort to fix.

  She comes with a sudden burst of breath, beneath which is a sharp cry.

  Ibrahim rests his cheek on her now damp thigh, waiting for a few moments until her labored breathing slows. Then he moves up, kissing the inside of her leg, her hip, her stomach, her breasts, until they are face to face.

  He looks almost unchanged since he went to prison, except now there are subtle threads of gray in his beard. His body is still firm. In fact, it is firmer, stronger, leaner. His arms are still as thick as ham hocks, his back, buttocks, legs, enviably fit.

  Women look at him all the time, and some search for his gaze, daring him to look back. When that happens, Jada feels something searing hot in her chest, and she is reminded of when they were much younger, and even girls walking down the street and glancing his way felt like active threats.

  Even now that they are both on the other side of forty-five, the idea of Ibrahim with anyone other than her can still make her heart feel like it might go up in a blaze and turn to ash.

  “Baby,” Ibrahim says as he enters her.

  There is nothing else. Just that: baby.

  Jada instinctively puts her arms up and around him.

  When he is inside her, she feels impossibly, thoroughly, completely full. Ibrahim waits, as he always does. She gives a gentle upward tilt of her hips, and only then, he moves. Slowly. He pushes himself in to the hilt, pulls back a fraction, then more, and more until she is making a strange noise in the back of her throat and begging him not to pull back too far, or God forbid, pull out entirely.

  “Ibrahim,” she protests, when it feels like he might be about to do just that.

  “Yes,” he says, answering but not heeding.

  He pulls out and back. He slides upward and against her clitoris, pressed between their bodies, slick and smooth.

  “Oh God …” Jada moans and clutches his ass, digging her nails into it, hoping to urge him to enter her once again.

  He plays with her for a few minutes, occasionally pulling back just enough so that she anticipates a thrust that does not come for a while. And when it finally does, she is so wet, that her body relents effortlessly.

  Then they are rocking against each other, moving with the adept rhythm of two people who know each other’s bodies almost as well as they know their own. Jada’s climaxes arrive, two of them in quick succession, cresting and then very gradually subsiding. Ibrahim’s movements are sparing until she settles.

  The next round is for him, but still, he takes her along. Jada’s body, already tingling and sen
sitive, irrationally, impossibly, responds yet again. And when Ibrahim grunts out his release, she is also panting, gulping and barely able to catch her breath.

  His weight is resting on her, only partly braced on his elbows. She likes how that feels. He long ago learned that when he tries to pull away, or roll over, she will hold him in place, so he no longer does it. Now, he waits until she is ready to let him go.

  “Okay?” Ibrahim asks after a moment when their breaths have slowed.

  “I don’t know,” she says, lips against his shoulder. Her voice is a croak. “I don’t know.”

  ~~~

  On the Saturdays when she isn’t working, she and Ibrahim run errands together. Grocery shopping, mostly. When the time comes to hand the cashier the debit card, Jada often makes herself busy or pretends to be distracted so that Ibrahim is the one who must pull the card out of his wallet and hand it to the checkout person. It’s become a habit, though she can’t recall when it began.

  This morning, she preoccupies herself with the magazines, pretending to be engrossed in Vanity Fair when the cashier announces their tally. And Ibrahim does what he always does, and takes out the card to pay. But as they make their way out of the store, each of them carrying two bags he turns to look at her.

  “You don’t have to do that, y’know,” he says.

  “Do what?”

  “It doesn’t matter who gives them the money. You and I both know who put it all in the account.”

  “Ibrahim …”

  “When you do that? Take all those … counter-measures to prevent me from feeling small? It does the exact opposite of what you want it to.”

  “I’m not taking …”

  He looks at her and the message in his eyes is clear: we’ve never lied to each other, let’s not start now.

  Swallowing hard, Jada nods.