Take a Hint, Dani Brown

by Talia Hibbert

  Not that he was watching the clock for anyone in particular. He had absolutely no reason to do that.

  “You look tired,” Fluff was saying. “Mum reckons you run yourself ragged and you’ll regret it in your old age.”

  “Add it to the list. And I don’t look tired, I look mysterious.”

  “Mysterious like a zombie,” Fatima said.

  “You’re such a rude girl. Respect your elders.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, tilted her head mockingly, and simpered, “Please, dearest Chacha, sleep eight hours a night instead of writing charity letters or whatever it is you do, and maybe you will not be at work looking like a dead thing, inshallah.”

  She was just like her father. The thought was bittersweet. “I’ll think about it. Why are you here? There’s nothing wrong, is there?” In the months since Fatima had enrolled, Zaf had only caught glimpses of her on campus from afar. He usually pantomimed his best Embarrassing Uncle routine, and she usually skulked away while shooting daggers in his direction—but now here she was, in his building. A kernel of anxiety skittered within his chest, always ready and waiting to blow. His Protective Uncle routine was even more intense than the Embarrassing Uncle one.

  But Fatima rolled her eyes—she had a minor eye-rolling addiction—and sighed, “No, Chacha. Nothing is wrong. I just moved a class around to fit in Level 1 Punjabi.”

  Zaf raised his eyebrows. “Your Punjabi is fine.”

  “Exactly. I look forward to my distinction. Of course, I didn’t know my rescheduled lit seminar would be”—she wrinkled her nose, looking around the foyer with blatant disgust—“here.” Echo was a squat, gray relic of a building halfway down University Road where medical-science students did weird things to dead bodies and animal organs.

  “Ah, it’s not so bad,” he told her cheerfully. “At least you’ll get to see your favorite uncle more often now.”

  “I see you almost every day, and you are my only uncle,” she tutted, shifting her handbag from her left arm to her right. He’d told her countless times to wear a rucksack for even weight distribution, but she was a little fashion plate like her mother.

  “Grouch as much as you want, Fluff. I know you love me. Now hurry up to your lesson, or you’ll be late.”

  “Nag, nag, nag. This is what I get for checking on your welfare, ah?” With another epic eye roll, she turned to leave.

  “Niece,” he called after her, “be good and bring me breakfast next time.”

  She ignored him, increasing her pace as she walked away.

  “A snack, even. Fluffball! Are you listening to me?”

  The flick of her headscarf over her shoulder was an unspoken Fuck you.

  And then Fatima was gone, and Zaf was alone—a realization that made him tap his computer again. If he was the type to obsess over women, he might notice that a certain someone was late, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t. Instead, he rubbed at his short beard, clicked his tongue against his teeth, and checked his emails. There was a reminder from the team leader about the evacuation drill planned today, because Echo housed a ton of dangerous gases as well as weird organs. There was another email from the university’s staff rugby team, inviting him to play—but, as much as he’d like to, that might be asking for trouble. Zaf was rarely recognized these days, what with the beard, and it was almost a decade since he’d last played pro. But getting on a pitch with local rugby fans could jog someone’s memory, and if anyone said to him, “Hey, aren’t you the guy whose family died in that car crash?” he might accidentally punch them in the face.

  While he trashed the email with a sigh, Echo’s automatic door heaved itself slowly open. In his peripheral vision, Zaf registered a familiar figure, and something inside him grew quiet. Watchful. Hungry.

  He turned, and there was Danika Brown.

  She walked like she’d never stumbled, studying the empty foyer with feline eyes he had a bad habit of falling into. Her dark skin glowed prettily under the same fluorescent lights that made everyone else look ghostly, jaundiced, or gray. And even though he’d told himself a thousand times that panting after a friend—a work friend, a work friend who might also be gay—was tacky at best and creepy at worst, lust slammed into Zaf like an illegal tackle.

  “I’m late,” Danika declared, because she rarely said hello or good-bye. Her long, black dress swirled as she approached him, the loose fabric occasionally clinging to her hip or her waist or her thigh. Not that he was looking, because that would be inappropriate. “Here you are,” she said, sliding a cup over the desk that separated them. “One extra-hot, extra-black, extra-bitter coffee for our resident prince of darkness.”

  “Cheers, Princess,” he shot back, and his reward was a million-dollar smile from that soft, scarlet mouth. The sight crackled through his veins like electricity. He kept going. “Out-gothed any teenagers, lately?”

  “Scared any old ladies shitless?” she replied sweetly.

  “Old ladies love me.”

  “Wow, hot stuff.”

  He flushed, but hopefully his skin tone and his beard would hide it. “Erm . . . because I mow their lawns and that. Is what I meant.”

  She grinned. “This just gets better and better.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Usually, she’d smirk at him and do as instructed, always in a rush to get to work. But today, she huffed out a laugh and ran a hand over her short, pink hair, from the razored edges to the longer curls on top. That hair had been black on Friday. Blue last month. Red the first day he ever saw her.

  Aaand he should probably spend less energy cataloging this woman’s hair colors, and more on . . . you know, important shit. It wasn’t like he didn’t have other things to think about—workshops to write and goals to chase and nonprofits to get off the ground.

  But then Dani sighed, and he was distracted from common sense again.

  “That was a hell of a sigh,” he murmured, because it had been.

  “Of course it was,” she replied absently. “I’m a hell of a woman.”

  True enough, and a typical Danika comment, but her gaze was distant and her heart clearly wasn’t in it. With her narrowed eyes and her pursed lips, she seemed unusually . . . agitated, and that gnawed at Zaf harder than it should.

  See, if she was pissed about “culturally biased research” or “two-dimensional claims to feminism,” he would have heard about it the minute she entered the building. Which meant something else must be bothering her, maybe something serious—but she hadn’t mentioned that something, so it clearly wasn’t his business.

  He wouldn’t ask. He wouldn’t pry. He wouldn’t—

  “Everything all right?” blurted his big fucking mouth.

  Dani startled as if he’d pulled her out of deep thought. “Well—it’s just—” She hesitated. “I should probably go up. You know I try to be early to class in order to give the impression of omnipotence.”

  She was ridiculous, as always. Unselfconscious, as always. Made him want to grin, as always.

  Zaf resisted, as always.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll see you—”

  She produced another sigh fit for the stage and announced, “Fine, fine, you dragged it out of me.”

  “Did I,” he deadpanned.

  “I’d tell you not to be sarcastic, but I don’t think you can help it. No, be quiet, you awful man, and listen to me moan. You did ask.”

  “That I did.” Fuck, but he enjoyed this woman.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me outside the coffee shop.”

  He sipped his coffee like he wasn’t desperate to know. “Feel free to tell me anytime now. It’s only been a century since this conversation started, after all.”

  That earned him a quicksilver smile before she confessed. “Some arsehole asked me to dinner.”

  His next sip seemed to burn. “Hope you told them to get fucked.”

  “Well, yes.” She must have approved of his response, because her gaze went all warm and sweet like
treacle. “Yes, I did.”

  “Good.”

  Good, as in, women deserved to go about their business without being drooled on at the arse-crack of dawn; not good because he didn’t want any fucker taking Danika out to dinner. That would be weird and possessive and pointless, because she was categorically none of his business. Sometimes he got this burning urge to make her his business, but he was pretty good at squashing that before it got out of control.

  See, what Zaf really wanted was to be happy, and he’d read enough romance novels to know how to make that happen. First, you reached your goals and shit. (He was working on that part.) Second, you found a good woman who made you think bad thoughts and you lived happily ever after with her.

  Dani was a good woman who made him think filthy thoughts, but he’d known her long enough to realize there’d be no happily ever after. They wouldn’t even get to “once upon a time.” First, because she talked about banging Janelle Monáe kind of a lot, and when he’d asked what she thought of Idris Elba (everyone who was into guys liked Idris Elba, right?), all she’d said was “He’s great. I really enjoyed Luther.” And then there was the fact that, according to staff gossip (not that Zaf approved of staff gossip—he really didn’t, he absolutely didn’t), Danika Brown was the queen of one-time things. Zaf wouldn’t know what to do with a one-time thing if it showed up with a fifty-page instruction manual and slapped him on the dick.

  So she wasn’t for him and he wasn’t for her, and they were friends, so he shouldn’t even think about it. Which was why he swallowed his ridiculous jealousy and joked, “Hope that guy falls down a manhole or something.”

  “From your lips to the universe’s ears,” she purred, and twinkled at him. That was the only way to describe it. She looked at him, and she just—she fucking twinkled. All of a sudden, he felt a little bit warm and slightly dizzy and way too horny for a Monday morning at work.

  Zaf cleared his throat and pulled himself together. Clearly, that was more than enough Danika for one day. “Anyway. You’re late, remember?”

  Her eyes widened in degrees as if she was a sleepy kitten. “Oh. Oh, shit! Yes, I am.”

  “Hang on.” He reached into his pocket for Dani’s morning protein bar, a habit he’d fallen into since she’d started working at Echo months ago. It was only fair, since she always brought him coffee. And since she never had time for breakfast, a fact he’d learned after seeing her chomp down a bag of Skittles at 9 A.M. And since she was a bleeding-heart vegetarian who might die of malnutrition without him.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said, and snickered, holding out her hand because she knew the drill.

  Zaf snorted. But what he found in his pocket was hard and cold and definitely not protein-rich: his phone. Wrong pocket. As he let go and withdrew his hand, sound filled the air.

  “Then have me. I’m dying for you, and you know it.”

  Oh, shit.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Of course he’d managed to press Play on his latest audiobook. Zaf grabbed his phone and fumbled with the earbuds wrapped around it—the same earbuds that hadn’t stopped him from hitting Play but now acted as some kind of impenetrable fucking shield protecting the Pause button. This must be one of his teenage nightmares, because his hands were way slower and clumsier than usual. The audiobook narrator warned, “If I touch you tonight, I’ll make you mine,” and across the desk, Danika made a choked noise of—horror? Yep, probably horror—and put a hand over her mouth.

  “Zaf,” she half-shrieked, “is that porn?”

  “No!” The word came out a bit too loud to seem honest. “No,” he repeated through gritted teeth, trying to sound like a calm, sensible man instead of a raging pervert. He finally managed to pause the app, then opened a desk drawer, shoved his traitorous phone inside (technology, like most apparently good things in life, clearly couldn’t be trusted), and slammed it shut.

  “That was definitely porn,” Dani said, and Zaf was so busy wanting to jump off a bridge, it took him a long while to realize she was laughing. One hand still covered her mouth, but little chuckles escaped between her words, and her eyes creased at the corners in an unmistakable smile. The relief that hit him was so fucking intense, he almost passed out. With every good-natured giggle, a bit of his instinct to think the worst faded away.

  “It wasn’t porn,” he repeated, and this time he didn’t have to shout over the frantic pounding of his heart, or the urgent moaning of his phone. “It’s an audiobook.”

  “What the bloody hell kind of audiobook?” But she asked with a grin on her face.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he muttered, not because he was embarrassed about reading romance novels, but because now didn’t seem like the best time to explain it. “Listen, I really didn’t mean for that to—”

  “I know,” she said, no hesitation, which was good. Because if she’d taken that fiasco as some kind of creepy, quote-unquote accident, Zaf would’ve had to run away to Guatemala to herd goats for a living. And he’d never been great with animals.

  His cheeks still burning—thank fuck for thick beards and brown skin—Zaf stabbed a hand into his other pocket, found the protein bar, and handed it over. “There. Now piss off.”

  “Rude,” she said, but she was smiling as she walked away.

  “You’d better eat that!” he groused.

  “Enjoy your sex book!” she called back. Then she swung open the door to the stairwell and disappeared.

  Zaf exhaled and dropped his head into his hands. “Kill me,” he murmured to no one in particular. “Just kill me now.”

  Chapter Two

  It was absolutely typical that Dani’s first year as junior teaching staff—good—had coincided with her unfortunate transfer to the hideous building that was Echo—bad. She should be teaching next door to one of her Ph.D. supervisors right now, in the tiny, cozy building on campus dedicated to literature and women’s studies. But back in October, there’d been an unfortunate incident involving a group of first years, clown suits, a piñata, and a surprising amount of asbestos. In the chaos of relocation, Dani had helpfully and foolishly volunteered to take the classroom no one else wanted to touch. After all, Jo worked in Echo, so how bad could it be?

  Now that Jo was no longer her good friend and regular lay, the answer was: quite bad. Even the best thing about Echo—one rather entertaining security guard—had a habit of making her late. Or later than usual.

  “All right!” Dani clapped her hands as she strode into her temporary classroom. “I’m here, shut up, hope you did the reading, because if you didn’t, you’re buggered.” She carefully removed her laptop from her rucksack, put it on the desk, then dumped the bag unceremoniously on the cold, hard floor. Uncapping a whiteboard pen, she pointed at the table of students waiting for her, all of whom looked slightly unnerved—which was just how she liked them. “Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market,’ let’s discuss. Emily, start us off.”

  The sleepy-eyed teenager wrapped a strand of long, blue hair around her finger and said promptly, “Totally about banging.”

  Dani approached the board and wrote Goblin Market in a bubble. Traditionalists might find writing on the board unnecessary, but not all learners were aural, no matter their stage of education. So she scrawled a little arrow coming out of her bubble and wrote: Banging.

  Then she turned back to Emily and said brightly, “Please elaborate.”

  “Well,” Emily hedged, “I mean, it’s either banging or Christianity. One of those. Maybe both.”

  “I think it’s both,” added the boy beside her, Will.

  Dani nodded, drew another arrow, and wrote Tits out for Christ? Then she asked, “Anything more specific?”

  “Tits in for Christ,” Will corrected.

  “Tits wherever you want for Christ,” Emily said firmly, “because he’ll totally forgive you. It’s an allegory. Lizzie suffers, right, for Laura’s sin?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dani grinned, grabbed a board cloth, and replaced Tits o
ut for Christ with Allegory: original sin, savior’s suffering. “Okay, someone else . . .” Her eyes landed on an unfamiliar face—the new girl. She’d received an email from scheduling about that. “Fatima, yes?”

  The girl nodded, small and serious and alarmingly well dressed. “That’s right.”

  “Did you have time to read?”

  “I did.”

  “Hit me, then.”

  Fatima cleared her throat. “I got the Christ thing, too. And I think the goblins are anti-Semitic.”

  The girl next to her, Pelumi, clicked her fingers. “Like in Harry Potter.”

  “Hey,” someone piped up from across the table. “Don’t shit-talk Harry Potter.”

  “It’s not shit-talking if it’s true.”

  Dani clapped her hands. “Robust discussion is precisely what I want from you, but unless you can connect Harry Potter to Rossetti’s themes more solidly, I’m going to ask that it’s taken off the table.”

  There was a pause before Pelumi said, “Excess sensuality and the private cost. Hogwarts has magically refilling tables as a result of underground slave labor; the girl in the poem dies of too many orgasms or something because she tasted some dick. I mean, fruit.”

  Dani nodded gravely. “For sheer ingenuity, I will allow it.”

  The debate burst to life.

  Dani spent the rest of the class listening to a mix of razor-sharp insight and meme regurgitation, directing the conversation when it seemed necessary, shutting up when it didn’t. Time skipped ahead of her until the seminar was over, notebooks were being stuffed into bags, and the cupcakes at the union stall started calling her name.

  As the students filed out with waves and good-byes, Dani paused to open her laptop and take a quick look at her emails. One had to stay on top of these things. Someone might need her to—

  Ah.

  There was a new email at the top of the screen with a bolded subject line that made her gut squeeze. Whether that squeeze was excitement or a warning sign of nervous diarrhea, it was hard to say. All things considered, it might even be both.

  DAUGHTERS OF DECADENCE, THEN & NOW: A PUBLIC RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM.