TDoCAJ 1: 1.1

The father of her baby was not the grand love of her life. He was several chapters down in her story, an incendiary character yet to be introduced.

The grand love of her life — or so she'd thought — she'd met at nineteen.

Kiiti had grown up watching her father's household run on a unique kind of chaos: wives in separate quarters, mystery children materializing at holidays, her mother's short-lived but passionate affairs, the stuff of the Mexican soap operas that played at 8pm on Sundays. She'd catalogued all of it from a young age and arrived at early adulthood with a grim resolution. None of that for her. She was going to meet someone decent in college, marry young, build something clean and boring. No chasing emotional highs. No clawing through the lows.

The author of her script must have been having a very good laugh.

She hadn't so much met Arume as he'd collided with her, rushing out of Econ 101 with the rest of the slackers, scattering her books across the hallway floor. He'd picked them up with a grin that suggested he found his own carelessness charming. She'd taken her books back without giving him her name when he asked.

The second time was Dunni's fault.

Dunni had been trying to drag her to an African Students Association event for the better part of a semester. Kiiti, having sworn to only attend if hell ever froze over, had successfully evaded all of them until the night Dunni asked in front of three other people and she hadn't produced a convincing excuse fast enough to thwart yet another of Dunni's whiny rants about how Kiiti was never there to support her, wah, was, wah. She'd tried the slow-getting-ready tactic. Dunni had simply sat on her bed and scrolled her phone with the patience of someone who had already won. Hell froze over. Kiiti went.

Dunni then disappeared backstage the moment they arrived, leaving her stranded alone in the audience with a headache and a front-row seat to someone screeching in a way that was allegedly entertainment. She lasted forty minutes before she gave up and slipped outside for a smoke. She'd been a social smoker since first year, not a real smoker, she maintained, just someone who happened to enjoy the picture it cut. The people who walked past her and scrunched their noses apparently disagreed, shooting her looks like she was defecating on their personal air pockets, as though they'd purchased them, when the last time she'd checked, air was still free. For the time being anyway.

She was almost through her third stick when she heard Dunni behind her.

She turned, response ready, and stopped. There was a guy beside Dunni. Econ 101. Smirking like he'd been waiting for this exact moment.

"Kiiti, you know Arume? He says you've met?" The arch in Dunni's voice meant she'd already decided there was a story.

"I wouldn't say we know each other—" she started.

Arume cut in smoothly. "Dunni, I think they still need you backstage before the next set. I'll keep Kiiti company until the team is ready to go.”

Dunni agreed and sauntered back inside. Kiiti watched her go with the full force of what her sisters called her if-looks-could-kill-you'd-be-motherfucking-kebab expression.

She turned back to him. "You really don't need to wait.."

"I didn't know the love of my life was a smoker."

She rolled her eyes.

"My grandfather died of lung cancer," he said. "I've been off the cancer sticks a year now." A beat. "Smokers have bad breath."

She reached for the insouciance she kept on hand for exactly this kind of situation, and not the Listerine strips she always had somewhere on her. "I'm guessing the last person you kissed told you that."

"That’d be surprising, since I don't smoke. Anymore."

"Too bad your breath still stinks then. What now?”

He cracked up — the easiness of it, no performance in it. "Want to confirm for yourself?"

“I’d prefer to enjoy the rest of my evening, no thanks.”

"Drink first, then”

"See here, Arume.” She ground the cigarette out under her sole, making sure a few sparks dusted the toe of his. “You’re getting on my last nerves. I don't like you. I don't like men in general. So if this is a pass at me, I'm not interested. Not now, not ever."

"You're wasting your breath." He said it with an ease that was almost offensive. "I'm going to be the love of your life. You just don't know it yet."

She stared at him, looking at his face properly for the first time — the conviction sitting in his eyes, the brows that had clearly never seen a tweezer, the complete absence of performance in what he'd just said. She filed the flutters in her chest under things to not examine right now.

"I think you need to leave me alone," she said. It came out weaker than she intended.

"If I do that, how do I get your number?"

"You don't." She walked back inside without looking at him.

He'd been right, in the end. They had turned out to be the love of each other's lives — for a season. He just hadn't mentioned how destructive that season would be.

She'd mentioned off-handedly, in a BBM chat at eleven on a Tuesday, that Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie was her kryptonite. She'd forgotten by Wednesday.

He hadn't.

She told herself she was being polite when she let him in that Friday, B&J’s in hand, and practical when she offered him dinner since she'd already cooked, and tired when she didn't ask him to leave after. They ended up on the floor of her room, backs against the bed, her ice cream gone within minutes, him watching her scarf it down with the baffled expression of someone who apparently didn't like ice cream — the weirdo — a CSI: Las Vegas rerun on her laptop. He didn't try anything. Just stayed, easy and present, while the room settled into the easy quiet of a Friday night with nowhere to be.

She was not, she told herself, in trouble.

Arume, when he was with you, was entirely with you. The attention was complete, unhurried. Everything else went slightly out of focus. She would figure out later what to call that. For now she filed it alongside the chest flutters and left it alone.

They were eight months in when she found out.

A text on his phone, which he'd left face-up on her desk. A name she recognized. A tone that didn't need translating.

She put the phone face-down and went to make tea.

She made a list, at two in the morning three days later, of all the things she'd filed under probably nothing. She deleted it before she went to sleep. The list wasn't the point. She already knew what the list said.

On the fourth day she told him what she'd seen.

He didn't deny it. He was sorry. It had meant nothing. She was the one who mattered.

Dedi would have had a field day, her conviction in yes, all men made whole . Fade would have gone with the gentler not all men but huh, this man. She told neither of them, which meant she'd already made her decision before she'd admitted it to herself.

She stayed.

The thing about a hamster wheel was that you always knew you were on one. That was never the problem.

Over the next two years, she broke up with him and each time, meant it. He came back with the same patience, the same unhurried attention, the same quality of presence that made everything else feel slightly less real by comparison. She found a reason to stay that felt different from the last one. Fade's sighs on their calls suggested it wasn't.

Dedi stopped offering opinions after the second time, her silence her verdict.

She left for the last time at twenty-two and spent a year being very busy and very fine and dating other men who were, objectively, probably perfectly decent and who made her feel absolutely nothing. She went back at twenty-three. She had reasons. She was always good at reasons. And somewhere underneath the reasons was the ice cream, the huddling on the floor, the giggling over Gil Grissom and his sunshades in the corny CSI opener, and the Friday that had felt like something she'd been looking for all her life without trusting she'd ever find it.

She found out at a gathering, from a friend of Bisade's catching someone up in the bathroom while Kiiti washed her hands. Not aimed at her. Not even aware of her. The word fiancée landing in the air between two people who had no idea what it was doing to a third. Bisade was getting married. To Arume, apparently.

She stayed another twenty minutes. She would not be the woman who fled gatherings.

She went to him that night.

He was sorry. It had happened during one of their breaks. Bisade — a meaningless diversion, he'd sworn — had gotten pregnant. He hadn't wanted a child growing up the way he had, without a father, so he'd proposed. Then she'd lost the baby, and he'd felt… he didn't know. Guilty. Trapped in a different way. He couldn't just end it after that. It would have been cruel.

But he was ending it now. He just needed a little time.

She listened to all of this and heard herself say she understood, which was the most damning thing she could have said and she knew it even as she said it. She was twenty-four. She'd been on this wheel since she was nineteen and the thought of stepping off it,of writing all of it off as a loss, the floor, the Fridays, the vision of what they could be, was more than she could make herself do.

So she let her brain arrange his nonsense into something that made an absurd sort of sense and stayed. Even as he moved in with Bisade.Even as the weeks became months and the time he needed kept quietly expanding.

He was going to leave her soon. They were the love of each other's lives, after all.

This was precisely what she'd promised herself love would never look like.

Funny, that.