TDoCAJ 1: 1.3

The other thing about a hamster wheel was that you could always find a reason to stay on it.

The latest reason had been this: he was going to call off the wedding. He'd told her so himself, multiple times, in the particular low register he used when he wanted her to believe something. She'd known she was being managed and had let herself be managed anyway. By then she'd stopped telling Fade and Tiny much of anything. Easier. Less to explain, less to walk back, less of Dedi's spiky silence coming down the phone like talons at her throat.

So when he'd called to say a friend was hosting a soiree at a resort and while he couldn't get her into the event itself, he wanted her there for the weekend — to see her, he'd said, he needed to see her — she'd packed a bag and gone. She hadn't interrogated the logic of it too hard. She'd had practice at that.

She was picking up after him the morning after when she found it. He'd left in a rush — overnight bag tipped, contents strewn across the carpet — and she was gathering without thinking, when she turned over the thick envelope at the bottom of the pile.

Arume Ogunbor & Bisade Akinyemi.

The rest of it — venue, dress code, RSVP details — was beside the point.

She sagged down onto the edge of the bed.

The night before sat differently now.

He'd snuck away from the soiree, he'd told her, as they swayed on the balcony above the party he'd supposedly left behind. She'd taken that at face value — the romance of it, the recklessness, the particular high of being the one he'd chosen to prioritize. Below them, guests were still at it on the sand, the music carrying up. His eyes had moved over them periodically while his fingers moved inside her, alert in a way she’d taken as passionate attentiveness rather than what it actually was: a man making sure no one was looking up.

Through half-lidded eyes, she’d watched his fingers working her into one of her most breathtaking orgasms and then, they'd spent the rest of the night sleeping and fucking in turns. When she woke up, daylight was coming through the balcony doors and he was gone. He'd left a note. Stay in, order room service, he'd be back after a couple of errands.

She pulled out the second card. An itinerary. Last night had been the rehearsal dinner. Rehearsal breakfast at ten, aperitifs to follow in the garden terrace. Light attire suggested.

She looked at the time. Nearly noon.

She poured herself a drink from the minibar. Then another. Then she got up, washed her face, found something that would pass for light attire, and went downstairs.

The aperitifs were already out by the time she found the room. She stood at the entrance and took in the guests doing what guests did at these things, laughing too readily, clinking glasses, performing their delight at someone else's happiness. Bisade at the center of it all in something gold and effortless that paled in comparison to the joy on her face. Kiiti had attended enough events to read a room. This one was warm. This one was real. Arume had built something here, with someone else, that looked nothing like what he'd been showing her.

Dunni saw her first. She crossed the room fast, her face doing several things at once.

Kiiti, what the hell are you doing here! Not a question.

She didn't answer. She was looking for Arume.

She found him the same moment he found her, across the room, over Dunni's shoulder. On her way down, she'd told herself she only needed to see his face, unguarded, just for a second, before he could compose it. She got that. She got more than that. What she saw in his face wasn't cruelty. Worse. It was inconvenience. She was a problem that had materialized at the worst possible moment and he was already calculating the solution.

An inconvenience who’d loved him for five years. A problem who’d rearranged herself around him for five years.

The rest passed in a blur. The whispers threading through the room, Bisade turning, glass in hand, then coming across the room the brisk way you did when you’d made a decision on the spot. The liquid hit her face cold and she blinked. Around her the room drew a sharp inhale and held it, the suspenseful quality of a crowd that wanted very badly to see what would happen next.

She didn't pay the crowd any attention, her gaze fixed on Arume. He was still across the room. His brother had a hand on his arm.

The no-longer-glowing bride had tossed her empty glass aside. How dare you. She was choking on the words she couldn’t find, her outrage at the intruder having far outpaced the language for it. Someone had seen them, she was saying, someone had seen the two of them, did she have any idea, did she have any shame at all, he had cut ties with her weeks ago and she had the nerve—

Kiiti listened to the words coming as though from a faint distance and felt that she should feel something more than she did. She was wet. Her dress was sticking to her. Across the room, Arume's brother still held his arm and Arume was letting him.

I’m guessing he didn't tell you he had his fingers in my cunt last night.

She heard herself say it the same way she heard everything else, at a slight delay, as though the sound was traveling from somewhere further away than her own mouth. Another collective inhale. Dunni said her name, sharp and low. Arume's friend appeared at her elbow as though he half-expected the bride to lunge and tear her to pieces.

But no. With the iciest poise, such as one could muster under the circumstances of one’s fiancé having brought his paramour to one’s pre-wedding festivities under one’s very nose, Bisade looked at her for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped.

For once, could you please have some respect for yourself and leave?

So for once, Kiiti had some fucking respect for herself and left.

She went back upstairs and finished the minibar. Not strategically. Just because the drinks were there and she was wet and the alternative was sitting with what she'd just done, which she wasn't ready for.

She ripped off her dress, dropped down on the floor, and drank. Outside, the afternoon did what afternoons did at resorts. It was golden, luminous, heavy with other people's ease. She sat in it as the gold faded to a sullen dark, yet another minibar bottle in her hand, a headache building behind her eyes.

She'd loved him since she was nineteen. She was twenty-four now. She’d had five years to develop better sense than to wait for a man who had just stood across a room with his brother's hand on his arm and let his bride throw a well-deserved drink in her face but no. Senseless still, a part of her that she hated thoroughly and completely still thought he might come.

It was dark when the knock did come. She'd drifted off somewhere in between, woke up disoriented, the room dim. She got to the door expecting him.

It was his best friend. He looked at her the way people looked at things they felt sorry for and slightly disgusted by in equal measure. She recognized the look. She'd been wearing it herself all evening.

He's not coming. Quietly, not quite meeting her eyes. He can't come.

She thought about what she must look like. The state of her, waiting in the dark for a man who couldn't come because he had a bride who'd thrown a drink at his girlfriend and was probably, rightfully, losing her mind.

Okay, she said.

She shut the door.

She'd forgotten Arume still had his key.

She felt the mattress shift and sat up before she'd fully woken, disoriented, the room dark except for the light bleeding under the bathroom door that she must have left on. Her headache was a settled, permanent fact, her mouth a gritty den of stale ethanol.

She reached over to turn on the lamp on the dresser and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror opposite, of the curls in rebellion, the raccoon eyes with bloodshot highlights. He was perched on the edge of the bed with the watchful stillness of a man on unstable ground. She almost laughed.

He reached for her hand. She let him take it, for a moment, because she was twenty-four and she'd loved him since she was nineteen and her body hadn't caught up with the rest of her yet.

Then she got up and stood so she could feel the floor.

He started talking. He was sorry, Bisade had always meant nothing, she was the one, she had always been the one, and he'd made the call tonight, he'd told Bisade he couldn't go through with it, he couldn't do it, not while he was still in love with…

She moved to the window while he talked and looked out at the resort below. Lights on the water. Guests still out enjoying their evening. She wondered which of them, if any, had been in that room downstairs. Beyond him, in the dark glass of the window, she watched him watching her, unsure, for once, at this version of her. Not the one he'd been expecting: the one where she raged and he soothed and they ended up tangled in the sheets and she stayed.

He kept talking. She let him. She'd spent five years listening to this voice and there was a familiar comfort in it even now. She wondered wryly what he would do if she moved further away from him and vaulted over the balcony. The melodrama of the thought brought a slight smirk to her face.

Arume. She turned back to face him when he’d run out of road. You win.

He blinked. What?

I'm tired, she said. I've been tired for such a long time. She picked up her purse from the chair. And you…keep leaving me. You’ve left me so many times now and I can’t…. A ragged sigh. Allow me to leave you first.

He was on his feet and his hands were on her face before she'd finished the sentence, tipping it up. She let him. She studied the face that had undone her at nineteen in a hallway outside Econ 101 and hadn't stopped undoing her since.

I love you, he said. You know I do. I love you, Kiiti.

There was conviction sitting in his face, the genuine thing for once underneath all the wreckage he'd made of them. He did love her. She'd never doubted that, not once, not even tonight. That was the cruelest part of all of it.

I know, she said. That's the matter with you.

She turned her face away from his hands and moved to the door. He said her name. Then, very quietly, that this was really goodbye then.

I love you, Kiiti.

She didn't answer. She didn't look back.

She kept her face neutral all the way to the lift, all the way down, all the way across the lobby.

Dedi was waiting there in her pajamas.

She'd answered the call an hour ago. Kiiti hadn't said much, just the name of the resort and the word come, and Dedi had come, which was the thing about Dedi that Kiiti didn't deserve and had never deserved and was beyond grateful for anyway.

Don't be a baby and cry.

As Kiiti approached, Dedi stood. Her eyes were grave as she took in the prodigal sister returned from exile.

Hey you, she said quietly. Come here. I've never been so proud of you in my life.

Don't be a fucking baby and cry.

Dedi took the fucking crybaby in her arms and held her, and somewhere in the middle of it produced, from her pajama pocket, a travel pack of tissues. And despite herself, Kiiti laughed.