LOVE ME LIKE ART

10

열
Zachary A. Choi

IT IS A BLEAK MONDAY morning and it tints the drab London skies with a colourless grey.

Tobenna winds his head through my office door and spots my hunch back in my office chair. I push the butt of my biro-pen against my chin where my focus is arrested by this divorce brief. It is full of complex legislature that hasn't settled into my brain on the 3rd or 4th read.

I am trying to peruse every paragraph, every word because the odds of Mrs. Rolt getting her preferred settlement sum don't look half as good as they did, when she first instructed me. I usually palm over this job to a bright-eyed and bushy tailed paralegal or to Maggie because her eye for detail is a lot more refined than mine. 

However, there is something about her case that means more. It feels like there is a lot more that she stands to lose, a lot more burning at the stake.

I haven't noticed that he's loitering by the doorway, as a faint furrow forms on my brow as I try to make sense of a document that isn't making too much sense, right now.

"Zu." Tobenna, in a film black suit calls me out and I tear my eyes away from bundles and bundles of paper. His suit is as neat as a pin but everything else about him seems ragged. My lips almost curl at the dichotomy.

"What you saying, g?" He asks.

"Yo, T." I point towards the brief that is lapped on my desk. "I'm trying to make sense of this before I see Mrs. Rolt."

"Ain't you got a paralegal that you can delegate that shit to?" Tobenna raises, as he slips into the opposite seat. He observes my crook posture and the fact the words splayed on the brief are making my eyes already bleed.

"With Mrs Rolt breathing down my neck? No, I'm good." I tell him, because even though the facts of the case make it seem like a prototypical divorce, it doesn't feel like that. The stakes feel like they are always shifting. "Happy Monday though, chief."

His eyes look back at me, like something has punctured his beam. I study how his body melds into the black leather and his collapse into the cushion strikes a supple drumbeat, as if I can hear the orchestra sonorously in my head.

"Ain't shit good about today." He cradles his forehead like that can stave his hangover from pouring in. He daps me then return to his body-in-a-slump. "I'm still fucking hanging from Friday. My head's pounding."

"I feel for your liver." I drop a boisterous note, remembering how there was never a point in the night that Tobenna didn't have a drink in his hand.

If it wasn't Stella, it was a Jack 'n coke.

If it wasn't whiskey, it was shots of dirty tequila—drinking Demi, Amiri, Koffi and I under the table.

"I feel for it too, g. I was out there doing the fucking most." His lips intone, like it isn't his greatest feat but one he is more embarrassed by.

I laugh lowly, apprising every part of him that looks sunken. "Now you're paying for it."

"Word." He mumbles, as a curl ghosts over his lips.

"Are you up to coming to Bijoux on Friday, Kof and the rest of them said they'd—" I ask but he gives my bid no thought.

He registers an incredulous tinge to his eyes that plasters NO in big imperceptible letters. There is nothing in his tone that suggests that he might think about it. It is strikingly final. "Fuck that. I need real respite away from you motherfuckers."

If I didn't know Tobenna for as long as I have, I would have believed in this respite that he is chasing. "You'll say something different on Friday, I can bet."