...I had to savor what bit we had left. Maybe, that was my hubris...
"I won't question your past as long as you do do the same. Alright?" He caught my hand in his and kissed it to soften the blow.
I nodded complacently but, fed up of the after-taste that lingered on my tongue, I lurched forward and guzzled the Honey Jack Daniels before instantly gagging. It was not pleasant, but it numbed my taste buds which was exactly what I needed. "You drink this- all the time?"
He snatched it out of my hands, shocked, "Yes, but you shouldn't."
"I shouldn't be here either, but I am. So, why not drink to being a terrible human being?"
"We're not terrible human beings-" He started.
"-according to you."
"No. According to history, we're doing what comes naturally: tasting the forbidden fruit, so to speak. That's okay. It's essential, actually, to our existence. Simple experimentation. And this age gap is hardly a rift at all. That's all there is to it."
"Adam and Eve paid for it later."
"And so will we."
"Eve paid for it nearly threefold, if I'm not mistaken."
"And so it goes naturally."
"That's awfully unfair."
He frowned down at me, suddenly wry of tone, "Plenty of awful and 'unfair' things happen in the world. For instance, men you don't know make decisions that strongly affect your health and well-being everyday. Albino people in Africa are hacked apart in the name of luck. Yet, you have hardly the faintest clue. People of your race have dealt and still do endure inconsistencies-"
Smiling, "Black people? Treated unfairly? Well, you don't say..."
"Yes, African-American people do suffer." He scoffed, "I can see how that's a bit hard to take in."
"African-American? It's just us two in here. That's quite a mouthful and there are no 'thought policemen' walking around to arrest you for using a shorter term."
He rolled his eyes, "My point is that great things happen to terrible people and, often times, vice versa."
"Am I a great thing?"
"Yes."
"So... Are you a terrible person?"
He let out an exasperated sigh, "No, but life's tricky, Henna, people simply do not care for you in the same way you may expect your mother to. Accepting the fact that inequality is a near after-thought these days will make your life a whole lot easier."
"I was just curious to know if you're used to this relationship-thing and now you're turning this into a teaching moment."
"Okay." He amended, "This relationship-thing, it's okay with me. It's what I want, but I also want my privacy."
"But what about something as innocent as curiosity?"
"There's nothing innocent about curiosity." Smilingly, he said, "It's privacy's worst nightmare and the bane of trust."
"It doesn't have to be if your secrets are just as innocent as mine. I sometimes stole an extra doughnut after Sunday Service. My old boss doesn't know that I was the one that left the dog poo on his lawn everyday for a whole week. Every now and then, I've cheated on my Chemistry tests because studying was futile. Your secrets cannot be that bad, can they?"
"Henna, please sleep."
The clock read that it was 1:14 in the morning and I was bone-tired, reeling from the events of that one night. Yet, I simply could not close my eyes for more than half a second. If the man had seen every inch my bare skin had to offer, what was it that scared me so badly? The fact that I didn't know him?
He'd left the windows cracked so that some good air could get in. And as strange as it sounds, we were spooning. Finally, in the silence only a busy city could offer, he decided to tell me about his childhood obsessions and cuddle with me the way I imagined the average couple would, arms wrapped tight around my waist, fingers trailing circles around my navel. "I didn't collect stamps. That's too boring. Instead, I collected magazine cut-outs."
I craned my neck to see him, "What kind?"
He shrugged, "Anything, really. Whatever caught my eye, anything that pertained to my life at all. Some things didn't, but they were always fascinating things like photos of computers and model cars." I giggled, "What?"
"Life without the internet."
He kissed the crown of my head, "Yes, it was a dreary sight, but we made do with what we had. So, I took them. The people at the Dentist's office hated to see me come in. It was like, damn-we're-gonna-have-to-make-another-trip-to-Harvey's bad. But, it wasn't until my entire room was filled with those cut-outs that I realized that my collection was over-flowing."
"You've come pretty far. At least from what I could tell." The floor was still covered with paper and such. "Have you ever broken anything?"
His smile fell and he was suddenly serious again, "Yeah." Flicking his gaze away from me, "Do you still think about him?"
My thoughts immediately went to Seth but I waited to speak.
"Your father." His tone was earnest as he continued, "I never made the connection between the two of you and I'm sorry about that."
"It's okay." The topic of my Father was one I never dove into with anyone and I wasn't ready to do it then. I scrambled for something else to look at other than the sincere curiosity in his eyes. On his nightstand, I noticed his notebook was still lying there. I reached for it, then paused, "May I?"
He nodded with some bit of reluctance.
The pages were weak and weathered, fraying at the edges but the quality of the works had not worn. Most of the things I saw were done with oil and maybe a little charcoal. From what I could see, he was big on landscapes and the few figures that I could see were mainly indecipherable. All except for one.
The sketch was incredibly familiar but vague and smudged in weird places, leaving me somewhat unfulfilled, craving more detail, more of myself. On the page, like many of the other pieces, I was made of mainly oil. My skin was charcoal. My eyes confronted the viewer with a sharp and precise hint of brown while my lips had a twinge of an amber color. The rest of my face fell away, lost in the vague pigments. I wriggled and turned myself in his arms so that I was facing him, "When did you do this?"
"A long time ago."
"When?"
"One morning before class started and after school that same day, when it was just you and me, like it is now." His fingers combed and pulled at my curls at a sleep-inducing pace, braiding them into pigtails. By the time he finished, I looked like a naive and wide-eyed ten-year-old little girl, "There. That was best time for me to really see you. You're a sight to behold; it's something like a mature innocence I see in you that just surprises me. I can't decide whether it struck me then or is still dawning on me now. But, it's true, you're-"
Right then, I twisted out of his grip and clambered on top of him until I was sitting atop his chest, just taking him in. His soft brown eyes were on me too, raking over all of me with some deep, shallow pit of an emotion I couldn't decipher. "Really, you're-"
I quickly put a hand over his archaic lips, hushing him. All I wanted was to gorge myself on the sight of him this way. The moonlight seemed to refine him at this three-quarter angle; it glinted off his silver-brown hair til there was an angelic glow about his crown, I saw that slight bow-curve of his lips, the deep-set dimple in his chin. His usual hum-drum attire did him a grand injustice.
These were my thoughts, but they may well have been the same as every other strange woman who's been in this position; every other dark girl with an interest in art and a naïveté like mine.
In seconds, my smile fell into a sullen pout and suddenly I was wracked with frustration with him and myself. If he saw it, it made no difference to his libido as he rolled his hips slowly, spreading my legs apart, a futile attempt at tempting me. I clamped them shut. Perversely blinded, he slipped his hands under the hem of my t-shirt and tried to tickle me into grinning. I jerked away.
He gathered me up into his arms and flipped me so that I lay sprawled on my back, pressed beneath him again as he pried my legs apart. The exposure was maddening.
"No." I slapped his hand.
"Henna, stay still." He hissed.
"Stop..." I mumbled, shoving him away as I crawled to the other side of the bed, pushing my knees together as I went.
"Can you please, for one second, stop being such a child?" He used one hand to fold my wrists as I thrashed and threw elbows and feet, until I lost all my energy and my legs began to ache. "I can promise that this will be a rare occurrence between us, if not the last. Just let it happen now before the opportunity's missed, before the stakes are raised."
He trailed kisses down the middle of my chest evenly to my navel like a canoe bobbing along a roaring stream. I was nervous, positioning himself ever so carefully between my thighs, waiting until finally I went slack. I gave in and it hurt.
He was right, I wasn't ready. And that was what filled me with such dread: relationships were not without expiration dates. They consisted of a series of fleeting moments and then they were done. Along the way, things were supposed to get ruined. I was nervous about that.
I tossed and turned into the early morning.
Grumbling, I wriggled to get closer, to feel a sign of him, until I noticed the spot beside me was empty and cold. He was gone. A sliver of fear egged at me with its close companion, insecurity, plucking up my nerves.
Then, I heard the sound of a deep and monotonous murmuring, a whispering of some smooth, methodic cadence coming from the corner of the room near the arm chair.
I pulled the comforter over my face and peaked out from my fort so that he couldn't quite see me as I watched him rock, back and forth, murmuring a flurry of prayers into a set of rosary beads.
"In nomine Patris," he touched his forehead, "et Filii," touching his breastbone, "et Spiritus," his left shoulder, "Sancti," his right shoulder, then he whispered quietly, "Amen."
I was entranced by the repetition; as he hunched himself forward, tense and stiff as a wooden cross just missing the beam of moonlight streaming in through the window, none of the prayers were in English.
"Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentum..." He whispered a rush of incoherent words, then once again said, "...Amen." More words flooded the silence, but I still couldn't understand. The foreign syllables were so beautiful, I had to move closer, so as if I were in a deep and restless sleep, I rolled to the edge of the bed, "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tuis..." And again, "Ave Maria, gratia plena..."
A tear slipped out and rolled down the bridge of his nose, landing on the page of his Bible for whom I was not yet sure.