Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Have a seat.”

She had not been so far off about the rugs and fertility sculptures. A huge kilim calicoed the floor, and earthen pots of various sizes nestled in niches. Pillows dotted the sofa, and in one corner a surprisingly ornate wooden desk held neat piles of paper. Other than that, though, it felt like a man’s house, plantless, dusty, and with a barrenness she couldn’t quite place until she realized there was nothing hanging on the walls.

“Nice artwork.”

“Want something to drink?” Jamie ducked through an archway, and she heard the fridge door open. “I’ve got seltzer or beer.”

“Just water is great.”

The soft thud of cabinets turned into a running faucet, and a cheerless, robotic woman’s voice announced three messages. The first beep was followed by a reminder from the dentist’s office. The second was a husky-voiced girl. “Hiii, Professor Anderson, I’m really sorry to have to call you at home, I just have some questions about next semester,” she said, sounding stoned and possibly naked. Jamie hit the fastforward button.

“James Mitchell Anderson,” a laughing voice said after the third beep, and Amina’s stomach lurched with recognition. “Your nieces would like to talk to you. We’ve made up this game with that photo from the Quinns’ party where we draw you new hair every week and tape it on, and this week Cici—”

“Mohonk!” someone clearly little and delighted screamed in the background.

“Yes,” Paige laughed. “You have a Mohawk this week. Green, actually. But I think you’d totally dig it. Anyway, call us back. We’ll be around all afternoon.”

“Paige has kids?” Amina asked as Jamie walked into the room with a glass of water and a Corona.

He tossed her a coaster before sitting on the opposite couch. “Three daughters. The youngest is six months old.”

“Does she live here?”

“Yup.”

Amina nodded. “Cool.”

Jamie took a long swig of beer. His gaze bounced toward her and away.

“So how have you been?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Working a lot?”

“Yup.”

A light-blue sedan pulled up in the driveway of the house across the way, and Amina watched it, breaking into a sweat. Did he want her to leave?

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “I had a kind of weird week.”

“No big.” His fingers drummed against the bottle. “Four weeks.”

“We got my dad’s test results back. He has a tumor.” She was too nervous to look right at him but sensed his flinch from her periphery. “In his brain. A brain tumor.”

“When did you find out?”

“The day after I saw you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Was he? Amina looked at Jamie’s face for comfort or sympathy and instead saw reticence, like he did not want to catch what she had.

“So anyway, he’s starting treatment next week.” Her voice pinched with an effort to keep calm. She took another sip of water, her hurt blossoming quickly and more substantially than expected, like some stupid sponge toy that grows to five times its original size in water. So this was what it felt like to tell other people the truth. It felt like shit.

“Anyway.” She stood up. “So that’s what has been up with me. What about you? Seen any of your former students? How is Maizy?”

Jamie frowned. “What are you doing?”

She was pacing. Amina shrugged.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“Are you mad at me?”

“A little.”

She stopped. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I didn’t call? I just told you we found out—”

“I know. I know that.”

“Then what—”

“I don’t know. It’s not like you don’t have a good reason. But you asked if I was mad, and I am, kind of.”

There was something about the reasonableness with which he said this, the entitlement, that made her want to reach over and throttle him. Amina spun on her heel, heading toward the front door.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?” She turned around. “What am I doing?”

“Don’t turn me into some asshole.”

“You’re doing that all on your own.”

Jamie put his beer down. “Sit down.”

“What for?”

“Can you please sit back down?”

Amina wavered in the middle of the room, momentum shooting off to equally impossible outcomes. She wanted to be back in Seattle. She wanted to be in her car already, driving back to Corrales. She wanted to be back to the night in the park, with his collarbone on her tongue. Jamie motioned to the spot next to him on the couch. She walked toward him and sat stiffly. A fresh puff of dust motes flew into the air between them.

“I just thought you had left,” he said after a moment. “And that sucked, but then at least I had something to tell myself. Man, she felt so much she just had to leave .” He laughed self-consciously. “And then it turns out you were here ignoring my messages.”

His face turned toward her like a bruised flower, something sad and too delicate in its dark center, and she shrank a little.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.

He did not look particularly moved by this information.

“I just … I kept thinking once we knew for sure what we were dealing with, we could just tell everyone at once and get it over with. But every week it seems like we know less, and now it’s just …” She leaned back against the couch, the fight in her replaced with a calmness bordering on exhaustion. “The biopsy showed low-grade cells, but the problem is that might just be that small area of the tumor, and it might be worse somewhere else. My dad thinks it is, anyway. And then he seemed totally fine until this afternoon, and now he’s …” Amina snorted, gesturing into the air. “And honestly? I don’t want to talk about this with you. Not now. This is like the biggest boner killer I could think of.”

She watched a piece of fluff wander through the air in front of her, horribly aware of the silence that descended.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Did you just say boner—”

“Yes. I don’t even know where that came from. Fourth grade.”

“It’s sexy.”

“Really?”

“No. But it’s sweet. That you were thinking about that, I mean.” She pushed her leg against his on the couch, thinking about how saying a small, true thing for the first time felt much scarier than not saying anything at all.

“I don’t know,” Jamie sighed. “It’s not like I’m some expert at this. To be honest, I was a total dick when my mom got sick.” He shook his head. “But I think you go one of two ways with this stuff — you either try to be good to the people around you, or you give yourself a free pass to act however badly you want to, you know?”

Amina nodded. He was right. Even if she hadn’t been appallingly close to his neck, the smell of his skin filling her with relief and arousal, she would have had to cop to that.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His hand was on her leg. Amina watched as it slid down to her knee and back up, his fingers stroking the inside of her thigh.

“So what happened today to finally get your ass over here?” he asked, and she shook her head. She pulled his hand higher and watched gratefully as it disappeared under her skirt. She would tell him later, when they rose from the couch parched and flushed, ready to guzzle down the entire fridge’s worth of beverages, but for right now, she was ready to stop talking.

The entire household was asleep by the time Amina got home that night, which made the next thing she needed to do infinitely easier. She found Prince Philip curled up against the coolest patch of the dining room floor and tugged at his collar until he stood up.