Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Someone was smoking a cigarette. It took a moment for Amina to realize this, and another to realize that that was a scary thing, the hair on her arms and neck rising all at once. Whoever it was, was close. Amina’s eyes zigzagged through the dark, straining. Was it a ninja? Was he watching her? She heard a small click behind her and turned around slowly, her heart seizing as an orange ember moved through the air a few feet back. Her throat went dry. Just as she felt herself tipping into a quiet, annihilating panic, the smoker took a drag of the cigarette, and the orange halo of light revealed a face so familiar that the night itself seemed to suck in sharply around her, every bit of oxygen rushing toward the flame.

He looked the same. The exact same, his cheekbones stretched into the wide arcs that had risen after the Big Sleep. The glow from the cigarette faded, leaving a light-green smudge against the night.

He was walking toward her. Amina understood this in some paralyzed corner of her brain, the same part that had watched countless glasses slip through her hands, plates shatter on the floor, car crashes occur in neighboring lanes, and just as she had held still in all of those instances, convinced that the damage was too obvious to actually happen, she held still now. Patches of light caught his jeans, his T-shirt, and then he was walking past her, toward the trees.

Amina turned around, hot and chattering. Wait .

She could not speak. He did not wait. Akhil parted the branches and walked toward the bright lights of the main campus.

They were running fast across the mesa, sand flooding into their shoes, sagebrush and ditchweed tearing at their calves and ankles.

“Hold on!” Jamie yelled after her.

Amina felt his hand grasping for her shoulder and jerked away. He hadn’t said a word as she’d come bolting back from the bleachers. By the time she’d hit the main road out of the campus, he was sprinting alongside her, his long strides keeping pace with her frantic ones.

“Amina, hold the fuck on!” He grabbed her hard this time, yanking her to a stop. “We’re safe. No one’s following us, I swear.”

Amina wriggled away from him. Up in the distance, the spaded tips of the iron fence had just come into view, and she juddered toward it, loosely aware that something was not right with her ankle. She was shaking.

“Hey.” Jamie touched her shoulder again lightly. “Hey, are you okay?”

She was not okay. Her ankle felt like it had a pencil lodged in it. Amina stopped.

“What happened? Was it a ninja?” Jamie asked.

Amina shook her head, her brother’s face rushing to her like wind through an open door. She covered her face with her hands. A rasping noise came from her throat, and Jamie circled her in his arms, scrunching down to mitigate his height. He was smoothing her hair back in small repetitive movements, the kind designed to soothe cats and babies.

“What happened?”

She shook her head. She wiped her face on her arm, embarrassed and desperately in need of a tissue. “Let’s just go.”

The drive home was silent. Jamie had insisted on driving her there, on helping her get her car the next day, but now, as the quiet stretched out between them, Amina regretted letting him. To be fair, he had tried to start several conversations, even trying to joke, but her inability to offer back a single word had sapped him, and they sat next to each other in the car like stones thrown together at the bottom of a pond. The car plummeted from the mesa into the valley, city blocks disappearing into the dark, smooth acreage of farmland. Soon they were winding down Corrales Road, signs for horse riders and cattle crossings flashing past them.

“Here,” she said, and Jamie turned off of the main road onto a shorter road. She directed him over the ditch, to the dirt road.

“Can you drive to the end?” she asked.

“What?”

“Of this road. Please drive to the end.”

They cruised past the entrance to her driveway, the road lit yellow and dusty in front of them. Jamie rolled to a stop at the dead end. He switched off the engine but kept the lights on, and they watched grasshoppers comet in and out of the dark. His shoulders had hitched up high around his ears like he was bracing against a blow.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded but her eyes burned.

“What happened?”

“I think I just got too high.”

The wall of ditchweed wavered in front of them, a dark curtain of fronds and bugs that led to the water.

“Sure,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She reached for him. She surprised him and his head reared back slightly as her fingers moved to the corner of his mouth, the meat of his lip.

“Listen,” he started, in the gentle voice of easy letdowns, and she leaned forward, feeling his mouth warm and still against hers. She kissed his top lip, and then, when he did not respond, his lower lip, sucking it gently. Jamie did not kiss her back, but he did not stop her either, and Amina leaned in a little more, a flash of pain slicing in her ankle as she tasted the beer and salt on him. He pulled away.

She kissed his jaw. Her fingers found the back of his neck, and she pressed it toward her, scared that he would stop her. She did not want to be stopped. Her hand ran along his thigh, his crotch, the warm Braille of his inseam, and she was surprised by how suddenly he moved then, one hand clamping against her neck, the other finding her nipple with a sureness that pulled the air from her lungs. He shifted, coming at her now, his back rising up. Amina reached for the door handle behind her. She stepped out into the swampy air, her legs jittering as she walked to the back of the car and opened the hatchback.

“Come on.”

He did not move.

“Please,” she said.

His door opened and she slid into the car, kicking off her shoes in the dark. He slid in next to her, and the car bounced lightly with his weight. She scooted down, lifting his shirt to kiss the hairless patch of skin above his hip bone. She pulled the edge of his boxers and inhaled the root-deep smell of him.

“Wait.”

She did not want to wait. His cock was a lovely weight, warm and solid and as reassuring in the dark as a flashlight.

“Amina, wait.”

She put it in her mouth.

“Fuck.” His hands were in her hair, cradling her skull, pushing her down farther as his hips rocked forward. He tasted like the beach, like relief.

She rolled over to pull her shirt off, wriggling out of her shorts and underwear in the dark. She could feel his eyes on her as she straddled him, ignoring the burst of pain in her knees. His eyes were glassy slits as she rose in the dark and sank down again. One of his hands grabbed her collarbone; the other moved between her legs. She leaned into him until she could not breathe.

“Come,” he said, and she did, easy like that, like she was a bomb waiting to go off.

Afterward, she lay her head against the tight pillow of his biceps, the little beats of aftershock pulsing through her.

“You scared me,” Jamie finally said with a soft laugh. Her forehead pressed against his throat so that his words hummed through her brain. “You came running out of there so fast, I thought, Someone is trying to fucking kill her . Like I was going to have to fight.”

He rolled over a little bit, and Amina’s ear flattened against his shoulder. For a minute she imagined telling him that she’d seen Akhil behind the bleachers, that he looked like he did after the Big Sleep, but Jamie’s hand found her cheek, rubbing it lightly in a way that felt both proprietary and absent, and she realized that what had started as an effort to reclaim him, to bring the night back snug around the two of them and huddle under it like a blanket, was not working.