Page 138 of Lethal in Pink

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking.”

“A fitted sheet. The elastic one. With the corners.”

“I know what a fitted sheet is, Amiyah.”

“And you—a grown man with a business degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country—cannot fold one.”

“I can get it into a shape that vaguely resembles a rectangle. It is not folded. It is contained. There’s a difference.”

She is looking at me like I’ve just confessed to a federal crime. Her eyebrows have climbed so high they’re practically in her hairline. “I need you to understand that I have watched you disassemble and reassemble a carburetor on YouTube. I have watched you recite the entire periodic table backward while drunk. You can speak three languages and you’ve never successfully folded a fitted sheet.”

“In my defense, fitted sheets are designed by people who hate humanity. The elastic is a personal affront.”

“It’s a rectangle with elastic, Jae. It’s not advanced calculus.”

“It might as well be.” I roll onto my side to face her properly. Her hair is a disaster—half of it flattened against the side of her head from sleeping on it, the other half standing at angles that suggest it recently survived a wind tunnel. There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase. The drool spot on my collarbone has started to dry, leaving a faint tacky feeling against my skin that I am choosing, deliberately, to find endearing. “I’ve tried every method. The burrito. The envelope. The thing where you turn it inside out and then somehow it’s supposed to—I don’t know, become sentient and fold itself? Nothing works. They always end up looking like I tried to strangle a ghost.”

She is trying not to laugh. I can see it in the way her mouth twitches at the corners, the particular tension in her jaw that means she’s holding back a sound. “The burrito method,” she repeats, and her voice wobbles. “You tried to burrito a fitted sheet.”

“It was on the internet. The internet lies to me constantly. I should know better by now.”

“The internet did not tell you to burrito a sheet, Jae. The internet showed you a video of someone who has been folding fitted sheets since the Cretaceous period making it look easy, and you took that personally.”

“I did take it personally. It felt targeted.”

She laughs then—a real one, bright and startled, the sound bouncing off the bedroom walls and settling somewhere in the space between my ribs. Her head tips back against the pillow, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and the crease on her cheek deepens with the motion. I watch it happen. I watch all of it happen—the laugh, the head tilt, the particular way her throat moves when the sound comes out of her—and I think, with the specific, bone-deep clarity of a man who has already made his peace with certain equations: This is what I’m keeping.

The conversation meanders. We talk about nothing. The kind of morning banter that has no agenda, no destination, the verbal equivalent of walking in circles because the circles themselves are the point. Amiyah tells me about a case from her property law final that involved a man who built a treehouse on his neighbor’s property and then claimed adverse possession because he’d been using it for seven years, and the neighbor’s counter-argument was that the treehouse was technically a vessel because it was on wheels, which meant maritime law applied, and the whole thing devolved into a shouting match about whether a treehouse on wheels constitutes a boat. I tell her about the time Kiho tried to cook bulgogi in our dorm microwave and set off the fire alarm at three in the morning, and how the RA who responded was wearing nothing but boxers and a Viking helmet, and how nobody ever explained the helmet.

The coffee maker gurgles in the kitchen. I set it before bed, the timer programmed for five-thirty, because I know myself well enough to know that waking up without coffee is waking up into a world I am not equipped to handle. The sound is familiar—the particular percussive rhythm of water hitting grounds, then the slower, deeper gurgle of the brew cycle kicking in. The apartment starts to smell like coffee, warm and bitter and specific, cutting through the sleep-heavy air of the bedroom.

Through the open bedroom door, I can see the blush sectional in the living room. My blush sectional, though at some point in the last three months it stopped being exclusively mine and started being the place where her pink throw pillows live alongside my gray ones, where her color-coded study materials colonize one entire cushion, where the remote control sits in the particular indentation her hand has worn into the fabric from holding it the same way every night. The city light presses through the balcony doors and turns the whole room amber, and the sectional sits in that light like something that has always been there, waiting for us to come back to it.

At some point, Amiyah stops trying to fix her hair. She stops tugging her sleep shirt down over her hips. She stops doing the particular, minute adjustments that she makes when she’s conscious of being watched—the straightened spine, the leveled chin, the careful calibration of her expression into something that reveals exactly what she wants you to see and nothing more. She just...stops. Her body relaxes into the mattress. Her hand finds mine on the sheets between us, and her fingers lace through mine without looking, like her hand knows the way and doesn’t need her eyes to confirm it.

And I stop cataloging. I stop burning photographs. I stop counting breaths and memorizing scar patterns and doing the particular, relentless arithmetic of a man who knows exactly how many minutes he has left. I just lie here. My thumb moves in a small circle against the back of her hand, and her fingers tighten around mine in response, and the coffee maker gurgles in the kitchen, and the city hums outside the window, and for one stupid, perfect stretch of minutes, the future does not exist. It has been temporarily suspended by mutual agreement. We are nowhere but here.

Her hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck.

The touch is slow. Deliberate. Her palm is warm against my skin, fingers finding the short hair at my nape, and then her thumb is tracing the line of my jaw—down from the hinge, along the curve, across the stubble I didn’t bother to shave yesterday because yesterday involved strawberry warfare and a shower that rewrote several laws of physics, and shaving felt like an unreasonable demand on my time. Her thumb moves with the particular focus of someone who is mapping terrain. Learning it. Committing it to memory the way I’ve been committing her to memory since before the sun came up.

My breath catches. Audibly. The sound is small in the quiet room, but she hears it—I see it in the way her eyes find mine, the particular shift in her expression, something warm and knowing sliding behind the brown. Her thumb pauses at the corner of my mouth. Holds there. Presses, just slightly, and the pressure travels straight down my spine and settles somewhere low in my abdomen with the weight of something that has been waiting for permission.

I roll her beneath me with unhurried care.

My weight comes down on my forearms, bracketing her shoulders. I give her every beat of space—time to change her mind, to laugh it off, to retreat into the particular careful distance she maintains when the world feels too close. She doesn’t. Her hands find my waist. Her hips shift beneath mine, and the movement is deliberate, testing, and then she arches up to meet me, and her mouth finds mine with a hunger that is tender rather than frantic.

The kiss is slow. Deep. Her bottom lip catches between mine, and she makes a sound against my mouth—low, quiet, the particular vibration that means she’s already decided and the decision is final. My hand finds her hair, fingers threading through the dark waves, and she tilts her head into the touch like a cat finding sun, and the trust in the gesture unmakes me in ways I am not prepared to name.

She wants me. Specifically. Entirely. Not as adrenaline, not as distraction, not as the particular calculated risk of two people who have run out of other options. She wants me the way a person wants something they have chosen, with clear eyes, knowing the cost. I can feel it in the way her hands move—down my back, palms flat against my shoulder blades, pulling me closer like she’s trying to eliminate the space between us through sheer force of will. I can hear it in the rhythm of her breathing, quickening against my mouth. I can see it in her eyes when they open, dark and focused and entirely present, holding my gaze like she’s making sure I’m seeing this too.

I take my time.

My mouth finds the hollow of her throat first. The pulse there is fast, steady, beating against my lips like something trying to communicate. I trace the line of her collarbone with my tongue—slow, deliberate, learning the geography of her—and her breath hitches, a sharp intake that tells me exactly where to go next. Her hand finds the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair, and the pressure is perfect—not guiding, not controlling, just holding, like she needs something to anchor herself against.

“Jae.” My name in her mouth. Quiet. Almost a question.