Choose Me: a novella (2 page)

chapter three

Whirlwind

They never made it to the vernissage.

After the kiss, Jessica couldn’t think straight and didn’t care where Chris took her, so long as they could be alone. So when his lips brushed her neck and a staggering rush of want coursed through her, she knew that she’d go anywhere he asked. She would’ve gladly stayed right there, with her arms clasped tightly around him as they kissed in the evening rain, as long as he didn’t simply vanish. Maybe this was what she’d missed these last three months. The touch of someone who desired her… the longing that was like a rush of blood to the head that flowed like lava through her limbs… She was vaguely aware of passersby, some of whom whistled at them and though the thought occurred to her that a few might disapprove, just then she didn’t care.

But he pulled back, and she let her arms slide away. They were both breathing heavily and smiling the slightly anxious smiles of the cautious would-be lovers. “Let’s go to my place instead,” he said in voice thick with want.

She nodded readily. “Let’s…”

He was staying in a small studio not far from Holyrood Palace. It was in a building tucked down a narrow alley that Jessica would’ve never thought of going down alone. But at the end of the alley was a small courtyard and a brick building that had probably once been a stable or a barn. She looked around, marveling at how, even with all the rain pelting down, it seemed so cozy there.

For a moment she questioned what she was doing – following a man she barely knew home. She would’ve never done this in Philadelphia, especially not with a white man.  At home, the girls she’d grown up with had known that white boys were off-limits: black girls were supposed to pretend that white boys didn’t exist, weren’t supposed to even be interested in them. It was okay if black boys slept with white girls. It was just a phase for them, at least, that’s what their parents told them. But for girls it was different. And even Jessica’s mother had warned her that white men were incapable of loving black women because their lives were too easy.

“They don’t know what it’s like to struggle or to be seen as s
econd-class,” was what her mother said in a scoffing tone when Jessica once confessed to having a crush on an Irish-Catholic boy she knew from school. “And no matter how much they care about you, you’re not the one they want to spend the rest of their life with. Your color is an albatross for them.”

She tried to push those words aside now as she followed Chris up the staircase leading to his studio. The rules were different now, weren’t they? Ever since she’d arrived in Europe she’d noticed interracial couples walking hand in hand, with no one seeming to
be alarmed by them or making snide remarks about “jungle fever”. Maybe it was true that Europeans were more sophisticated when it came to race. They didn’t have the same baggage that Americans carried. And Chris didn’t seem to care about the color of her skin. Besides, no one said this had to go anywhere. She could take a page from the
Sex and the City
girls and have sex like man.

Inside his studio it was warmer than the hallway. In fact, it was almost tropical compared to Jessica’s student rooms. Chris helped her with her coat and hung it on one of the hooks above a piping hot old-fashioned steam radiator, then he removed his own coat and hung it beside hers. He turned on a lamp and Jessica took in the size of his apartment. Though it wasn’t huge, the ceilings were high, which had made it possible to divide the room into small lofts. One such in the far left corner housed his unmade bed.  Just to Jessica’s right was a loft in front of what had most likely been the hayloft doors. Those doors had been transformed into a huge window that looked down on the courtyard and, on the small pla
tform in front of the window were a dining table and some mismatched chairs. The rest of the floor space had been divided between a small open-plan kitchen and the living room. And tucked behind one of the doors was the bathroom.

It must have been nice to have all of this
space to himself, she thought. Though she didn’t mind sharing her living space with Gillian and her roommates, there were times when her housemate’s untidiness was too much to bear. Especially when half-eaten takeaway curries were often left on counters and coffee tables for hours before it would occur to Gillian to clear them away. 

But she didn’t want to think about Gillian. Not when she could feel Chris standing behind her and all she wanted to do was to take off her clothes and feel him naked against her. So she turned to
face him and took the initiative, exploring his neck and mouth with her lips, running her hands over his chest and pulling at the hem of his shirt. It wasn’t long before he was following her lead, and they were both stumbling towards his bed.

Later, as she was gathering her clothes from the floor and dressing again, she couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed by her forwardness. Though she was no wallflower, she wasn’t the sort of girl who usually took control when it came to sex.  The men she’d dated in Philadelphia often professed to being put off by women who wanted to be in control and she’d acquiesced, anxious to please instead of rocking the boat. If Chris had minded he certainly hadn’t given any sign of it.

Chris.

She crept back over to the bed and watched him sleep. He’d curled around one of the pillows now. Even in the wan light coming through the windows she could see how attractive he was. He had the long lean body of a swimmer. He wasn’t hairy, though there was a sparse patch of dark silky hair on his chest that trailed down to his groin.  She hadn’t thought he’d be so beautiful naked.

Her breath caught in her throat just remembering how expertly he’d played her body. How his mouth sought her nipples and sucked until they were so hard they ached. How his fingers danced over her clit and slid inside of her, rubbing and probing, making her body arch upwards to meet his. How he’d knelt between her legs and breathed in the scent of her pubic mound then kissed her thighs until she grabbed his head and pressed his mouth firmly against her sex. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had gone down on her. Her last boyfriend had behaved as though her pussy was something that should only be penetrated and never
kissed or licked or sucked. Whenever they made love, she most often came away from it unsatisfied and waited until she was alone to masturbate.

Well, the same couldn’t be said for Chris. She came three times before he’d finally admitted he couldn’t hold back any longer. And thinking about how the weight of his body felt on hers was making her want him again. But it was late, and she had a Saturday mor
ning seminar that she hadn’t even begun preparing for. So she finished dressing and slid out of his apartment.

It wasn’t until she was safely back in her student rooms and l
ying in her lumpy bed that she remembered she hadn’t given him her phone number, nor had he given her his.

chapter four

Fate
Steps In

Three days in a row Chris went back to the Honey Pot,  nursing a pint of beer and waiting for her to turn up again. Each day he wai
ted around for an hour or two, jumping whenever the door opened. He asked the bartender, a hard-looking bruiser whom Chris had seen play in a weekend rugby match, if he knew Jessica but he muttered something along the lines of not caring too much about names and faces so long as the tabs were paid in full. On the third day he was tired of drinking tepid beer and looking like a sap just waiting so he headed for University of Edinburgh’s campus, figuring he was more likely to bump into her there.

The clouds had finally given way to sunshine and it was one of those glorious autumn days when every color was more vivid and you could smell the last traces of lavender in the air. Just smelling the lavender reminded him of the scent of her skin, of the soft lavender tones of the perfume she’d worn and how when he kissed her neck, her skin was so warm under his lips. She’d smelled so
lovely. God, just thinking about it was giving him a hard-on. The sight of her sliding her jeans off her hips and, once they were at her ankles, stepping out of them and kicking them aside… his fingers unbuttoning the thin cotton shirt she’d worn and revealing the dark plane of her torso and the valley between her breasts.

Don’t think about it, not until you find her, he thought, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her and this had already gotten him in trouble with Fergus, the photographer he worked for. On Sunday he’d forgotten to meet Fergus at a posh dinner party where Chris was supposed to take party shots as part of what Fergus loosely deemed his training. All it really meant was that Fergus would criticize whatever shots Chris took, then send out copies of the prints to his friends as party gifts with his own name scrawled on the back. Chris wasn’t sure how any of this constituted training but at least he was getting paid.

Then today he’d been daydreaming about Jessica and how soft her lips were and the velvety touch of her skin, when he dropped one of Fergus’s prized Hasselblads. Luckily, the camera was sturdy enough to withstand the fall but Fergus had gone ballistic, swearing so loud his already booming voice seemed to fill the room again and again. When it nearly happened a second time, Fergus let out a resounding, “For fuck’s sake!” then told Chris to “piss off until you get your nuts out your ass!”

He found her standing in line in a café just when he’d got fed up with walking around in circles. She was cradling a huge book, reading and waiting for her coffee. Her hair was loose today and it trailed down to her shoulders, framing her face and shining like polished wood. He said her name. She nearly dropped the book. Before she could say anything, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. Then when he stepped back to look at her, he said, “Sorry! Couldn’t help myself.”

She nodded. She was still holding that heavy book, which he now saw was one of those thick literature anthologies that he’d always despised when he was in college. Most times, he never opened them and took to using them as doorstops or forgot about them and they collected dust under his bed.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he confessed when the silence between them became too uncomfortable. “I didn’t expect you to just leave.”

“I had a seminar
.” She shifted the book under her arm, gripping it a little tighter.

“On Saturday?”

“Twice a month we have a breakfast seminar with our lecturer,” she said.

She glanced past him. He turned. The girl she’d been with at the pub was watching them with great interest. She was already holding court at a round table by the window, talking over the two guys sitting with her. They were serious types, at least they r
eminded him of the serious types he’d encountered at University of the Arts: strange haircuts, heavy black-framed glasses and ratty sweaters, black jeans and Doc Martens. They were the type who listened to the Smiths and Morrissey and could quote Ted Hughes and Galway Kinnell by heart, who blathered on about deconstructionism and post modernism and thought everything they said was so deep. He hated guys like them. One of the guys was watching Jessica. He made as if to stand and join them, but she shook her head no.

“What’s going on?” Chris asked. “Are you with him?”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” she said. “He’s one of my roommates.” But she looked uncomfortable. Maybe Friday night was just a one-night stand for her.

Shit, had he misinterpreted everything? Maybe that was why she left without saying goodbye or why she hadn’t even left a note with her number or her address.

“I’ll see you around.”

“Where are you going?” She reached out, grabbing his arm and stopping him. “Do you always just do that? Kiss a girl and then leave?”

“It looks like I’m interrupting something.”

“We’re just studying.”

“So why is he staring at you like that?”

“I don’t know. Ask him.”

“Screw him.”

“I’d rather not,” she laughed. That was better. The
weird mood was lifting.

“I want to see you again.”

“I’d like that too.”

“When can I see you again?”

“Tonight?”

“Where?”

“I’ll come to your place as soon as I’m done here.”

“Do you remember where it is?”

She nodded, but he grabbed a napkin from the counter and jotted down his address and the door code on it. He folded the napkin and slid it in her jeans pocket.

Before he left, she set her book down on a nearby table and kissed him. Then she murmured in his ear, “I want you again.”

The stupid grin on his face took hours to disappear.

chapter five

Black and
White

She didn’t know exactly when she realized she didn’t want to be without him. It could’ve been that first night when he kissed her in the pouring rain and she forgot all about the awful weather and the heavy darkness. Perhaps it was well after that night. All Jessica knew was that after a month of seeing him nearly every night and wallowing in the luxury of his attentions, she stopped wishing someone would come along who’d sweep her off her feet. She didn’t need it—it had already happened!

But as much as she enjoyed his company and how he could never seem to get enough of her, she still felt nervous when they were out in public together. Occasionally someone would give them an odd questioning look or mock-whisper a rude comment that Chris never seemed to notice. Whenever this happened, her spine turned to ice and she felt the old reservations creep to the surface. She’d tell herself that it didn’t matter, but she’d hear her mother’s well-meaning but critical voice in her head, reminding her that whites and blacks would never be able to love each other, not in this lifetime anyway when the rancor of slavery and apartheid and Jim Crow were still fresh wounds.

What would her mother and her friends back home say if they knew she was sleeping with a white man? Or that she thought she was falling in love with him? She knew her best friend
Aisha would just cackle a laugh full of derision and accuse Jessica of trying to escape reality. Hadn’t Aisha said those very same words to other friends of theirs who’d dated outside their race?

Like Jessica’s mother,
Aisha was of the belief that the races weren’t meant to mix, at least not yet. Aisha was convinced that most whites were still out to get blacks, and that they were just looking for excuses for keeping minorities from advancing. Her favorite proof of this was the how few blacks were represented in Congress or the fact that there had never been a black president, let alone governor of any state. Aisha saw the state of the working class neighborhood where they’d grown up as proof that whites wanted blacks to live worse than they did. She could go on for days with bits of proof without once ever considering an alternate opinion. Jessica never understood Aisha’s hostility. As far as she could tell, her friend had never been discriminated against nor been the victim of racism. But she never questioned it because she knew that Aisha would only just find more strands of “proof” without once hearing Jessica’s own opinions.

Now with the ocean and so many miles between Jessica and the West Philadelphia neighborhood where she’d grown up standing between her, she felt free to be with Chris. She liked that he didn’t make her feel like the color of skin was an anomaly to be either treasured or despised. Often she wondered if he noticed the co
ntrast of his pale hand on her dark skin, as he never commented on it. The only time race had ever been mentioned between them was when he’d told her how the first black person he ever met was a girl in his ninth grade algebra class. 

“Her name was Ellie, she was the smartest girl in our class,” he’d said as he adjusted his camera on its tripod. “The rest of us always wondered how she seemed to understand all of those equ
ations and symbols when it all looked like Greek to us.”

Then Jessica had wanted to tell him what her mother usually said—that little black girls always had to work twice as hard as the rest of the world, if only to prove to them that they were equal. Ellie’s mother had probably said the very same words to her, pro
bably even warned her that everyone—from the other students to the teachers to the principal—was waiting for her to stumble so they could throw salt in her wounds and confirm their own misgivings about her achievements.  But she hadn’t said anything; she’d just smiled at him and lay back on his bed, waiting for him to take the picture of her that he’d said he wanted. And when she didn’t comment, he’d gone on to say that eventually that Ellie had gone on to Harvard while the rest of his classmates had settled for Temple or Villanova or Community College.

“Last I heard, she was going to law school,” he said as he peered through the viewer. Then he dropped the subject of Ellie—whom Jessica suspected he’d had a crush on—and began snapping pictures of Jessica, until she started to undress and lured him into bed with her.

“Who’s this Yank you’ve got your panties in a twist over?” Gillian asked her one morning over breakfast. They were sitting at the small Formica card table that functioned as their kitchen table, both of them wrapped in thick robes and flannel pajamas. Though
the radiators were on full blast, the kitchen was chilly. Gillian had even turned on the oven just to generate a bit of heat.

Jessica smiled hazily. She’d spent the previous night with Chris at his place, letting him take pictures of her for his portfolio. He told her she was his muse, an idea that appealed to her. No one had ever found her inspiring before. And when he’d said it, her skin went prickly and a thousand tiny lights blinked on inside her.

“His name is Chris,” she said. “I met him at the Honey Pot.”

“Figures you’d come all the way here to meet another Amer
ican. I was so sure you were keen on Andrew.”

Andrew was one of their study partners from their
Birth of the Novel
seminar. Like Gillian, he was from Aberdeen. Jessica didn’t find Andrew half as attractive as he seemed to find himself. He was always blathering on about his own positive qualities and who was interested in him and who was not. And though Gillian was convinced that Andrew had a thing for Jessica, Jessica thought it more likely that he was only interested in her because she hadn’t shown any real interest in him. He flirted shamelessly with her, especially since he’d seen Chris kiss her that day in the café. He habitually treated the girls who asked him out or who slept with him badly, giving them the cold shoulder when they next met or pretending not to know them. And while he was attractive in a ginger-haired freckled face sort of way, the limitlessness of his ego turned Jessica off. She couldn’t picture him as relationship material, and he wasn’t the sort of person she’d ever change her life for.

“Andrew is a good study partner,” Jessica replied with a smile, “but he’s definitely not date material.”

Gillian accepted this with a slow nod. It was too early for her to challenge Jessica much. Gillian usually slept in on Saturdays until noon so Jessica was surprised that she was actually awake when she came home.

“It’s odd is all, I figured American blokes were too scared to date…well, you know what I mean—someone one wasn’t exactly the same as them.”

“And what about Scottish men? I haven’t seen very many dating girls like me.”

“It's not the same,” Gillian retorted. “We’re not altogether ra
cists like most Yanks.”

“What a load of bollocks!” Jessica said. She was about to lay into Gillian and remind her of the news reports that had greeted Jessica during her first week in Scotland when three White Power skins in Glasgow attacked a young Indian woman after a football match but then Gillian’s face went beet-red as she burst into a fit of staccato laughter.

“Sweet lord, you said ‘bollocks’! I was beginning to think you’d never start absorbing little Scottish ways!”

Jessica set down her cup of tea. She had said ‘bollocks’, come to think of it, instead of her usual ‘load of crap’. And that was enough to distract Gillian that Jessica started teasing her about wanting ‘taters an’ neeps’ and ‘the dreaded haggis’, which set them both off in another fit of giggles. 

After her seminar, Jessica walked up to Princes Street with the intention of going to Waterstones’ for an American newspaper and a cup of coffee. A part of her wanted to meet up with Chris, but they’d spent so much time together the last few weeks that it som
etimes scared her to think that it couldn’t go on like this. In May they’d both be returning to Philadelphia, and it didn’t seem likely to her that they could continue seeing each other. It was one thing to be together in Europe where hardly anyone stared just because a white man kissed a black woman. In the States everyone reacted to interracial couples, even when they were pretending not to react, and made it their business to state their approval or disapproval.

She’d commented on this once to Chris and it was the closest they’d ever come to an argument. At first he’d brushed her co
ncerns. “We don’t live in the Fifties anymore, Jess,” he’d said with a lopsided smile. “Nobody’s going to burn crosses in front of our house or lynch us in Philly!”

“I didn’t say they would, but it has happened before—just a few years ago there was that couple in Frankfurt whose house was burned down by their neighbors and the black family in South Philly whose house was vandalized by those stupid bastards who painted “Nigger” and “Go Back to Africa” all over their front porch and the house façade.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. All we have to do is show people we don’t care what they think—”

“But I
do
care—I
have
to care!”

“Why? If we want to be together, whose business is that other than our own?”

“You can say that because you’re white—”

“Don’t even turn it into
that
. You make it sound like the color of my skin is the only thing that defines who I am.”

“It’s not the only thing that defines you but it’s a part of who you are, just like I can’t ignore the fact that my skin in black and no one else ever ignores it either!”

“So what are you saying? That we can be together like this now but the moment we hit American soil you don’t want to have anything to do with me just because somebody
might
not like the fact that we enjoy being together?”

She didn’t say anything. She was almost afraid to. If she told him the truth, that she was terrified of how things would change once they were back in the States surrounded by their family and friends, he wouldn’t take her seriously. He was so easy-going he just didn’t get that their being together would rub a lot of people the wrong way. 

His jaw had gone tight and a flush of red spread over his face. He shifted away from her and a pocket of cold impenetrable air formed between them. Then he mumbled that he had to get back to work. He paid the bill for their coffee and stalked out without saying goodbye. She’d remained sitting in her chair, unable to move because her legs were shaking. If she’d turned and looked out the plate glass window, she would have seen him pause just outside the door and rub his hands over his face. She would have seen how unsteady his hands were and that his skin had gone pale and ashen. But she didn’t turn, not even when she felt him standing there on the other side of the glass. And he shook his head and walked by, watching her from the corner of his eye until he couldn’t see her anymore.

Later that night she called him and, extending an olive branch, took him out for drinks at the Honey Pot. Both of them were car
eful with their words, doling them out in small amounts as if afraid of going too far. It took several pints of ale to drown the brittleness that had come to the surface, and even then she hated that she’d even brought up race. Something felt off-kilter now, as though some unseen scale had tipped and they would have to work even harder than before to keep themselves from sliding off.