MEHAR
I wondered if I’d ever feel normal again.
Would I ever truly laugh and have my smile reach my ears? Would I ever sleep through the night? Would I ever stop flinching when a man got near me? Would this bitter taste in my mouth ever leave?
Who had I become?
When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself. I had morphed into someone stronger. Deadlier. But also angrier. And the anger was the part I couldn’t figure out. Because I wasn’t angry at anyone specific anymore. Ahmad was handled. Thad was handled. My father was irrelevant. The men who’d hurt me had been dealt with in ways that most women only fantasized about. So why was I still walking around with my fists balled up? Why did my jaw ache every morning from clenching it in my sleep? Why did every man who looked at me too long make my skin crawl like I needed to either fight him or run?
I crossed my legs on Janelle’s oatmeal-colored couch and waited for her to say something that would make it make sense. That’s why I was here. Every Wednesday at four. Because somewhere between the woman I used to be and the woman I’d become, I’d lost something. I just couldn’t figure out what.
Janelle sat across from me in her leather chair. Notepad on her knee. Cream silk blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt. Gold hoops. Long hair parted down the middle, falling past her shoulders in loose waves. Hazel eyes that could go from warm to “I see right through your bullshit” in half a second. She was a pretty woman. She appeared to be mixed but I wasn’t sure with what. She looked like Jasmine Guy with light eyes.
“You said the sleep has gotten worse.”
“Two, three hours a night,” I said. “And it’s not real sleep. It’s that fake sleep where your body is lying down but your brain is doing a whole TED Talk about every terrible thing that’s ever happened to you. My body just refuses to shut down. Like it doesn’t trust the dark.”
She wrote something on her notepad. “And the irritability we discussed last session? The difficulty being around men?”
I let out a laugh that had absolutely zero humor in it. “Difficulty is a real polite word for it.”
“What word would you use?”
I thought about the nigga at the gas station last week who had the audacity—the absolute unmitigated audacity—to say “smile, beautiful” and I turned around and told him to go fuck himself with so much venom that even I was shook by what came out of my mouth. The worst part is that I was clenching a the hidden knife in my pocket. The barista at the coffee shop who reached across the counter to hand me my latte and his fingers brushed mine and I snatched my hand back so fast I knocked the cup over and made a whole scene at seven in the morning on a Tuesday.
Those men did not deserve all that. I knew that. But my body didn’t care what they deserved.
And then there was Yusef’s recital. That hallway incident.
I’d been fine and composed. Minding my business on the way to the bathroom between sets, existing peacefully for once in mylife, and Quest Banks came around that corner and bulldozed me. Well, at least that’s how my brain registered it.
The full chest-to-shoulder contact knocked me back a step and sent my clutch to the floor. And before I could even process what happened, before my brain could sort “accident” from “threat,” my whole body went to war. My shoulders climbed to my ears, my jaw locked tight, and my pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
I went off on him. I knew I did. Called him out like he’d swung on me instead of bumped into me. And the rational part of my brain was screaming at me the entire time—he apologized, Mehar, he literally picked up your purse and said my bad, calm the hell down—but the part of my brain that actually ran things, the part Ahmad had rewired over years of flinching and ducking and bracing for impact, that part did not give a single solitary fuck about rational.
And he just… took it. He didn’t get loud, didn’t get aggressive, just apologized again and made a joke about trying to buy the building. Called meMean-harwith this annoying, yet sexy little smirk and walked away like my whole meltdown was mildly entertaining to him.
That made me angrier than the collision.
But it wasn’t the anger that kept me up that night. Or the night after.
It was the wedding.
Because my brain—my stupid, traitorous, uncooperative brain—wouldn’t let me think about Quest Banks in that hallway without rewinding further. Before the recital. All the way back to Prime and Zainab’s reception, and that goddamn garter.
The whole thing was Rita’s fault. She was the one who yelled at him to get out of his chair. Called him by his whole government name in front of a hundred people—Questor Rufus Banks—and he’d taken a slow sip of his bourbon like the threatof public embarrassment was a minor inconvenience, then stood up, adjusted his cuffs, and walked to where I was sitting with a bouquet I didn’t even mean to catch dripping champagne in my lap.
He knelt in front of me. I told him it was outdated and sexist. He told me to give him my leg.
And I did. Because apparently my body was running a whole separate operation that night and didn’t feel the need to consult me about it.
His hand started at my ankle and slid upward, over my calf, past my knee, his fingers warm and deliberate against my skin while Keith Sweat played and the whole room lost their minds. And my lungs just… stopped. Everything stopped. The music, the noise, the hundred people watching. All of it went mute. And all that was left was his hand on my thigh and his eyes looking up at me, and they weren’t playful anymore. They were focused with fiery intent. Like he was reading something written on the inside of my skin that I didn’t know was there.
I shoved him. Both palms flat against his chest. Hard enough to rock him back on his heels. And he laughed and I laughed and the room went crazy and it was fine. It was all fine. Just a tradition and a joke. Nobody had to know that my hand stayed on his chest a beat too long because my fingers didn’t want to leave and I had to physically force them to let go.
Nobody had to know that I went home that night and stood in the shower for forty-five minutes because I could still feel where his fingers had been, like my skin had saved the receipt and refused to throw it away.
Nobody had to know that two days ago, standing in that hallway with my clutch in my hand and my pulse going crazy, the anger I felt wasn’t really about the collision at all. It was about the fact that Quest Banks had touched me once, months ago, for less than a minute, and my body had been holdingonto it ever since—replaying it on a loop, cataloging every detail, comparing every sensation to the ones before it and coming to the maddening conclusion that nothing had ever made me tremble the way his hand sliding up my thigh had.
