Jaleesa
Lila’sandGrayson'slivingroom smells like ginger tea and prenatal vitamins and the particular brand of lavender candle she burns when her morning sickness is bad. She’s on the couch with her feet tucked under a blanket, one hand resting on the tiny swell of her belly that wasn’t there a month ago. The bump is barely visible beneath her oversized cardigan, but I know it’s there the way I know the mating mark is under my scarf—by the gravity it exerts on everything around it.
She hands me a cup of tea and studies my face with the quiet precision of a woman who has known me since we shared a dorm room and a meal plan and a mutual conviction that the world owed us nothing we didn’t earn.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“Jaleesa.” Just my name. The way she says it when she’s done letting me deflect.
I set the tea down. Wrap my hands around my knees. Stare at the candle flame on her coffee table because it’s easier than looking at her.
“We’ve been hooking up.”
Silence. Not the shocked kind. The kind that’s been waiting.
“More than once?”
“More than once.” I pull at a thread on my sleeve. “A few times. Several times. Every time we swear it’s the last one. Every time we sayfor nowand meanfor neverand then three days later he’s at my door, or I’m texting him back, or we end up in the same room, and the room gets very small very fast.”
Lila sips her tea. Waits.
“It’s like—” I press my palms together, fingers spread, then rotate my hands so the heels push apart while my fingertips stay locked. “Magnets. Bonded on one side. Repelling on the other. We keep flipping back and forth, and the whiplash is—” I drop my hands. “It’s driving us both insane.”
“Is it just sex?”
The question is gentle. Direct. Classic Lila—no ambush, just the cleanest possible path to the truth.
“Of course it’s just sex.”
“Jaleesa.”
“It’s just sex with—context.” I pull my knees tighter. “We’re both lawyers. We have things in common. Occupational overlap.”
“Like what?”
“We love the law. Obviously. We love our families. We both watch old black-and-white movies—the ones where the couples really go at each other, Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall. We read. He reads legal history, I read case studies in civil rights litigation, but sometimes we—” I stop. My mouth was running ahead of my brain. A dangerous configuration for an attorney.“We like to argue about what we’ve read. He has terrible opinions about procedural reform. We…”
The list is getting long. The list is getting long, detailed, and specific, and it sounds less like occupational overlap and more like the inventory of a relationship I refuse to name.
“You love—” Lila starts.
“Don’t.”
“—each other.”
The words land between us and sit there, fully formed, refusing to be unsaid.
“No.” My voice is harder than I intend. “It’s not— Lila, itcannotbe that. We are opposing counsel. He built the system I’m trying to dismantle. He is the literal, legal architect of the policies that are destroying Maya Lincoln’s career. Whatever this is between us, it is biological, and it is temporary, and it is not—”
“Okay.” She holds up one hand. Lets the word do its work. Then, quieter: “It’s not so bad, you know. Surrendering to the bond. I fought it too. You watched me fight it.”
“You fought it for about forty-five minutes.”
She laughs—short, real, the Lila laugh that crinkles her nose. “Fair. But I fought it in my head for a lot longer than that. And I’m telling you, from the other side—” She sets her tea down and leans forward, her dark eyes serious. “I’m worried about you. Both of you. The bags under your eyes. The weight you’ve lost. Neither of you is eating right, and don’t tell me you are because I watched you push food around your plate at dinner last week like a kid hiding vegetables.”
I don’t have a rebuttal for that. My appetite has been erratic since the lodge—present when he’s near, absent when he’s not, my body running a hunger strike against the separation my mind insists on.
