On Rotation

by Shirlene Obuobi

I never felt like he was humoring me, or simply waiting his turn to talk about himself.

But of course, he was like Markus—a girl’s guy, a grandma’s boy, used to the kind of aimless chatter Frederick had once described as exhausting.

And yeah, it was nice, but I couldn’t just give him brownie points for, gasp, actually being interested in what I had to say.

Dang

I saw so many bodies all the time, many with features that I hated on myself and found human or even beautiful on others.

The next thing I knew, he’d grabbed my hand and placed it firmly on his chest. Underneath my palm his body was warm and firm and wet. I could feel the ridge of his nipple along the edge of my middle finger, and the steady pounding of his apical impulse under the flat of my palm.

A muscular Asian guy with a sleeve tattoo smirked back at me;

Hello?

“I’m not hungry anymore,” I lied. “And I think I need another dip.” And some space. Away from you. It was as if Ricky could hear my inner dialogue; suddenly, he looked down at his plate, twirling a chopstick between his fingers. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

Ughh

“You think when I came to this country I wanted to go around cleaning other people’s behinds?

“Is this one of Dr. Wallace’s projects?” Momma said when I was finished. I bit the inside of my cheek. “No, but—” I started. “Because it sounds a little . . .” Momma paused, searching for the word. “Fluffy to me. Why haven’t you picked one of the projects on her list? I think that would be better.” Her words slashed through me like a knife across my chest.

“It’s all right,” he said, yawning. Then, noticing my stony expression: “Everything okay?” I shrugged. I felt drunk, my hold on my body tenuous in the aftermath of my emotional onslaught. I wavered on my feet, then sat down.

“I’m pretty sure you’re right.” The light cast his face in an otherworldly glow, and I knew that this image of him, his features simultaneously flattened and sharpened in red, would be etched in my mind from now on.

I think the job market just wasn’t great in Ghana, and they were hoping for something new.” “And so they leapt at the chance to move to the Land of Opportunity,” Ricky said drolly. I chuckled, closing my eyes.

Ricky’s smile unfolded across his face slowly, first in the corners of his mouth, the lift of his cheeks, the squint and crease of his eyes. How many times had I looked at that face just to watch it light up like this?

My first thought was that Ricky’s lips were softer than I had imagined. Fuller than Frederick’s, and smooth, like he used scrub or something— The second was that they weren’t moving.

oof

I dropped my gaze to our feet. Nia’s socks were cute today, pastel pink and patterned with smiling bananas.

“I . . . ,” I said. The cup noodles I’d had for dinner threatened to come back up. “I didn’t mean—”

Then she swallowed and steeled herself. “I’m moving out.”

WHAT

Shutting me out. Leaving me behind. For so long, Nia and I had been a reliable source of love for each other. A fountain of validation. Proof that someone out there thought that we were the best exactly as we were. Others could come and go from our lives, but Nia and I were supposed to be forever. I hadn’t even thought to imagine a future where we weren’t.

But Nia wasn’t saying anything at all. She’d dropped off the face of the earth, ghosting me just like all those boys I’d cried about in the past. But this hurt so much more because I could never have seen it coming.

“This is the worst,” I said. “She didn’t say anything to you, either?” Michelle shook her head, her gaze dropping to the table. I could tell that Nia’s rift from the group was hurting her too; the Sanity Circle group chat had been conspicuously silent for some time now. “Maybe,” Michelle suggested cautiously, knowing that she was entering dangerous territory, “it was just a function of time. Maybe you were outgrowing each other, and it just took you a while to notice.”

“Most people aren’t still cool with their high school friends, I guess.”

At some point, she’d tried to slap him, but being too short to reach his face, accidentally hit poor Arnold Patterson instead.

“Come on, let me show you my toys.” He led me to his workstation, an expansive desk with two large mounted monitors and a smaller screen that he explained was actually a graphic tablet. He showed me these with the giddiness of a child at show-and-tell, describing not just the items but where he found them, when, his decisions to arrange them as he had.

I laughed, imagining the Ricky I’d seen from his middle school photo holed up in an elaborate fort, playing Pokémon and humming along to the gym themes.

“I’m sorry about Nia. I know how important she is to you. If it gives you any solace, even Shae doesn’t really get what’s going on. I don’t think . . .” He sighed, pushing his hair back. “We don’t think this is just about you. Shae says she’ll probably come around.”

“You heard of One Punch Man?” he asked.

OH LOORRDDDD

I could feel him chuckling too, his tone tinged with disbelief, and the sound rumbled through my belly.

He was close. So close that there seemed to be two Rickys overlapping each other, three beautiful, dark eyes, two sets of soft slightly parted lips.

But I hadn’t expected it to feel like home.

My heart skipped a beat, and I averted my eyes, focusing instead on the flickering of the fake candlelight against the ceiling.

Listen, gordito. The secret to long-lasting love is simple. You wake up. You roll over and look at your wife. And you say to yourself, today, I will choose you. I will love you. And you keep doing that every single day until you die.’” He grinned. “It sounds better in Spanish.”

After that, I figured that loving someone, the proper way, I mean, was about discipline. Being disciplined enough to keep choosing the same person you chose fifty years ago, over and over again, year after year, rain or shine.”

Ricky reached for me then, brushing his knuckles against my cheek. It was as though once he’d gotten permission to touch me, he couldn’t stop, like his affection was bubbling up inside him and needed to be released in small gestures.

Tabatha looked especially gorgeous in an off-the-shoulder floral shirt that showed off the slope of her back, and I’d watched about four guys begin to approach her before jumping back at the sight of the glittering rock on her finger.

Once the judgment of the most important people in his life came into play, would Ricky realize that, actually, the whole “being Black by association” thing wasn’t up his alley?

It would be a lie to say that I didn’t miss my family, but the peace of knowing I could walk through the hospital halls without hearing a diatribe about my unworthiness was worth it.

Despite the outpouring of support from Michelle, Tabatha, and my not-boyfriend, I still carried Nia’s loss like a boulder on my back. And with every passing day, I felt more and more sure that she was never coming back.

God, how could I not love a man who loved like this? With his whole heart, even when choosing love was hard? Even when the only thing he could reliably expect in return was disappointment?

I roped my arms around his waist from behind and rested my head against his back. His voice vibrated into my cheek, and I let myself be lulled by the sensation, by the whooshing of my pulse in my ears and the thrum of his heartbeat against the flat of my palm.

Introduce Ricky to your sister, he’ll like that, a voice in my head had said, somehow forgetting that my sister was the kind of Grade-A Mean Girl who had once made her eighth-grade teacher cry in the middle of class.

Omg..

Just as I was typing bodycon midi into the search bar, a text banner dropped from the top of my screen. It was Nia. Hey Angie, it said. I was hoping to stop

What?

Because the longer I replayed our last conversation in my head, the more convinced I was that Nia hadn’t been fair to me. We were supposed to be ride-or-die. Neither hell nor high water should ever have come between us, let alone something as asinine as a misunderstanding.

But every time I tried to parse what could have compelled Nia to abandon me, I came up empty. It felt as if Nia had taken a decade of trust and cracked it like a kola nut.

For so long, Nia had seemed a bit lost. She’d graduated college with dual degrees in communications and education but no real plan.

“It’s not the same,” I said. “Your problems are different, Nia. Not less.” “I know that,” Nia said. “And I know that if I’d said something, you would’ve told me as much.”

Shae always be on that phone texting him.”

“That finding someone to love you romantically is actually kind of easy,” Nia said. “There’s a whole cocktail of brain chemicals at work telling you to obsess over this other person. Plus a rulebook for relationships we’ve all been given since infancy.

Oh thelma and puh lease

“Shae is wonderful. They . . . really feel like they could be it for me, you know? They love me, and make me feel beautiful every day, and hold me accountable when I act out of pocket. I love them, and I’m loving living with them.”

“That’s right, baby girl,” Miss Bernice said. “You don’t need to be nobody’s wife! When the boys come around, you take what you want and move on, ’cause that’s what they’ll do to you!”

Ricky was always brazen in his appreciation of me. All I had to do was stand up from my chair and stretch to get an approving Mm! from him, or a half-lidded, lascivious stare.