Except . . . Zaf clearly didn’t like being the center of attention. And when he was nervous, he became particularly, adorably intimidating, only no one else seemed to notice the adorable part. And, for fuck’s sake, he had anxiety. So, no, Dani wasn’t going to let him do this alone. That thought was so urgent, so vehement and intense, that it almost alarmed her—but this caring came from friendship, and friendship was just fine. Friendship was perfectly safe. It might hurt sometimes, but it had never crushed her heart and ruined her from the inside out.
For a moment, the slight hollow in her chest where laughing with Jo had once lived felt unbearably dark and shadowed. But Dani pushed that ache away.
“I’ll come,” she said.
Zaf looked startled, probably because she’d been silent for a good few minutes. Long, thoughtful pauses were a socially unacceptable habit Dani struggled to break, one she knew from past experience and blunt feedback made her seem strange and/or boring. Zaf never seemed to mind, though. He simply waited for her, and when she spoke again, he always spoke back as if the silence had never happened.
Like right now. “You’ll come?” he echoed. “But—”
“But nothing. Let’s do this properly.”
“You’re sure?” His expression was unreadable.
“I’m sure,” she said, despite the tiny voice in her ear that was screeching, What is happening here? What are all these warm, glowing sparks and why are none of them centered around my genital area?
The slight tension in Zaf’s shoulders melted away, and he gave her a huge, heart-stopping smile—the pesky kind that always made Dani want to kiss his nose (against her conscious will, that is). Then he made things a thousand times worse by sliding a hand around the back of her neck, pulling her close until the desk between them was less innocent plank of wood and more evil cock-blocking barrier, and pressing a kiss to her lips.
It wasn’t a hot, hard, passionate sort of kiss. It was a slow, soft, tender kiss, a not-quite-but-almost-chaste kiss, his lips parted but his tongue behaving itself. Sweet, warm pressure, a faint, comforting nuzzle, and then he pulled back just enough to look her in the eyes. His were warm like caramel on the stove and cradled by smile lines.
“How many people,” he asked quietly, “know how kind you are?”
“I . . . um . . .” Dani swallowed befuddlement and willed away her blush. “I’m not.”
“Right,” he said dryly, and then he bumped their noses together, and her entire middle folded in half before melting everywhere like butter. We’re in public, she reminded herself harshly, which means this is all pretend.
Except, most days, Zaf couldn’t fake basic good cheer well enough to stop swearing while in uniform. He couldn’t even fake a smile. Which begged the question—
Don’t. Don’t ever beg that fucking question, or you might have to give up your first lay in months before you even get a ride. Security walls slammed up in a section of Dani’s mind, concrete thicker than Zaf’s thighs and higher than her heart rate every time he put his hands on her. Because feelings had wings, but Dani didn’t, and she wasn’t about to let herself chase a tiny bird clean off a cliff.
She didn’t even feel the urge. Not ever.
So she forced her focus back where it belonged and said, “Maybe after the interview we could . . .”
“I’ll come home with you,” Zaf said. No hesitation. Just hot, liquid lust.
CHAPTER NINE
That afternoon, Dani watered her plants, salt-watered her goddess, and hunted down a few online articles about Swedish literary criticism, just to be sure. She added a few pink sticky notes to her Wall of Doom, the mind map she’d created beside her desk that contained all her symposium research. Then she found a fascinating essay on race, gender, and the nineteenth-century new woman that she could include in her panel preparation, fell down a rabbit hole, and promptly forgot all her plans for the evening.
She was still playing with pink sticky notes when her grandmother Gigi called to complain about misbehaving grandchildren and difficult yoga poses. Time ticked firmly on but was, unfortunately, ignored by them both.
“Eve has been impossible since that little friend of hers became affianced,” Gigi drawled, having moved on from the treacherousness of the wounded peacock pose. “The bride is a nightmare by all accounts, and Eve, bless her heart, is bowing to every whim. I’m beginning to doubt the integrity of my granddaughter’s spine.”
“Eve’s spine is fine,” Dani murmured as she scrawled across a new sticky note A room of whose own? and slapped it onto the wall. “She simply places too much value on being nice.”
“I cannot fathom why.” Gigi sounded genuinely bamboozled. “Niceness is incredibly dull.”
“Mmm.” Zaf wasn’t nice. He was kind. It was a notable distinction. Rather like the distinction between misogyny and misogynoir. Dani snagged another sticky note.
“She came storming into my yoga studio just the other day—an interruption which quite distressed Shivani”—Shivani being Gigi’s live-in yoga instructor and girlfriend—“asking me to consider performing at the wedding reception! She told me, ‘I would be your eternal household savant and greatest fan,’ as though she isn’t already! That is, supposing she meant to say servant.”
“Probably,” Dani replied.
“Well, I said, ‘I hope you are referring to your wedding reception, darling, because the marriages of you girls are the only events that might ever inspire me to so exert myself.’ ”
“Quite right,” Dani muttered, switching her Zora Neale Hurston and Zadie Smith sticky notes around.
“Speaking of which, when is that gorgeous white man going to marry Chloe?”
“Promptly, I’m sure,” Dani replied soothingly. Gigi, having been abandoned as a pregnant teenager by her first
