Bad Idea- The Complete Collection

by Nicole French

  “Fuck, Layla!” Nico moans as he moves even more erratically. He pushes up slightly on his forearms, angles me to take him deeper as he finds the last few, frenzied strokes that make me fall apart completely.

  “Nico! GOD!” I shout.

  Nico’s body shakes right along with me, and he tips his head back to howl at the ceiling. My name, over and over again, like a wolf to the moon. Then our bodies puddle together, his hands on my ass, mine around his waist as we struggle to regain our breaths. Our chests move in tandem. Nico inhales deeply into my hair and sighs with utter content.

  “God, I’ve missed this,” he breathes. “I fucking miss you.”

  My breath hitches again. I forgot just how good that deep bass feels, vibrating against my skin. I sigh, my voice suddenly small.

  “I missed you too,” I whisper and breathe deeply. And in. And out. I seem to have lost all ability to function correctly, so lost am I in him. Talk about zero to sixty in no time flat.

  “Damn,” he breathes. “God, I...that wasn’t really what I was planning to do when I saw you, you know.”

  Slowly, my heart rate calms, and my senses return. As I consider what’s just happened, my bare legs, still wrapped around his waist, shiver in the cold.

  “Off,” I mumble, shoving ineffectually at his leather-covered shoulders. Jesus, we couldn’t even manage to take off his jacket.

  Nico frowns, but obligingly pushes up and discreetly refastens his pants before turning back around. I’ve scrambled fully onto the bed. My underwear has disappeared, but I’ve managed to yank the thick knit of my skirt back over my legs, now wanting nothing more than to dive under my covers in shame. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be with us. I’m not supposed to be some cheap, easy piece that he can use whenever he comes to town.

  I look at everything but him.

  “Hey.” The word is gentle, floats like a breeze while I bury my nose into my arms. My feet are cold; I shove them under my pillow at the edge of the bed.

  “Hey,” Nico says again.

  The bed shifts under his weight. It’s a crappy mattress, and I roll into him. The contact is the last straw, and I suck in a sob just as it’s starting to escape.

  Nico slips a few fingers under my chin and forces me to look at him. His eyes are wide, still sparkling with the leftovers of lust, and his dark brows are slightly furrowed with concern. He looks different in ways I hadn’t realized, hadn’t had time to notice because of how overcome I’d been with desire. His skin is even darker than the last time I saw him, more coffee than cream now, whereas before it had been the color of a rich café au lait. The fine hairs around his forehead have been bleached by the California sun, and if I’m not wrong, he has a few tiny wrinkles around his eyes. He looks like he’s been outside a lot, playing at the beach. Having a great time. Without me. With someone else.

  Jessie, tall and blonde, rises in the back of my mind. I hiccup another sob as tears spill down my cheeks.

  “Aw, baby, please don’t cry.”

  Nico cups my face and kisses me, oh-so-softly, over and over with his full lips. The kisses aren’t about sex, but about love and compassion, and they just make me cry harder.

  “Please,” he whispers as he pulls me against him, tucking my face into the coarse leather. “Fuck, baby, I can’t take it when you...what can I do? Tell me what to do.”

  I grasp at his coat, ignoring the bite of the cold zipper under my palm. The only thing I can feel is my heart splitting in two all over again. Who am I kidding? It was never really back together in the first place.

  So he rocks me, then lays us back on the throw pillows shoved against my wall and strokes my back while I cry on his chest. Even through his jacket, I can feel the warmth of his body, the solid blocks of his muscle, the thump of his heart against my hand. I had no idea what was going to happen when we came together again, but I certainly never expected this. I never expected sky-high ecstasy follow by gut-twisting pain.

  Nico croons softly until my sobs slowly subside. Eventually I wipe the last tears away, confident no more will come. I sit up, but still avoid looking at him, choosing instead to dash to the bathroom to wash away the mascara I’m sure is all over my face. I don’t even look in the mirror until I’m done scrubbing. The cold water is a welcome distraction. Everything is different under the harsh fluorescent lights. We’re not reuniting lovers anymore. I’m that sad girl who gets left by everyone. He’s the boy that still doesn’t want me in the end.

  When I come out, Nico is sitting against the pillows, his feet crossed on the floor in front of him, beanie on his lap like a guilty schoolboy. He looks up, dark eyes wide, like he’s expecting some kind of punishment.

  “I’m...I’m sorry about that,” I say.

  “Sorry about what? Crying?” He smiles ruefully. “You don’t have to worry, beautiful. You can cry on my shoulder any time.”

  “Of course I can’t,” I say a little too sharply. “That’s just the point. You don’t live here. And I just fucked another woman’s boyfriend.”

  My voice cracks a little at the end, and the tears rise again. I walk past him to my desk and flop down in the chair. It’s too much—his warmth, his scent, his gorgeous face. I can’t sit next to him like this and not kiss him or cry, and I don’t want to do either.

  Nico scoots over on the bed so only the small frame separates us. He leans over and takes my hand gently in his, brushing over my knuckles like he always does. Or did.

  “Don’t...” he starts, then trails off. He bites his lip, clearly trying to figure out the right thing to say. “Please don’t feel bad, baby. Layla, this wasn’t wrong.”

  “It was wrong,” I snap bitterly. I jerk my hand away and scoot out of his reach. “I helped you cheat on your girlfriend.” I practically spit the word out, hating how my voice quavers around it. Girlfriend. I was that for all of a minute.

  “Jessie is not my girlfriend.” When I don’t answer, Nico swears. “Layla, I’m serious. I don’t want you thinking that about yourself. Besides, don’t you have a boyfriend? That dude from the picture?”

  I scowl. “I told you there was nothing serious.”

  Nico looks at me like he doesn’t quite believe me, even if he’s the one living with a girl he’s sleeping with. If that’s not a girlfriend, I don’t know what is.

  After a moment, he gets off the bed and kneels in front of me, cupping my face between his hands so I have to look at him. He tries for a kiss, but I lean back. So he stops, though his hands stay where they are.

  “Listen to me,” he says, low and soothing. “This wasn’t wrong.”

  “How can you possibly say that?” I whimper, unable to keep the quavering at bay.

  A tear falls down my cheek, and Nico sighs as he gently brushes it away with his thumb. He kisses the spot where it fell, and this time I don’t pull away, even though a few more tears fall behind the first.

  “Because you’re Layla,” he replies. “Because it’s us. It’s always been that way with us. Layla, I couldn’t be around you and not need to fucking touch you, baby. And because...shit, because you can’t help it any more than me, can you?”

  I sniff back a few more tears. “Would Jessie be okay with those reasons?” It’s a shitty question to ask, but I can’t help myself. He’s not wrong about us, but that doesn’t make this okay.

  Nico drops his hands and looks down at the floor guiltily.

  “Probably not,” he admits. “But that’s my fault, not yours. And maybe it makes me an asshole, but I’m not sorry. Jessie knows the score. I never made her any promises I couldn’t keep. And I...fuck. Layla, I could never be sorry about anything we do together. That’s the truth.”

  “But you’ll still leave me for another woman.”

  My words are tart. I can’t help it. I know I’m the one who convinced him to go, but it still hurts that he has someone else waiting in the wings.

  “That’s not fair.” Nico stands up and shoves his hands into his coat pockets. “I don�
�t know what you want me to say here. I just wanted to see you. To tell you I’m sorry about how things worked out. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls and everything—I just...shit, Layla, I just didn’t see the point, you know? I missed you, you missed me, but we can’t be together. The timing is just shitty. And you know what I’m trying to do out there.”

  “Is it working?” I ask, although my tone still isn’t exactly generous. “Are you happy with everything? With her?”

  “Are you happy with him?”

  I bite my lip. I have no idea how to answer that question. So I ask another one. “Are you thinking of coming back?”

  He can’t quite meet my eyes. Of course he’s not coming back. He’s only been there for six months. It wouldn’t be much of a go of it if he turned around and came right back.

  “I see,” I say. “So you just came here to fuck me and leave me all over again. I get it.”

  Nico’s expression darkens. “That is not why I’m here, and you know it.” He looks like he wants to say something cutting, just like me, but just as quickly, his expression softens. He sits next to me on the couch and takes my hand. “Five days. I have five days in New York, and I wanted to spend as much of them as I can with you, Layla. For the next five days, I’m yours. Unless you don’t want me.”

  I bury my face in my arms. I can’t say that. I could never say that. So instead, I collapse on his shoulder and let him rock me again until the guilt goes away.

  “You think we should go to confession?” Nico jokes.

  I snort. In a weird way, it would be fitting. I haven’t been to confession since my dad left, and since then, I’ve been sinning left and right. But I don’t think I could ever repent for anything I do with this man. Everything about him feels right. Even when it hurts.

  So I sit up and wipe the tears away. Again.

  “I want you,” I admit. “I’ll probably always want you.”

  One side of Nico’s full mouth quirks with a half-smile. “Yeah?”

  I sigh. “Yeah. But I want to do something different than mope about the fact that you’re leaving again. If we only have five days, then I want to do them right.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Nico

  “Okay,” I say once Layla stops crying. I’m glad—not because I don’t want her to feel what she feels, but because I fuckin’ hate it when my girl is sad. And I hate it even more that I’m the one who made her cry. “What should we do, then? Hang out here? Go get some food? When do you take off for Thanksgiving with your friends?”

  “Um, never?” She swipes under her eyelids again. “I’m not going anywhere for Thanksgiving.”

  I know I shouldn’t like it, but after she cries, her eyes turn this crazy shade of aquamarine. Right now they shine, and I can’t look away.

  I frown. “You’re not going home with Quinn or one of them?”

  She shakes her head. “My roommates are all going somewhere with their families. I’ll probably just stay here and get ahead on schoolwork.”

  Huh. This is not what I expected at all. Despite the fact that Layla comes from so much more than I do, I actually have more of a home to go back to than she does. The shitty one-bedroom where my mother still lives might not be much, but it’s the place where I grew up. And when all of my siblings and I get together there, we might drive each other crazy, but it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  Layla doesn’t have that anymore. My chest physically hurts as I realize the pain she’ll be going through over the holidays.

  “Fuck that.”

  I shake my head. The idea of Layla sitting alone in this dorm room eating takeout while I’m gorging myself on turkey and sweet potatoes goes against everything I know is right.

  “You’re coming home with me.”

  Her eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously?”

  I nod. The idea is scary. Between my sisters and my mother, I’m basically feeding her to the wolves. But it also sounds right. I’m home for the holidays. Celebrating with my family, and Layla should be there. It will maybe make up a little for this colossal fuckup that just happened. You don’t take someone you don’t care about home to meet your mother. And, I realize with an ache in my chest, there’s no one I care about more.

  I kiss her—because her lips just beg for it, and because the way they open in surprise is too fuckin’ adorable not to. I kiss her again, and again, until the room is full of her laughter, chasing away her tears.

  “One rule,” I confirm. “No holding back, baby. My mother puts something on the table, you gotta eat it.”

  Layla just giggles. Motherfucker. I forgot how beautiful that sound is. My grin is so big I feel like my face is going to split into pieces.

  “Okay,” she says. “Stuff myself silly. Got it. What can I bring?”

  Layla

  We meander around Union Square a while, hand in hand, talking about everything and nothing. In a way, it’s like he never left. I tell him about my classes—despite Quinn’s reservations at the beginning of the quarter, my African Diaspora class has ended up being one of my favorites. Where I went to school in Washington, black history was one-sided, had one month where when you learned anything about it. The teachers usually recycled the same few faces: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Sometimes they brought up Oprah.

  But in this class I’ve been learning that because of slavery, Africans came to this part of the world almost concurrently with Europeans. I’m learning about how deeply entrenched racism is in just about every country in the Americas; how deeply entwined that history is with my history, my family’s history. And more evidently, Nico’s family’s too.

  “Do you consider yourself black?” I ask him after I mention a book we just finished, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets. It’s a book that made me think a lot about Nico and his mother when I read it—a memoir of a Puerto Rican man from Spanish Harlem figuring out his identity as both black and Latino. Even though it was written in 1967, a lot of it seemed relevant to Nico’s life. At least, so far as I could tell.

  Nico blinks, clearly surprised by the question. Whatever he was expecting me to say right then, it wasn’t that.

  “No,” he says finally. “Do you?”

  I can’t tell for sure, but his expression isn’t one I’ve seen before. Guarded, sharp. Maybe a little scared.

  I shrug. “No. But I’m not. My dad is a light-skinned Brazilian, and my mom’s about as Aryan as it gets with her blue eyes and blonde hair. It’s not really up for discussion.”

  “And it is with me?”

  I glance at him nervously. “You act like I’d think it was terrible if you said yes.”

  Nico shakes his head. “It’s not that. I just...no. No, I don’t consider myself black. To start, it’s not something most people say to me. I mean, sure, there’s some African in there somewhere. My mom’s darker than me, from Cuba, right? It’s in the blood over there. At the same time, I grew up boricua, or Puerto Rican, even if plenty of people would say that I’m not actually from the island. But I grew up speaking Spanish, you know?”

  I frown. “I don’t get it. If you know you’re part black, doesn’t that make you black?”

  “I think there’s a difference,” he says carefully, “between having somebody’s DNA running through your veins and having it come out on your skin, versus being a part of a culture, you know? Maybe that’s what that cat in the book was talking about, what he was struggling with. Like, I could see how it would be hard for him in El Barrio, especially in the sixties. That racism you’re talking about, it’s everywhere. Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, whatever—a lot of people don’t want to be seen as black because they think it makes them less Latino. Less...I don’t know...pure, I guess.”

  I twist my mouth around. I wouldn’t necessarily look at Nico and say he’s black, but you can tell he’s a mix of a bunch of things, and that black is probably one of them. He makes it sound like it’s a choice he has. It’s confusing.

  “Shit,” he continues. “Y
ou wanna talk DNA, most of the people in this country are technically people of color. You know, if you want to go by the one-drop rule. But one drop, ten drops, none of it matters if you don’t look the way that people see you.” He looks at me knowingly. “I think you know that. Technically you and I are probably the same percentage Latino, whatever that really means. But which one of us looks it, huh?”

  I look down at our joined hands. My much lighter skin contrasts with the deep tan of his.

  Nico shrugs. “In New York, you know, sometimes it’s just about how you show it. I look mixed, so I guess if I wanted people to think I was black, I could be. Other people don’t have that choice, like my sisters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We take a seat on a bench that faces Gramercy Park. We’ve been walking a while now, having circled the park a couple of times. I like this part of the city. It’s quieter, full of classic old brownstones that feel like an Edith Wharton novel. Like someone wearing petticoats and carrying a parasol should walk around the corner.

  Nico doesn’t say anything for a while, so I wait. His answers have my mind working a mile a minute.

  “My dad was half Italian, half Puerto Rican,” he says finally. “I think. I ran into him a few times when I was a kid. He was a little dark, but not too dark. I get my hair from him, and also my nose. Selena and Maggie on the other hand, their dad was from Cuba, and dude was like, black black. Like, you-wouldn’t-be-asking-this-question black. They both have darker skin, much darker than mine.” He pauses, and taps his finger to his lips. “Then there’s Gabe’s dad, David. That asshole’s family is from the Dominican Republic, but the way he tells it, he descended from Christopher fuckin’ Columbus. He’s fair—really fair, like you. And Gabe looks like that, doesn’t he? Like, until he opens his mouth and starts talking, it’s not really obvious what he is, huh?” Nico pauses again, mulling. “I guess...for some people, maybe the lucky ones, race is a decision more than something they just are. For others, the ones who can’t hide it, it’s just a fact. To me, that’s where you really see racism. That lack of choice. That’s why, you know, racism isn’t just about how others hate you for your skin color. It’s about a system that also makes you hate yourself.”