Beyond Roomies

N'yona POV

---

"Honestly, Yona, you sure the new track is gonna hit?"

"Taste the Rainbow? Yes. Absolutely."

"I ain't never done it before." He rolled past a row of cars without slowing down for a single one of them. "You sure an audience is gonna vibe to a track they ain't never heard?"

"This one, yes." She turned in her seat toward him. "*Taste the rainbowww—*"

He laughed.

She felt it land in her chest. Actually felt it, the way you feel a bass line in a small room, and she clamped down on the laugh coming up in her own throat and held it there until it went quiet.

No. Not right now.

Because if she started, he'd start again, and then they'd be two grown adults crying in a parked car over a Skittles slogan and they'd miss a ten thirty appointment that took her six weeks to get, and that would be on her.

Later. You can be stupid with him later.

"Marky. Could you just pick a spot."

"As long as it ain't next to one of these big-ass trucks." He kept rolling. "I don't get it. Nobody out here needs one of these trucks. Where they hauling stuff to? Where?"

"That man barely dinged the door."

"We just got this car though. And besides, it was the passenger side, and you on the passenger side." He glanced over. "We got a baby on board."

She laughed. Not a small one either. It got out before she could stop it.

"*I've* got a baby on board. We think. So says the pregnancy test." She rubbed her stomach, slow. "You gon' be like this over everything now?"

He took a breath and let it go. "You right. I'm trippin."

A car came around the end of the row doing thirty in a lot marked ten and he stood on the brakes hard enough to throw her against the belt.

"*Yo! The fu—" He caught himself, both hands on the wheel, watching it go. "See! *See. This is why I gotta be how I am."

"Okay, road rage." She pressed a hand to her chest. "Could you just let me out at the door? This is the second loop and it's making me car sick."

He went quiet. She could feel him looking at her without looking.

"Really, Yona? Car sick? Not the morning sickness again?"

"It's not. I'm fine."

Have one bad week and this is what you get.

Two days flat on her back in a dark room, unable to keep down water, and he'd taken off work for both of them. Brought her crackers she didn't ask for. Sat on the floor by the bed at two in the morning because she said the sound of him breathing helped.

Okay. Being waited on hand and foot was nice, actually.

Don't tell him that.

He pulled up to the entrance and put it in park and was out the door before she got her purse strap over her shoulder. She watched him come around the hood.

Her door opened.

"Marky." She got her foot down onto the curb. "You don't have to do this every time."

"I know."

"Soundcheck at six?"

"Six." He shut the door behind her, already walking backward toward the driver's side. "Don't go in without me."

"Then park."

---

The first thing she noticed was that it didn't smell like a clinic.

It smelled like somebody's front room. Fresh flowers on the low table by the window — real ones, white and yellow, water in the vase, somebody's job to change them. Perfume on top of perfume on top of perfume, four or five women's worth all sitting in the same air and none of them losing. Under all of it, faintly, coffee.

Two weeks. Two weeks of reading reviews at one in the morning.

She'd gone through every practice within twenty-five minutes of the house. Read all of them, including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. Made a list. Crossed off the ones where Black women said they weren't listened to, which took the list down by more than half and put her in a mood for a whole day.

What was left was this place. Carter Women's Health. Run by a midwife, and when you called after hours an actual human being picked up, not a service. Mercy General was fourteen minutes up the road if anything went wrong.

And they did home births.

Which is the plan. Which is still the plan. Which I have not said out loud to his mother.

The room was two-thirds full and it did not sound like a waiting room. It sounded like a cookout. Somebody's grandmother knitting something yellow and holding court about a cousin who'd married badly. A woman seven or eight months along, ankles gone, phone held above her face at an angle that had to hurt. A young girl, nineteen maybe, alone, green around the mouth, holding a plastic bag she was clearly hoping not to use.

And by the flowers, a woman built like a house with a belly out past her knees, and a little girl at her feet in light-up sneakers, holding a doll upside down by one leg.

"When the baby come out," the little girl announced to the entire room, "he sleepin' in *my* room."

"He is not."

"He is.”

"Sit down, Journey."

Journey did not sit down. Journey walked her doll along the edge of the coffee table like it was a balance beam and kept talking.

N'yona felt herself smiling at the floor.

Siblings.

I want more than one. More than two, honestly.

She couldn't tell him the number. The number was crazy. And they hadn't talked about it, not for real, not once — they hadn't talked about *this* one. They just made him. Or her.

Or oh my God, them.

Twins run, don't they? Twins are more likely to have twins, right?

And there he was in her head, unwanted, immediate. Her brother's face, from the other side of a hospital hallway, hands in his pockets.

Not that. Not right now.

Stop. Breathe. You look like a freak standing in the doorway.

Go up to the counter and check in.

She didn't quite make eye contact with anybody on the way. There were no men in the room. Not one. A grandmother, a girlfriend, somebody's sister — all women, all here with women, and it landed on her sideways and unpleasant.

Should I have made him come?

Then she heard it and almost laughed at herself.

Made him. This man got out the car to open my door.

---

Her phone went off in her hand and her stomach dropped straight through the floor.

KAMARI

Every time. Every single time.

She answered on the first ring. She always answered on the first ring.

"Sis. I did a lap."

"A lap?"

"A whole lap. Around the floor. One hand on the rail the whole time." A breath, proud of itself. "Denise cried."

"Denise cried?"

"Denise cries at everything, she's a therapy nurse, she's like a faucet. But still." Something plastic moved. "Anyway. I am so *over* this place."

Her voice came in clear. It always came in clear now. Six weeks of bad signal and then they moved her to the third floor and suddenly she sounded like she was standing in the room.

"Didn't they say you could go home next week?"

"Yeah, but they said that the week before too. *If there are no setbacks.*" She did the voice. Clipped, papery, somebody's clipboard voice. "There's always a setback. Like I wanna get back to living. Tired of feeling like a victim and dressing like one too. This gown ain't it."

"Well, you can't rush it." A beat. "Hasn't Hassan been stopping by?"

"Yeah…" A wrapper. Something being pushed around on a tray. "That's nice. Sometimes. But like, he wants to get frisky and—"

"You're not ready."

"The opposites.”

"Mari."

"I want to. I just can't even move my legs the way I want. And I'm not supposed to, um…"

The pause opened up.

N'yona's free hand went up to the end of her ponytail and started working the hair through her fingers.

Let her find it. The finding is the exercise.

Dr. Vance had said that at Kamari's session last week. N'yona had nodded like it made sense, then gone out and sat in the car for eleven minutes without turning the key.

"Um…"

"*Overstimulated.*" It came out of her all at once. "That's it. I'm not supposed to get overstimulated."

"Okay. So don't."

"I'm a person, sis. I have needs."

"You need to focus on recovering."

"A book I read said it can help."

"And what did the doctors say?"

"Ugh. Whatever." The wrapper again. "What are you doing today anyway? Please tell me something interesting. I need to live vicariously through someone."

Here we go.

She looked up at the ceiling. There was a water stain on one of the tiles shaped a little like Florida.

"I'm about to step into an appointment, so I gotta go."

"Appointment for what?"

"Um. Work."

"Well, okay then." Nothing in it. No suspicion at all. Kamari didn't have any left to spend on anybody. "Call me back later?"

"For sure."

"'Kay! Love ya."

"Love you."

The call ended. She held the phone to her ear a second longer with the screen already dark.

Work.

One word. Didn't even hesitate.

Something that big should cost you more than that.

---

It should have been me.

Her hand went to her stomach. She didn't send it there. It just went, low and flat, the way it had been going for a month now.

That room was built for her. A chair turned toward the window. A lock on the outside of the door.

Lavender sheets.

My color.

Her detergent. The dress she wore at sixteen that Markease still brought up ten years later. The smell in that apartment the night Kamari's face came up on the screen with MISSING over it.

Vince got that part right. Out of everything he got wrong, he got that part right, and it was the worst thing about the whole room.

Thank God it wasn't me.

And there it was. Right behind the first one, on time, the ugly honest one. Because if she'd been the one who went back to that apartment that night there'd be nothing under her hand right now. Nothing at all. This baby got to exist because somebody else got taken.

I'm allowed to be glad. I'm allowed. It doesn't make me—

She stopped it there.

Her phone buzzed. She flinched hard enough that the knitting grandmother looked up.

Payout processed — $1,840.00

Archive stuff. Things she shot back in the spring, going out on a schedule she set months ago and hadn't opened since. She hadn't filmed anything new in nine weeks. Neither of them had.

Eighteen forty. Car note, storage unit, Kamari's co-pay for the month. Money they earned by doing nothing except already having done it.

And I just told her that's where I was.

She put the phone in her purse and went to the counter.

---

The receptionist was an older woman, curls begging to grey, reading glasses pushed up into them and forgotten. Cardigan over her scrubs. A mug that said SOMEBODY'S NANA in letters that had been through a dishwasher a few hundred times.

"Hello. Welcome in. How are you today?"

"I'm doing well. I think." N'yona put her hands on the counter, then took them off. "It's my first visit, so."

"No worries. Can I get your name, please?"

"It's N'yona. I have a ten thirty."

"With Dr. Carter?"

"Yes." It came out too fast. "I read about her for like two weeks."

The woman looked up over the glasses that weren't on her face. "Did you now."

"…A little."

"Mhm." She went back to the screen, but she was smiling. "She's worth it. You'll be in good hands."

"That's great. I'm honestly really nervous."

"Mm." She didn't look up this time. "Are you alone?"

"No. My fiancé's parking the car. He should be in any minute."

Fiancée

It walked out of her mouth like it paid rent there. She'd said it out loud maybe six times in her life and four of those were to a bathroom mirror.

Say it again. Say it to somebody who don't know you and see if it still works.

Her hand came up and pressed the ring flat against her chest through her shirt. It hung on a gold chain where nobody could see it, cold in the morning and warm by lunch.

Gold, because she'd been wearing gold since she was sixteen years old.

Since a lavender dress and a gym strung with streamers and a girl standing in front of a mirror picking the metal he *didn't* like, on purpose, because she was still a little bit mad at him. He'd waited ten years to tell her she'd changed his mind about it that night. Told her at Deron's block party with a guitar still in his lap and her mascara all over his collar.

Ten years. He carried that for ten years and never said it.

"Well, that's good. Lots of men don't come to these appointments."

"Really? He wants to be at everything. We start birthing classes tomorrow." She heard herself and could not stop herself. "It's all happening so fast."

The woman slid a clipboard across with the papers already squared, a pen on top taped to a plastic spoon the way pens are in places where people steal pens. "Wish I could tell you it slows down. It doesn't. You'll be okay, though."

"How do you know?"

She nodded at something over N'yona's shoulder.

Markease had come through the door with his hood half down and his hair loose. He was already looking at her.

He didn't check the room.

This man clocked every truck in that parking lot. Every dent, every speeding car, every door within swinging distance of hers. He walked into a building he'd never been in before and didn't look at one thing in it.

"That your man?"

The smile got away from her before she could catch it. "Yeah. That's him."

"You got a keeper."

"He is very handsome."

The receptionist laughed. One syllable, not impressed. "Mhm. But that's not the part worth keeping. He walked in here and his eyes didn't see nothing but you. That's what you keep."

*What am I supposed to say to that?*

"Sign the top and the back," she said, already turning to her screen. "Insurance card if you got one. If you don't, that's fine, we'll figure it out."

---

He took the chair by the flowers.

She went down into his lap without breaking stride. Clipboard against her chest, back finding the dip under his collarbone where it went, hips shifting once to square her weight. His arm came around her.

There it is.

She'd done this on a busted couch with a patty melt going cold on the table. On his mother's porch steps. In a dark hospital chair with his head pulled into her chest and her fingers going through his hair. Ten years of sitting down on this man and not one time did it ever occur to her that it looked like anything.

Journey stopped walking her doll along the table and stared at them with her whole face.

His hand tightened at her side.

"Babe."

"Hm."

"You can't be doing that in public."

She went still. Then her whole face went hot at once, jaw up, the way it always did.

"…Okay. It's not on purpose. I just—"

"Nah. I know." His mouth was at her ear and he wasn't lowering his voice much. "I'm acting like I ain't put my hands on your hips and pull you in place."

"Cause you did."

"Cause I did."

She looked down at the clipboard so she wouldn't have to look at anything else.

Last menstrual period. Family history. COVID vaccination. Surgical history.

She went through it fast. Heart disease, her father's side. Diabetes, her mother's. Hypertension on both, which struck her as greedy. Her great-grandmother's breast cancer, which came up every Thanksgiving and not one single time in between.

She knew all of it. Her mother had made sure of that. Dates, names, which aunt, which year — anything a form could think to ask, she had.

Her pen slowed on her mother's line.

She doesn't know.

Twenty-six days now. Her own mother didn't know she was pregnant, didn't know about the ring, didn't know she was sitting in a waiting room filling out her medical history in a chair that already had a man in it. Harmony knew. Harmony had known for three weeks and yelled about it and then held her hand under a table.

I'll call her. This week.

I said that last week.

Then the section for the baby's father, and she slowed down for a different reason.

He had nothing. Not one item on that page applied to a single person in that family. Nobody in it had ever gone out the way a form expects people to go out.

Father's medical history.

She left it blank. There was no box on that page for what happened to Markease's daddy, and she wasn't about to build one at ten twenty in the morning.

His thumb was moving on her hip. Small, absent, back and forth, the way it did when his head was somewhere else.

I love his hands.

She'd loved them when she had no business loving them. Watched them tape up before a fight. Watched them wrap a sandwich. Watched them work a guitar in a bedroom with the door closed and her parents downstairs trusting him completely. And now they were allowed on her and her skin still went hot everywhere they landed. Still. After a month.

Please don't let that ever stop.

Let me be sixty and still get like this when he touches my hip.

She adjusted again.

On purpose.

"Okay." His voice dropped. "So you wanna play."

"I'm filling out our forms."

She reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear and he got there first. The left hand, the good one, catching the loose strand and dragging his knuckle down the shell of her ear on the way back.

She smiled. Didn't even try to hide it.

Nobody touches his hair but me.

Nobody had made that a rule. It just went that way, the same way everything with them went that way. Two boys had him against a wall in a seventh grade hallway over that hair — *why yo hair so long, bruh* — and she'd stopped instead of walking, which is the only decision in her entire life she'd make again exactly the same. He broke a nose. They both got detention. He asked her about the book she was holding.

Ten years of her hands in those curls since. She'd never once asked. He'd never once said don't.

Her ear was still warm.

"Okay, you two." The receptionist, not looking up from her screen. "Turn down the heat."

"Whew, chile.”The woman with the ankles was fanning herself with a folded pamphlet, laughing at them. "The AC ain't strong enough for all that."

"Mama, why she sittin' on him?"

"Journey.”

N'yona put her face in her hands.

She did not get off his lap.

---

"Gimme something to do," Markease said.

She peeled off the back sheet and passed it over with the pen without turning around.

He took it left-handed. The cast came up onto the arm of the chair beside her, blue velcro, the fingertips out the end a shade darker than the rest of him. He put the paper on the chair arm and bent around her to reach it, tongue pressed into his cheek, and started writing. Slow. Enormous. Big square capitals pressed hard enough to bruise the page.

She watched four lines of it happen over her shoulder.

"Your letters are huge."

"Yours are little." He didn't look up. "Your handwriting's polite. It says please and thank you. Mine look like a ransom note."

"That's the cast."

"That's my whole personality."

Her hand went to his without her looking. Reflex. Ten years old. And landed on the plaster.

She grimaced. She always did. Her body pulled back a quarter inch before her brain caught up, because touching that thing played her the sound. From four feet away in that bedroom. Not a thud. Wetter than a thud.

No.

Not here.

She killed it. She was getting faster at killing it.

"Marky." She held the clipboard up over her shoulder and put her finger on the line. "What do I put here?"

Marital status.

He looked at it. Then at the side of her face. Then he laughed, one low breath of it against her neck. "Girl, quit playing."

"I'm serious. Engaged? Soon to be?" She tapped the pen on the spoon. "What do I put?"

"I don't know, Yona." He was enjoying himself. She could feel it building through her back. "Did you mark Ms. or Mrs.?"

She kept her eyes on the paper.

"I put Mrs. Duh. What else would I put?"

She'd filled that box in at the counter. Before he was in the building. Looked at four little squares, put the pen through one of them, didn't let herself think about it for one second, then carried the whole clipboard across the room to ask him a question she already had the answer to.

*Because I can't just ask. Ten years and I still can't just ask.*

"Let me see."

"No. Move." She angled the board away. "I'm tryna finish this."

"Let me help."

"It's for me. It's not even asking about the dad."

"Really? Why not?"

"Guess you're just not that important."

"Wow." A beat, timed perfect. "Didn't seem that way in the bedroom."

Her mouth dropped open.

The woman with the ankles coughed into her fist and didn't come close to killing it. N'yona looked over and mouthed *sorry.*

She waved it off. "Girl, it's okay. That's why we're all here."

"Yeah, but he ain't gotta *advertise* it." N'yona put the pen down on the clipboard. "He's so embarrassing."

Markease put his chin on her shoulder. His hair came down along her neck and she tilted her head into it.

"This is the last appointment you're coming to."

"You think so?"

"I know so."

"Need help finishing?"

"Are we still talking about the documents?" She picked the pen back up. "Either way, no."

He laughed into her shoulder.

Then the laugh ran out and he didn't lift his head.

She felt him go still under her before she saw a thing. The way he was holding her changed. The thumb on her hip stopped in the middle of a stroke.

She looked down at the cast on the chair arm. At four lines of ransom-note capitals. At the pen in a hand that was holding it wrong because there was no other way left to hold it.

He'd been carrying his phone in his left hand for a month. Eating with it. Picking out chords one-handed and stopping halfway through because the shape wouldn't come. He signed the sponsorship paperwork with it and made a joke about it that nobody laughed at. Including him.

She was the one holding the clipboard.

Don't say anything.

He'll talk about it when he talks about it.

She put her hand flat over the cast and left it there.

---

She still couldn't fully meet his eyes. Ten years of teaching herself not to, one month of being allowed to, and the second number wasn't winning yet.

I teased him too much about the marriage thing.

He'd laughed. He'd made it a joke and his chin was on her shoulder right now, so it landed fine.

But she kept hearing it back. *Engaged? Soon to be? What do I put?* Said light. Said smiling. Said by a woman who waited a decade, to the man who made her wait it.

From the right angle that sounds like a bill.

He won't hear it that way. He knows me.

A month. She counted it again and got the same number. A month of dating, a ring on a chain under her shirt, and a whole person coming. Harmony's kitchen table three weeks ago, the word *irresponsible* landing four separate times while under that table their hands stayed locked where she couldn't see, N'yona's thumb going back and forth over his knuckles the entire lecture.

Everybody's going to say it's fast. It is fast.

The ten years before this weren't a relationship. Anybody would tell her that. Except she was inside them, and they didn't feel like nothing, they felt like—

"Yona."

"Hm."

"Honestly, the only heartbeats I ever heard are yours and mine." His chin shifted on her shoulder. "Kinda wild to think I'm about to hear what they sound like together."

The laugh that came out of him didn't sound like his. Shaky. Uncertain.

The words caught in her chest.

Because until he said it she hadn't realized — those were the only two she'd ever heard either. His and her own. That was the whole list.

This is real.

It's about to be real.

"N'yona!"

A nurse in the doorway at the back, chart in the crook of her arm, already reading the next name off it.

"That's us," she said.

The room got big. Her breath caught somewhere under her collarbone and stayed there and the chairs and the flowers and the whole cookout of it slid a few feet further off.

His hand found hers.

The room came back.

"I know," he said. "Me too."

She hadn't said anything. She hadn't made a sound. He read it off her body from an inch away and answered it out loud, the same as he'd been doing since she was thirteen.

She turned to look at him. The smile was on. Full, easy, the one he used on cameras and landlords.

He's scared too.

Good.

She got up, gathered the clipboard, and made it four steps before she noticed he hadn't followed.

She turned back.

"You coming?"

"Yup." He hadn't moved. Sheet of paper flat on his thigh, both hands in his lap. "Give me a minute though."

Behind her the pamphlet went straight up over somebody's mouth.

Her ears went so hot she could hear them. But she was already looking at him, and he was not looking at her. He was looking at nothing, somewhere around the baseboard, and his jaw was set.

Oh.

You'd rather this whole room think that.

He'd take it. He'd sit there and let seven strangers laugh at him for the exact opposite reason, because being the man who couldn't stand up was easier than being the man who needed a second.

Okay, baby.

Take your minute.

"I am so sorry about him."

The nurse didn't look up from the chart.

"Mhm. Room three, when he's ready."

N'yona didn't go through the door. She stood next to it with the clipboard against her chest and waited, and when he finally came, she took his hand and they went in together.