Yielding

Naila feels herself losing balance when she tips back her head to laugh at Nathan’s story about this one Coasterian girl that kept going even when he had no more thrusting power in him. She reaches for the table to steady herself and instead catches his outstretched hand.

“You’re an embarrassment to Kenyans, Naila. Three useless cocktails! Where is your patriotism?” He pulls her back upright on the barstool.

She giggles, feeling embarrassed even as she does. Her inability to handle her alcohol is a feature, not a bug. It is cheaper this way. Her first strawberry daiquiri had given her a buzz, and by the second one, she’d needed to exercise care when she stood to go to the washroom. When Nathan ordered her two more, she didn’t protest. It has been a long month—if she can let loose on someone else’s tab, she will.

After graduation, Nathan had taken his business degree and gone on to flying school, and she had stuffed her law degree into a drawer and waded into the frigid waters of the nonprofit world. His name became just another in her contact list. But now, here they are, like they are once again in the university cafeteria arguing about the things that make up life.

“Hey, are you okay?” Nathan asks, placing a hand on her bare shoulder.

She laughs. “Yeah, sorry. I just zoned out a bit.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing, really.” He wouldn’t understand. He’s been ordering drink after drink like each of hers doesn’t cost one thousand shillings. But his eyes remain on her, like her smile is the only thing of consequence, so she adds, “after the breakup, moving, my insane boss…” A shrug. “It’s nice to just…hang out.”

“Eh, yeah, I get it. Nairobi is hard,” he says, picking up one of two full beer mugs in front of him and taking a swig. “But”—he plonks the mug back on the table a little too hard—“if all that is what it takes for you to call me after three years of ignoring my calls, then…” He holds up his hands in mock surrender, the “so be it” remaining unsaid, and laughs the easy laugh of someone whose wallet loves him back.

“I wasn’t—”

It doesn’t matter. Nathan knows this is what she is, and it has never been a problem before. This is the purity of friendship: you can exist on the periphery of each other’s lives without absence hacking away at what is. Romantic relationships could never.

Ah, but the night is enchanting—why is she thinking about hearts and how they rupture? As the sky darkens, the lights come on along the concrete-slab paths that lead to the washrooms, the bar, and the indoor seating area. Fairy lights glow yellow, draped across the jacaranda tree at the center of the grassy space where the tables are set up. At the table next to theirs, a couple has been inching their seats closer to each other the drunker they get. At another table, two older men murmur as they sip White Caps. At another, five babes are settling into their girls’ night out, complete with the squeals, cackles, and eventful high fives that are ritual when women gather. As waiters crisscross the grounds, carrying bottles and snacks, the smoky, savory smell of nyama choma pervades the crisp night air. A deejay replaces the ambience music, and when the amplified semi-acoustic guitar riffs and steady bass line of Sauti Sol’s “Suzanna” come floating through the speakers, everyone is on their feet. It is Friday. Nairobi is alive.

When the song gives way to a less infectious tune, they settle back into their seats. Naila is saying that she loves how the song’s mix of zilizopendwa and rhumba makes her feel like she is being led back home, as if she were Suzanna, when her phone rings. A twinge shoots through her chest in the place where her heart had fractured as she looks at the name on the screen. Silencing the phone, she places it face down back onto the table, and when she looks up, Nathan is watching her.

“He was an idiot to let you go,” he says, reaching out to rub the back of her hand.

Naila nods, defying the urge to pull her hand away. Agreeing that he was an idiot doesn’t make it hurt any less, though. Besides, he wasn’t; they had grown in different directions.

That doesn’t make it hurt any less either.

Her phone buzzes again, once. A text. She turns it over.

hey, just wanted to know when i can come get my things. let me know.

She presses her right forefinger and thumb into her closed eyes and sucks in a breath. The breakup had involved zero dish-smashing incidents. They had sent each other out into the world with wan smiles and I-wish-you-all-the-bests. Yet an urge to incinerate his belongings rather than return them to him claws its way up her spine and closes its fist around her throat. They had broken up on text, an odd way to dissolve an eight-year relationship. Perhaps this is the problem.

Nathan’s gaze probes. How much of the exhaustion hangs on her eyelashes? Something like commiseration but not quite swims in his eyes, almost as if bidding her to allow the dam to break. She shifts in her seat, laughs, as if pretending to be okay will push him back across the line they are straddling.

“I used to tell myself that guy was lucky I met you when you were already dating him.”

“What?”

“Come on. You can’t tell me you didn’t know I had a thing for you!”

Naila hides her face in her hand, amused more than anything. Once, she had missed her boyfriend’s call, and when she told him that she had been at lunch with Nathan and hadn’t heard her phone ring, he had morphed to stone, impervious to her “aki babe”s.

“There was a time I suspected it, when we first became friends,” she replies, “but I brushed it off. I figured I was overthinking things.”

“If you had asked, I would have denied it. You were in love and happy, and I’m a good guy.”

In his pause, Naila hears questions she wishes would never come.

“But are you telling me that you never felt anything for me? Ever?”

Her shaking head does not convince him.

“You’re lying, Naila! All those times we hung out? Not even once? Not even a bit?”

His denial is entertaining. What impression had she given to make him overestimate his allure? She feels the apology on her face. “I enjoyed your company, but I’ve never looked at you like that. I never looked at anyone like that!”

Nathan smirks, leans forward, and crosses his arms on the table. His eyes hold hers. “What about now?”

The drinks, the food, the anything-you-wants: was this why?

She wishes she could lie to him, tell him that if he keeps buying her drinks, his generosity will cloak him in the fashions of one whom she could love. Instead, she shakes her head again. One of the mercies of singlehood is that she doesn’t have to lie anymore to assuage a man’s ego. “Even now. I’ve known you as my friend all these years. That doesn’t change just because I’m not in a relationship anymore.”

“Ah, Naila, I still think you’re lying. We had too much chemistry! But I also think I can change your mind.” He winks.

Naila raises an eyebrow at the private confirmation—if she possessed so much as a scrap of anything other than companionable fondness for him, his gesture would have earned an involuntary jolt. But, nothing. “Your confidence is intriguing. How would you change my mind?”

“You love food, and you love travelling. I would start there. I would treat you well and listen to you… Naila, I can make you happy.”

What is this word, happy? Wrung clear out of her vocabulary by aloneness in a city whose lessons are exacting and extortionate, it feels foreign as she turns it over in her mind. She moved out of home against her parents’ wishes. “What kind of life do you think you will find out there that you cannot find here? Has anybody chased you out of home?” her mother had asked. Naila’s best efforts to explain that it was time for her to plant her own feet in the ground bore little fruit. Now, she hasn’t seen her friends and family in months. She is still reeling from her discovery of the cost of insecticide and toilet cleaner. Two weeks ago she had to get tomatoes from the mama mboga on credit.

But here, with him, hadn’t all that given way to a simpler thing?

“We make sense, Naila. We already know each other, you already know I care about you, I can buy you all the food and cocktails you want. Just think about it.”

Wearied by honesty, she manages a smile and nods. Her mind reaches for a life of diminished worry. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

▴ ▴ ▴

At one a.m., she is done. She can no longer feel the wet stickiness of the cocktail she spilled on her feet inside her shoes, but the thought that it is there is revolting. She has been drunk for hours, her throat feels red from that scream-singing that is the domain of the drunk, and the aerobics necessary for twerking are far beyond her now. Mo would be so disappointed.

Her best friend could dance and drink all night and often left the club at seven a.m. still possessed with energy. She grimaces with regret. Tomorrow is Mo’s birthday. She shouldn’t have stayed out so late when she will have to do it again tomorrow. The last time they went out, Naila dozed off in the club, right next to a couple performing thrilling gymnastics as they mashed their bodies together.

She turns to Nathan, and it is like he has read her mind. “Ready to go home?” She nods, grateful.

He had promised to take her home, buying more of her time. Rampant accounts of cab drivers locking their female passengers inside their cars make sure she has never gone home drunk on her own. She isn’t sure about Nathan taking her home either, but it is better, she thinks, than getting into an Uber with a deranged driver and heading to a neighborhood that has been her home for only a few months.

Outside, Westlands pulses. Ubers and motorbikes line the street, glad for the profits of the Nairobi weekend, hopeful they will last till Monday without having to yell at throwing-up passengers. Men fumbling for their words stand nose to nose with colorfully lipped, bare-thighed women. One man is selling hot dogs and kachumbari-stuffed smokies, another is selling burgers. Laughter and youth and music from the no fewer than nine clubs along the street intertwine, pumping warmth into the night air. Nathan pulls her toward a car.

“Hey, you will want something to eat, right?” he says as they enter the cab. Naila nods, thinking of her stomach for the first time since she demolished a plate of wings at the restaurant hours ago. “Sawa, I’ll be right back. Just stay here. Boss, chunga huyu mrembo.”

He returns with three hot dogs in his hands. If she trusted her stomach to retain its contents, she would pounce on them. How long since anyone paid so much attention to her? She revels in it. Still, there is nothing there, and a night of grinding only proved it. She would never have done it sober, but he had insisted. “Don’t worry. If you still don’t feel it, it won’t be awkward. We’ll just go back to being friends.” She had yielded then. And now, after she packs the hot dogs into her handbag and Nathan’s hands lift her top up, she yields again.

She is apologetic to the cab driver when the car stops outside her gate in Ruaka but lacks the articulation to express it. And what would be the point? Cab drivers see things every weekend. Nathan is out of the cab now, helping her out, making sure she gets to her door. But as she scrabbles for her keys in her bag, she can see that the cab driver has begun to reverse, preparing, it looks like, to leave. She tugs at Nathan’s shirt. “The driver is leaving without you,” she slurs. “You should get back in…or tell him to wait until you come back down…”

“Ah, no, it’s fine. I’ll just call another one.”

Naila wants to say that it is hard to find Ubers in Ruaka at 1:30 a.m. and that it would be wiser to go with this one, but the journey her words need to take from her brain to her lips is longer than usual. He takes the key from her and opens the gate. Her landlord’s lights are still on. In the months she has lived here, she has always come straight home from work. Is his wife now peeking through a window, reassessing her with a disappointed “wasichana wa siku hizi”?

She has never been more thankful to live on the first floor. She opens her door and floods the sitting room with light. As usual, Twinkle, her cat, is not here, off being a ho. Tonight, that makes two of them, Naila thinks. She drops her bag on the couch and turns to thank Nathan. Maybe if he calls the cab driver now, he could still come back.

But he is closing her door. And then his hands and mouth are on her, and he is pulling off her clothes, pulling her toward her bedroom, and she is saying no, but her body is weak, her brain weaker. And she is on her back, on her bed, and—she can’t believe it—she is yielding again.

He puts his head between her thighs, and his tongue rains on her like hailstones on a mabati roof. It is only a box to be checked though and is over rather quickly. He removes his boxers, and, giving up on the question of whether he had heard her say no, repeatedly, or whether she had sounded it out at all, she watches him insert himself into her. She makes the appropriate sounds. Nothing about it fits, physically or otherwise. He grunts out his orgasm and rolls off her.

Naila sits up, her head in her hands. She just wants to sleep. She watches him make his way to her bathroom and hears him turn on the shower. Okay, he is showering first, and then he will leave. She cannot sleep until he does, so she sits and waits. A minute goes by, and he returns to pull her into the shower with him. He is…jovial. He seems pleased with himself as he talks, but his words blur past her. She lets him rub the soap on her body, turning around when she should, smiling insipidly when her eyes meet his, wondering why there is a man in her house at two a.m. when she does not want him there.

She stands under the shower only long enough for the soap to rinse off, and then she steps out, taking her towel with her. Her ex used to use her towel after showering, and when he did, she had to take out another one, even if she had been using that one for only two days. He thought it was sweet that he could use her towel; she thought it was gross, and she resented the extra washing.

Her thoughts begin to swim into focus as she dries herself and pulls on an old promotional T-shirt. The unease that had been a blurry, nagging thought now spreads across her body and pools in her fingers so that she clenches her fists. Her eyes sting. What has she done?

Nathan finds her sitting on the edge of her bed. She doesn’t wait for him to speak. “You need to call a cab now.”

He hesitates. “No, let me just sleep here. I’ll go in the morning.”

Silence distends. All night she has let him convince her of things she wasn’t sure about. This time, she is sure. “No. You can’t sleep here. Call an Uber.”

He sits down next to her. “If you’re uncomfortable sharing a bed with me, I can sleep on your couch. It’s really late.”

Frustration rises like acid in her throat. If she stops to consider that it does make more sense for him to stay, she will spend the night and the morning uncomfortable in her own home. No, her rent costs far too much. “Please, Nathan. I would rather you didn’t stay. Plus, my couch is covered in cat fur…you can’t sleep there…” She is floundering now, making excuses. Justifying her no. She sighs. “Just call a cab. You can’t stay.”

He looks at her in a way he hadn’t all night. She doesn’t care. She wants to sleep. He takes out his phone from the pocket of his trousers and opens the Uber app. A few moments later, “There are no cabs, Naila. It’s two a.m.”

“I told you to go with the cab that brought us here, and you said you would call another one.”

He sighs.

The strain of forbidding her tears curdles her face into a grimace. If she cries now, she loses.

Nathan opens the Little Cab app. “The fare from here to my place is twelve hundred bob, Naila. It’s too expensive. I’ll just sleep on the couch. I don’t mind the fur.” There is an edge to his voice as he stands up, his decision a judge’s gavel. Naila swallows her laughter. Their night could not have cost him less than ten thousand shillings, and yet here he was, back broken by a twelve hundred-shilling straw.

The realization that she is now clearheaded enough to judge him inflates her. She has heard the stories about men who turn aggressive the moment they come into contact with a “no.” But Nathan wouldn’t do that.

Would he?

She stands. “No. Call the cab.”

▴ ▴ ▴

She is groggy when the sounds of the day wake her. She feels around her body. No headache, no nausea. She sits up in bed and thinks of the night before. For the first time, it dawns on her. He didn’t use a condom. She gets up and checks the wastepaper basket in her bedroom, the dustbin in her kitchen. Nothing. She sits back down on her bed and buries her head in her palms.

So stupid. Why did she get so drunk? Did she say no? Out loud? Did her body betray her by putting up a weak fight? Did she fail to make it clear enough that she did not want him in her bed? But also…why didn’t he stop to make sure?

She checks her texts. Mo is letting her know the details of her birthday shindig. Naila needs to leave the house by 4:30 p.m. to make it all the way to Mombasa Road in time. It is now midday. She texts back a confirmation that she will be there, then checks her M-Shwari savings: 1,256 shillings. Closing her eyes, she nods. It has only been a week since she got paid, and after she set aside money for rent, electricity tokens, grocery shopping, and transport, this is all that is left.

She can make it work.

Or she can take another M-Shwari loan. Being broke is no reason to miss her best friend’s birthday.

She gets up. The hot dogs from last night are still in her handbag—thank God because there is nothing but milk and two eggs in her fridge. She takes them out, warms them in the microwave, eats. She showers, again. She takes out her journal to write, and fails. She stares, gathering her memories, trying to piece them together.

Then, it is four p.m. She picks up her phone and calls her father. Talking to him always cheers her up. He picks up right away. He tells her about the renovations they are doing in the kitchen and she tells him about her job. He is outraged that her employer doesn’t pay her more and laments the cost of everything. Now she is on loudspeaker and her mother demands to know when she will be visiting. Soon, Naila promises. “Maybe the new kitchen will convince her to come home,” says her father as laughter bubbles in his throat.

When she hangs up, the apartment is silent. Twinkle comes in through the sitting room window and saunters to the bed. Naila runs a hand over her fur, scratches her chin. The cat settles on the duvet, in the space between Naila’s legs, and curls up, purring. Naila thinks about that one time when she was fourteen, when one of her best friends, a guy, came to visit her at home. When he was leaving, she had leaned in to give him a hug, and he, out of nowhere, had gone in for a kiss. She had turned her head just quickly enough for it to land on the corner of her mouth. She pulled back to look at him, alarmed, and he had only gazed at her, said nothing, and then said something funny. Their friendship had never been the same after that, and when they went off to different high schools, Naila hadn’t bothered to keep in touch.

Exhaling, she picks up her phone and texts Mo.

you’re going to hate me for this, but i’m bailing. i can’t make it… i can’t afford it. if i come today, i won’t make it to the end of the month. i promise i will make it up to you when i’m in a better place. please don’t cancel me.

Send.

The tears from last night erupt. She folds her knees to her chest, throws her hands over her bowed head, and cries.