Excerpt from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Like I said, it was unfair. Dane never stood a chance. Nor did I for that matter. Q and I. We fell in love without preamble. My premature cynicism about him began to erode almost immediately. Because Q seemed so sure about everything: that we would love each other forever, that we would get married, that this was it for him. I trusted him because he had given me no reason not to. We had sex for the first time on his body pillow bed and I got not one but two splinters in my behind, which he tweezed out as the late afternoon sun dropped behind the London skyline. For once, I was unconcerned with eyes on my body; I loved the way he looked at me, like I was too good to be true. The time we spent apart lessened by the week until my clothes were stacked in the corner of his room and his photographs lined the walls of mine.

By week three, we were spending every night together. By week six, my friends, angry and baffled by my desertion, staged an intervention, which Q gate-crashed, bringing beignets and charming them all. Fucking beignets. That boy.

We would laugh as we'd fold ourselves around each other in my minuscule bed, ending up, no matter the position of the mercury, sweating after a night's sleep. He asked me to read to him a lot. So I read him The Virgin Suicides and he bought me biographies about the wives of famous men. He was artfully disheveled in that way the very wealthy often are. Although his efforts seemed a tad forced. The untucked shirt that his fingers strayed to tuck in before he remembered that was the entire point. Right from the beginning, he suffered infuriating lapses in sense that left me staring at my phone with mounting irritation, waiting for him to text, only for him to appear hours later, his face open and beaming. He was always thrilled to see me and his smile would falter; he could never understand my annoyance.

I didn't say a word about him to anyone at home. Not even Gloria.

By week twelve, there was a ring on my finger. I said yes without blinking. The night he proposed, we drank lukewarm wine straight out of the bottle and had giggly, fumbling sex in a deserted train station on the outskirts of London. I wanted to run away. Get married on a deserted beach somewhere exotic where hibiscus grew and the sand would be white and hot between my toes. I wanted to wear a sundress and wed with my feet in water the color of Quentin's eyes. Mostly, I wanted to escape so I wouldn't have to face my family and tell them I was marrying the boy I had known for five minutes. And he wasn't even Igbo.

"Relax. You've known me at least seven," the bastard said, because when it came to us, he somehow knew things would work out. As I threatened to float away on a storm cloud of worry, he grabbed my ankles and tugged me back down to earth. "You'll regret it if you get married without your family there," he said.

He was right. Plus, he was fascinated by us. He was an only child and I could see the envy in his eyes whenever I spoke to Glo or Nate on the phone, the sad little smile on his face when he heard me telling my parents I loved them. He wanted to be part of something new, something warm. He wanted more than weekly calls with a mother who treated his vocation like a pipe dream, a silly display of youthful defiance. He had so much love in him and had swiftly run out of places to put it and have it reciprocated in a way that made sense to him. So, because he graduated a year before me, we made a deal that we'd get married the day after my own graduation. And we did. In a "small" ceremony with two hundred guests (listen, a normal Nigerian wedding has upward of five hundred; this was tiny by comparison). I remember Dad decked out in his smart black-and-gold Isiagu, Nate winking at me from his place beside Jackson. Ma managed to keep it together. She was mentally listing all the friends and extended family members to whom she would have to explain—playing out the exclamations of sympathy she would get from her friends when they realized her girl was marrying the handsome oyinbo who had rushed her into marriage at the tender age of twenty-one.

Excerpted from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli. Copyright © 2022 by Onyi Nwabineli. Excerpted by permission of Graydon House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.