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

I wasn't ready for Q. He was not someone that was supposed to happen to me.

On the day I met him, I left Dane sleeping in my room and headed to Tesco for the obligatory replenishing of cheesecake and cheap lasagna—my staples once the food Ma forced into my arms whenever I visited home ran out.

That he approached me at all instantly made me curious. The few boys brave enough to spit whatever lackluster approximation of game they thought they had were met with laughter or a hail of verbal missiles from my friends. I was an introverted girl, easily tongue-tied, but I imagine I came across as standoffish and I intimidated the majority of boys, cowed as they were by the sight of me striding across campus, braids swinging.

Quentin materialized at my side as I scrutinized the frozen dessert selection. I didn't notice him right away. I tossed a New York–style cheesecake into my basket and moved along and it was only then I realized he had been standing there barely breathing and staring at me with an intensity I had heretofore only associated with those on campus who had discovered hard drugs.

I moved to fresh produce.

Moments later, there he was.

Look, I'll just say it. He was gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, beautiful. Almost painfully so. I dug deep for a scathing comment but was rendered speechless by his eyes—the color of an unsullied ocean, the kind you see in travel brochures advertising islands you have never heard of.

"Hi," he offered and matched the word with a hint of a smile so beatific it actually made me angry.

"You're following me," I snapped.

"I am," he agreed amiably.

"White men don't follow Black girls around supermarkets unless they suspect they're being robbed."

"Interesting theory."

He was familiar. Of course he was. People who look like Quentin looked don't roam the earth unnoticed. However, he was not a plainclothes security guard but a fellow student.

I sighed. "What do you want?"

"Um. Well, I was hoping you could help me choose the right kind of pepper for—"

I cut him off. "What makes you think I know anything about food shopping?" I indicated my basket. "Or is your assumption that because I'm a woman, I should know about groceries?" This was the person I was back then. That I hadn't once again been ostracized by my peers was nothing but God at work.

Q took great pains to assure me that wasn't it. "I'm going to attempt jollof rice and—"

"You what? You're making jollof? For what exactly?"

"My Visual Culture class is having a potluck and we have to choose a dish from someone else's—"

I could not stop interrupting him. Me, a person who went to school in a place that made me swallow my own voice. "So it's not only that I'm a woman but because you assume I can cook jollof?"

He scratched the back of his head and my heart hiccupped. "I think it's more because in your last debate, you said that just because you can make the best jollof rice this side of London doesn't mean you, under patriarchy, should be compelled to do so. I'm not compelling you to do so. Just so you know."

I had said that. In an impassioned diatribe to my debate teammates in a half-darkened lecture hall we had been fairly certain was occupied by no more than six people, most of whom had come to ogle Cynthia, our stunning ringleader.

I helped Q locate the Scotch bonnets.

He said he had "noticed" me on campus because he thought "my cheekbones would photograph well" and he wanted to be the one to take that photograph. I remember laughing at him even as I snatched glimpses of his ocean eyes. His game was a limping, struggling thing, but I liked the way he looked at my face, like it was the only thing he could see. We made a second circuit of the supermarket, and even though I hated how intrigued I was, I was riding the wave of lust he rode in on and now there was intrigue in my sails.

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.