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

"So, you should let me," he said when we were outside.

"Let you what?"

"Take the photograph. Of you."

I searched his face for signs of bravado, but he was swinging his backpack onto his shoulders, looking more nervous than I felt. "Alright," I said.

* * *

I changed my mind the next day as I sat in my lecture and resolved to tell Quentin as soon as I saw him, which I did unexpectedly quickly. He was waiting for me outside my classroom when I was done.

"Hi," he said and handed me a biography of Judy Garland. He saw the expression on my face and he flushed, redness creeping up his neck and cartwheeling across his cheeks. "I... I saw you had the biography of Billie Holiday in your bag yesterday, so I thought maybe you'd like this."

A boy. Bringing me books. Wanting to photograph me. It was too much.

"I do," I told him. "Shall we go?"

His off-campus student digs consisted of one long room with bare, paint-flecked floorboards and walls filled with Polaroids and prints of his own shots. Even then his talent was a wild animal refusing to be tamed, but his confidence was still tightly furled inside him. On the way over there, I'd battled with myself, trudging alongside him wondering what Gloria and Imani, my most feminist friend, would think of me. I didn't pull shit like this. And look, I get it. There's nothing "empowering" about capitulating to a dude with pretty eyes and a killer smile, and had Q's teeth been crooked or his skin acne-scarred, there is an excellent chance I would have sprayed him in the eyes with Tabasco sauce in Tesco and gone on my merry way. But beauty does something to us all. If a beautiful person demonstrates interest, it is as if we've been given a gift, and right now, I was the girl with all the damn gifts. I was shallow. But I was also nineteen.

"Look," I said to him as he unlocked his front door, "this doesn't seem..." I did not finish my sentence because he smiled a smile I felt on my skin and below my waistline. It was a wrap.

He sat me on a stool and took my photo, and afterward, he showed me my face on his computer screen and asked me if I wanted him to cook me something.

"The jollof?" I asked.

He blushed. "I thought I might make something different."

"So you actually cook?" I asked.

"For you, I cook," he replied.

Over inexpertly prepared pad thai eaten cross-legged on his floor, he talked his way into my life. I learned he was one of those Morrows, Britain's less ostentatious answer to the Rothschilds, and suddenly his expensive student housing made sense. He was studying photography and digital art. He wasn't flashy. His voice faltered more than once, like our conversation was an interview, an oral exam for admission into my world. It was like he dipped his hand past the buttons of my shirt and snatched out my heart. He never did give it back either. You need chairs, I told him. I'll buy chairs, he responded before gently curling his fingers against the back of my neck and kissing me. We talked some more. We kissed again. Eventually we fell asleep on the mound of body pillows he had the audacity to call a bed, and in the morning, I woke first and took the opportunity to commit his face to memory. Later, with my shoes tied and my glasses back on my face, I idled by the door, wretched. Was I simply a conquest? A box to be ticked? What came next? The thought of this being a onetime occurrence made me sick to my stomach. Q asked me to wait while he buttoned his shirt, and in the age it took him to cross the room, I tasted a hundred flavors of rejection.

Then he laced his fingers through mine.

Dane was apoplectic.

"The fuck you mean?" he thundered when I finally mustered the courage to tell him a few days later. "You're leaving me for some white boy?"

Quentin leaned languidly against the doorjamb and dared Dane with his eyes to do something. Dane considered it, but his pride more than his heart was bruised. I would be forgotten in a month, swapped for a girl who looked at him like he was the sun.

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.