We Are Not Like Them(75)
When Corey slipped his hand in my pants before we’d even made it to his room, we were both shocked at how wet I was. It felt like my own body had betrayed me with this evidence of my desire. I would have been embarrassed by how primal it was, I would have been concerned about the cameras in the elevator and who might be watching, reminding myself, Nice girls don’t do this—had I been capable of having any thoughts and feelings beyond This, now. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t even care that after two hours of sex I’d sweated out my blowout. The entire night, I was a stranger to myself, free of any and all inhibitions.
Even thinking about it now brings a stirring between my legs. I press a throw pillow into my lap as if to muffle any lingering lust.
When I’d woken the next morning in Corey’s suite, sore and spent, it had felt like waking from a fever dream, or what I imagine a heroin bender must feel like. I hobbled around, naked, to collect my clothes that had been scattered around the room, reaching under the bed for my bra, all while Corey watched me with this look, like he could see right through me. I didn’t want him to look at me like that. I didn’t want to feel the way I did. I didn’t want to date a white guy. I didn’t want a long-distance relationship. As I dressed, I explained that as best as I could (except for the white-guy part).
“Okay, Riley,” Corey said, in a tone I couldn’t read. Playful? Resigned? Annoyed? “It sounds like you know best. At least kiss me goodbye.”
I leaned over the bed to give him a peck. Before I could pull away, he grabbed my face and drew me closer, his tongue probing mine, until I surrendered completely, too shaky and weak to resist. When I finally managed to tear myself away, I didn’t trust myself to say goodbye; I just flew out of the room. Not an hour later, after I’d showered away all the last traces of sex and chalked it up as a once-in-a-lifetime blip that no one needed to know about, I received a text.
I’m booking a flight to Birmingham. You can’t get rid of me that easily. We have to see where this goes.
I both loved and hated this about Core: his ability to proceed as if everything was going to fall into place for him, because it always had—the privilege of being a good-looking white guy from Connecticut. His confidence bordered on arrogance, and it was sexy as hell when it wasn’t infuriating. In any case, his Jedi mind tricks worked. Nine months later, I was introducing him to my family the weekend before Thanksgiving. God, how I had dreaded that visit. But then, there I was, watching Corey taking in our “Wall of Pride,” the long hallway between the front door and the living room, every square inch covered in family portraits and the requisite photo of Martin Luther King Jr., along with framed mementos of Black excellence and history: the New York Times from the day Obama was elected president, two poems by Maya Angelou, a poster with a listing of Black inventions, etc. I explained the origins of the wall, parroting Momma.
“The world outside may try to tell you that you’re less than, but as you come and go from this house, you’re going to look at this wall and remember who you really are and who you can be.” It was practically the family slogan.
Corey proclaimed the display “very cool.” I was busy wondering if he’d ever even been inside a Black person’s home before and why I’d never asked him this, when he leaned in for a closer look at the inventor poster.
“You know, it was a Black man who created the recipe for Jack Daniel’s whiskey,” Corey said. “Nathan Green, it was his creation.”
By this point I was used to Corey being a fountain of random facts, but this one endeared him to my parents, who were watching from the hall. I let myself enjoy the tiniest bit of relief that this might go well.
I hadn’t expected Corey to be so at ease at my family’s table, though he was, completely, gamely submitting to piles of food and some friendly ribbing. (“I bet you never had grits before, have you, son?” Daddy asked. He hadn’t.) I was the one on edge. I tried to calm myself by refilling glasses of iced tea and ferrying plates of food back and forth to the table. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with this picture, that I was doing something illicit, like the first time I drank under my parents’ roof or cursed or got my belly button pierced with Jen at that grimy shop on South Street.
Dating a white man—marrying one, if it came to that—felt disloyal. I always thought I should end up with a fine upstanding brother, build up the community, have two beautiful brown-skinned children who would be a credit as well, advance their race, the cause. Not with this white guy who played lacrosse in high school, went to Williams, and came from money to boot. Sometimes, as I lay beside him in bed, his pale body against mine, one word would float through my mind: “sellout.” I swore I saw the same word floating like a cartoon bubble above Gigi’s head when he visited that weekend. She was perfectly polite to Corey, but as soon as he was out of earshot, she couldn’t help reminding me, “He’s never going to get you, and you won’t get him. Why add more heartache to your plate? The world is hard enough as it is. Find one of your own.”
The entire time he was with my family, I was preoccupied, wondering what it would be like to meet Corey’s parents, Steve and Catharine, an environmental lawyer and a landscape architect from Connecticut. All the energy it would take to make sure they understood that I was one of the good ones. All the condescending comments I might have to ignore, the fear that they’d be one way to my face and another behind my back. It was enough to make me want to avoid the whole thing altogether.