I’m Keith. Saima has been renting the spare room in my parents’ house for two years, and somewhere in that time we became each other’s closest friends, close enough that she started telling me, in detail, exactly what the men she was with did to her. Tariq, her first, back home in India. Uday, after him. Now Paul, the football captain who once tossed my glasses into the grass in front of her while his friends laughed. What I’ve never told her is that every time she told me another story, I sat there, said nothing, and wanted her for myself.

***

Things were reaching a breaking point and that came the day she said Paul had asked her if she’d like to go on a trip. A week, just the two of them, some cabin his family owned up past the lake, no phones, no plans beyond whatever he wanted to do with her for seven straight days.

“He told me exactly what he’s imagining,” she said, curled into her usual corner of the couch. “A whole week where he doesn’t have to share me with anyone or anything. He said he wants to fuck me so many times that I lose count of which day it is.” She laughed, a little breathless even in the telling. Then her eyes went dreamy. “Can you imagine? A week. Fucking day and night.”

I couldn’t imagine her sharing a week with anyone else. I couldn’t imagine anything at all except that I was about to lose her. Not to one night, not to one story I got to sit through and survive, but to seven days that would end however they ended, with her coming back changed in some way I wouldn’t get a story about, because some things stop being things you tell even your best friend.

“Keith?” She’d noticed I’d gone somewhere else. “You okay?”

“No,” I said, and it came out before I’d decided to say it. “I’m not okay. I have not been okay for two years, Saima, and I am done pretending otherwise.”

She opened her mouth, and I don’t know what she was going to say, because I never let her finish.

I kissed her.

For one extremely long moment, she went completely still, and every terrible thing I had ever believed about myself came rushing back at once: too much, too late, an idiot who’d misread two years of kindness for something it was never going to be. She’s going to slap me. She will call my parents. She will tell Paul. Please don’t push me away.

None of that happened.

She kissed me back.

Both her hands came up into my hair and she kissed me like she’d been waiting for me to stop being a coward about it, and when we finally broke apart she was breathing hard and smiling in a way I’d never once seen on her face in two years of living on the other side of my wall.

“About time,” she said.

Then she stood, took my hand, and walked me to my room without a word.

Continue the story in About Time.

All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.