Page 1 of Isn't It Obvious?
CHAPTER ONE
Yael awakens in a haze. Her limbs, her tongue, her very being heavy with the kind of sleep that borders on coma.
This hasn’t happened in a while, and she forgot this part. How everything goes cloudy, and waking up seems to be a minutes-long process, each part of her brain stuttering on sequentially like a series of breakers being flipped. Shehasn’tforgotten about hyperventilating on the phone to Sanaa yesterday, convinced she was going to lose her book club and her podcast. Which, of course, would make her lose her day job, too, because she knows she’d be entirely checked out already without her carefully curated hobbies. Her career would be over! She would never get a full night’s sleep again!
The olanzapine helps with some of the embarrassment, at least.
She had managed to wrap her hair before falling asleep this time, mercifully. When she finally wills herself out of bed and into a shower, she won’t spend forty-five minutes combing out the beginnings of a loc formed at her crown. She sits up with an aggrieved sigh, her volume proportional to her effort.
A loudthunkechoes throughout the room. Probably herphone sliding off from where it was balanced precariously on the edge of her comforter.
“Christ! Fucking Christ.”
Ah, not her phone. She turns toward the voice and is greeted with an unfamiliar man straddling her windowsill and rubbing his hand against the back of his head. A reasonable response would be to scream, but Yael has two and a half milligrams of medical grade antipsychotic coursing through her veins. Her heart couldn’t race if a rabid animal were chasing it. Right now, and for the next couple of hours, her emotional response to just about anything will beOh, okay.
Which is why she looks at him long enough to take stock of the position of his body, the fact that the pane pushed up above him is unbroken.
“Are you… breakingoutof my room?” she asks.
His full lips curve into a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I, em, I suppose I am.”
Oh, okay.“Why are you breaking out of my room?”
“I didn’t realize you were home, I promise,” he says. The texture of his voice is smooth and rich, but the tone varies greatly across a few short words. Far too much song in it to be English, but there’s an unmistakableCommonwealthquality to his accent. Caribbean, maybe. Yael is too foggy to place it further. “And I didn’t want to disturb Charles.”
Charlie, Yael thinks,definitely thought you were British.“You could have just as easily tiptoed to the front door,” she says, extending her clasped hands overhead, then to each side, stretching her obliques. The man follows the motion with his eyes, as if momentarily transfixed.
“I, eh, see…” He looks at her, tilting his jaw upward, that closed-lipped smile quirking again. But he doesn’t continue, like he expects her to put something together.
In heroh, okaystate, that’s unlikely to happen. “I just woke up,” she says. “My brain is too cloudy to decipher subtext.”
“But not too cloudy to use the phrase ‘decipher subtext’?” the man says, his dark, thick, perfectly formed eyebrows lifting upward. Toward artfully tousled, equally dark, equally thick hair. Yael briefly wonders what she looks like. Since her silk scarf is tied securely and she seems to be in sleepwear, there’s a good chance she brushed her teeth. Probably even washed her face. Possibly moisturized.
More than likely, though, her skin is dry, oily, or somehow both and is creased from wrinkles in her pillowcase.
She shrugs. “Humor me,” she says. “Why are you in here? There has to be a better way to sneak away from your sleeping lover than through his roommate’s occupied bedroom.”
The stranger touches down with the foot that never made it out of the building on her bedroom floor and swings his other leg around to meet it, like he’s accepted he’ll be here a while longer. “It didn’t seem like you were home. The duvet and pillows really do a lot to camouflage.”
“Fine,” Yael says, lifting one heavy arm and lazily flicking her wrist. “His roommate’s presumed unoccupied bedroom.”
“I’m having an increasingly difficult time believing your brain is cloudy,” he replies.
“You’re breaking out of my bedroom. Humor me,” she repeats.
He sighs. “Charles isn’t asleep.” He narrows his eyes slightly. “I’m surprised you couldn’t hear that.”
Yael only shrugs.
After a beat, he says, “I guess it’s a good thing you have thick walls.” He smirks, revealing a singular dimple in his left cheek.
“I don’t think it’s the walls. I was asleep for…” She feelsaround for her phone, finding it underneath a throw pillow she couldn’t be bothered to move the night before. She presses the side, and the time reads 9:33. “About fifteen hours.”
“Heavy sleeper?” he asks, tugging on his earlobe. It’s pierced with a thin gold hoop, a matching one on the other side.
“Sure, something like that.”
His brow furrows.
