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Now and then Nakia thinks T’Challa loves as deep as every river she’s ever known. Looking at him next to her, salt stained by the San Francisco Bay and sand caked by this beach and sun burnt by this sky, she thinks she is okay with drowning.
T’Challa watches the waves build and fall in the distance and when she leans against him, his arm goes around her shoulder as easily as breathing. It is not her first time at the beach. She and Shuri come here most weekends when they can, once the work for the week is done. Today, though, Shuri bowed out of the outing, citing a need to not be there while her brother and his girlfriend were flirting. She’d winked at them both when she said it, and a memory of the pleased embarrassment T’Challa did nothing to hide still makes Nakia smile.
Now, she pulls T’Challa to his feet and smiles and tugs him after her as she runs to the water. He stumbles and she laughs and he sticks his tongue out and as the water splashes cold to her thighs, Nakia is, quite simply, happy.
The bay water streams off T’Challa’s forehead when he kisses her. Nakia frames his face with her hands, and his lips tastes like the ocean.
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She wakes before he does the morning after the beach and it is so quiet and as she holds him, she is almost persuaded to stay. Nakia presses her nose to the back of his neck and breathes in, closing her eyes. He smells the same as river clay from home.
Her name rumbles through his body. She can feel it in her own chest. “Nakia.”
“T’Challa,” she whispers, and he rolls to face her. She smiles; he looks as though he would fall asleep in an instant, if allowed to. “I am sorry I am always leaving.”
He watches her push the blankets away and she still feels his eyes as she dresses. As she shuts her dresser drawers, she feels him come up behind her. Nakia leans back into him as he slides his arms around her waist and he rests his chin on her shoulder.
“I don’t mind that you leave,” T’Challa says. His words tickle her neck. <<I know you will come back, if you want. That is enough.>>
<<You know I will. >> She threads their fingers together. <<Just like I know you will meet me where I am, if you want,>> Nakia says, and she feels it when he smiles.
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Shuri’s first decision, when they reached their new embassy, was to remodel the exterior. Nakia had agreed; how are they to properly share their culture and technology in a building that says nothing about them? She and Shuri, along with their delegation of the Dora Milaje, had gone looking for paint samples and had Okoye send them pictures from home for inspiration. Nakia and Shuri had paid for everything themselves, agreeing that embassy funds should be saved for outreach.
Today Nakia and Shuri recognize the embassy from miles away. At the sight of it, something grows warm in her chest.
“What’s on your agenda today, Princess?” Nakia asks. The smell of paint hits them the second they step into the lobby, and she makes a note to ask Okoye to ship oils and perfumes when she is able. A large shipment, she thinks, stepping around a drop cloth. There’s still much to be painted.
Shuri hits the elevator button and rolls her eyes. “You’re a princess too, you know,” she says, “so stop it with the title and things, it’s annoying.”
Nakia bites down a laugh. Shuri catches her reflection trying not to smile and turns to her, an accusing finger in her face. “T’Challa told you to call me that, didn’t he?”
From behind them, Ayo says, “We told him you would figure it out,” and now Nakia laughs at the look on Shuri’s face.
The elevator opens on the top floor and Nakia’s guards shadow her to her office. Shuri’s amused indignation follows after them, even when Shuri closes her lab door, and the sound makes the warmth grow and spread down her arms.
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Nakia’s staff shows her a mock up of a culture presentation they’ve pieced together for the inter-city schools. They show slide after slide of pictures, slide after slide filled with information too dense to actually read. She stops them after ten minutes, her head hurting so much she can hardly pinpoint the problem.
“Is this all you have?” she asks. The four presenters look at her blankly, before turning to each other. She sighs and massages the skin above her eyebrows. “Thank you.”
They file out of the room, still looking confused. From behind her, Ayo says, “What was wrong with it?”
“It wasn’t alive,” Nakia says, her voice muffled by her hands. “Wakanda is more than statistics.”
“What would you have them do instead?”
Nakia drops her head onto the table and says, “I’m not sure yet.”
Ayo, thankfully, doesn’t push her.
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She takes T’Challa to her favorite sushi restaurant and he tells her about walking through the city and he doesn’t say anything about Killmonger. She can tell where he’s hiding those emotions though, and she takes his hand over the table. His shoulders are tight and raised the way they get when he doesn’t want to talk about something.
<<What is it?>> Nakia asks, as their waiter sets their rolls on the table. T’Challa smiles at him in thanks and it is too tense to be a real smile.
He says, <<What is what?>> Nakia raises her eyebrows, and he studies the table. <<I passed a group of boys playing basketball, Nakia. They were so small.>>
<<You are not responsible for the way your cousin grew up,>> she tells him. <<You are not responsible for who be grew to become.>> He rubs a corner of his napkin between his thumb and forefinger and she squeezes his other hand until he looks at her. <<T’Challa.>>
<<Nakia,>> he says.
They don’t say much else, but the silence between them is soft and low like the silence between the moon and the tides. His shoulders relax, and in that silence, she hears him say he heard her.
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“How long do I have you for?” she asks him, shouting to be heard over the rain. T’Challa ducks into her space and she repeats the question and he pauses. A pedestrian jostles into them and Ayo stares until the walker apologizes.
T’Challa leads them under an awning, pushing down his hood. Nakia wants to follow the path the raindrops take down his neck with her mouth. She settles for tracing it with her finger.
They’ve crowded into a flower vendor’s sidewalk space. T’Challa makes a show of shifting through the vases, looking at her now and them to make sure she’s watching. She rolls her eyes and nudges his side with her elbow but she’s smiling, and when he buys her flowers as green and white and yellow as her tribe’s colors, she kisses him.
“You have me as long as you’d like,” he says, and she leads him into the rain.
It is a pretty untruth. Nakia knows, his hand in hers, that he is here to the end of the week to visit with various dignitaries and establish their legitimacy in Oakland. She lets herself believe it for the afternoon. Someday, Nakia wants to hold that promise in her hands. T’Challa smiles wide as the river like he knows what she’s thinking.
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They plan a movie night that evening after drying off and changing into pajamas. Nakia experiments with their microwave’s popcorn button while T’Challa cleans the common room and Shuri chooses a movie. Shuri teases T’Challa for the amount of socks he’s left everywhere, and they trade affectionate insults until Nakia accidentally burns the popcorn.
After T’Challa turns off the fire alarm, Shuri says, “That’s a literal burn, then, isn’t it?” Nakia tosses popcorn at her. T’Challa laughs, and she throws some at him, too.
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Her staff bring her another plan, this one involving some of their virtual reality technology to give the students an immersive experience. Nakia considers it.
“Would we have enough visors for all the children?” she asks.
“We do not,” Shuri says, poking her head in from the hallway.
“They could share,” Nakia says, brightening. This may work; her team can still use their statistics while showing the students around the city. “We will have to come up with something for the other students to do while they wait.”
“No,” Shuri says, shaking her head. “We have enough for about a thirtieth of the students. That won't be enough, I’m sorry.”
Nakia sucks in her lip before sighing. “We will think of something.”
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T’Challa takes her back to the beach the next day and he is so lovely it nearly hurts. It’s another foggy, drizzling day, and the mist budding on his hair looks like dewdrops on grass.
She doesn’t sit when he does, preferring instead to stand and rest her hands on his shoulders. He leans against her legs and reaches back to rub her calves and she feels so steady, she thinks she could hold all the oceans in her hands and not stumble.
The sky and the bay stretch so far outward and upward that there is no way to differentiate them. Nakia focuses on T’Challa beneath her hands, and when she taps the back of his head, he lets her tilt his face back. His eyes on hers are so warm she shivers.
He tugs on her pant leg gently so she kneels next to him, ignoring the cold of the wet sand. Nakia rests her forehead against his and they breathe together. It is enough, kneeling in the fog and mist and cold, if he is here breathing beside her.
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She thinks of it that night and nearly falls getting out of bed to write it down. T’Challa protests sleepily, rubbing his eyes at the lamplight, but when she tells him, he looks at his hands. Nakia crawls back to him and when he cries she kisses the tears away, and they taste like the sea.
<<Do you think it will work?>> she asks some time later, her own voice hoarse from tears.
He takes his next breath in time with hers and says, <<I know it will.>>
<<It isn’t too little?>>
<<Nakia,>> he says, and her name on his tongue is deep as the ocean. <<It is everything.>>
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The day before he has to leave, Nakia watches through a camera as T’Challa loses a basketball to a young boy half his height. Shuri laughs from the paint station as T’Challa pretends to be out of breath when the boy runs past him to the basket. Nakia joins her, pointing the camera at students studying Wakandan designs to copy onto their section of the building.
One of the students pours a cup of paint on Shuri’s head as her laugh turns to a shriek, and then a threat of retaliation. The girl looks terrified until Nakia asks Ayo to bring out the paint balloons.
“Our only rules are not to hit anyone who doesn’t want to participate, and not to hit anyone in the face,” Nakia says, once she has everyone’s attention. “If you don’t want to play, please stand by the food table and avoid the basketball court.”
A sizeable group of students stays on the basketball court. Ayo and Nakia split the group in half and send them to either end of the court as they spread the balloons along the half court line. Shuri makes a face at the girl who dumped paint on her, making a show of going to the opposite side of the court. The girl makes a show of not being afraid. Nakia decides she likes her.
“Are you playing?” T’Challa asks, grinning. He’s already rolled up his sleeves.
“Of course I am.” She winks at him, and the students go ooooo.
Ayo gives them the signal to start and paint and happy shrieks rain from the sky.
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The teachers give them all hugs when the throwing stops. They wave the buses off with ten new interns and thirty more students signed up for lab time with Shuri.
“Good work,” Shuri says, surveying the paint splatters. “It looks much better this way.”
There is no pattern at all to the paint. Footprints cover the entire court in smeared lines interrupted by random, exploded bursts of color. It’s a mess, truly, but it’s beautiful.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Nakia says. “It looks alive.”
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T’Challa wakes her the next morning when it is still dark out. He kneels on her side of the bed, and she trails her finger down his forehead to his nose to rest on his bottom lip. He kisses it.
“I have to go,” he whispers against her finger. “I am sorry I am always leaving.”
It is dark out but he’s turned the light on, and in the light, he is luminous. There is still a sliver of yellow paint dried under his ear. She touches it, and he kisses the inside of her wrist.
<<I don’t mind that you leave,>> Nakia whispers. He pulls the blankets up higher around her shoulders and that warm feeling stretches sleepily in her chest. <<I know you will come back, if you want, and that is enough.>>
T’Challa finds her hand under the blanket and laces their fingers together. Holding him feels like holding a promise in her hands, and, seeing him lit softly by the lamplight, she thinks she might be able to keep it.
<<I do,>> he says softly. <<I will always want to.>>
There is so much to say to this and not enough to say to this at the same time. He doesn’t rush her, letting her memorize his face with her fingers. He feels like the rivers do. Nakia thinks she would recognize him anywhere.
<<I love you,>> she tells him.
<<I love you too,>> he whispers, his shoulders relaxed.
A quiet moment passes between them in which she looks at him and looks at him looking at her.
<<I’ll be back in a month,>> T’Challa says. He breathes in so deep Nakia can almost feel it in her own lungs. She presses her forehead to his. <<Only for a few days. But after that—>>
<<I’ll be home,>> Nakia says. <<And then the embassy will run on its own, and then you’ll have me as long as you want me.>>
He smiles at that. <<I like being next to you. You may have to put up with me for awhile.>>
<<I can think of worse things,>> she tells him, and when they kiss, she smiles against his mouth.
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