After Hours, a Postscript

An excerpt from The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown by Nina Sharma

Nina Sharma, author of memoir The Way You Make Me Feel; photo by Ricardo Horatio Nelson

Every time I think back to that night, I remember myself wearing stockings, but it was July, too hot for stockings.

“Last call!” A crowd once united by Stevie Wonder disperses. We break our dance, wander back to the bar to wait for Justine.  Quincy leans his back against a stool and turns to me. 

“What do we do now?” 

I lean my legs into his.

After 2 AM Philly goes dry, the post-prohibition era state liquor law to “prohibit forever the open saloon” still in play. Bars crammed with people become ghostlands minutes later. No one hanging over its edges lunging towards the bartender, no effort of shoulders to nudge in or out or race toward stool before someone else does: just a bone-dry, stained, about-to-be-Cloroxed counter. Soon after, the club empties entirely.

We go back to Justine's place, where the walls are paper thin and this “artist loft” building is filled with all kinds of unartful noises – hipster rock, white kids listening to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” Justine puts a mix on over it: Total crooning to Biggie, the heat like a glaze over us.

We three are four now, Aisha has joined us. I’ve known her as long as I have known Justine. I met them both at a month-long writing conference in a part of upstate New York that feels more deep South, in a town where Solomon Northrup was drugged to be later sold into slavery, at a conference where a white woman once came up to Justine and said “hello Jamaica Kincaid.”  We found refuge in each other. And one of us, or maybe all three of us, found a local bar that, one night a week, played hip hop, good 90s- early 2000s hip hop,  where we stole away after Big Important Book Reading and became better friends. 

What luck, I think. Not because I want to see my friend but because I’m not through with Quincy and I hope he’s not through with me: after hours, after the kiss, this is my one focus.  This man, who as I stretch out on Justine’s couch, has taken my feet in his hands. I try to steal a glance to see what Aisha thinks. She doesn’t seem to notice anything. But then again Aisha is a poet, a great poet, the kind who knows how to leave out all the right things. 

Quincy suggests David’s, an after-hours Chinese restaurant that has good wings. “That’s the spot.” 

I’m not hungry. I’m ravenous. Horniness might seem like a wild, incoherent thing. But I feel it sharp and piercing, nothing but concentration, the mind and body joined at a single point – the mole on my labia maybe.  That’s the spot. 

It’s decided that Quincy and I will just go to David’s together: an artifice of a decision.

“It’s worth the wait.”

I was used to the backseat of Maxine, as Q referred to his car - Maxine, oh Miss Maxine - me and grade stacks and good books. But now I’m approaching the front.

Quincy opens the door, a habit of his I’m noticing. For a moment, it’s just me and Maxine, all her gunmetal grey sharpness, the automatic shift, the tape deck nobs, the steering wheel locked by The CLUB, heat making it hard to touch any one of these things for too long. Any contact would inevitably singe. 

Q climbs into the driver’s seat.  The door closes.

“We really should get the food,” Quincy says.

The drive itself is short, Chinatown not so far from Justine’s place on Spring Garden. Quincy parks a couple blocks away: another habit I’m noticing. We make up for the short drive by staying in the car for 30 minutes. We see other people climbing in and out of cars in party dresses and night looks. We see other cars fogged up with weed or love or some mix. We see people milling in and out of shops, Chinatown active at 2AM like no other part of Philly.  But that’s the outside world.  Inside, Maxine is all steam, the faintest curtain of privacy, our heat pressing against Philly summer.

“We really should get the food,” Quincy says.

David’s is the spot, the bustle beginning even before stepping foot inside. Cars double park with abandon out front of a simple brick building that looks just like the one next to it and the one next to that save for the decorative green ceramic tiles that fan out into an awning. There is a large neon rectangle that sits atop the door, proudly announcing David’s Mai Lai Wah in both English and Chinese characters in distinct primary colors, neon that continues to burst through the three octagonal windows each meant to tantalize in their own way, neon signage that overwhelms any other light source on the block: “OPEN”, “COCKTAILS”, “BEST FOOD IN TOWN.”

There is not much room left to move once inside. Everything feels alive and lively with drunk hunger. We can barely hear ourselves, post-club chatter wafts and mixes with the place’s sugar-and-smoke smell, the steam of rice and countless orders of their famous salt and pepper chicken wings. The owner himself, David, approaches us. His appearance completes the fever dream that is this evening. We order too much. “40 minutes,” David shakes Quincy’s hand vigorously. “Okay!” we say.

We make our way back to Maxine. Too many blocks away. Too many cars to pass. Streets getting darker with each block but I can still spot which car is his – the one with The CLUB locked on to the steering wheel. I want to fasten myself upon him like that.

I hurdle the gear shift, a perfect 10 of a landing, straddled atop him. His hands are not on at ten and two but on my hips. His feet not braking but slipping as we send the seat further back as I rise and rise, my back arcing against the steering wheel, grinding, the hot metal buckle making my knees jerk, my body flinch and then everything clicks into a groove. 

My thighs get slick. I go faster, but he doesn’t: the rhythm more and more off between the two of us until he pulls away entirely, which is not so far away as I’m still on top. So it’s more like a very awkward distance in name.

I see him move his lips first, before he says anything, trying to talk himself through it seems.

Fuck the food, I’m prepared to say.

“I’m fresh out of a relationship,” he says, breath still steadying, “I’m a little broken.”

*

Every time I think back to that night, I remember myself wearing stockings, but it was July, it was too hot for stockings.

At some point after Fluid, Aisha is there. I don’t know why she wasn’t with us at the club. It was too hot for stockings. It was too late for Aisha to join us at the club. And I don’t recall her in the after-hours planning either. I don’t recall her being part of the moment when between debating plans, while Q slipped out the car, Justine whispered: “He and his ex- might be still figuring it out…watch out for him.”

The next evening Justine, Aisha and I decide to go to the Irish pub down the road, on the other side, closer to City Hall, further down from the gun shop and club. 

Quincy joins us there. Blasting old school R&B like only an Irish pub in Philly can, in this crowded narrow bar with a floor that slightly tilted, Quincy and I find a way to wiggle-dance.

Justine, Aisha and I want to drink some more, drink in a state with no liquor stores open on Sunday rule. Quincy and I drive across Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden, NJ, to the first liquor store we see: a huge and harsh-white fluorescent brick block, the type of place needed more than it needs you.  I spy a soccer-mom-style minivan a few feet away from us with a dent, like a kid’s ball went through it. I see a young Asian boy come out, a bandana over most of his face, followed by two more teens with same colored bandanas over their face followed then by the van’s hip hop: loud but indiscernible, incoherent, mostly just a vibration through their dented exterior. I guess it’s not that kind of minivan.

Quincy parks Maxine and before he can even take the key out, I’m leaning towards him. “How about we get the liquor first?” he says.

Inside, the space is vast and overwhelming with choices. We are charged with getting Justine’s Captain Morgan and Aisha’s Don Julio. Quincy suggests something too, “Bahama Mama, my cousin likes that.” Quincy is not a drinker and I know this isn’t the type of mix my friends prefer but we pick up the mixer anyways. I just want to go back to the car.

There is no 40-minute wait. I climb over him and fasten myself upon him. He doesn’t pull away this time under a sputtering parking lot light, in front of this van of dented incoherent hip hop, in the part of town that is but a strip of liquor stores screaming competitive deals to those that have crossed over from Philly, but something doesn’t feel right.  “We should get back,” I say even as my body wants to go further. It takes all my energy to put myself back together and on the passenger side. Are there other hesitations underneath that one? And do I have my own? 

I’m fresh out of a relationship. 

I try not to worry. 

I’m a little broken.

I try not to imagine or hope or anything too much.  

How about we get the liquor first? How is prohibition still ruining everything?

Back home, Justine is going through the free movies on cable, we all decide to watch Vampire on Bikini Beach – the softest of soft porn except free so sans sex scenes. I have my legs up on the couch and Quincy takes hold of my feet. I feel equal parts self-conscious and proud that our friends can see. The porn only makes us sleepy.

Justine gets up to go to bed. Aisha nods off on the couch and I nudge her. She smiles a “love you girl,” smile and dozes again. I nudge her once more. She gets the hint.

I flip off Vampire on Bikini Beach. Quincy helps me convert the couch to a bed. I get up to walk him to the door which becomes us falling atop the bed. I climb on top of him, enjoying my new perch without a hot steering wheel singe. I ask him to spank my ass, quietly, “a guest slap,” I say as we whisper and giggle.

There, now, on Justine’s pull-out couch I grind on Quincy so hard that when I eventually pull my tampon out, it is wet not with blood. I climax with a moan into his ear. And I discover something new – that he likes a kiss there, his body giving way the more I linger there, I feel like I found my own vampire region.

I don’t tell Aisha and Justine what they had missed. I don’t tell them about the guest slap or about the ear. I don’t tell them about I’m fresh out of a relationship, I’m a little broken. 

Instead, Aisha tells me what I had missed: opening the bedroom door to find Justine asleep with a book on her head.  Justine’s voice fighting through the Bell Jar, “Is Nina okay?”

*

Every time I think back to that night, I remember myself wearing stockings, but it was July, it was too hot for stockings.

But let’s put myself in stockings. Let’s find a world in which they exist. Let’s make this world the kind of world where Quincy and I don’t have a past. In this world there is no after. In this world we are forever in firsts – first kiss, first lover, first time. 

But then Quincy still says it, there is no avoiding it. No amount of my ass up against the steering wheel. He still says it – “I’m fresh out of a relationship, I’m a little broken.”

This is the truth. Unvarnished. I know my legs are bare without stockings. I know we have less than 40 minutes to go. I don’t know what to do with this truth yet.

From THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL: Love in Black and Brown by Nina Sharma, published on May 7, 2024 by Penguin Press an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Nina Sharma.

Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Longreads, and The Margins. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she served as the programs director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Columbia and Barnard College. She is a proud cofounder of the all–South Asian women’s improv group Not Your Biwi. The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown is her first book.