“Jamal,” comes the response, his voice deep and rounded, like a river of melted dark chocolate. Actually, Sophie thought as he shook her hand gently, he looked like a towering dark chocolate river, smooth skin and a perfectly matte complexion.
She needed to get back to her run, and shake her head of the thoughts that crept into her head suddenly and without invitation. She could have no such thoughts, not of Jamal, or of anybody. She was just here for a year, and the last thing she needed was the complexity of a one-night-stand, especially since she was still a virgin…
Jamal watched her as she disappeared around the track. He couldn’t take his eyes off her ass, thinking that it was just too perfect to belong to a white girl. Another place, another time, he thought, he might have stood a chance with the almost-too-sexy Sophie. Perhaps if they had met on the island and he was 20 years younger!
He returns to his sweeping, and tries to shake the thoughts he knows he should not be having about her. When he doesn’t succeed he disappears into the storeroom near the track before she comes around again, parading her perfection in front of him almost as though she were daring him to reach out and touch it.
For the next couple of days they see each other every day, at 4AM, exchanging lingering looks that both hopes the other doesn’t notice. Jamal knows what his attraction to Sophie is, even though she is still unsure about her own. A week later Sophie tries to find another place to run.
Accustomed to this new found anticipation of watching her run each morning, Jamal waits and extra 15 or 20 minutes each day, just to make sure she isn’t coming. Resisting each other is futile though. With the unabated intrigue of ‘the idea’ of one another, neither can imagine staying away from each other. At least, until the burning curiosity is satisfied one way or another. Try as they might, both of them are once again like moths to a flame, meeting on the track at 4AM again.
Neither can even explain to themselves what the visceral attraction is!
Pondering her growing obsession, Sophie thinks it’s probably the fact that he is a nonthreatening man who seems to be interested in nothing but casual greetings and the occasional lingering glance, but Sophie knows that there is more to it. At least she hopes that there is, although she will not admit it to herself. She doesn’t even know why, because not only has she never slept with a black man, she in fact has not slept with any man before. You wouldn’t think it by looking at her though, but Sophie is a virgin.
Perhaps Jamal knows this, because he seems to ask her things that make her feel like he wants nothing but to protect her, for the duration of her stay at least. About two weeks into her daily runs, he asks her something in fact, that both takes her by surprise and sends her into a bit of a tailspin.
“Would I be forward if I said that you came running at 4 every morning just to see me?” he asks her casually, almost joking, almost serious. She doesn’t know how to respond to this so she just laughs, loudly. Surely Jamal can’t be serious. He must be joking, making his usual early morning conversation although this morning it has a rather flirty slant.
She cannot believe that he would go there though, because he has always acted more like a big brother. Now it seemed that he was going somewhere else with his thoughts and now his words.
“You would be right…” she says, laughing. She hopes he sees that she is joking, just because Sophia really wants him to be joking.
“I thought so,” Jamal continues, and he smirks. Sophie watches Jamal for a moment and then when it is clear that he is serious, she breaks the stare, and continues on her way. She cannot help the warmth filling her chest though.
Sophie hadn’t really thought of what her type was until then. She has been so focused on her studies and on her pending career in the renewable energy industry that she had really up until that moment put the idea of being with a man, any man, on the back burner. She knew that she would get to it, eventually, but now was just not the time. And then she met Jamal.
Jamal had entertained the possibility many times though, always attracted to the pale skin and great legs that all white women seemed to have. And Sophie had a perfect ass too, which really was a bonus because this is that one thing Jamal thought was lacking on real white women in the real world. He had always figured that asses had been photo-shopped into their pics on the magazines and billboards that he had seen.
“Are you avoiding me,” he asks one day when she had not been on the track for two days.
“No not at all,” she says, although she knows that she really had. Jamal was proving to be a distraction for her now, and she really couldn’t use any distractions so early in the year. She had also already received more than a little bit of attention from her fellow students, but there was just something about Jamal that had her fixated. She knew that it couldn’t happen though.
She was nice, to him, to everybody. But he was twice her age, and she knew that there could really not come too much good from a liaison with him. She had planned on losing her virginity this year, but she hadn’t envisioned
losing it to a Jamaican in his forties. Why not though, she asked herself.
“You been busy?” Jamal continues.
“Yes,” she says, not really a lie, but she knows that she could have still come running on the track because she just changed her route and not the time of her morning jogs.