Excerpt from You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Do we really need names? Feyi had thought, but she smiled back anyway, her hand splayed against his chest, his heart galloping steadily beneath her palm. "I'm Feyi."

Milan had glanced around the roof. "Wanna get out of here?"

Nice. He was playing along perfectly, no hesitation, no coyness.

"Not too far. I came with my girl."

He'd nodded and looked back at her. They were close enough for his breath to brush against her skin, for her to see the dark flecks in his brown eyes as he took in her face, his gaze lingering on her mouth. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped, low and rough. "Downstairs?"

Feyi had raised an eyebrow, hiding how his lust was like a match igniting hers. He wanted her, badly enough to ask only the important questions. "You're solution-oriented. I like that."

Milan took her hand, and they left the rooftop, squeezing past people on the stairs, then ducking around a corner as he led her into the bathroom. Feyi watched the muscles in his back move under his shirt as he closed and locked the door, then tracked the caution in his eyes as he turned back to her.

"So…," he said, giving her space, not assuming.

It was sweet. It was so unnecessary. Feyi did not need to think about this. She put her drink down on the counter and pulled her blouse off over her head, her pink braids getting briefly caught in the black cotton, leaving her breasts covered in nothing but a thin bralette, small gold rings pressing through the sheer mesh.

The stranger—Milan—inhaled sharply, the want in his eyes going aflame. "You're fucking beautiful," he growled, still holding himself back. "Your skin, it just… drinks up the light."

Feyi smiled and said nothing. Instead, she stepped up to him, pulling his face down to hers, his mouth down to hers, his willing and ready tongue down to hers. He seized her greedily, his hands digging into her flesh, his hips pressing an iron length against her stomach. Feyi felt like a monster and a traitor, but it was fine, it had to happen.

It was precisely what she had come here for.

The accident had been five years ago, which felt like both forever and yesterday to Feyi. She'd been living up in Cambridge, near her parents' house, but she couldn't handle the roads afterward, couldn't handle driving or the way her mother's eyes were weighted with pain and pity every time they saw each other. So Feyi had moved down to New York, because if she was a monster, then so was the city, glorious and bright and everlasting, eating up time and hearts and lives as if they were nothing. She wanted to be consumed by the relentless volume of a place so much louder than she was, a place where her past and her pain could drown in the noise. Here, Feyi could keep her name and her unruined face, yet become someone else, someone starting over, someone who wasn't haunted. No one in New York cared about the vintage of the sadness tucked behind her eyes and in the small corners of her smiles. She didn't have to drive, and she could cry on the train and no one would look, no one would care, because she didn't matter, and it was, honestly, such a relief to stop mattering.

Feyi moved into a brownstone apartment with Joy, her best friend from college, and paid for it with the life insurance money, trying to ignore how ghoulish that felt. Everyone said it's what he would've wanted, but she was fairly sure he would have wanted to live. Most people didn't get what they wanted. Feyi didn't want the money, but she needed it, that obscene check, and maybe she even needed the accompanying guilt. It was a punishment that felt necessary, like balance. He was dead, and what was she doing? Being alive, making art. How frivolous.

She and Joy lived on a green and sunny block, around the corner from Baba Yusuf's botanica and the Trini shop that sold doubles at inconsistent hours. They smoked joints on their fire escape, and Joy convinced Feyi to dye her hair pink. "You're in Brooklyn now," she'd said. "Try a different look. It's not a big deal."

Excerpted from You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. Copyright © 2023 by Akwaeke Emezi. Excerpted by permission of Washington Square Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.