Excerpt From CNA's AMERICANNAH

 OBINZE’S MUSCLES WERE ACHING. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”

“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”

“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.

“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.

“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.

“I’ll come out,” he said.

“You know it doesn’t always work.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll welcome Junior.”

“Stop it.”

He looked up. “But, Ifem, we’re going to get married anyway.”

“Look at you. I might meet a rich handsome man and leave you.”

“Impossible. We’ll go to America when we graduate and raise our fine children.”

“You’ll say anything now because your brain is between your legs.”

“But my brain is always there!”

They were both laughing, and then the laughter stilled, gave way to a new, strange graveness, a slippery joining.