A Love Noire: Noire's World
LEANiN6’s funk-laced groove poured out of Noire’s stereo speakers like spiked molasses and intoxicated her body. She danced like a woman possessed, the spent elastic band of her cotton panties failing to keep her underwear on her hips, her old Amherst sweatshirt brushing across her stomach, and her carefree Afro swaying as she pitched from side to side. The approaching dusk made her living room—chock with overdue library books and plastered with huge black-and-white photographs she had snapped everywhere she had ever traveled—a shadowy den with only the frozen eyes of her subjects bearing witness to her catharsis.
She sang along with the band, but louder than it ... her voice drowning out her frustration over the graduate school paper she couldn’t seem to write. She wiggled. She sang. Pulling her sweatshirt over her head, Noire let it drop to the floor before falling on top of it. Her gaze on her naked belly, she did sets of crunches in time to the music and prayed for an end to writers block before she had to get dressed to meet Jayna at Brown Betty Books. Jayna promised there would be an abundance of “eligible cuties” who would love her for her body and her mind. Restless but still no closer to finishing her paper, Noire popped up from the floor, retrieved a brand-new thong from her dresser drawer, and picked out an outfit.
