Queenie Has Sex with Adi

Queenie Has Sex with Adi is an encounter shaped by Queenie Jenkins’s longing for Tom and her attempt to escape an immediate loneliness. It begins with a message from Tom that she reads through tears, moves from an unwanted advance by Rich to a late-night request for Adi’s company, and ends not in relief but in Queenie’s shame and uncertainty about her own behavior.

Circumstances and Decision

After reading Tom’s message, Queenie aches for him and wonders whether he misses her. He does not answer her calls. Outside the house, she is on the verge of ordering an Uber when Rich puts an arm around her waist and presumes she will leave with him. Looking at Rich, she recognizes that she does not want to go home with him. She tries Tom again, without success, and concludes that nothing else would make her happy; what she wants is Tom. Her question shifts from what might make her happy to what might distract her until Tom responds.

At two in the morning, Queenie texts Adi, asking whether he can meet her outside luxury apartments in Fulham and take the drive he has often talked about. The request is a bid for company and distraction, made while she is missing Tom, rather than evidence that her feelings for Tom have ended. She expects Adi may not reply and gives herself five minutes before she will order an Uber. He agrees to come, and twenty minutes later she is in his black BMW.

The Encounter in the Car

Adi reclines the passenger seat fully, explaining that he does not want people in the area to see him driving a woman who is not his wife. The arrangement establishes secrecy before they have gone anywhere: Queenie is present in his car, but he is concerned about how her presence might appear to others. He tells her to relax and touches her thigh. Queenie’s attention moves away from the situation and onto details about him, a sign of the distance she begins to place between herself and the encounter.

Adi parks in a warehouse lot and makes a request about what Queenie should wear. When he criticizes her underwear, she offers to have him drive her home. His response then makes his racialized interest explicit: he describes his attraction to Black women’s bodies and contrasts Queenie with his wife, whom he characterizes as thin. The exchange makes clear that his attention is not simply directed toward Queenie as an individual; he frames her through a racialized preference and a comparison with his wife.

After this, Adi maneuvers Queenie into the position he wants. She complies because, as she later explains, acting without stopping to think feels easier than considering why she is doing it. She asks him to turn up the heat, then looks out of the car and fixes her attention on a distant streetlight while he continues. The scene presents her participation alongside conspicuous emotional withdrawal: she is physically there, but deliberately directs her attention elsewhere. This distinction matters to the encounter’s meaning; her compliance is not presented as uncomplicated enthusiasm.

The encounter continues into sexual contact. When Adi exposes himself, Queenie registers that the experience is new to her, including the fact that he is circumcised and that she is with a man in a car. She touches him, but her thoughts turn to the difference between this encounter and the familiar, less hostile intimacy associated with the person she loves. Tom remains an emotional reference point even while absent from the car. The contrast underscores how little the encounter answers the longing that prompted her to contact Adi.

Confession and Significance

Later, Queenie tells Darcy Betts that the encounter happened after the party. Darcy first asks whether it was with an Uber driver; Queenie corrects her and identifies Adi, whom Darcy already recognizes as the man who has made remarks about the size of Queenie’s body. Queenie says she contacted him while feeling lonely, did not expect him to answer, and now feels bad. Her account links the decision directly to the emotional state that followed Tom’s message and unanswered calls.

Darcy points out that Queenie and Tom are on a break, so the encounter does not violate the break’s terms as Darcy understands them. Queenie’s distress, however, is not resolved by that practical reassurance. She says that the behavior does not feel like her and that she does not do this sort of thing. Her reaction locates the aftermath in a conflict between the temporary distraction she sought and her sense of herself, not solely in whether she has breached an agreement with Tom. The episode thus turns a late-night search for company into a sharper recognition: being with Adi cannot substitute for Tom, and acting to avoid loneliness leaves Queenie with a new source of unease.