Honey and Spice(27)

I froze. “Okay, wow.”

Aminah’s eyes widened as her head whipped between Malakai and I, her hair swishing in my face in the process. Something flitted across Malakai’s strained face and he flattened his lips. It looked like it might have been a small dose of regret. He cleared his throat.

“Look . . . let’s just calm down. I didn’t mean to—”

I held up a hand. I had stopped floating a while ago, but now I crashed to the ground. I had been so stupid.

“Oh, I’m calm. Who’s not calm? Don’t try and do that . . . gyaldemwhisperer thing to me. It won’t work. And don’t try and backtrack because you just exposed the real you. Now it makes sense. You didn’t agree to kiss me to help me. Why on earth would a guy like you do that?”

Malakai’s smile was now a sardonic curve. “Guy like me?”

I ignored him. “You did it to call public bullshit on what I said on my show. You wanted to show me up. Expose me. You played me.”

Malakai sat back. He nodded slowly and his demeanor shifted with a shrug of his shoulder. “What if I did?”

Hot fury turned the words in my mouth into ash. A heavy silence dropped between us. I shook my head in disbelief. It was almost a relief to know that it was just a seduction ploy to make me look dizzy. The part of me that wanted to believe that what had just happened between us couldn’t have been fake only worked to convince myself that it had to be. This was exactly what guys like Malakai did. When you fell into the trap, they’d tell you that you should have been watching where you were going.

Aminah cleared her throat. “Wow. That was hot.”

“What?” Both my and Malakai’s voices were incredulous, our eyes snapping into each other’s almost as quickly as we tore them away.

Aminah shook her head sloppily. “I mean don’t get me wrong, I am vexed. I wanna cuss Malakai out.” She threw him an irritated look. “But it was compelling. Juicy. Better than my favorite reality show, Romance & R&B.”

Malakai stared at her. “What is happening right now?”

I picked up my bag. “I’m leaving.”

Aminah placed a hand on my arm, steadying me. “Seriously. I would watch this. Or listen to it.”

I nodded sarcastically. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do a radio show where I let Malakai break down all the benevolent ways being a Fuckboi actually helps women.”

Aminah gasped and her eyes widened. “Kiki Banjo, you beautiful, talented superstar. This is why I manage you! Opening up the lines of gyaldem-mandem communication. Fuck, I’m a genius. I mean, technically you came up with the idea but I definitely led you to it. Wow, even when I’m not trying, I’m on it. Why am I studying marketing and business when I could just teach it?”

Aminah’s hands were suspended in the air as she pantomimed the frames in a screen in which she could apparently see her future as some sort of public relations fixer. I nodded, pulled Aminah’s hands down, and hopefully, with them, her excitement for the idea.

“Alright. Calm down, Olivia Nope. There is no way I’m doing this. Can we go? I’d rather listen to Camila Cabello singing Beyoncé songs acoustically on loop than be around him for one more second.”

Aminah gasped. “Alright, I know emotions are high but, please. Don’t put evil like that into the universe. Our tongues are powerful. We’re Nigerian. We know this.”

I reeled myself back in. Anger had pushed me too far. “No, sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight. My brain is just all out of whack because the girls think I played them for nineties Morris Chestnot.”

Malakai sat up. “You think I look like Morris Chestnut?”

I shot him a withering look. “Has the inflated size of your head made your ears shrink or something? I said not.”

Malakai’s hitched right shoulder and half smile simmered my blood.

“You used him as a reference. You’re clearly thinking of me in the tangential direction of a nineties heartthrob. I’ll take it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Prick.”

Malakai didn’t blink. “She-demon.”

My smile was a pastiche of innocence. “What happened to ‘angel face’?”

“I didn’t specify if the angel was fallen or not.”

I narrowed my eyes and yanked an increasingly waved Aminah up with me, rattled by the fact that I was rattled. I’d had enough.

“Have a nice life, dickhead.”

Malakai smiled brightly and reclined, sipped at his drink. “It will be. As long as we never have to do this”—he gestured at the space between us—“again.”

I paused. Inhale. Deeply. That’s it. And exha— I was picking up the glass of watery remains of my drink. I’d intended to down it, hoped that even in its ultraweakened state the rum would drown my irritation, but as I lifted it up, I found my hand tilting away from me, in the direction of Malakai Korede, so that the cold watery drink trickled down into his lap. He jumped up, eyes so shocked that the light in them sharpened to a blade.

Aminah gasped. So did I. A little bit. I decided the best thing to do was to lean into my actions.

I smiled sweetly at Malakai’s shocked face. “Don’t worry. We won’t be.”

I stalked out of Cuffing Corner, my best friend staggering gleefully behind me, while I made the determination that any mild kindles of warm feeling I had felt toward Malakai were simply the result of looking directly into the enchanted eyes of the Fuckboi Supreme.