Honey and Spice(74)
I swallowed, his words helping to clear a mental fog that obscured the truth. “Yeah. Yeah, I do, thanks Kai, I just . . . it was confusing. That whole situation made me feel so out of control. And I spent that summer afterward trying to get it back. I’d actually got into an internship that summer. It was pretty prestigious and competitive and once you were in, you were in. You could go back there for grad opportunities. It started in July and the plan was to work at my dad’s restaurant up until then. He was still at the hospital with my mum a lot and he was stressed. My little sister was staying with my aunt and our cousins for the summer, so this was a way I could help. But when the time came, I just couldn’t go. After everything that happened and losing like . . . all my friends, I just wasn’t in the right head space. The internship felt foreign, I guess. Scary, suddenly. I felt safe working at the restaurant. I kind of just wanted to hide.”
I took a fortifying breath. Malakai’s thumb swirled on my wrist lightly in a tactile cypher that my pulse translated as “I’m here.”
“Anyway, while I was working shifts, these really cool Lagos babes would come in every Sunday. They were a group of friends spending summer in London. They used to talk loudly about their dating life. Give each other advice, that sort of thing. They tipped well. Once, they caught me listening. Or more like, once they saw me roll my eyes at something a Wasteman did to one of them. They asked me my opinion on the situation and I gave it.
“Apparently my advice worked and they liked it, because they started bringing me in every week on their dating lives. It was like having friends again. It inspired me to create Brown Sugar. I couldn’t make things right with Rianne, so the least I could do was stop guys doing what Nile did to the both of us—pulling friends apart. I wanted Brown Sugar to be a place where girls could feel powerful. And the music is the ultimate company. Songs about love and lust and loss. It speaks. It connects. I wanted to connect. Make people feel less alone.”
Malakai’s gaze was so full of warmth it made my skin prickle and I pushed out a coy “Corny, I know—”
He shook his head. “No, Scotch.” He looked like he wanted to say more but he left me space to speak. I held it close to me. It gave me courage to continue.
“Um, I still didn’t trust myself to be involved, to make friends. Aminah and I became friends by accident within the first week of uni and I’m so glad, otherwise I would have had no one. I was so scared I’d mess up . . . but I think I’ve overcorrected and numbed myself to the point where I’ve turned myself into some kind of heartless, weird, judgmental robotic freak.” I thought about what Shanti and Chioma had said, that they’d thought I was judging them, that I was better than them.
Malakai tugged at a twist that straggled from the high bun tangled on the top of my head. “Kiki, the first time I spoke to you, outside them lifts, I felt like I’d been electrocuted.”
“Hmm—”
“Not in a robotic freak way.” Malakai grinned. “Your energy grabbed me by the throat. You’re electric. Like lightning. Bright with it. Bold with it.”
His eyes caressed my face like the flutter of a butterfly wing. “You care so much. You feel so much. So if you’re a robot, you’re one of them robots that everyone is scared will overthrow humans one day because they’re so emotionally sophisticated. If you’re a robot you’re a really sexy despotic one.”
I laughed, and the action further loosened the already slackened tension in my chest. Frightening, how he knew how to do that. When to do that. Merciful, how he knew how to do that, when to do that.
I smiled up at him. “Thank you for thinking that I’m a hot megalomanic android. And thanks for like, um, being you enough to make this feel as easy as it does.” For being a soft landing.
“Hey.” He lifted up my hand and gently chucked my chin with our entwined hands, his gaze finding a new latch in mine to click into. “Scotch. I got you.”
I smiled shyly, straightened, then exhaled deeply through the bloom of heat that rushed through me, my voice intentionally light as I said, “Netflix and trauma. So, how does the wet mascara look around my eyes?”
“Peng. Shall we take a picture for the socials? Let the people know about the sexy night the Campus It Couple is having—”
“Yeah, which filter erases the look of emotional evisceration?”
“Alcohol. There’s that bottle left.”
“Let’s do it. . . . Oh, by the way, since we’re doing confessions, did I tell you that I think I’m friends with Shanti and Chioma now?” I reached for his television remote to unpause Eddie Murphy.
Malakai spluttered on his room-temperature mug wine. “What? You couldn’t lead with that?”
“Well, I’d just witnessed a very intense father-son confrontation.”
“What you just told me is way more stressful.”
And so it went, flowing back and forth together with satiny ease until he walked me home. We held hands the whole tipsy way through the forested path to my halls, the delicate moonlight and brazen campus lights finding love and making a home on Malakai’s silk-over-marble face. I wasn’t sure who picked up whose hand, all I knew was that we were holding each other’s for no reason.
At the door to my halls, Malakai still didn’t let go. We talked like we did, laughed like we did, and he didn’t let go. When an errant yawn from me alerted us to the fact that it was three a.m., he laughed and murmured, “Sweet dreams, Scotch.”