“You think buttering me up is going to make up for how you did me these last couple days?” he teased.
“No, but I’ve got a few ideas on how to make it up to you next time I see you,” Jo said lasciviously. “Which is... when again?”
As soon as possible, Mal wanted to say.Right now. Today.All the answers he could think of sounded overeager. Mal looked down at Ampersand, who chirped at him as if to say,Be brave.
“I’ll be home in a couple hours,” he said. “Want to come over? Meet my new cat?”
“Is that a euphemism?” Jo asked coyly. “The new ‘Netflix and chill’?”
“Only if you want it to be,” Mal said. “But really, I was thinking maybe we could go out. Walk to the lake. Go on a proper date. I’m supposed to be courting you, remember?”
Jo laughed, and Mal warmed, feeling, finally, settled. The moment he hung up, he’d be texting the group chat to let Kelechi know that she’d won their bet.
“Of course,” Jo said. “Be there soon.”
“Oh wow,” Jo said as she padded through Mal’s living room a few hours later, observing the changes he had already made to accommodate its newest occupant: toys, wands, a robot litter box tucked behind his monstera plant. She stopped at the half-assembled cat tower that Mal had set up next to his desk and flicked the swinging mouse toy as Mal affixed the final platform at its top. “This cat hasn’t even been here a full day and is already spoiled rotten.”
“Just giving her the life she deserves,” Mal huffed. Ampersand curled around his feet in appreciation, then froze, affronted, when she spotted Jo. “She’ll warm up eventually, probably.”
Seeing Jo in his apartment again after spending the past three days certain that she wanted nothing to do with him was surreal. He’d opened the door to Jo wearing an orange maxi dress that made her look like the tiger lilies growing in his neighbor’s garden and a chagrined smile. Whatever anxieties he’d had that she was still in fact disinterested in him were eased when Jo greeted him by winding her arms around his waist. “Hi,” she had said breathlessly, then stepped back and folded her hands behind her back like a child waiting to be chastised, and after all of that he’d sighed mightily and thrown open the door to let her in.
He should have been disgusted with himself, at how badly he still wanted her. The moment Mal shut the door behind her, he turned into a lecher, his eyes locking to the swish and sway of her round hips in the airy fabric of her sundress. He wondered how she’d react if he tucked his hand under the slit at its side. If hegrasped a hold of the thigh that peeked through the fabric, raised that skirt higher and higher until her ass was spilling out into his palm. She’d play coy, probably, or maybe swat at him playfully, but she would want him too, drop her head back against his shoulder as he peeled away her underwear, plunged his fingers into the heat of her—
“Oh my god, she’s cross-eyed,” Jo exclaimed, knocking Mal out of his fantasy. She dropped into a squat—the reverberations of the motion certainly not helping to sanctify his thoughts—and held out a hand to a very apprehensive Ampersand. Ampersand curved away, then, having reconsidered her initial judgment, rubbed her haunches against Jo’s knee. “Andverycomfortable already. Congratulations, Daddy. What sparked this?”
If Jo knew what calling himdaddywas doing to him right now, she might rethink it.
“Procrastination,” Mal admitted, wandering into the kitchen to finish packing for their date. “I have the event at Em-Dash the day after tomorrow. Got a proposal due Friday. So, naturally, I felt like now was the time to make a big life change.”
Jo laughed. “Hold on, am I part of the procrastination plan?” she said, catching right on. “Did you just invite me out to distract you from your work?”
“No regrets,” Mal said. Finished, he hoisted the insulated bag onto his back. “You ready to go?”
Jo and Ampersand cocked their heads at him simultaneously, and Mal wished he could whip out his phone to take a picture.
“What’s all that for?” she asked, rocking to her feet.
“You’ll see,” he said.
Mal’s apartment was a ten-minute walk from the lakefront. It was part of why he’d moved there after he and Portia split; hestarted most days with a run down the lakeshore path and ended several more clearing his mind looking over the expanse of crystalline waters. He’d gotten so used to walking this path to the pier alone that it felt strange to do so with someone by his side. Mal and Jo walked in comfortable silence on the trails along the lake. It being a gorgeous day, most of the city had spilled out onto the grassy hills, parents chasing after kids, kids chasing after dogs, college students lying on their stomachs and flipping through books, families grilling burgers over the firepits. A crew of shirtless men in cargo shorts blasted reggaeton from speakers mounted on their bicycles and cheered when an elderly man danced along from his hammock. Even the pier was occupied, mostly by teenagers daring each other to dive off the docks into the calm waters below. They reached the end, and Mal laid out a blanket.
“Romantic,” Jo observed.
“Kind of the point,” Mal said, unzipping his cooler and assembling its contents before them: a thin wooden cutting board, jarred honey, small bricks of cheese, prosciutto, olives, a bowl of cherries. Then, finally, a pair of personal bottles of rosé.
“This is quite a spread,” Jo said, in a way that could have been either appreciative or critical. She pulled out her phone to take a photo, rolling her lips into her mouth, and Mal realized, suddenly, that what he’d often read as disapproval on her face was actually astonishment.
“Not to be creepy or anything,” he explained, “but you had a video a while back, where someone asked you what your ideal date was, and you said...”
“A picnic,” she finished for him.
“Yeah,” he said. Under her probing gaze, he felt shy, like hewas admitting to something he shouldn’t. “What did you say? You didn’t want Doritos and Jimmy John’s. You wanted something that was just as pretty as it was good to eat, with items you wouldn’t normally get, you know, so it felt special, and so I tried to do that. The lady at the cheese counter said this cheddar paired well with this prosciutto, so—”
His words were cut off by Jo’s lips, her hands hooking under his jaw to open his mouth to hers. She tasted vaguely of spearmint, and her kiss was declarative, as much a statement as it was a show of affection. Its force knocked him off-balance, and he fell backward on the heels of his hands to support himself, knocking over the bowl of olives in the process.
“Sorry,” Jo said, pulling back abruptly. “I’m sorry, I just...”
“No,” Mal said, flustered. “Jesus. Don’t apologize. Please kiss me whenever you want.”
