“Hmm?” Mal hummed. He’d brought dinner rolls with him and organized them onto a baking sheet. Then he smiled at me and said lightly, “Come on, Jo, you know why.”
“Because you love me?” I said, watching his feet as they stepped closer to mine. “I’m not sure if I know what that means.”
Mal cupped my face, and, unbidden, I leaned into the warmth of his hand.
“It means I want to see you happy,” he said gently. “It means I want you to win, and that I want to be the one beside you when you do, the one to comfort you when you don’t. It means I don’t go more than an hour without thinking about you, and when I think about where I’ll be next year, or in the next five, or the next ten, you’re always there with me.”
My tears pooled into the crease of his palm, and he wiped themaway, pulling me into his chest. It must have been the writer in him that gave him the ability to say the exact right thing to me at the right time.
“Me too,” I whispered. “That’s how I feel about you too. I want you to have the world, Mal, and youcanhave it. I mean, look at you. Look at how many people you’ve touched with your work. You love me because you think I push you forward, right? Because Iseeyou? But what if that’s an act? What if I end up holding you back instead?”
I could feel the exact moment that Mal’s heart stuttered under my cheek, felt his arms tighten around me just before he pulled back to look me in the eye.
“It’s not possible for you to hold me back,” he said. “Even if you can’t do anything for me ever again. Even if I take care of you like this forever. I’ll be happy to just be yours.”
I’d never cried as a kid. It was as though the part of me that was supposed to feel had gone dormant after age ten. Prudence had told me to make myself useful, and so I did, ensuring I inconvenienced her as little as possible before disappearing altogether. My emotions finally woke up in college, but even with Ezra, I knew not to take up space. To him, my slumps were short-lived and self-limited, small periods of exhaustion-induced gloom from which I would assuredly bounce back. And I always did, like a ball against a hard wall, a rubber band stretched thin and then let loose again. He’d never seemed to wonder if I would snap, because I had never let him in close enough to worry. I was thestrongest person he knew. Little did he know that the love he had for me was based on a lie.
But Mal had seen me at my lowest. He’d smelled my Frito stink. He’d seen me bedraggled, dressed in my last clean shirt,and he was still holding me like I was the most precious person in the world. My chest throbbed, and I sucked in a breath, looking everywhere but at him, at our tile floor that needed cleaning, the heathered pattern of his shirt.
“Ezra’s in love with me,” I said abruptly, unsure of how else to respond, how to communicate the transfiguration his words had triggered in my soul. “That rumor is true. He told me himself Sunday morning.”
Mal nodded, his expression curiously passive. “I figured,” he said.
“I don’t love him anymore,” I said.
The smile that broke out across Mal’s face was sunlight therapy, a lightning flash in the midst of my melancholy. He dropped his head against mine, and for a moment, I couldn’t tell whether the heartbeat I felt galloping against my chest was his or mine.
“I figured that too,” he said.
And then he kissed me, and for a brief moment, the world seemed a less desolate place.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mal
Jo got a little better, day by day. As promised, Mal brought Ampersand over to her apartment, and the two of them became thick as thieves, Ampersand curling at Jo’s feet as they watched their respective favorite comfort films (Rodgers & Hammerstein’sCinderellafor Jo,The Bodyguardfor Mal) or beat Dahlia at her own overcomplicated board games. Jo was still too anxious to wander outside for fear of being recognized, but she had started heading downstairs into her apartment’s gym again and occasionally down to the mail room. She’d even ordered Ampersand a name tag with an&, under the auspices that a “chic little thing like her would prefer it.”
And while Jo healed, Mal kept an eye on the news cycles.
To his horror, they’d only gotten uglier. ThePostarticle had uncovered several potential controversies, and every patchy-bearded man with a podcast mic and woman with a webcam had a hot take about the situation that required four minutes of ranting and two hundred comments worth of discourse. The Adelmans were racist because Paul had assaulted his Black assistant, or they weren’t racist because they’d donated to this or that Black peoplein tech organizations. Jo was a conniving, capitalistic opportunist because she allowed them to use her for PR, or an unsuspecting victim who had found herself immersed in an unscrupulous billionaire family’s business. There was talk about whether her medical admission had been bought, which then spurred an internet-wide debate about whether such nepotism was only being considered a problem because a poor Black woman was benefiting from it. And of course, the speculation on her love life, with Ezra worshippers flooding her inactive page with vitriol and original Dr. Jojobee fans defending her honor in the comments section.
It was simultaneously horrifying and fascinating to witness, like watching the aftershocks of a tsunami. Jo had been right to turn off her phone.
“So...” she asked, leaning against her doorframe, fresh from a shower. She wore a fluffy lilac robe, her hair held out of her face by a matching headband. “How bad is it?”
Reflexively, Mal grimaced, and Jo sighed.
“Yeah, I figured,” Jo said. She stretched, and he followed the rise of her chest through the fluffy opening of her robe. “Well. On the plus side, Denise has informed me that my follower count is currently at seven hundred thousand. Granted, two hundred of those are probably just waiting for me to post something so they can find something wrong with me, but, you know. All press is good press, and all that.”
She’d said it with bite, and Mal sighed, placing his laptop on her desk before opening his arms for her. She hopped onto his lap, and he dropped his head onto her shoulder, pulling her close.
“Denise isn’t giving up, is she?” he said. She smelled sweet, like the lavender body wash she favored and the ginger spice underlay he had only recently realized was her natural scent.
“Nope,” Jo said, sagging into him. Mal nipped at her neck, and Jo sighed, angling her hips into his. Then she leaned away, smirked down at him. “Are you seriously hard right now? Reading all those terrible, awful things about me get you going?”
Mal laughed breathlessly, parting her open robe farther to weigh a breast in each palm.
“Oh yes,” he said. “You’re a very bad woman, according to all the reports. Downright villainous, actually.”
