scarlemsfinest:This whole saga has been more entertaining than the last season of Love Island, tf
wonhosbabymama:@jenkiesjenkins, yoooo did you see that Adelman was dating her childhood bully too? Go to the Bustle @ashleybiernacki. Shit is craaazzyyy
margedonaldson:Dr.Boateng saved my husband’s life. We were out at the zoo when he suddenly collapsed. She didn’t hesitate to start CPR on him and assembled a team to help him immediately. He’s doing well and recovering at home now. The ICU doctors told me that if she hadn’t acted so quickly, he could have died or had significant brain damage. I’ll forever be grateful to her. I don’t know if she’ll ever read this, but if she does—thank you. Because of you, I have my family.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Mal
“You said what?” Kieran said in disbelief, his voice as booming and bombastic as if he were sitting in Mal’s living room.
“If you loved her, you would figure it out,” Kelechi repeated, deepening her voice in mimicry of his. “Come on, Mal, you write love stories. You should have known better than to give your rival that kind of encouragement. And now look what he’s done with it.”
Mal covered his eyes with his arm, miserable. He’d known that there was a chance Jo wouldn’t take too kindly to the fact that he’d been the impetus for Ezra’s public confession, but facing the reality had been harder than expected. Returning to his quiet, empty apartment hadn’t helped. He’d spent yesterday pining and trying to distract himself with emails, work, and one brutal two-a-day at the gym before giving up and calling his friends.
Who, unsurprisingly, were definitely making things worse.
“You think I pushed them together?” he said miserably.
“Of course you pushed them together,” Kieran said. After watching the Em-Dash book event, he’d switched to being staunchly Team Jo.Like, damn, he’d said, covering Harvey’s ears.I get it now.“Like. What’d he say? ‘I was so lucky to stand in your light’? Bars. I teared up.”
“Thanks, man, I feel so much better,” Mal said sardonically.
“We’re just messing with you,” Kieran said, his tone mollified. “It’s just... this is crazy right now. First Lana, now this. You’re like,famousfamous. Do you know how many people from college have hit me up to ask about you?”
Mal shrugged. His phone hadn’t stopped ringing all day, calls from everyone from his agent to reporters to curious acquaintances suddenly interested in “catching up,” and he’d already cleared his voicemail twice.
“It’ll die down soon enough,” Mal said. “I’m not all that interesting.”
“I would have said the same a few months back, but that was before you managed to steal Ezra Adelman’s girl,” Kieran said.
“If I haven’t already messed things up,” Mal said with a sigh.
“Um, Mal,” Kelechi said, her voice high the way it was when she had made a discovery. He could see her face in his mind’s eye, the sideways tilt of her head, her eyes wide with thinly veiled delight. “I don’t think you messed things up.”
“And how would you know that?” Mal said, suspicious. “You hack into her phone somehow? Tap into her Alexa?”
“Nope,” she said brightly. “I just checked her page. You should do that. And then call us back. Or maybe don’t. You’ll probably be busy.”
And then, abruptly, she hung up.
Mal looked down at his home screen, dumbfounded, and then opened up his Instagram. To Amelia’s naked delight, @malcolmjwaters now had a following forty thousand large, with Ampersand’s linked personal account sitting close by at twenty-eight.He blinked at the number, bewildered, then, biting down on his tongue, he navigated to Jo’s page.
There was a new post.
Mal sat up in bed, tapping it open with bated breath.
The photographs in the carousel Jo had posted were uncurated and unedited, a far cry from her typical well-manicured content. If Mal hadn’t explicitly sought it out, he would have assumed he’d scrolled past a high school friend’s post, except none of his high school friends ever got anything close to two hundred thousand likes. He recognized a few of the shots as his own: Ampersand curling into a ball at the base of a rumpled white bedsheet, dark, pink-toed feet peeking out in the background behind her, a portrait of Josephine in profile he’d taken during one of their many breakfasts together that focused on her neck. But most of them were Jo’s: Mal typing at her dining table, his face tense with concentration, his and her shoes arranged over her “As Featured on MTV Cribs” welcome mat. A silver serving tray with a glass of water, a plate of tortellini, a side salad that probably came from a bag, taken from inside a dimly lit room.
And underneath that, the caption:
Hi. It’s been a while. If you’re new here, you know why I’ve been gone so long. If you’re not, well, thanks for sticking around.
For the last few weeks, I’ve let other people tell the world who I was. Scream as I might against the noise, I knew and felt like I couldn’t be heard. I felt lost, misunderstood, hurt, discouraged.
But in that cacophony, I found something incredible. I found courage. I found clarity. I found love.
Malcolm Waters, my knight in shining armor. Thank you for weathering this storm with me. You saw me at my most broken and decided to love me all the same. Thank you for reminding me that I deserve shelter too. That I deserve to be protected, and cherished, and loved.
