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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 beinvolved,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 roboticfreak.” 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 iswaymore 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 threea.m., he laughed and murmured, “Sweet dreams, Scotch.”
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that night I would close my eyes and think about how he’d said that before he squeezed my hand and I pulled him into a hug and his arms pinned me so close I could feel his heart racing through his sweatshirt. His face fit into the crook of my neck like it belonged, his nose brushing up against the skin between my collarbone and throat, eliciting a spark in my heart and between my legs. He released me so slowly, like he was giving something up by doing so. His hand dragged currents across mine as he surrendered it, palm to fingers to tips, before lifting my hand so his lips could graze my knuckles like a feather on fire before finally letting it go, because no kissing. I’d said no kissing. I couldn’t remember why anymore.
