Chapter Nineteen
Mal
“Who do we have here?” Kieran said from his doorway, hands on his hips, bags under his eyes. With Kelechi’s due date three
months away, he’d been working overtime to get his team of software developers to the end of a project before he disappeared
for his six-week paternity leave. Chasing after his toddler was not helping. “You decide you bit off more than you could chew,
fraternizing with these celebrities, and now, the moment they stop paying you attention, you come crawling back to us normal
people.”
Mal rolled his eyes just as a pair of small feet pattered across the wood floor.
“Uncle Mal!” Harvey shouted, holding out his arms to be picked up. Mal chuckled, placing the plastic bag full of apology beer on the floor before bending to lift the kid into his arms. It had been only a few weeks since he’d last visited, but Harvey was already heavier, his annunciation clearer (last time, he’d been “Uncuh Mah”). Nothing like small children, he thought, to clue you in on how long you’d been neglecting your friends. As usual, Kieran’s ribbing had a kernel of truth to it: he really had disappeared once things with Jo had gotten serious, and also equally true that he’d come crawling back to them the second things got rocky.
Not that he would describe his inability to reach Jo as rocky . Surely there was a reason why her number no longer worked. Maybe her phone had died (doubtful, as she’d updated her Instagram
story today with a video of her roommate doing a shimmy in front of a mimosa). Maybe she needed a little space after their
admittedly intense conversation (worrisome, but he would have found a way to be okay with it).
“Or maybe she ghosted you,” Kieran said at the door when Mal presented these possibilities.
“Boo!” Harvey said. Then he erupted into a peal of giggles, delighted by his own joke.
“Sound a little less gleeful about it, maybe?” Mal said, making a face for Harvey that made him laugh even harder. Mal wasn’t
an idiot. He knew that this was the most likely scenario: that Jo had gotten exactly what she’d wanted out of him and, freaked
out by his premature use of the L word, disappeared in a cloud of jasmine-scented smoke.
“You think I’m glad to be right?” Kieran said. “Nah. I’m sorry things didn’t work out. You handling it okay?”
Mal shrugged. Mostly he felt numb. It had been two days since he’d tried to call Jo and been answered by three long, grating
beeps and a robotic voice informing him that “The number you have called is not available.” He’d tried to send a text, only
to get a red exclamation mark and a Not delivered notification. His DM felt about as effective as a glass bottle pitched into an ocean; she had yet to even read it.
Mal’s initial drop into despondence had been precipitous, a lot of moping around his bedroom and staring longingly at the photo a girl had taken of them at the Summer Concert Series at Millennium Park. But now, two days later, he could be objective. Dating wasn’t the straightforward game it had been in college. There were mind games now. A talking phase, which might give way to a hooking up phase, which may or may not lead to exclusivity, which wasn’t even the same as a relationship anymore. Nothing was predictable; a girl could text you every day for three months and then stop responding altogether when you tell her that you love her. And a girl like Jo, whose DMs were probably overflowing with six-pack abs and celebrity dick pics? Maybe she’d just been humoring him all along. Maybe he’d never really stood a chance.
“Is that Mally-wag?” Kelechi shouted from the other room. He twisted around fast enough to catch her cane turning the corner
before she did. “Are you here to drink away your sorrows? If you are, can I please smell your beer?”
“I did bring libations, yes,” Mal said, pushing past Kieran to let himself inside, Harvey still balanced on his hip. “Not
planning to drink, though. I need to be productive.” Then, to Kelechi, who had long ago proven herself his best brainstorming
buddy, “I need to borrow your brain today.”
“Ooh, yay, are we finally working on number two?” Kelechi said, gesturing to Kieran to pick up Mal’s bag. When he did, she
tore an IPA from the six-pack, turning it around in her hand with longing in her eyes. “I know this baby is going to be a
rebel . She’s got me craving beer , of all things.”
She snapped the can open, then handed it over to Kieran, her expression grave. Kieran obeyed automatically, taking a quick
swig before giving it back to his wife. She inhaled deeply, then, satisfied, gave Mal a sideways hug to get around the kid
in his arms and the one in her stomach.
“I, for one, would like to entertain the possibility that this is all one big misunderstanding,” she said. “It’s a bit too early to catastrophize, don’t you think?”
This too Mal had considered, but that didn’t change the fact that Jo had become a central thread in the fabric of his life.
They talked so often, and so consistently, that this change, if only for a few days, felt like a paradigm shift.
“Here you go again, being reasonable,” Kieran said in feigned disgust, carting the remaining beers to the fridge. “Giving
people the benefit of the doubt. Yuck.”
“Yuck!” Harvey echoed. “Mommy, that’s yucky!”
Kelechi kissed her baby’s cheek and rolled her eyes at her husband. “Okay, bet. If three days go by and you still haven’t
heard anything from Jo, I’ll handle Harvey on the day of Mal’s event so you two can have a boys’ night and cry about it together,”
she said. “If I’m right, though, I get to go.”
“Oh, that’s a deal I’ll take, easy,” Kieran said. “You see, I’m not blinded by my parasocial relationship with this girl,
so I can be objective.”
Kelechi stuck her tongue out at her husband, then lumbered to the couches, gesturing for Mal to follow. Mal acquiesced, handing
a fussy Harvey back to his dad.
When he thought too hard about it, seeing Kieran and Kelechi as parents freaked him out. He still remembered when Kelechi
was the cute Nigerian girl in the suite next door to him in college with a highlighter-pink prosthetic leg and a life-size
DIY cutout of Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender , and Kieran his foulmouthed half-white, half-Chinese roommate, who sometimes forgot to wash his Rugby jerseys and let Mal eat half the dump lings out of his mother’s care packages. When they first started hooking up, Mal had privately thought they would never work.
But he’d been wrong. The living embodiment of them “working out” was toddling around his playpen, pushing a toy ambulance.
Mal still remembered when Kieran first evoked his son’s eventual existence, with a long-suffering sigh, a backward collapse
onto his twin XL mattress, and a casual “my kids are going to be so fucking mixed.”
Unbidden, an image of a different child flashed into Mal’s mind: toddling around his living room with nut-brown skin somewhere
between Jo’s deep ocher and his sandalwood, giving him her impish smile with his Cupid’s bow mouth.
“You’ll have this someday too, if you want it,” Kelechi said, interrupting the course of his thoughts.
Mal tore his gaze away from Harvey, embarrassed by the longing he assumed had been apparent on his face.
“Get out of my head, K,” he said.
“Never,” Kelechi said. “But I’m just saying. If not with Jo, definitely with someone else. You’re a good man, Mal. Always
have been.” She scooted up higher on the arm of her couch, then spared him further humiliation by changing the subject. “Anyway,
yes, you said you wanted to be productive.”
“Yes. Please.” Amelia had given him less than a week to come up with a list of potential plotlines to pitch to his editor, and he knew that if he tried to kick the can any farther down the road, she might try to stuff him into it. Back in college, when his writing was more of the embarrassing thing he did in his own time and told almost no one about, he’d spent hours sinking into Kelechi’s fuchsia sofa, throwing around ideas for stories he would never write and letting her tease them apart. But why would the hot vampiress go for the dorky self-insert photographer? she would say, and he’d be back at the drawing board, making the vampiress a little less femme fatale and a bit more “girl
next door who happens to have an appetite for blood,” and the dorky photographer a little less, well, him , and a bit more “distinct protagonist with qualities a woman might want aside from being the hero.” She’d helped him hone
his niche of epic romance in a small setting of a slightly fantastical world, forcing him to define the traces of magic he
liked to interlace in his narratives over and over again until he could almost feel them swirling around his skin.
Idea number one: Man and woman have torrid affair. Man’s ailing and scorned wife, a witch in hiding, curses all their future
incarnations to fall helplessly in love, and for that love to end in tragedy.
“How would the future incarnations even know they were in love before?” Kelechi asked. “Do they keep their memories from their
past lives?” And when Mal said that yes, perhaps they would, she argued, “If they know it’ll end in terrible tragedy, then
why even bother to get to know each other?” To which Mal had no response and tabled the thought.
Idea number two: Man falls in love with mysterious foreign woman. She agrees to marry him, but with a catch—her culture practices
polyandry, and she has another husband already in her home country. The man agrees to split time with his wife with this unknown
man, and for half the year she would spirit away, like a migratory bird, then return with the change of the seasons to be
with him—
Kelechi snickered.
“What?” Mal said.
“Are you down so bad that you’re willing to share her with Adelman?” she asked. “Because that’s what this is giving.”
Mal sputtered back his response. “What?” he said. “No. Never.”
Now that he’d held Jo close, the thought of the man she’d confessed she had feelings for ever doing the same inspired a howling fury that he couldn’t examine too closely for fear of getting sucked too far into
it. But even if Kelechi was off, she’d scratched right at the surface of his greatest worry. It would be one thing if he could
no longer reach Josephine Boateng because she’d run out of his arms, but another thing entirely if she’d fallen right into
Ezra’s.
Ezra, who per her own admission, had already earned her trust.
“Oof, hit a sore spot,” Kelechi said gently. “Look, Mal. You’re clearly preoccupied. Maybe take a break. Detox. We can do
this later.”
Mal shook his head, his hands hovering over his keyboard. Writing had always been his escape. He’d buried himself in it before
and come up with gold. And besides, he had deadlines. The event at Em-Dash. A career that required his attention.
“No,” he said. “No, let’s do this now.”