Chapter Twelve What He Said, What She Believed
He showed up at her apartment at ten, still in yesterday’s clothes, eyes red-rimmed from a sleepless night, and she opened the door only because Nina had texted please let him explain, I promise you it’s not what it looks like, I was THERE.
“She kissed me,” Amir said, before Mika could get a word out, before the door was even fully open. “I didn’t — Mika, I swear to God, she grabbed my face, I pulled back, look, look at the whole video, not the clip, the whole thing—”
“I’ve watched it seven times.”
“Then you saw I pushed her off.”
“I saw you push her off after.” Her voice cracked on the word and she hated it, hated that she couldn’t say this the way she wanted to, cold and controlled and unbothered. “After a whole second, Amir. A whole second where you didn’t move at all.”
“I was in shock. I didn’t see it coming. You think I invited that?”
“I think,” Mika said, and the words she’d been holding back for months finally came loose, “that I’ve spent a year watching women look at you like I’m not even in the room, and I told myself it didn’t matter because I trusted you.
And now there’s a video of you letting one of them kiss you at a party I wasn’t at, in a life that’s gotten so big I don’t even recognize it half the time. ”
“So punish me for getting famous? That’s what you want?”
“I want you to understand why this hurts so bad!” Her voice broke fully now, and everything she’d swallowed for a year came up at once.
“Everybody online already says I’m not good enough for you.
Not pretty enough, not rich enough, too quiet, too plain.
And now there’s proof, right there, eleven seconds of some girl who looks like she belongs in your life doing what she wants with your face while I’m home studying so I don’t lose the one thing that’s mine.
So yeah. It hurts. It hurts because some part of me has been waiting for this since the day you walked through that door. ”
Amir went quiet, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its defensive edge entirely.
“I never once looked at another woman and thought about leaving you. Not Cherise, not none of them. But you right, I let it get too big without checking on you. I got so deep in camp and cameras and everybody wanting a piece of me that I stopped asking if you were drowning.” He reached for her hand; she let him take it, barely.
“I’m not gonna stand here and act like that video don’t look bad, ’cause it does.
But I need you to hear me say it plain: I didn’t cheat on you.
And I’m sorry I let you feel alone enough to believe I might. ”
It wasn’t a clean fix. Trust, once cracked, doesn’t seal shut just because the explanation makes sense.
But she let him stay that night, on the couch, at a careful distance, and in the morning Nina sent her the full, unedited footage from three different angles, and the full footage told a truer story than eleven viral seconds ever could — Cherise, planning it from across the bar, moving fast and deliberate, Amir’s whole body flinching backward the instant her mouth touched his.
She watched it once, then again, then set the phone face-down on the counter and found Amir sitting at the kitchen table where she’d left him, elbows on his knees, looking smaller than she’d ever seen a man his size look.
“I’m not gonna pretend the last twelve hours didn’t happen,” she said. “I’m not gonna pretend I trust the world around you the same way I did yesterday. That’s just true, and I need you to let it be true instead of trying to talk me out of it.”
“I hear you.”
“But I watched the whole video. All three angles. And I believe you.” She sat down across from him, reached for his hand before he could reach for hers, a small thing that mattered more than either of them said out loud.
“I need us to figure out how to protect this from happening again. Not just apologize after it does.”
“Okay.” He said it like a vow, steady and immediate. “Whatever that looks like. I’ll do it.”
Mika believed him. Mostly. The rest of the doubt she kept quiet, small, tucked away — a splinter she’d learn, in the months ahead, wasn’t fully gone.