Chapter Sixteen
Mal
Mal awoke, for the first time in over two years, to another person in his bed. Light poured into his bedroom from its single
window, bleaching his pale blue sheets almost white and bathing his delightfully curvy bedfellow in an almost angelic light.
He blinked himself back into awareness, watching her face. Asleep, with all of her ferocity locked away, Jo’s features were
actually cute: her button nose pairing well with her full, round lips, high cheeks, and long curling eyelashes. She would
be mad about her hair when she woke up—they’d fallen asleep far too suddenly to remember bonnets or satin pillowcases—but
he’d never seen a sight more beautiful than this. Josephine Boateng, naked and sated, in his bed.
“I think I’m in love with you, you know,” he said softly.
Jo hummed, not opening her eyes.
“Good morning to you too,” she said. She reached for him blindly, then, finding his arm, dragged him back under the covers. He kissed her, sure she could feel his heart thundering through his chest, and she opened her eyes, forcing him to watch as she licked her palm and reached between them. She stroked him with slow, languid movements, her grip already sure; then, after clumsily slipping on a condom, turned to her side and guided him into her. She was warm, tight, wet, and he found himself too close too soon, the sight of her body rocking against his in broad daylight too stimulating for any hope of longevity. When they were done, reveling in the aftershocks, Jo kissed him deep and slow, morning breath be damned.
“I really, really like you,” Jo said. Her voice sounded ragged, stripped of its usual bravado. “I just think... I probably
shouldn’t be saying the word love yet.”
Mal nodded, fighting to keep his expression even. He’d known that Jo didn’t quite feel the same, but hearing it out loud stung.
All things considered, she’d reacted very well to him dropping the L bomb; there had been no snickering, no queasily delivered thank yousss , and, by the way, she was still tucked into his arms, no haste to leave his bed. Also, the sex. That she’d initiated. That
had to bode well for him, right?
“It’s okay,” Mal said. “I wasn’t expecting you to say it back. Just wanted to let you know where I was at.”
Jo nodded slowly, then blinked away, and he was shocked to see that her eyes had welled with tears.
“Whoa,” he said. “Please don’t cry. I’ll be fine—”
“No, no, I know,” Jo said, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “It’s silly. But. Um. No one’s ever told me they
loved me before. At least, not in the way you mean.”
“Never?” Mal said. He couldn’t imagine that a woman like Jo didn’t have a hundred suitors, a thousand guys who would be willing
to fight to the death to swap places with him right now. “You don’t think that, maybe, someone’s felt this way before but
wasn’t able to tell you?”
Jo’s laughter was a single bark.
“No way. I’ve only been hot for five years or so. Boys used to ask me out as a joke .” She paused. “Wow. I feel like we’ve talked about everything , but somehow I’ve neglected to ask you about your dating life. Let me guess. Trail of broken hearts left in your wake?”
Mal rolled onto his back, propping his head up onto a pillow.
“I had some fun in college,” he confessed. “But, um, not really, no. One long-term relationship. Nothing else outside of that.”
Jo draped an arm over his chest, tracing the sparse hairs.
“One long-term relationship,” she repeated, mimicking his gruff tone. He felt rather than saw her smirk against his skin.
“There’s a four-word story if I’ve ever heard one. It’s giving: ‘Baby shoes, never worn.’”
Mal cracked a smile that was half grimace. It disappointed him some that his bitterness was still so conspicuous, like he
should have been a little closer to apathy by now.
“Yeah, well, it’s not nearly as tragic as that,” he said, half a lie.
Jo propped herself up on one arm, and Mal realized, with some annoyance, that he was going to spend his first morning after
with Josephine Boateng talking about his ex.
“How long were you together?” she asked.
“Ten years,” he said, predicting Jo’s gasp and preemptively answering her next question. “Broke up two and a half years ago.”
“Ten years,” Jo repeated. She sounded, to his relief, curious rather than put off. She drew something around his nipple with
her pointer finger: A star? “Why’d you split? Grew apart?”
Mal scoffed. “Nah,” he said. “It was kind of a unilateral decision. I came home after a trip, and she’d moved out.”
Just as he’d expected, the amusement fell from Jo’s face like a candle being blown out.
“Oh,” she said simply, and Mal swallowed. The last thing he wanted Jo to feel for him was pity, especially not now, on the legs of his blundered confession. But when she spoke again, it wasn’t pity he heard, but something like envy.
“I don’t think I could do that,” she said. “Fall in love again, if someone I loved did that to me.”
The words themselves were chiding, as if she were chastising him for expressing his feelings too soon, but she said it like
she was in awe of him, like she found his capacity to still love something to be admired.
“It’s not something I actively chose to do,” Mal said, feeling his face warm. “It just happened.”
“That can’t be true,” Jo said. “It didn’t just slam into you like a ton of bricks—like, Wow, I think I love this woman . It had to be a decision, right?”
That’s exactly what happened , Mal thought. Jo had grabbed hold of his hand in that bedroom at the Adelmans’ and he’d felt himself sink like he’d stepped
into quicksand. That had been natural. Only his resistance afterward, his attempts to slow himself down, had required intention.
“It wasn’t conscious, Jo,” he said.
“It is for me,” Jo said quietly. She tucked herself farther under the covers. “You’re very brave, is all I’m saying.”
This, from the woman who had looked him dead in the eye and told him that she intended to sleep with him on the first date.
From the woman who spoke her mind so clearly that she transformed him into someone who could do the same, if only in her presence.
He told her as much, and she snorted.
“That’s not me being brave. That’s me being careful. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to someone’s truth. Talk to them straight, without all the social niceties, and they’ll let you know sooner rather than later if they’re someone you can trust.”
Mal started, looking down at her with renewed understanding. Suddenly, his early interactions with Jo made sense. How she’d behaved during their first date, coming after him with rapid-fire questions, how he had once felt like their conversations
weren’t conversations exactly, but oral examinations. The small sense of triumph he felt when he realized he’d provided the
answers she sought. Even the way she seemed with him lately: less intense, more playful, like once he’d stepped over her defenses,
she’d let him closer to her real self.
“But you trust me?” Mal said, wanting to hear her confirmation.
From this vantage point, Jo’s eyes were round, shining.
“As much as I possibly can,” she said. “More than I should, if I’m being real.”
“More than you should?” Mal echoed.
Jo sat up, and he worked very hard to focus on her eyes and not the full, swaying breasts she’d brought back into view.
“Do you want me to be honest?” she asked. “Or do you want me to be nice?”
The fact that there was a choice to be had shook him, but his answer was obvious.
“Honest,” he said. “Always.”
Jo didn’t look away, but her gaze sharpened, and he could sense that he was walking into another test.
“The first thing I wondered when you told me you loved me was whether it was a trap,” she said. Mal winced, but she pressed on. “That maybe you were love bombing me and going to turn into a monster the second I got comfortable, or that you’re currently trying to replicate what you had with your ex and will drop me once you realize I’m not her. At best, that you’re just saying things because the vibe felt right and you’re happy to get laid.”
Her words burned like a fire iron against his chest. All this while, Mal had thought that Jo assumed the best of him, only
to find that it was the opposite, that actually she assessed him through the most uncharitable light possible.
“That’s... I’m sorry that’s how you feel,” he said. “But that doesn’t sound like me at all.”
Jo turned his head back to her by his chin. “You’re hurt,” she said.
“A little,” he admitted.
She ducked her gaze, but she didn’t apologize, nor did she take back her words.
“For what it’s worth, I assume the worst of everyone. And most of the time, I’m right.”
“Did that go for Ezra too?”
The second the words left his mouth, Mal wished he could snatch them back. Even to his own ears, they sounded petty, and he
wondered if by uttering them out loud he’d set himself back.
But Jo didn’t look upset. Instead, she snorted with amusement.
“At first? Definitely,” she said. “But he’s had time to prove me wrong. And he has, a thousand times over.”
Then why aren’t you fucking him instead?
Mal squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the thought before it could crystallize into a feeling. He felt raw, flayed, and also
a bit sticky, and his discomfort was making him vicious. He needed clarity, the sort he could find in a cold shower.
“I’m going to clean up,” he announced.
Jo had the nerve to look embarrassed, as if she’d had no hand in his mess.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll go after you, if that’s okay.”
Mal snorted a confirmation, then tossed the sheets aside and clambered out of bed. It had been so long since he’d slid out
of bed with a new partner in it that he forgot what it felt like to have eyes trailing after him. His last first time, he’d
had roommates, and he hadn’t stayed naked long, tugging on boxers and a shirt before waddling to the communal bathroom. And
he was pretty sure Portia had huddled under the covers and pretended to be asleep, not trailed his every move like Jo was
doing right now. Ordinarily, her naked admiration would have made him flush, but now all of his energy felt frenetic. There
was rejecting him because she didn’t feel the same way, and then there was not believing him at all. He’d rather she’d laughed
at him, instead of this. Instead of telling him that what he felt for her wasn’t real .
Suddenly, a memory came to Mal, of Yves, his therapist, peering at him over round rimmed glasses.
“We’re doing an exercise today, where we try to step into another person’s shoes. A practice in empathy, so to speak,” he
said. “And I want us to start with Portia.”
Mal remembered this session well, even though it was one of dozens, a single point in the extensive timeline of work he’d done to rebuild himself. It was not his first appointment, but one of his earlier ones, attended at a time when Mal was still skeptical about this whole therapy thing, and even more skeptical of the thin, bespectacled Haitian man sitting cross-legged in front of him. Yves preferred to keep his clinic space sparse and depersonalized, so there had been no photographs of family, and the only artwork on his wall was so nondescript that it gave no clues about his personal tastes—watercolor sailboats and thinly rendered flowers that Mal suspected had come with the frames. But on this day Mal had walked in to see a vibrant print of six children gathered behind a seventh, whose arms were spread wide, as if to protect them from an unseen threat.
“Bisa Butler. The Safety Patrol. She had a great exhibition at the Art Institute recently,” Yves said, following the path of his stare. “So. What do you think was the greatest source of Portia’s frustration in your
relationship?”
“I don’t really understand what the point of this is,” Mal snapped. “Portia wanted me to be some big hotshot. She wanted spreads
in magazines and partnerships with major brands. She thought I should want the same things. I didn’t. She left. End of.”
But the question had lingered in his mind, sticking to him like a burr, until, against Yves’s advice, he convinced Portia
to meet and asked her his question directly. Portia had answered succinctly, with a hard gaze and a tight smile: “You never
gave me the space to figure out me. I was too busy trying to figure out you.”
And even though it hurt, Mal understood. He understood that Portia pushed them to take on more clients because she’d come from a working-class family in which fourteen-hour days and six-day workweeks were the norm rather than the exception. That she grew frustrated when he missed opportunities to network because those networks had not been available to her growing up. That ten years into their relationship, she’d looked back at her life and realized that she was living it for a man, just like her auntie Elaine, who’d given up a future as an accountant to have four kids and clean house for a husband who picked the craps table over her in the end. Mal had known Portia’s history. He should have realized that self-determination was important to her, shouldn’t have let her yoke herself to his talent just because a photography business had made sense when they were first trying to make it out of college. He should have tried to look beyond his hurt and listened to her .
He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.
Mal let go of the doorknob, turned around, and marched back to Jo’s side, then dropped onto the bed next to her.
“I’m not running away,” he said. “I’m going to go shower, and then I’m going to make breakfast, and then we’re going to continue
this conversation. Cool?”
The look Jo gave him was indiscernible, her hands clenching and unclenching around blankets like a kitten kneading biscuits.
“Cool,” she said.
Jo brushed her teeth with his toothbrush, showered with his products (“Good arsenal you’ve got,” she said. “I was kind of
worried I’d be walking in to three-in-one shampoo and the sad remnants of an Irish Spring situation.”), sipped his coffee
at his kitchen bar while wearing his T-shirt and basketball shorts and watching him flip pancakes over his gas stove. She’d
emerged from the bedroom shortly after he’d finished in the shower, her expression pensive. He tried to play Yves’s empathy
game and step into her shoes. Josephine Boateng, who’d been abandoned by her parents at a young age, who learned early on
that the only person worth relying on was herself. Who, despite the cosmopolitan big-city-girl image she projected online,
was sort of a hermit. Who trusted people so little that she struggled to accept love when it was offered.
“I think that one’s ready,” Jo said, appearing by his shoulder to point to the pancake that was beginning to smoke.
Mal cursed, then flipped it over.
“That one can be mine,” he said. “Almost done.”
Jo stretched, bouncing to the tips of her toes, and it took a Herculean effort not to ogle. She was beautiful dolled up, of
course, but he thought he preferred her like this, her face wiped clean and skin shining, padding about braless in one of
his favorite graphic tees.
“It smells incredible,” she said, leaning against the counter. “Is this a thing for you? You try to impress me with your cooking?”
Mal laughed, bumping her aside with his hip so he could get sausages from the oven.
“If you’re impressed by pancakes and pasta, then I’m going to blow you away someday,” he said, laughing. He cocked his head
toward the dining table. “Go sit.”
Jo obeyed, but only after badgering him into letting her set it. It occurred to him, as they gathered around the table, that
this was the first time in years he’d had breakfast at home with someone else. Even more since it was someone he could say
he loved.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in love,” Jo clarified around a mouthful of fluffy buttermilk pancake. “It’s that I think it’s
very temporary. The majority of the time, it doesn’t have much staying power.”
“Okay,” Mal said, propping his chin on one hand. “Explain.”
“All right,” she said. “Divorce rates. Fifty percent of first marriages end in divorce—”
“Which means that fifty percent of couples stay together forever,” Mal continued, waving a hand dismissively.
“Not necessarily because of love,” Jo said. “People stay together who shouldn’t all the time. For the kids, or because they like the societal benefits that come with being married, or because of financial situations. You catch my drift.”
“So let’s be generous and say three-quarters of the people who stay married shouldn’t. That still leaves millions of happy
couples, still together, still obsessed with each other.” Mal popped a grape into his mouth. “My parents, for example, are
disgusting. You saw them. It’s like Gomez and Morticia in the Waters house.”
“Well, that just means you’re biased, because what I’ve got is my sperm donor ditching my mom the moment he found out she
was pregnant, and Paul Adelman’s potato-looking ass getting caught on TMZ sleeping around on his literal supermodel wife,”
Jo said, and Mal held back a grin, realizing that his ploy to use being open about his own history to get her to share her
own was successful. “Okay, fine, I guess I’m biased too. But I guess what I don’t understand is... why we have to even
declare things. I like you, I enjoy your company, and I’ve just discovered that I really, really like having sex with you.
I’ve already told you I’m not planning on seeing someone else. So why even bring love into it?”
“Because I want to,” Mal said, bewildered by the question. “Because I think there’s freedom in being in love.”
“Freedom?” Jo repeated, skeptical.
“Yes,” Mal said. “In trusting someone with your whole heart. In not having to put on airs, or to pretend to be someone you
aren’t, because they accept you as you are.”
Jo scowled, dunking a chunk of pancake into a pool of syrup. She wasn’t incapable of love; he knew that. If anything, he suspected it came easily to her. Renata had said it herself—that when Jo “decides to love you, she does it with her whole heart.” And he’d felt that from her, that day when she’d dragged him to the front desk at a bookstore, her unabashed enjoyment of his company. The feeling that Jo genuinely, selflessly wanted him to be happy.
“That’s a very privileged take on the subject,” she said. She chewed, swallowed, pointed at him with her fork. “Because I
think the opposite. I think, for women especially, that love is usually a prison.”
Mal recoiled. His mind flashed back to two years before, standing in an eerie, sanitized version of his living room: throw
pillows gone, candles cleared off end tables, a bookshelf half-empty. Portia’s scribbled words on a Post-it note— I can’t do this anymore —as if loving him had become a burden too great to bear.
“Did you know that men are six times more likely to leave their female partners after they get a devastating diagnosis?” she continued. “Go to a hospital sometime. Take a look at the patients. The men? They either have no one or there’s a woman by their side, arthritic, with medical problems of her own, working hard to maintain an income for the house while cooking for the guy, cleaning him, giving him his meds. Being his night nurse and his momma all at once. The women? It’s their daughters. The men they made them with are nowhere in sight, and even when they’re around, half of what they do is try to tell you about their issues or complain about how she doesn’t put out anymore.” She looked at Mal, tired, her arms crossed tightly around her waist as if to protect herself from him. “You might think love is unconditional because you’ve been loved unconditionally. But from everything I’ve seen, for a woman to be loved, she has to serve a purpose. She has to look good on your arm, but not too good or she’s a slut. She has to be sensual but puritan, needs to work or she’s a gold digger, but not more than her man or she’s a harpy. She can’t gain weight, or she’ll have let herself go, and if she has your children, she has to prioritize them over herself at every turn or she’s a bad mother. She has to be strong, the backbone of the family, an extension of a man instead of his partner. If she defies any of these terms, most people won’t blame a man for telling the world that his love for her has dried up.”
Jo took a deep breath, her gaze focusing on him.
“Mal,” she said. “I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time right now. I’m not going to lie and say that some of that hasn’t
come from being with you.” Before he could delight in that information, she continued. “But I’m scared. Scared that once I
let you in, I’ll no longer get to be the main character in my life. Scared that you’ll start expecting that of me once my
novelty has run out. Is that a good enough answer?”
Mal took a deep breath, then chased it with a chug of coffee so big that it hurt his chest on the way down. He understood
what she was describing because he had once done something close. He’d been too afraid to look inward and address his own
fault lines, too content to hand over the reins of his life to a woman who loved him and then grew bitter when she turned
them in a direction he didn’t want. But he wasn’t that person anymore. He was doing the work to never become him again.
“I get it, Jo, I really do,” he said. “What you’re describing is a pattern of behavior that you’ve observed and lived through. I’m not going to pretend that nothing you’ve said is valid, or that I haven’t been guilty of some of it. And I don’t deny that society enables us to behave in the ways you describe. But I’m one person, Jo. Give me a little agency. Judge me for me.” He reached for her, gently uncurling her arm from its hold around her waist. “You don’t have to trust me fully right now, but I hope you can eventually. And I want you to decide whether I’m worthy of your trust based on my actions, not all the shit other people are doing and have done. Okay?”
For a slow, torturous second, Mal thought Jo was going to cry again. She swallowed, looked away, tucked her lips in the way
people did when they were holding back tears.
But then she clasped his arm back tight, as if he were pulling her off the edge of a cliff and onto stable ground.
“You sound like my therapist, getting after me for my ‘defense mechanisms,’” Jo said. Then she laughed. “But damn. You’re
right. I’ll try. But I’m a harsh judge, okay? And I will let you know when you start slipping up.”
“I’m good with feedback,” Mal said, grinning. Negotiating his own trustworthiness shouldn’t have made him this giddy. But
the realization that he could have hard conversations, and that they could feel productive, gave him hope. Jo smiled back, bashful, and he tugged her chair
closer to him, catching one of her legs between his.
Across the room, a high-pitched tinkling punctuated the air.
“Hold on,” Jo said, whipping around to find it. She followed the sound to the couches, to their pile of carelessly discarded
clothes, then, with a cheerful “A-ha!” found her phone inside the pocket of her bike shorts.
Mal cleared the table as she spoke, feeling rejuvenated. With Jo, things were going to be different. He wouldn’t make the
same mistakes he’d made last time. This time, he’d check in, and Jo would be comfortable with those check-ins, and maybe someday
she would look him in the eye and say those words ( I love you too ), and they would be all the sweeter because he would know he’d earned them. And after that, well, maybe days like this could become more regular. Maybe Jo would start moving her things over, her face masks and skin serums filling in the empty spaces in his bathroom cabinet, her clothes filling a drawer—
“Hey,” Jo said. She’d appeared behind him in the kitchen, her tote bag slung over her shoulder, shoes on, expression suddenly
somber. “Um... sorry, but I’ve got to head out.”
The domestic picture he was painting in his head blotted out.
“So soon?” Mal said, then realizing that he’d sounded disappointed, tried again. “I mean, yeah. Of course. It’s almost ten.
I’ve kept you long enough—”
Jo cocked her head to the side, pursing her lips to hold back a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Then she stepped forward,
bouncing to her tiptoes to kiss him gently on the cheek.
“It’s not you,” she assured him. “It’s just, ah, I spoke of the devil, and she emerged.” When Mal blinked at her in confusion,
she clarified, “My mom just called, and I need to go be in my feelings about it.”
“ Oh ,” Mal said. He had so many questions, but all of them seemed inappropriate. “Oh shit. Are you okay? No, sorry, there’s no
way that you are—”
“Relax, Mal, it’s not a big deal,” Jo said, already headed for the door. She turned back, gave him a small smile. “I had a
great time. I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “I’ll call you.”
“Sure,” Jo said. The door snapped shut behind her, and he listened to her steps echo down his hall, down his staircase.
The next day, when Mal tried to make good on his promise, her line had been disconnected.