5. Maliah
Maliah
Istood there in Tahari’s arms and let myself cry. For once, I didn’t care how I looked.
I didn’t care that my makeup was probably ruined.
I didn’t care that I had driven across town in the middle of the night.
None of it seemed important anymore. The only thing that mattered was the fact that I was standing in the apartment of the man I loved after finding out my father had shot him.
My father. The thought alone made fresh tears fill my eyes.
Tahari’s arms tightened around me slightly as he rested his chin against the top of my head.
Neither one of us spoke. There wasn’t anything left to say.
Not right now. I listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing and tried to make sense of everything.
Still, my thoughts kept circling back to memories I had never paid much attention to before.
MJ used to say things. Little comments here and there.
Maybe some of them were jokes, maybe some were stories.
They were all things I always brushed off.
He ain’t just Dad. He was really outside.
You act like Pops wasn’t a gangster. You don’t know our father like I know our father.
Every time MJ said something like that, I rolled my eyes.
To me, he was embellishing and being MJ.
But standing here now, wrapped up in Tahari’s arms while blood seeped through a bandage beneath his shirt, those old conversations suddenly felt different.
They didn’t sound like jokes anymore. They sounded like warnings I never understood.
Or probably never wanted to understand. This was the same man that would wear fairy wings on his back and run around the house with me when I was a little girl.
The same man that would wear a crown and have tea parties with me.
This shit couldn’t be real. I pulled back slightly and looked up at Tahari.
His eyes met mine immediately. There was so much sitting behind them.
A mixture of pain, exhaustion, and concern looked back at me. And somehow, he was still worried about me. I hated that because he was the one who got hurt. Yet somehow, he was the one comforting me.
My gaze drifted over his face. I took in every little detail of his profile. It was the slight tension in his jaw. The tiredness beneath his eyes. The way he kept favoring his injured arm even when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. My chest tightened.
“I was so scared,” I admitted quietly.
Something softened in his expression.
“I know.”
My eyes filled again.
“When you wouldn’t answer…”
My voice trailed off. I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t need to because he already understood. He knew me inside and out. His hand lifted and brushed gently across my cheek.
The gesture was simple. It was so tender and so familiar. And just finding out some foreign shit, the act of something known for some reason… it almost made me cry all over again.
Instead, I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his.
The kiss wasn’t rushed, and it wasn’t desperate.
It wasn’t one of those just erratic acts.
It was soft. It was the kind of kiss that happened when words stopped working.
His hand settled carefully against my waist as he kissed me back.
For a few seconds, the rest of the world disappeared.
Nothing of what I was going through mattered.
Not in this moment. I felt free from it all.
There were no questions. No fathers. No secrets.
Besides hearing his nearby faucet dripping into the sink, nothing else mattered because it was just us.
When we finally pulled apart, neither one of us moved very far.
Our foreheads rested together. The breaths he breathed out were the same ones I took in.
We were sharing energy, and I needed this moment.
I could still feel the weight of everything that had happened, but it felt lighter standing this close to him.
Tahari brushed a kiss against my forehead again before resting his cheek against the top of my head.
This time when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t crying.
I was grateful. Grateful that he was alive.
Grateful that I had found him. And grateful that, despite everything trying to pull us apart, I was still standing right here in his arms.
For a long moment, neither one of us moved.
I stood there with my face buried against Tahari’s chest while he held me, one hand resting against my back and the other carefully cradling the side of my face.
Every now and then his thumb brushed against my cheek, wiping away tears that seemed determined to keep falling.
I hated crying. Always had, but tonight it felt like something inside me had cracked open, and I didn’t know how to put it back together.
My father shot him. Even thinking the words felt wrong.
It felt impossible. Like they belonged to somebody else’s life instead of mine.
I pulled in a slow breath and squeezed my eyes shut. The familiar scent of Tahari’s cologne filled my lungs, grounding me just enough to keep me from completely falling apart.
When he pressed another kiss against my forehead, I finally lifted my head and looked at him. My gaze drifted toward his arm before returning to his face.
“I don’t understand any of this,” I admitted quietly.
Tahari didn’t rush to answer. He didn’t try to give me some speech that would magically make everything okay. He looked at me and listened. That was one thing about him.
He knew when somebody needed answers. But he also knew when somebody just needed space to feel whatever they were feeling.
I swallowed hard and stepped away from him, needing a second to gather myself.
My hands rubbed over my face as I walked around the kitchen island, eventually settling onto one of the stools.
For a few seconds I stared down at the countertop before letting out a small laugh. The sound surprised even me. Tahari looked over.
“What?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing.”
But it was something. My mind had drifted back years without my permission.
Back to all the little arguments MJ and I used to have.
Back to all the comments he would make whenever I acted like our father was some harmless family man who spent his days working and coming home.
A small smile touched my lips despite everything.
“MJ used to get so irritated with me.”
Tahari leaned back slightly against the counter.
“About what?”
I laughed softly.
“About Dad.”
The smile faded almost immediately.
“I used to tell him he was dramatic.”
My fingers traced absent circles across the countertop.
“He’d say things about my father, and I’d roll my eyes because I thought he was lying.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t know Pops like I know Pops,” I mimicked MJ.
The memory sounded different now because finally I know the truth behind all of the bullshit. I looked down for a second. Then out toward the living room. Then nowhere at all.
“I think there was always a part of me that knew there were things about him I didn’t understand.”
The admission left me feeling strangely exposed. Because it was true. There were moments over the years that didn’t quite fit the image I had of my father.
There were questions I never asked and things I ignored because it was easier to ignore them. I looked back at Tahari.
“My father has always just been Dad to me,” my voice softened before I continued,
“The man who called me princess. The man who showed up for everything. The man who never let me want for anything.”
My throat tightened.
“And now I feel like everybody else got a version of him that I never met.”
Tahari stayed quiet. He didn’t defend my father. He didn’t criticize him either. He just let me talk. And somehow the silence of him letting me have the floor made me keep talking.
The words came easier after that. One thought led to another. One memory led to the next.
By the time we eventually made our way to the couch, I wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. I curled up against one end while Tahari sat beside me, listening the same way he had been listening all night.
At some point I stretched my legs across the cushion and rested my feet in his lap without even thinking about it.
His hand immediately settled around one of my ankles.
The gentle pressure made me sigh. Somewhere in between one of my trips down memory lane, he had reached for the remote to the television and turned it on.
Neither one of us paid much attention to it playing in the background.
I kept talking. Sometimes about my father.
Sometimes about MJ. Sometimes about nothing at all.
Mostly because I wasn’t ready for the quiet.
I’m sure he was tired of hearing me talk, but he let me ramble anyway. Every now and then he responded.
Most of the time he listened while his thumbs moved slowly across the bottoms of my feet. The motion was comforting. It felt steady and safe. And little by little, the exhaustion I’d been fighting all night started catching up with me. A yawn escaped before I could stop it.
Then another. My eyes felt heavier each time I blinked.
The last thing I remember was Tahari’s hand still resting against my foot and the soft sound of the television playing somewhere in the background.
Then the weight of the day finally became too much.
And before I knew it, I had drifted off to sleep.
BLEEK
Something was staring at me. At least that was the first thought that crossed my mind when I opened my eyes.
For a second, I just frowned up at the ceiling, trying to figure out why I felt like somebody was watching me.
Then I rolled onto my side and found Eternity sitting beside me, smiling. My brows pulled together immediately.
“What?”