12. A week of silence.
TWELVE
A WEEK OF SILENCE.
Seven days.
Malik didn't answer. I stopped calling after the third day because leaving voicemails for a man who doesn't want to hear your voice is a kind of begging I'd outgrown.
Jarvis texted every day. Short. Careful.
Thinking about you.
I'm sorry about what I said.
Whenever you're ready.
I read them. Didn't respond. Not because I didn't want to. Because I was still sitting with what his instinct revealed. Still turning it over in my hands–the gap between who we were privately and who we were with an audience.
Work was fine. Nine Body Co. didn't stop because my personal life cracked down the middle. The Pure Passion campaign launched on Thursday to strong numbers. Bria brought me a matcha latte without asking why I looked like I hadn't slept, although I knew she was dying to ask.
Life around me was still going, and none of it changed the fact.
I missed him.
The apartment felt too quiet without his voice on the phone at night. My bed felt too wide without the phantom of his body heat. My hands felt purposeless without his skin under them.
I missed both of them. Hanging out with my brother, his loud laugh across a brunch table. And my man's presence altogether.
Seven days of silence. And on the eighth day, my phone rang.
Malik.
“You know you could have just told me."
His voice through the phone. Not angry. Not wounded. Tired. The way you sound after a week of processing something that reshuffled everything you thought you knew.
I was sitting on my kitchen counter. Feet dangling. The apartment dim.
"I know," I said.
"I'm serious, Nai. Y'all been doing whatever y'all been doing and I'm out here in the blind. As much as I mention him, nothing in you, though, to say anything?”
I was silent, what could I say. He was right.
"How long?" he asked.
"About two months. Since your birthday dinner."
"Two months?" A sharp exhale. "And neither of you said anything."
"I didn't know how."
"You didn't know how to say 'hey, I'm seeing your best friend'? That's like one sentence, Nailah."
"It wasn't that simple."
"Why not?"
Because it wasn't just dating; we had an arrangement. Because that arrangement brought out a version of me you’d never met. Because telling you meant explaining not just who, but what, and I didn't have the language for that yet.
But I didn't say all that. Some things are mine.
"Because I was still figuring out who I was in it," I said. "And I didn't want to explain something I didn't understand yet."
Quiet. I could hear him breathing. The faint sound of a TV in the background. His apartment.
"You happy?" he asked. The same question he always asked. The brother question. The one that cut through everything else.
"Yeah, Lik. I'm happy."
"He treat you right?"
"Better than anyone ever has."
Another silence. Then: "You know what bothered me? It wasn't that y'all are together. I'm not some possessive weirdo who thinks his sister can't date. It was the hiding."
"I know. And I'm sorry. It was new and–”
"Don't apologize for being with someone."
Silence again.
"And Nai?"
"Yeah?"
"You look different. I noticed it weeks ago. You sit different. Talk different. You walk different. You are more confident. Setting boundaries for yourself.” A pause. "I'm not mad about that part. That part, I'm glad. You seem like yourself. More than you ever have."
My throat tightened. My eyes burned.
"Thanks, Lik."
"Now call your man. He really likes you, maybe you should hear him out.”
Sighing, I replied, "Fair."
"Love you, Nai."
"Love you too."
I hung up. Sat on my counter in the dark with my phone against my chest and something loosening behind my ribs that had been tight for seven days.
I called Jarvis. He answered on the first ring. Like he'd been holding the phone for a week waiting.
"Hey." His voice careful. Soft.
"Malik told me to call you."
A breath. Relief in it. "Yeah. We talked."
"When?"
"Yesterday. He came by the studio."
"And?"
"He asked me how long. I told him. He asked me if I was serious.
I told him I'm serious about you. That we're not casual.
" He said it plain. Like a fact already established.
"He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, 'If you're in, be in.
Don't be halfway with my sister.' And I told him you’re it for me, he didn’t have to worry about that. "
My chest ached. The good kind.
"What else?"
"He said he wasn't mad about us. He was mad about feeling stupid.
About being the last to know something that was happening in his face.
" Jarvis exhaled. "And I told him he was right.
That we should have told him. That I was scared of losing him and ended up disrespecting him instead. And that was worse."
"How did he take that?"
"He nodded. Dapped me up. Said, 'Don't make shit weird.' And then he left."
I laughed because that was so on brand for Malik.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About the bathroom thing, I genuinely just wanted you to get dressed. I wasn't trying to hide you. I was..."
"Scared."
"Yeah. Scared. And my scared looks like controlling the situation. I know that about myself. I'm working on it."
"I know you are."
"It won't happen again. Next time, I stand up. Next to you. In whatever you’re wearing or not wearing."
"That's all I needed to hear."
Quiet again. Then,
"I missed you," he said.
"I missed you too."
"Can I see you?"
"Not tonight. Tonight I just want your voice."
"Okay." I could hear him settle. The creak of his bed. "Then you've got it. As long as you want it."
We talked until 2 AM.
About his mother and why he built cages out of control.
About my father, absent since I was nine, and how his leaving taught me that men don't stay, so you might as well not need them to.
About the difference between independence and isolation.
About the fact that letting someone in doesn't mean you're weak; it means you're brave enough to lose something.
"All I need is for you to do this with me," I said. "Stand in it. With me. In front of whoever needs to see."
"I can do that."
"I know you can."
We stayed on the phone another hour after that. Saying nothing. Saying everything. Two people in separate beds breathing together in the dark, learning what it sounded the way being honest without hiding sounds.
I fell asleep with the phone still connected. Woke at 4-something to silence and a text sent at 3:12:
You fell asleep on me. I listened for twenty minutes before I hung up. Your breathing is my favorite sound. Goodnight, my Orchid.
I read it. Smiled. Set the phone down.
But tonight, the silence was over.
And that was enough.
JARVIS
She called me.
That's what keeps replaying. Not the week of silence, not Malik or how he felt. Not the seven days of texting into a void and wondering if I'd lost her over three seconds of panic.
She called me.
After everything. After I told her to hide. After I failed the one test that mattered: standing in the truth of us in front of the world.
I've been thinking about that. About why my first instinct was go to the bathroom instead of I'm right here, and she's with me, and this is real.
My father's son. That's why. The man who controlled the room by controlling what was visible in it. Who kept my mother small by deciding what she was allowed to be in front of other people. Who curated his life the way I curate a frame: only showing what serves the composition.
Nailah called me on that. She said: you don't get to control this part.
And she was right. The back room, the studio, the sessions: those are controlled environments by design.
That's the point. But a relationship isn't a session.
A relationship is the front door opening without warning and whoever walks through it seeing exactly what's happening without edits.
I failed that.
And she gave me the week to sit in it. Didn't punish me. Didn't rage. Just went quiet. Let me feel the weight of her absence. Let me understand what it costs when you try to put a woman away who spent her whole life putting herself away and finally stopped.
Malik came by. Sat on the couch. Looked at me with his jaw tight and his arms crossed and said: "How long, Jarv."
I told him the truth. All of it. Not the details, not what we do, but the timeline. The dinner. The text. The studio. The parking lot. The apartment. Two months of building something real with his sister behind his back.
He was quiet for a long time. Then: "You serious about her?"
"Dead serious."
"You love her?"
I didn't hesitate. "Yeah. I love her."
He looked at me. Really looked. Searching for something. Whatever he found must have been enough because his jaw unclenched by a degree and he leaned back on the couch and said: "If you're in, be in. Don't be halfway with my sister."
“Man, she it for me, she the one. You don’t have to worry about that"
"Then don't make shit weird."
He dapped me up. Left. And I sat in my studio alone and thought about what all the way in looked like.
It looks the way Sunday morning looks when she's still asleep and the light finds her face before anything else in the room.
It sounds the way her voice breaks apart at 2 AM, syllables dissolving into breath, her body surrendering to sleep while she's still mid-sentence because she'd rather lose consciousness than hang up.
It feels the way her laugh feels when it catches her off guard, that full, thrown back, hand on her chest laugh she does when I say something stupid enough to crack through the composure she shows everyone else.
All the way in looks the way grocery shopping with her looks: her reading the back of every label, me pushing the cart behind her watching the way she furrows her brow at sodium content, both of us arguing about what constitutes a real meal.
It's the text she sends at 3 PM on a workday that just says thinking about you with no context, no follow up, just wanting me to know I crossed her mind in the middle of something ordinary.
It's the sound of her keys on the hook when she walks into my loft without knocking because she stopped knocking three weeks ago and neither of us mentioned it.
It's her orchid on my windowsill because she brought it over one morning and said it gets better light here and never took it back.
It's Tuesday night cooking together and burning the garlic and laughing about it while the smoke alarm screams. It's knowing which floorboard in her apartment creaks and stepping over it at 3 AM so I don't wake her when I get water.
It's her head on my chest and her breathing going slow and the weight of her trust settling against my ribs, heavier than anything I've ever held.
Heavier than control. Heavier than the lens.
Heavier than every frame I've ever composed.
She is the only thing I've ever wanted to stop framing and just live inside.
All she asks of me is to stand with her. And I will. Every day.
Just us. Real. Out loud.