I bit down on my lip to keep from smiling. “So why did you date her? I mean she is who she is, so once you figure that out and you don’t like it, maybe it’s on you to stop hanging out with her. At some point you can’t blame her anymore. It’s on you.”
Malakai’s lips quirked up at the corner. “You’re good.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He laughed. “Uh, I guess it was familiarity. We grew up together. Our dads are friends. They work together. It was just kind of a given that we’d date and then we’d go to the same uni. She’d study law and I would study economics. We’d dated for years and she was all I knew. I thought that was what romance was. You’re attracted to someone and you just power through the fact that sometimes you genuinely feel like they’re a stranger to you. Like they don’t really know who you are. I thought distance was normal. That’s what I saw with my parents and I had no reason to think it could be any different.”
His voice had another dimension to it when he spoke about his parents, lightly detached, breezy enough to know it was concealing something heavy. I nodded.
“But you have a point.” He frowned. “I should have ended it. I just thought that part of being a good guy was sucking it up. And we had good moments, like my parents had good moments. So, I just rolled with it, hoping that we’d just figure it out.” Something dark flitted across his eyes—it was only a split second but it was so dark it made me miss his light. “But . . . something happened that made me realize that life is short. Too short to be at a uni I hated, studying a course I hated, and with someone who called me childish for finally having the guts to tell her that I wanted to maybe make movies one day.”
He coughed and there was a bite to his eyes and in his voice that pinched at me. The breakup was just the surface. I decided to leave the dark alone for now.
I sat up, sighed. “Alright. You get to complain about your ex-girlfriend two more times and then I’m going to have to stop you out of feminine solidarity. Okay?”
Malakai shot me a warm look of gratitude. He knew I wasn’t asking what I wasn’t asking. He leaned forward. “She hated The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. How can you actively hate The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?”
I laughed and felt the mood shift. “Right. It’s like not liking plantain.”
Malakai spread his arms wide in emphasis. “Exactly. I remember one time I showed her the most emotional episode I could find—”
“The one where his dad disappears again?”
Malakai nodded and smiled. “Gets me every time. You know the bit where he goes—”
“‘How come he don’t want me, man?’” The words leaped out of us simultaneously, as if we’d rehearsed.
Malakai laughed. “Punches me in the gut every time. She didn’t even blink. Her eyes didn’t even get shiny. She said it was overacted.” He paused. “And it’s not like she was incapable of emotion because I saw her get emotional over a werewolf imprinting on a half-vampire, half-human baby in Twilight.”
I snorted as I helped myself to another one of his chips. “Now I know you’re chatting shit.”
Malakai’s eyed widened, and his hands raised up. “Okay, so I’m not a prick for thinking that was weird. When I commented on how creepy it was, she looked at me like I was an idiot and said I was being ‘emotionally basic.’ The only person emotionally basic is Bella, because who the hell would choose a vampire over a werewolf?”
“Facts. But also, my first crush was the Beast, so I’m biased.”
Malakai paused and leaned back, assessing me with a comical expression on his face. As if I’d said something unhinged. “As in the Beast from Beauty and the Beast?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. He was sexy. Like, ‘Yo. What that snout do?’ Obviously, I didn’t think that then. Just now.”
Malakai seemed stunned. “Rah.”
I tilted my head, looking him up and down. “Oh, what, like you’re so special because your first crush wasn’t a cartoon rendering of a creature that was basically an amalgamation of a wolf and a bear?”
Malakai popped three chips into his mouth. “My first crush was on Nala actually.”
“Okay, see, that’s weirder than my thing.”
“How?”
“Because a lioness already exists. It’s a real animal. An anthropomorphic beast doesn’t exist in real life. Well, unless you count Zack. Oh shit, everything makes sense now.”