Rianne: That’s actually how we got together. We were just sitting with each other in the staff room while I was scrolling my phone, in silence, when the guy with the Africa pendant came in. It was the first time we’d seen it. He was real posh, on a “gap yah,” talking about how he couldn’t wait to tell his friends back in the UK that he’d found a new spiritual home, and that didn’t we feel so connected to nature out here, like in a real, base, animalistic sense. And the entire time, he kept touching that fucking pendant. It was so bait that he wanted us to say something. To compliment him. Anyway, as soon as he left, we bust out laughing. Like howled. Then, Amari goes—
Amari: “If I steal it for you, would you get a beer with me?”
Rianne: And I go, “He probably sleeps with it on.” Amari says that that just makes things more interesting.
[Rianne grins and plucks a gold necklace out from beneath her neckline]
Amari [grinning back]: Reparations.
Rianne: But honestly, even without him stealing from a man who used to speak in some beg “African accent” that sounded like a hate crime—
Amari: I think it was a hate crime.
Rianne: I would have gone on a date with him. What I liked about him is that he didn’t force anything. He gave us the space to happen.
Amari: But it was mostly the jewelry, right?
Rianne: What can I say? I’m a gold digger.
The next morning, I was woken up early by a stream of dawn flowing into a room that was not mine but felt as safe as my space. I found myself warm, secured against a chest that was rising and falling softly against my back, Malakai’s sweet tiger-cub snores the only sound in the room.
After we got back from the convention and changed, Malakai ordered Sweetest Ting to his place, where we indulged while watching old R&B videos, discussing the logistical issues of pleading for a woman on a street in the rain. It got late and our words slowed. I was already curled into his bed and Malakai offered to sleep on the floor, but I told him not to be silly, that it wasn’t necessary, I trusted him. Then he’d offered to put a pillow between us and I’d said that it was cool, that it wasn’t necessary, I trusted him. Why did I trust myself?
Half-asleep, I’d moved back, body curved in a tentative question mark. He didn’t wake up, but he did respond, shifting closer to me, his breath tickling the nape of my neck. It felt too natural, too easy, too comfortable. The reasons around the comfort felt like they would be hot to touch, that they could burn, so I left it alone, but the comfort itself warmed me so I let myself settle in it.
I was lying there in joggers and little else. During the night I had removed my cropped sweater to reveal my bright pink bralette. Malakai was shirtless but had kept his own joggers on too. I could feel his heart ticking away against my shoulder blade. When I reached over to pull his arm around my waist, he immediately fastened on to me, shifting his other arm behind his pillow, pulling me in closer, his lips just below my lobe.
“Scotch.” His voice was drowsy, delectable hot honey rumbling through my ear and directly to my core.
I swallowed, suddenly uncertain. “Should I go?”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t want you to.”
Then his lips were nipping at my ear, sending a shiver through the delightful loophole of our no-kissing rule. I was moving back against him and I could feel the depression and extension of his bare chest against my back, agitating my heart rate further, a throb that dropped below my waist as it rotated in a rhythm that he immediately, excruciatingly, matched. His hardness spoke directly to my softness and turned me molten in the places where it mattered. Malakai’s teeth scraped the soft part of my lobe, tugging it with a tender surety.
I felt myself becoming feral.
I swivelled under his arm to face him and, fuck, dawn suited him, landed sweet on him, and the narrow column of new sun made the blaze in his focus more intense. My stomach flipped, my pulse skipped, my breath tripped. His too-respectful hand remained on the incline of my waist, his thumb searing circles into my skin. I was just about to ask What is this, what is happening, what have we started? when I saw a glimmer of something cross his face, a flash of something, something like—apprehension? It sent a nervous knot into my stomach despite the tie between us winding tauter and tighter by the second.
Malakai held my gaze, in a space I couldn’t figure out the dimensions of, face inscrutable. His thumb stopped its hypnotic circuit on my hip. Then he removed his hand from my waist, dragged his knuckles down the side of my face, and said, “Uh, actually . . .”