I grabbed his chin and a hold of myself. “Focus. I need you to get into beast mode. Our main competition is Ty. He has Shanti and he’s gonna wanna show out for her. He has something to prove. Kofi will be too flustered by Aminah’s proximity to focus.
“We have to win this. We’re gonna have them eating dirt. Well this house is super clean so, like, licking the marble.” I paused. “We’re gonna have them getting mild poisoning from the disinfectant, just a couple of trips to the bathroom, nothing major.”
There was a couple of silent beats until Malakai breathed out. “You’re kind of a competitive sociopath, aren’t you, Banjo?”
“Shut up.”
“I like it.”
“Anyway, I’m gonna hoist my butt slightly up to alleviate the pressure on your—”
“Kiki, chill. I got you.” He gripped tighter onto my thighs.
“You better have. I’m at a really juicy part in the latest Ifekonia book. Shangaya and Niyo are in a mountain cave. They just had a heated argument and they’re definitely about to have angry sex. The hot tub would be a perfect place to get into it.”
“I’mma get you that horny reading hot tub time, Scotch.”
It was the first time he called me Scotch since the other night. It sunk into me, sat warm under my skin, made my heart buoyant enough to jump to my mouth and push out a smile that I didn’t tuck in fast enough. I was grateful he was blindfolded. The potency of whatever permeated the air between us seared through my confusion over the other night.
“Alright sistren, brethren, them-thren.” Chi, our self-proclaimed games master, gathered our attention. She was perched on top of Ty’s dad’s home bar in the corner of the room, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a karaoke mic in the other.
“On your marks!”
I had a last-minute anxiety spike, imagining being dropped on my ass in front of the Blackwell elite and having it immortalized in GIF form on Simi’s blog.
“You better not let me go, Kai.”
“Get set!”
Malakai bent his knees slightly, his hold on my thighs firm.
“Already made that mistake the other night.”
What?
“Go!”
After our triumph was declared I untied my scarf from his eyes and they were ready for me, waiting for me, searing through my flimsy resolve to not let him in again, because who was I kidding, he was already here. My chest had grown a hook for him to hang his smile on whenever he came around. He reduced all half-reconstructed walls around me to magma. I was in trouble, had been in trouble since I first set eyes on the kid.
The party around us began to roar back into action, as Ty clapped Malakai’s back in good sportsmanship, as the tunes picked up pace and volume under Kofi’s resumed authority, and as my whirling literary analysis of Malakai’s words gathered speed. Already made that mistake the other night. I hopped down from him, but his hands stayed on my waist and my arms stayed around his neck. He opened his mouth to speak, but then Chi was pulling my arm up from Malakai’s neck, looping hers through mine and dragging me away. Shanti promised that they would return me in one piece while pushing a cup of something syrupy and potent into my hand. Aminah loudly commanded Kofi to play our newest favorite song.
Then we were dancing, and the lights dimmed and my thoughts became looser, and though it became harder to grip on to what Malakai had said, the taste of it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I realized that there was something sweet there, something intoxicating there, stronger than what was in my cup. As I rolled my tongue around its possibility, I got more excited. But then there was the burn. The thrill quickly got chased with fear. He could have just been playing, saying things just to say things. I looked across the room and he was with his boys by the drinks; he caught my eye and stole a heartbeat. There was too much to lose here—my head, my heart.
I was getting waved right then and my girls were waved, and it rolled under us and merged with the rhythm to pull us into the middle of the room. We went with it, hand in hand in hand, weaving through a crowd that had somehow doubled in size within the last hour. I lost sight of Malakai but found myself in a cluster with the girls where we fell into moves that called and responded to each other, that were in conversation, hips calling each other’s to come join, and I found myself laughing. I was here, with my girls, and our hair was swishing, and our booties were teasing gravity and we were whining on each other and delighting in each other. I was in this. I wasn’t on the outside anymore. Our laughter was a featuring artist on every banger and it made it better. We rapped, we sang, we rolled, and we dipped as our bones became tender with the heat of the beat. The chandeliers in the garden house shimmied in appreciation.