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I yanked the pillow out from under him to bash him on the head with it. ‘I can’ttake the day off, Kai. Some of us aren’t shadowing a BAFTA-winning director who keeps the hours of 4 p.m. to 4a.m. three days a week!’

Since graduation, Malakai had rolled through short-term contract stints at various production companies and post-production houses as a runner, whilst filming weddings and christenings and motives and fiftieth-birthday parties for fifty-five-year-old aunties as a side hustle. He was just at the brink, wondering if he should use the economics minor of his degree and apply to a sleek shiny firm for a nebulous job that involved numbers– or, at his more desperate moments, work for his dad in Lagos– when he met a script editor step-cousin-twice-removed at a traditional wedding he was working at. Over a screeching mic and an MC who made a joking innuendo about the bride and pounded yam that made only the groom’s uncles chuckle, he told Malakai that his company was holding a networking mixer for young Black creatives. It was here, in the basement of a Soho cocktail bar called Smoke & Mirrors, that Malakai had met and subsequently charmed Matthew Knight, British indie darling turned Hollywood juggernaut, the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Director (a visually gorgeous and excruciating film calledPrimative,a loose retelling ofThings Fall Apartby Chinua Achebe). ‘The fight for freedom goes on, and art is the spear,’ he’d said in his viral rousing acceptance speech for a film produced by Black Viking, the production company he co-founded with his Swedish partner. Malakai hadn’t wanted to ask if he could send him a link to his short films,Cutz(about the music of the Black barbershop) andUntitled(a meditation of love and youth and, incidentally, me) out of fear of looking like a ‘beg’.

What he was really afraid of, I knew, was rejection. It was so close to what he wanted he could taste it, and losing the opportunity would leave him hungrier, emptier. Just before graduation, he had submittedUntitledto a film competition, and, whilst it was the only film that had received a ‘special commendation’, it hadn’t won– it lost out to a short film calledSirenabout a white policeman who falls in love with a ‘gang-affiliated’ Black woman from a council estate. He’d tried to hide his heartbreak from me, but I felt it. Malakai’s swagger had stumbled, and he hadn’t really made anything since, with his ideas restricted to scrappy notes and liquor-loosened rhapsodies to me while we were on dates. But Malakai was brilliant, like, objectivelybrilliant,and I didn’t just think this because of how he kissed and how he touched and how he fucked and how he loved me– in an elemental way, like I was air, water and fire and he were a palaeolithic man looking for something to worship. I thought it because it was true.

He had an eye for the most visceral of feelings and a heart for the most evocative of visuals, and he was created for this, for capturing moments, helping to tell stories, for helping people feel less alone. It was part of him; on a walk, he’d stop, and nudge me, gesturing for me to clock the big brother helping to tie his little brother’s shoelaces, or the elderly Nigerian couple holding hands on the tube, or the group of boys at the back of the bus roasting each other, or sometimes he’d nudge me to look at me. I would be sitting on the other end of the sofa, my legs outstretched over his whilst I read a book, and he’d stop watching his movie and watch me.

‘What?’

‘What you mean, what?Youwhat, Scotch.’

I would see me in his eyes, and my breath would turn round on itself, disorientated by the fact that I was the sparkling thing that made his eyes glitter like that. I would sink into his softness.

So I knew that my job, then, was to make him look at himself.

‘Ah, cool, yeah, I get it.’ I’d nodded, soothingly rubbing his back. ‘So you’d rather beg your dad to work at his property firm in Ikoyi, yeah? You wanna go back to him and tell him that he’s right, and your filmmaking career is the dream of a fool? That’s great. I’ve always dreamt of being a Lekki housewife, as you know.’

Malakai slowly turned to look at me. I tilted my head and looked right back at him.

He sent the links to his films the following day, and, as I predicted, Knight had asked him to come see him the following week. And now, a year on, my boyfriend was the protégé of one of the most acclaimed directors in the world, frequenting afterparties with entertainment’s elite and asking me if I could skive off my assistant job at the publishing house in which my role was to order lunch and warm a boardroom seat whenever a white editor (they were all white) needed A Black to wheel out so they could poach atimely, powerfulbook about race.

Malakai picked up my hand and kissed it. ‘Seriously, I’m sorry. My bad– you’re right.’ The heat of his mouth awakened a tart hunger between my legs, like it wasn’t relatively chaste compared to the other places he’d been kissing last night. I was still so fascinated by how my body reacted to him after five years, reduced to chemical reactions and sensations so rich that they made me leave the confines of my skin, burning me into vapour, but somehow also making me fuller, moreinsidemy own body.

‘Sit with me for a second. Just a second, baby.’ His gaze was honey and drenched want, and any protestation I had got stuck in it, drowned in it.

His hours had been more erratic lately, which meant we hadn’t been able to spend as much time together. Karaoke with our friends last night had been the first time in two weeks. He pulled me back down so I was sat on the edge of the bed, enabling him to wrap his arms round me, pulling my back to his chest so he could rest his chin on my shoulder. I momentarily forgot where I was supposed to be. It seemed kind of fucked up that I was to be anywhere else but there, sat with the heat of his heartbeat against my shoulder blade, his arms securing me to me. I inhaled deeply, let the steadiness of his affection settle in my bones.

He murmured against my skin. ‘I just hate that you get so stressed about a job that treats you like shit.’

I sighed and coughed out a humourless laugh. ‘Yeah. Me too.’

My journey after graduation was a little bumpier than Kai’s. Whilst he had a clear direction– he wanted to make films– for the first time in my life, it occurred to me that I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. Throughout uni, I’d been decisive, ambitious: get high grades in my Media and Politics degree, then ensure our university ACS, Blackwell, didn’t crumble under my presidency, then it was to get into my master’s programme, then it was to get a distinction in my Global Politics and Popular Culture degree, and it wasn’t till I’d completed all that, that I realised I had no idea what to do with my life. My skills– understanding people, talking about pop culture, music and feelings– didn’t exactly have a career pipeline. My parents were pretty chill for Nigerians Of A Generation, but even then I was beginning to feel like a second-gen cautionary tale, the kind that aunties would tell their kids about. ‘You know your radical cousin, Kikiola? With her nose-piercing? Look at where that her useless degree got her. You better sit down and face your law books.’

I enjoyed politics, but wasn’t sure I could enter the public sector without losing my mind. I wrote all the time, but didn’t know if I was good enough to attempt journalism, finding the intersection of my interests tough to write about in a field where it was musicorpoliticsorrelationships. I considered America– I’d had a summer fellowship at NYU where I’d done well– and I knew Malakai and I would be fine. In my mind, we were an inevitability, a certainty. We were the sun and nothing could sink us, but when I left uni all the media and broadcast connections I’d made told me they couldn’t afford to sponsor a visa. So I signed up to a media temp agency in London, and just as I was wondering whether I should just work at my parents’ restaurant full time I found myself temping as an office manager for a six-month mat cover at Jupiter Press publishing.

I smiled when I made the teas. I went to pub birthday drinks where I learned to fake-drink gin and tonics forced on to me so they could feel like they could trust me, like maybe I was one of them. I complimented their shoes or their new fringe and asked questions about the charity race they did with their running group and their weekends at Soho Farmhouse and listened to them whisper about how they were cheating on their boyfriend with someone from their running group, because smiling and nodding and saying ‘wow’ and ‘totally’ and ‘so true’ every few seconds seemed to ensure trust. I listened to how, actually, plot twist, he was who they spent the weekend with at Soho Farmhouse. Nothing was required of me but to be a sentient ear.

When slowly I started asking them questions about books they were working on, they askedmequestions, for some reason shocked that I read everything that passed across my desk. When I had listened to enough sloppily shared secrets in the basement of a Monument pub, an editor (who’d tearfully confessed to me that she’d been sleeping with her best friend’s ex who just so happened to work in marketing) asked for my CV and told me to apply for an editorial assistant role.

‘We need someone like you,’ she said with an oddly deployed wink, and I wasn’t sure if she meant it because of my intelligence or race or my presumed ability to keep secrets, but frankly I didn’t give a shit. It was a job withpotentialand it had editorial in the title so my parents could tell everyone I was an editor if they wanted to, which they did. I wasn’t sure it was exactly right for me, but who had a job that was exactly right? Not everyone had a direct calling like Malakai. I loved books and reading, so maybe it was right enough.

The maybe, however, was a little disconcerting. I’d always felt certain of so many things in life– ofmyself–and now I felt like I was in a place where I was losing my individuality a little, my voice. I’d been working there for a year, and a girl who happened to be the niece of the Head of Marketing had been hired to be assistant editor, despite the fact that I’d unofficially been doing the tasks required for six months.

Then when I’d come across a breathtaking short story by a young Senegalese girl about Mami Wata, an editor had sucked some air between her lips and said that though she ‘enjoyed’ my ‘initiative’, and that I should ‘keep it up’ (with a tight-lipped smile that one might give to a small child holding up a picture of a wonky triangle they’d drawn), she said she found fairy tales too archaic and, plus, ‘Race-bent Little Mermaid is kind of overdone. Don’t you think?’

And instead of asking her how it is possible to ‘race-bend’ a humanoid mythical creature with gills and telling her that the blunt-bob-chunky-fringe-sack-dress-dirty-white-trainer look was overdone and, in fact, basic in its attempt to be chic, and how it was impressive that she surmised this all from a story she clearly hadn’t even deigned to read, I said, ‘Sure, Pippa, I get it,’ which made me quite grossed out at myself.

I didn’t get it, but I couldn’t say I didn’t get it, because the one time I vocally disagreed with an editor (that we maybe shouldn’t make an offer onBars,a book by a white guy with a buzzcut who took it upon himself to write about the link between prison and grime), I was told to ‘take emotion out of it’ and open up my mind more and ‘if we don’t do it, someone else will’ and essentially that I was naïve and underexposed, despite apparently being aware and exposed enough to be the Black representation when a Black author whose subject fit their rigid remit (race) came their way.

I told myself it was temporary. I was paying my dues. And I was doing what I could: though I couldn’t get an editor to read the girl’s work, I was able to introduce to her a kind agent I’d once met at work. Baby steps.

I shrugged. ‘But it’s fine. It’s not terrible.’ I nodded to myself, attempting to coax hope. ‘It will get better.’

Malakai kissed my shoulder. ‘You’re going to make it better, because you’re the best. Sharp, sweet, kind, fierce. Let no one fuck with you, sugar blade.’ He nipped at my neck, his accent mutating to Yoruba sweet boy. ‘Sweet assassin.’ His nose and lips nuzzled into my cheek. ‘Iyawo mi.’

My stomach fluttered despite knowing that he was only calling me his wife as an endearment. I tamped it down, grounded myself. ‘Not yet. Gotta be on my way first. Like you are. Right now I’m just. . . lost.’

Malakai shifted so he could look at me properly, and tugged my chin between his fingers. His brow creased gently, disconcerted, framing a twilight of a gaze that stirred something hot and sure in my belly. His thumb gently swept across my lips as if to wipe the self-doubt from them, wanting me to taste his own confidence in me.