Page 3

He was awkward and yet assured, nerdy but with an air of unaffected cool–like everything he did he believed in. The very reason I wanted to talk to him was the very reason I wanted to go–this could be a thing, I felt like it could be a thing and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it to be a thing.

In the year and a half of my singledom–well, in the last six months of it–I’d gone on torturously boring dates (if I had to answer what my favourite colour is one more time I was gonna start saying ‘fathomless black, like the void this interaction should be thrown into’), thrillingly decadent but shallow dates (there is no point just saying yes to a man because he’s six foot six inches), engaged in drunken make-out sessions with no heart and too much tongue (because often they just rely on the fact that they’re six foot six and don’t bother to learn how to kiss) and one-and-a-half talking stages (I tapped out after ‘what do you do for fun?’).

They were meaningless, and I found comfort in the meaninglessness because I didn’t have to try, because I didn’t have to open myself up to hurt, but by doing that wasn’t I just opening myself up to old patterns? Running away from emotions because I was scared of vulnerability when vulnerability was where the good stuff was, the sweet stuff; vulnerability had treated me so well until it hadn’t any more. My life was full with work and my friends, and finding out more of who I was, but maybe I had some space for a new flavour of joy. I knew it couldn’t be the same romance as I’d had before, but maybe that was a good thing. Before this, I was yet to find a man I could bear talking to for more than thirty seconds. If my calculations were correct, this had been at least three minutes.

I smiled. Nodded. ‘So is little Solange OK?’

He frowned. ‘Who’s Solange?’

It had been a while since I liked a man who didn’t immediately catch what I threw, and so I tamped down my confusion at his confusion, and helped him out. ‘What, you don’t remember the name of our kid?’

Baby Daddy blinked and then nodded and laughed. ‘Ah yes. She’s doing well, just a high temperature, but— I’m sorry, I’m not good at this. Fuck it, you wanna get a drink with me?’

‘Depends. Will they have calories? I really can’t take any more of the Ozempic water they’re serving us.’

‘Chock-full of them. I promise. Sugar levels gonna sky rocket.’

With Bakari, everything wassimple, cut and dry, not so much an enchanted forest of romance, but a neatly manicured national park, clean paths, trimmed hedges, no messes. I liked that. I needed that.

It was kind of funny how I was able to joke about us having a kid together within the first ten minutes of us meeting when now, a year or so on, the idea of us getting married is sending me into a conniption.

Bakari clears his throat. He looks softly nervous and his thumb presses into the back of my hand with purpose. ‘Look, you’ve been stressed about what you’re going to do when you wind up The Heartbeat’s tour. MelaninMatch has just been acquired by Cypher and, like, not to be weird about it, I’m doing really well right now because of that.’

He’s talking about the huge business acquisition that saw the successful dating app he’d created when he was twenty-three blow and become international. It’s odd how little Bakari and I discuss money despite the fact that he’s a tech founder who was on the Forbes list by twenty-five, and I always scan Ready To Eat avocados as unripe avocados at self-check-out because they’re 20p cheaper. He started with a dating app created for Black people looking to find love, then created an app called ShortCutz that would pool all the barbers in your vicinity–this led to him creating Onyx, an umbrella company that would serve underrepresented communities. It had a team of twenty that was fast-growing and whose merch was responsible for everything from the giant T-shirt I wear while spooning peanut butter directly from the jar when I’m Going Through It to my stationery, with which I journal when I’m Going Through It. Both things have been put to use recently. While my boyfriend was doing Well, I was doing Fine. Technically Fine. As fine as an overachieving eldest Nigerian daughter could be after quitting their job out of nowhere. I’m down to browsing graduate courses only once a day now rather than once every hour of every day.

I slowly nod, although I’m not sure what I’m agreeing to or with. The fact that his career’s soaring whilst mine is plummeting? Bakari isn’t the most romantic guy in the classic way (he once called holding hands down the street ‘a bit inefficient for our purposes. What is it for? You know I care about you, and it’s not great for optimised walking’), but, still, I didn’t think a proposal would involve him talking about how marriage might make the most financial sense like I’m in a Regency romance, and my family are struggling gentry with a crumbling manor, having to retrench. Although, I guess a Nigerian restaurant that has gone into decline because more of a certain kind of person who’s willing to pay £10 for a cakepop at the ‘artisan bake shop’ has moved into the area may count. (They’re called Fat & Flour. Their bagels are very dry.)

‘Look, all I’m saying, babe,’ he says, reaching for my hand and reading the confusion on my face, ‘is that life has changed for me now. And I think by extension it could change for us. We’re in a transitionary space, and I feel like there is an opportunity for evolution in our relationship.’

Why is he suddenly speaking like a lifestyle guru doing a Ted talk? He’s always wanted to do a TedX talk. He told me this in bed once, after sex, confiding in me, feeling vulnerable enough to admit it. He stared at the ceiling, smiling wistfully as he confessed, like he’d just told me that one day he wanted to climb Kilimanjaro. Recently, he’s started wearing an everyday uniform: a sleek slate kaftan shirt and navy chinos, because apparently it says ‘reliable, confident. It’s the colour of a man who knows who he is. Unashamedly Black, and serious’. Those were the things I liked about him–confident, reliable, knows who he is–but now I’m wondering if all his choices are made with an eye to writing a self-help book calledThe Diary of a Disrupter: 93 Laws of Power to Guide the Art of Climbing the STEM of Success.

‘We’ve been dating for about a year now, and I think we make sense, right?’ he asks.

I let the question marinate as I sip some more of his App Launch wine. Aminah is nice enough to him, but early in our relationship she once compared him to lemon-and-herb chicken from Nando’s. (‘Not in a bad way! He’s a tasty option. Can’t go wrong. I’m just saying, Keeks, he only ever kisses your cheek in public. I’m used to seeing you with someone who acted like he would die if his hand didn’t brush your waist or your other cheek every three seconds.’) And Kofi is coolly polite at best due to loyalty to my ex, his best friend, and love for me, his pseudo-sister-in-law, but– the ambivalence of my friends aside– wedomake sense. It isn’t the most passionate relationship, sure, and his kisses are a pleasant and enjoyable sensation rather than a heat that turns my joints molten, but it is easy, it is safe and its lack of abundance is enough for me. I love me enough to cover any gaps: the fact that he doesn’t get it when I need silence at a certain part of a song to let melody and lyric sink in to my bones, that he talks through it loudly and quietly, that he thinks I am too sentimental sometimes, that he hasn’t listened to one episode of my podcast (but plugs it always), that sometimes I tuck my sarcasm in, my humour, because I know he won’t totally catch it, and that if he did he might not know what to do with it.

I’ve known a love that had overflowed out of me and them, and it had nearly toppled me over. I’d barely been able to contain it; it was too dense and rich for a body that had just started to know itself. This adequate affection with Bakari, though, this measured warmth, I like. I could quantify it. 1+1= Not Too Much.

Bakari looks up a restaurant with the highest rating, and takes me there. It doesn’t matter what it is and he won’t consult me about what I’m in the mood for– he just books it because it’s the best and he says I deserve the best. We go on trips that are the result of him googling ‘top ten quiet, romantic destinations’ rather than places he’s dreamed of visiting. He is serious, and I am less so. I get him out of his head, and he is calm enough to allow me to stay in mine. We make sense.

‘I think we do.’

Bakari grins. He looks me in the eye and I swallow nothing but doubt.

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he says, ‘because—’

My wine glass ripples with the vibration of my phone. A flitter of annoyance flicks across Bakari’s face.

‘You said you put it on silent—’

‘Vibrate is silent—’

‘No, vibrate is like a regular ringtone— we’re not Boomers. No one has their phone on loud any more.Silentis silent.’

I turn my head to look at his empty open-plan beige and grey and chrome living room, past the art that came from his assistant handpicking from the ‘artists to watch’ list, and beyond that at the panoramic night-time view through his window, city lights against blue-black, to theatrically check if there is someone else behind me. I return to look at him, evidencing the confusing conclusion that he could only be talking to me.

‘Yo,’ I say. ‘Tone.What’s going on?’

Apology flicks across Bakari’s eyes, and he pushes his glasses up, a tick that never fails to soften me. ‘Sorry, sorry, I’m just jittery and nervous and I want to ask you something serious.’