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Aminah’s eyes widen, swivelling between Malakai and I. ‘See! You guys are supposed to set the tone! You’re messing up the tone!’

Kofi throws me a beseeching look, and I step closer to her, hands on her shoulders. ‘The tone will be fine, OK? Malakai and I really need to settle on a location for this shoot otherwise we’re screwed. The dancing will be fine on the day. I promise. Authenticity is key. You don’t want it to feel over-rehearsed.’

I kiss her on her forehead, ignoring the fact she’s fuming, and say goodbye to the rest of the group. Malakai is tapping on his phone impatiently, brow furrowed. It’s a look I’ve seen on him before, just before we broke up. Distracted, annoyed, frantic. He looks up from his phone, face absent.

‘We gotta go now, Kiki.’

I flinch at his tone, looking over my shoulder as I gather my things. ‘Yeah, I know, you’ve said. What’s your problem, actually? I don’t like how you’re talking.’ I zip up my fitted workout jacket, and look up at him. ‘Get it the fuck together, man.’

Malakai runs a hand across his face with a deep inhale. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just stressed.’

‘OK, well,unstress.’I hitch my tote bag onto my shoulder, eyeing him as we walk towards the door, while in the background our friends are humouring Aminah’s guidance to ‘demure bum-flicks and wining’.

‘It’s thirty minutes away. We’ll get there on time. You need to relax. Don’t make your mistakes everyone else’s problem.’ I eye him warily. He looks exhausted, a little gaunt. I don’t care. It’s none of my business. I wet my lips, keep my voice light. ‘Is there anything else bothering you? I’m asking as a colleague.’

He shakes his head. ‘Nah, I’m cool. Let’s just get there, yeah?’ He shoots me an offensively brief, empty smile and walks through the doors. I roll my tongue in my mouth and nod to myself. It’s almost satisfying that I’m instantly thrown back to the time just before we broke up. At the end, he was closed off when it counted, unpredictable, flaky. In a way, I welcome it. It’s a timely reminder.

Three years ago

Malakai wasn’t here yet. I wonder how many free rolls I could eat before it became gauche. I tore a piece of granary bread and dipped it in some olive oil. I’d already finished a red wine, just asked for another, a merlot and then a cabernet just to mix it up, and I assumed they tasted different even though with every sip I could taste my own apprehension, this sick dread. I kept telling the waiter that the other half of my party was still coming because of course he was still coming– why wouldn’t he still be coming? It was a dinner I’d planned for us, one of the last we’d have before he went away to America to work on Knight’s next venture, and I’d come ready to make him lose his mind. I’d worn a strappy black mini freakum dress and heels. I’d got a wax, exfoliated, layered several scents on myself, just in case my pheromones weren’t enough. I smelled good, and I knew I looked good and I was sat at the restaurant in the hotel with which I was planning to surprise him. I’d somehow got into doing ‘Black Girl in Media’ panels, as if I had any clue about what I was doing. One of them had been at a swanky five-star hotel in central London and, as a partial apology for the truly pitiful pay, I’d been offered a voucher for a night’s stay, a night that ordinarily would have cost a smooth £650. I’d saved it for when I thought we really needed it, but there was no time for saving and we really needed it now. Nine months ago, Malakai would have answered my texts by now. Nine months ago, he probably wouldn’t have had to reply to my texts because he would have texted me that he was going to be late, but nine months ago Malakai’s life hadn’t been ruptured. Nine months ago, Malakai was still talking to me like I was his partner, like he loved me, like I was his best friend. Nine months ago, Malakai hadn’t spent nearly every night of the week away from me, drinking with his colleagues at industry parties, and when he was with me, wasn’t saying, ‘I’m cool, Kiki. Chill.’ He was hurting, I knew that, but, bizarrely, refused to admit he was hurting and so we were stuck in this loop of him moving under a dark cloud and me charged with the responsibility of pretending that the cloud wasn’t there, because if I pointed it out I was the villain– I was dragging him down. So I sucked it up, because this wasn’t about me, couldn’t be about me. My boyfriend had lost part of his world, had the whole world shift beneath his feet. In the space of a night, he became responsible for his little brother, for the well-being of his mother, had relatives pulling him in every which way. I couldn’t bother him because what would I say? I wanted a movie night? For him to wake up and pull me to his body like he used to do? That I was never worried about him moving to America temporarily for work, but now I was terrified of what would happen when we had physical space between us because the emotional space we had was already killing me?

My heart spiked when I thought about it, my mouth went dry, my palms sweaty, my body going into something like shock, because I couldn’t imagine a world where we didn’t survive. It was unthinkable, inconceivable. I was beginning to feel like the ground that we had been standing on was beginning to tilt, and this dinner, this night, was a way to steady ourselves, get back to ourselves. We both lived with other people so this was an opportunity to be in our cocoon, be us. Fuck, I missed us. I sipped some more of my wine and felt my heart lurch because something already felt wrong, askew. I didn’t know what I knew, but I knew.

He strode into the restaurant thirty minutes after we were supposed to meet, smelling like tequila, cologne and bullshit. He kissed me on the cheek before he sat down. ‘Kiki, I’m so sorry I’m late. We got caught up—’

I controlled my rioting emotion, extracting grace from the reserves on which I’d been relying for almost a year. I feared I was beginning to run out.

I raised a brow. ‘We?’

‘Yeah. The team. It was after-work drinks—’

I laughed and rubbed my forehead, because, really, there’s no way that Malakai kept me waiting forhalf an hourbecause he was drinking gin and tonics in some Soho pub with his colleagues. Malakai’s expression stilled in the dim of the restaurant. He looked so different these days, the light in his eyes less buoyant, far away. It was like seeing a fairground without the lights, all the power out of the machines. Haunted. I used to look in his eyes and see love I could bite into, see him catching everything I would throw at him, ready, waiting for me and my spirit to come out, come play. Now irritation etched his face. I felt my heart crack.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

Malakai shot a polite smile at the waiter as he came to take his drink order, then turned to me, brow furrowed, that storm cloud heavy above him. ‘Kiki, I know you.’

‘I don’t wanna ruin tonight.’

‘You think you holding your emotions in is gonna make it better?’

I stared at him for a moment as another arid smile slipped. The wine and my repressed irritation collaborated to say, ‘You really wanna talk about holding your emotions in, Kai?’

Malakai nodded slowly and leaned on the table, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘Cool. We’re gonna do this again.’

‘Do what, Kai? You may think you not talking about it is helping, you being a big strong man or whatever—’

‘Don’t take the piss, Kiki—’

‘I’mnot.I’m just saying that this macho shit serves no one and it doesn’t suit you. It’s nothelpingyou. It all goes somewhere, baby. All the pain goes somewhere, and it’s bleeding out, all over us—’

‘Well, you know what, I’m sorry that my grief is an inconvenience for you.’

It winded me, knocked the breath out of me, pushed tears into my eyes immediately, my throat tightening. There was nothing to say to that.

Shame shadowed Malakai’s face instantly, his hand reaching out for mine. ‘Fuck. Scotch. That wasn’t fair.’