Sweet Heat

by Bolu Babalola

I know I said I was gonna come with you to Aminah’s, but I thought about it, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t want to put up a front while we’re working through our shit, you know? It’s too hard. I do love you. You’re everything I could want. I think we just need a little space to re-learn ourselves and know how to direct our energies to this relationship for the optimal outcome. There’s a thing we do at work called a ‘unit test’. It’s when the tiniest parts of an app are scrutinised to see if they operate to their best capacity. It’s how we create the best product we can. This is just a version of that. Love you deep and strong Keeks.

?!???!

I know this man didn’t bail on me just before my best friend’s engagement party whilst talking about our relationship like it’s a fucking app?

When Malakai and I broke up, I was determined to overhaul my life in every way I could with a fresh start. The first was a sunrise tattoo on the inside of my forearm, created with dashes, reminding me that the sun was constant, light was constant – I just needed to wait for it. Cliché probably, but every time I looked at it I felt proud that I’d found myself again, that I conjured my own light and, more importantly, that I’d made the ultimate act of eldest Nigerian daughter rebellion by getting a tattoo. I even enjoyed the pain of it: a sort of letting of the heartbreak that had seeped into my blood.

Cliché probably, but every time I looked at it I felt proud that I’d found myself again, that I conjured my own light and, more importantly, that I’d made the ultimate act of eldest Nigerian daughter rebellion by getting a tattoo. I even enjoyed the pain of it: a sort of letting of the heartbreak that had seeped into my blood.

My parents plan on selling the restaurant and keeping the flat, but, still, I need to find a way to continue to pay the remaining mortgage to make it worth it for them.

Her hair falls and frames her doll-like face in loose, bouncy curls, and she looks like a 1940s Hollywood starlet in her cream silk slip and her delicate make-up of deep bronzy warmth, and brown-lined mink lip.

‘She said she’ll get back to me if they have any openings, but she thinks my “vibe is great”, which is code for she has absolutely nothing to offer me. But anyway.’ I release my slight pique and brush it off with a smile.

They look amazing together: Kofi looking as sharp as his line-up, with gleaming deep skin and high cheekbones, decked in a sleek deep-navy suit paired with a crisp white button-down, and Aminah is grace and mischief, an angel on a rumspringa from heaven, making earthly men collapse to their knees.

It’s why, as a surprise, I’ve started making a scrapbook, writing their love story – the plan is to give it to them at their wedding, with the blank pages open, ready for guests to sign and stick Polaroids in.

I love their love and I love my friend and I love how Kofi loves my friend and I love how that love wraps around her essence.

I ordered extra champagne in case. Using some of the money my parents gave us towards the wedding. And I know Kofi would moan about how we should save it or whatever, and how this engagement party was just supposed to be a “small drink up at the house”, but what’s next? I get married in a barn and we make our wedding toast with mason jars?’

‘Like, let’s be serious. My sister’s engagement party was on a yacht off the Amalfi coast. The same one Jay and Bey rented that time! I had to!’ I don’t mention that her sister is also married to a hedge-fund manager. I don’t exactly know what the job entails, but I do know it probably means easy access to Jay and Bey’s love boat.

You know that Kofi wasn’t supposed to see me in this outfit before the event – it’s bad luck. The plan was to take two separate cabs from mine, but because you bailed he had to zip me up and we went in the same car, like we were going on a common date!’

‘OK, well, first of all, I think that superstition is for the wedding, not the engagement party, anyway, and, second of all, we couldn’t get ready together for the same reason I’m late.

I appreciate you – this place is amazing and I’m just hot because my mum has invited, like, a dozen aunties I don’t know even though I very clearly told her the engagement party was really for us and our friends and we only invited our parents because we had to. They have both weddings! Traditional and white! I couldn’t invite my nail tech because of capacity, but my ma can bring the lady she’s sat next to once at a party? Like, if I knew aunties and uncles were gonna be there, your parents could have come!’

I tilt my head to the side and stare at my five-foot-two best friend. For someone so physically compact, she truly harbours a lot of righteously bellicose energy. Like a Bichon Frisé raised by tigers. I’ve never stopped being in awe of

Minah Mafia was the nickname Malakai dubbed Aminah after we started going out, primarily because he was terrified of her, but really because with charm she could get anyone on campus to do what she wanted, like cajoling extra donations in her capacity as communications officer of Blackwell society and convincing the acapella group to move their rehearsal so we could have an extra hour to prep for an ACS social.

I have my hands full ensuring that Aminah’s make-up stays the perfect grade between matte and dewy with the mini setting-spray I’m keeping in my clutch and interrupting any conversation she has with her sisters after seven minutes. This is the precise amount of time it will take for them to say something that will make her want to fight them. (The last thing that made Aminah want to scream was her sister saying she looked ‘nice’. ‘Nice? Nice? Would you call the Sistine Chapel nice?’)

Shanti, in her gorgeous, form-fitting, deep-navy strapless mermaid dress is flirting with Kofi’s suited-up finance-bro cousin by the bar and they are the kind of pairing that is perfect for around ten minutes until he starts talking about how he loves and respects women, but they can’t ‘pick and choose’ when they want to be feminist and he doesn’t mind paying for everything if she also understands her ‘divine feminine duty’.

Ew!!

Her university ex, our mate Ty Baptiste (a rugby jock turned sweet sports writer and Internet Golden Retriever Boyfriend ever since a clip of him being in unabashed professional awe of a female athlete went viral), is also set to arrive any minute now and I hear he’s newly single so that could potentially make things even more interesting, given that he melts to broad-shouldered goo in Shanti’s palm.

Book 3?

Shanti stoically sipped her drink and enquired whether Chioma was high. She is, in fact, quite high. I can tell by the fact that I saw her sneak-eat a piece of suya, which means in about forty minutes I’m going to have to dissuade her from reading people’s auras – something to which I don’t think a room full of African elders would take kindly. Chioma once off-handedly said to Aminah’s mother that she’s ‘such a Virgo’, which led to Auntie Rafiat looking at her as if she might genuinely be a witch.

She’s a formidable former executive at a Nigerian bank, who retired early to join her husband in running a snack empire, and her clan of three strong-willed girls are born of her spirit. I am simultaneously frightened of and obsessed with Auntie Rafiat, who is kind and warm in a regimented way, like a queen who has allowed you into her court. Her attention is graciously bestowed, not merely given.

I don’t feel like I can quite explain why he isn’t to Auntie Rafiat, who is looking at me with an expectation that is somehow both calm and impatient,

‘My dear,’ she utters with genuine befuddlement, ‘who is Bakari?’

They think she's dating Kai.

She met Malakai at Aminah’s second-oldest sister Damola’s wedding, and therefore that is who my boyfriend is. Why should I expect her to keep up with my revolving door of men? She’s a busy woman with Nigerian Women in Business conferences to attend and facilitate in Houston, Atlanta and Lagos.

She remembers and does not approve. I showed her a picture of Bakari the last time I told her about him (three months ago) and all she replied was, ‘Hmm. OK. God is with you as you make your decisions, my daughter.’

New favorite phrase.

I liked the way you smiled around him. With your whole body. Light and free. I wanted to ask him when it will be your turn.’ She says this with a broad, warm smile as my blood makes a mockery of biology and physics and cools and heats up simultaneously.

There was a time where we could have sworn we were going to get married. Where he would have been by my side and would have replied to Auntie Rafiat with, ‘As soon as she allows me, ma. I’ve been waiting,’ his smile sloping, his gaze glinting at me with a light I knew, I swore I knew, a light that I had said ‘let there be to.’

It feels as if it’s a dream that I’m supposed to wake up from, like these past few years were a hyper-realistic hallucination during a fever, and I’m going to open my eyes in his bed, his arm slung over my stomach, a single eye of his flickering open and beaming light, his lips smiling at the sight of me, rolling out a syrupy, ‘Mornin’, Scotch.

I showed her the piece! I think the tattoos and the wide-neck shirt he wore in the headshot let him down in her eyes.

‘I mean, sure, Malakai is a director, which she does not consider a real job, but he was polite and made her laugh and took great pictures of my sister’s wedding and prostrated when he met her and fixed a plate for my great-aunt, so I guess his home training went a long way. You know she’s a sucker for home training.’

It’s going great and I haven’t slapped a single sister thanks to your excellent interruption system.’ ‘It was a close call, though, when I heard Laide ask if you had a second dress option.’ Aminah throws an irritated look at her second eldest sister, looking like her but stretched, more hollow to her cheeks, nose a little less button, as she fires strict orders to a waiter to get her a cosmopolitan despite Aminah being firm in only wanting to serve wine here.

Can you imagine, she’s unironically ordering a cosmopolitan in my shoes. So tacky. Who orders a cosmopolitan? Are we in Sex and the City? She’s so old.’

When there’s a major shift in the Bakare sisters’ lives, there is some tension, for unobvious reasons. It’s not necessarily because of envy or competitiveness, or because of stolen dream wedding venues (although that has been an issue) – it’s because they’re terrified of it affecting their relationship to each other. The sisters are close in a non-cutesy manner, having each other’s backs but fighting all the way.

‘Man, I could kill Malakai Korede. When I catch that boy, ehn! So is it because he’s a bigshot director he now thinks he can miss his boy’s engagement party?’ Aminah is evidently very annoyed, because her accent has slipped from neutral posh to Lagosian posh.

If I find out that he missed his flight because he was hungover and doing body shots off some model’s navel, he’s going to have to square up to me! Doesn’t he know that Ty is waiting in the wings to take his place?

Oddly specific.

‘But she’s a wildflower. Beautiful, defiant, blooming wherever she finds herself, knowing who she is. Her place is wherever she is, and she owns it.

‘And, the thing is, the breeze, it needs the wildflower to help give it direction, something to flow through, and the wildflower . . . well, the breeze reminds it to bend, to twirl. They’re perfect together.’

I swear I can even smell him – wood and amber and resentment. I know, because, for better or for worse, my body reacts to his presence, acetone on a papercut. My heart hisses.

His face, the face I haven’t seen in the flesh in two-and-a-half years, is inscrutable. Time hasn’t etched it, but instead brought out things it was supposed to. His cheekbones are still steep, but his jaw is wider now, covered with a beard as plush as a night sky, glistening, and his skin is an undisturbed pool of dark elixir that looks like something you can lap at for refreshment; in fact, I used to. His deep eyes carry no love, no hate, but something strong and intense, wrapped in clingfilm to preserve it or maybe to keep out . . . Keep me out.

I contemplate it for a few seconds (by holding my breath for a long, long time), but I decide against it for many reasons including, but not limited to: I cannot die because of man. Embarrassing. I cannot die in front of Aminah’s mum. Even more embarrassing. I cannot die because of man in front of Aminah’s mum. Disgrace to my family. I cannot die at Aminah’s engagement party, because she would break her No JuJu stance to conduct a séance so she can bring me back to life just to kill me again.

‘Well, look who it is. The prodigal ashewo.’

Of course, Malakai has managed to be approximately 2.75 times more attractive than the last time I saw him, when he was already insanely attractive.

Breaking my heart wasn’t enough – he had to go ahead and get finer too.

His crisp white button-down shirt is slightly creased – he obviously dressed quickly – but he makes it look deliberate, snug in his aura of careless sauce. It fits him perfectly, confidently, not too tight, but fitted enough to let me know that he’s more filled out now. Thicker, more muscular. It suits him. He’s grown.

‘I’m being polite.’ ‘I prefer you rude.’ ‘It’s great to see you.’

There’s a hole already there, a battle wound. His smile stretches, but it isn’t friendly. None of this is friendly. This is us fighting without fighting.

Our sentences will always curl around each other. That was always the easy part. Nearby, our friends surreptitiously watch this duel, sipping their drinks, rapt by the reunion they thought they’d never see. We drifted apart.

It didn’t really make any sense. Malakai and I didn’t have a love that was capable of becoming brittle and thin enough to snap. Our love was many things, but flimsy wasn’t one of them.

Besides, I barely know what happened. All I really know, all that matters, is that one day we were, and the next we were not. One day my heart was intact, the other it was scattered into so many pieces I still don’t know if I’ve got all of them back. I need to protect what I’ve got left.