The God Who Stayed - Part 3
The Thing You Don’t Say
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He clambered after her. But Katie—somehow—landed upright.
Not a mark, not a broken bone. He screamed anyway. Like shouting ow before a stubbed toe that never came. At the very least, it helped to expel the image that had formed in his mind: a smashed and bruised body at a haphazard angle.
“Holy shit,” Katie breathed, patting herself down. Disbelief spread nakedly on her face. Surely, there was at least a scratch. A bruise. Something.
But there wasn’t. As if fate, so fickle and feisty, always left something visible. I leaned in, the way you do when something teeters.
A small smile tugged at the left corner of Katie’s mouth. Then she burst out laughing.
“I don’t think we should go out,” Malik said. “This is all starting to feel like an omen.”
“Did Miss Cleo teach you that at psychic camp?”
“You know what,” Malik said, his face going a little stiff, “the universe will whisper things to you before it will hold you down and start to shout them. We can go out tomorrow if you want to, but let’s just stay inside tonight. We can listen to our own music, and we don’t have to get all feral just to get a drink or to fight our way into the bathroom.”
“Fine,” Katie relented.
Malik made sure to hold her hand as they went back up as a pair, despite Katie muttering something about being treated like a grandma.
Back inside, he checked the app again. Still spinning. He didn’t know if that should make him feel relieved or cursed.
“You do know that some stupid app doesn’t know when we’re going to die, right?” Her voice was cool and clinical. And factual, Malik realized. She was right; this was just a stupid app.
He popped another bottle, and the two had a laugh about it, the story already softening into this distant myth that they would bring up in the future in increasingly hyperbolic terms. “Remember when you almost died in my stairwell but landed it like Cirque du Soleil? Remember when you were immortal until brunch? Remember?”
They poured.
They laughed.
They danced.
At some point, Katie spun too hard and clipped the coffee table. Malik overfilled their glasses. And their laughter stretched just a beat too long. Katie could feel it, that itchy, buzzing tension at the back of her mind, knocking to be let out.
She slipped away from club living room and opened the window. The nighttime air hit her like a slap and a balm. Below, the city murmured: rattling trams, distant arguments, the low thrum of nightlife. She let her face hang in the breeze like laundry that wouldn’t dry and stayed there, still, waiting for the wind to carry something out of her. What, exactly, she could not name.
“Honestly,” she muttered to herself, leaning out far—dangerously far,” if I die tomorrow, at least I won’t have to pick over all the stuff my dad left behind.”
“Katie, what the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m unkillable, at least for tonight, right?” Inch by inch, she flailed more of her torso out of the window, feet acting as anchors, hands splayed against the brick exterior.
One more shimmy and she might have slipped right into the dark like it was nothing. Malik lunged. Grabbed hold of her waist this time. She resisted, kicked him. Maybe on accident. Maybe not. He didn’t care. He yanked her back inside anyway.
They crashed into the side table, and the photo frame resting on it flung to the ground. Glass cracked beneath them.
Malik sat up, cradling the photo of him and his brother. The edge of the frame was splintered, the memory bruised. “What is wrong with you?” he snapped. “You broke my picture frame.”
“You haven’t spoken to him in years.” Katie pulled herself up, breathless and distant. “I’m surprised you even have that picture out.”
“Doesn’t mean you get to break shit.” Malik shot back, rubbing his chest where Katie’s foot had landed.
“I will buy you a new frame, okay? Jesus. I didn’t expect you to get so worked up over it,” she said, standing up too fast. “You won’t read any of the letters he sends from jail, yet you’re breaking down over some photo?”
Malik stared at her. He felt like his eyes were throwing off sparks. His voice came in low, quiet. “We weren’t always strangers.”
Katie blinked. And something in her recalibrated.
“I’m sorry,” she said, collapsing on the couch and propping up the sides of her head with her palms. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just—”
“You just what? You think you’re allowed to act out just because you’re not dealing with your own problems? C’mon.”
They sat in silence for a long time.
“There’s no excuse. Really, I’m sorry,” Katie said finally. “But your brother—he’s alive, Malik. And he is reaching out. And we don’t get forever with people.”
“I know,” Malik said. “I’ll read the letter, I promise. I know what that means, especially coming from you. I get it. I just don’t want to get my hopes up, you know? The last few times he reached out, it was only to ask for money. And it’s nice to think… maybe this time it’s something else. It’s nice living in that space between what I think it says and what it actually says.”
Another pause birthed between them.
“You want to talk about your dad?”
Her head dropped lower into her hands. “Not really, no.”
“Fine, as you like to say.” Malik put the broken frame back on the table and stumbled over to her on the couch. “But we need to discuss this side quest guy. You two are texting way too much to be not dating.”
“Ugh. Probably.” She rubbed her temples. “I think we have landed in full-blown situationship territory. We matched on one of the apps and started texting. And we’ve said yes to a happy hour, sometimes two, every week. It’s been a fun distraction. Light. We laugh, we drink, we have great sex. And the tradition kind of stuck for the past several weeks. Well, until this week.”
Katie leaned back, hoping the couch might swallow her whole. “My dad’s birthday was on Tuesday, and I didn’t want to explain all of that to him. I feel like he would know something was wrong or off. I don’t want to lie to the guy, so…I have been avoiding him instead.” She looked up at the ceiling. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“It’s okay,” Malik said, his anger slipping off him like a coat. “You’re just damaged goods like the rest of us.”
“I’m tired of being a mess, though. You know I haven’t cried since my dad died? And I don’t know what to do about this whole SQ thing. He’s a good guy. Like, genuinely. He’s the first man in a while who actually seems to want a relationship. Everyone else I’ve come across has Peter Pan syndrome or commitment allergies. And here I am, ghosting the one great thing I’ve found lately. All because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’m never going to see my dad again. And SQ—his name is Matt—deserves better than the version of me that is…stuck in all of this. Whatever this is.”
“You’re not stuck,” Malik said, taking hold of her hand. “You just haven’t picked a direction yet. And you don’t have to right now. But even when you’re a little bent at the edges, Matt would still be lucky to be caught in your orbit.”
“Katie turned to look at Malik, startled. “Thanks. You always say the thing that makes me hate myself a little less.”
“I just say what I’d want to hear.” He offered his arms. “Now come here.”
They hugged, not the playful, one-armed thing they usually did. This was full-bodied. And for a moment, they just were.
When they released each other, Katie grabbed her phone off the coffee table. “I think I need to start fixing some of this mess. That’s what you do in your thirties, right? I’m gonna go to Matt’s.”
“Oh.” Malik felt his stomach drop. “I thought maybe you’d stay. We could rewatch The Devil Wears Prada and get in all our practice quoting Meryl.”
“If you magically become straight and want to sleep with me, sure. But otherwise, this whole night kind of made me…weirdly horny.”
Malik laughed, but it sounded hollow to his own ears. He started tidying up—grabbing wine glasses, rearranging couch cushions—small chores to ward off a rising hysteria. This image of a body, twisted in a heap, made its way into his head again.
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