What We Chose (The Mirade Series Book 2)

Chapter 1

Imade's POV

The car turned off the main road and onto a quieter street, where the houses stood behind high walls and the afternoon seemed to have settled into a rare stillness.

Lekan drove a little farther before pulling over beneath the shade of a large tree. He switched off the engine. Neither of them moved. The dashboard clock glowed faint green between them, and for a long moment the silence itself seemed to be something they were both listening to.

He turned to her first. Reached for her hand slowly across the console, the way a man reaches for something he still isn't sure he's allowed to have.

"Here we are," he said, and let the words hang there before he added, quieter, "Finally."

"Finally," Imade answered right away. She turned his hand over in hers, studying it — the width of his knuckles, the faint scar along one finger she'd never asked about — before she covered it with her other palm, cooler than his, her rings catching the sunlight that came through the windscreen. When she finally looked up at him, she was almost smiling. "Jealousy doesn't look good on you, you know."

"It doesn't feel good either." He shook his head slowly.

"And how do you think I felt?" Her thumb stilled against his knuckles. "Watching you with Ayomide all this time?"

"It must not have been easy." He held her gaze, unhurried, as though he owed her the full weight of it. "It's over between us now."

"Really." Not quite a question. Imade searched his face for the seam, the place where a lie might show through, and took her time finding none. Something in her chest gave way all at once — she reached for him, arms circling his neck before she'd finished deciding to, and kissed him with the relief of someone who has been holding her breath for a very long time.

He let her lead it. Then, slowly, he didn't.

When he pulled her closer and kissed her again, it was unhurried in a way the first one hadn't been — deliberate, as though he were finally permitting himself something he'd rationed for years. Imade felt it in her spine, in the way her fingers curled into his collar. When she drew back at last, breathless, the car felt smaller than it had a minute ago, and neither of them rushed to fill the quiet that followed.

"When did this happen?" she asked eventually, still close enough that her words landed against his jaw.

"The day you left my flat." His thumb moved over her hand, absent, steady. "I asked her to leave that same morning. I didn't know you'd already gone, I wanted you by my side."

"Oh." Imade sat back slightly, turning the timeline over. "No wonder."

"No wonder what?"

"I met her, outside your gate, days later — I'd gone to see Big Mummy." Her eyes drifted to the windscreen, to nothing in particular.

Lekan went still in the way he did before a storm of his own making. "Did she do anything to you? What did she say?"

Imade closed her eyes. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Tell me, Arike."

The name did what it always did — pulled something loose in her. She let out a slow breath, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone carefully flat, the voice of someone reciting rather than remembering. "She called me scrawny. Said I wasn't your type. That I was groveling for your attention by buying you gifts while your eyes were on her. She said you'd never look at someone so thin that a strong wind could blow off the surface of the earth." A pause, a humorless breath. "She said if she caught me at your flat again, she'd beat me up."