Office Hours

Chapter 5: The Correct Next Thing

She didn't sleep. She lay in bed running Aro's voice on a loop, you look like someone standing at the edge of her own life wondering if she's allowed to jump, until the words stopped sounding like words and started sounding like an accusation she couldn't argue with.

By morning she had a headache and no answers, and a nine a.m. discussion section she absolutely could not skip.

Kairo was, unfairly, early for once, already in his seat when she walked in, and something in her face must have shown more than she meant it to, because he caught her eye with a small frown of actual concern before she'd even reached the podium.

She got through the class on muscle memory. Media theory, discussion questions, someone's tangent about algorithmic bias that she was grateful for because it ate eight minutes she didn't have to spend thinking. When the room cleared, Kairo lingered, packing his bag with deliberate slowness that fooled absolutely nobody.

"You okay?" he asked, once it was just the two of them and the hum of the building's old heating system.

"Long night."

"Bad long or good long?"

"Complicated long." She sat on the edge of the desk, suddenly too tired to maintain the usual careful distance. "Can I ask you something? The thing you said, weeks ago, about performing your own life. Did you ever figure out what to do about it?"

Kairo considered the question with more seriousness than she expected, setting his bag down again. "Not really. I think mostly I just started being a little more honest in the small moments, and hoped it would add up eventually. Told my dad I wasn't doing pre law. Small thing. Felt like jumping off a building at the time."

"How'd he take it?"

"Badly, initially. Better now. He's coming around." A small, wry smile. "The world didn't end. That's mostly what surprised me. I built up this whole catastrophe in my head and then I said the true thing and the sky stayed exactly where it was."

Temi looked at him for a long moment, this student she had no business studying so closely, who somehow kept handing her exactly the piece of clarity she needed without knowing he was doing it. "Why do you keep doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"Saying the thing I need to hear like you can read my mind."

Kairo's smile shifted into something quieter, more careful. "Maybe I pay closer attention to you than I should. I know that's not exactly appropriate to say out loud, given the whole TA situation. I've been trying really hard not to say it." He picked his bag back up, put actual distance between them now, physical and deliberate, and she understood it for what it was: him drawing the line she hadn't managed to draw herself. "I like you, Temi. I think you probably already knew that. I also think you've got a lot going on right now that has nothing to do with me, and I'm not going to be the reason you make a decision you're not ready to make. So. I'm going to go to my next class, and pretend today was a normal Thursday, and you're going to go figure out whatever it is you need to figure out. Deal?"

"Deal," Temi said, throat tight in a way she hadn't expected.

He paused at the door, the same unhurried pause from the quad weeks ago, the one that made it seem like he had all the time in the world. "For what it's worth. Whatever you decide. I hope it's the true thing and not just the correct one. You seem tired of the correct one."

Then he was gone, and Temi sat alone in the empty classroom with the heating system humming and her phone buzzing with a text from Dele about dinner reservations for their anniversary next month, and a separate, unread message from Aro that just said, No pressure. Just didn't want it to sit unsaid another six years.

Three lives, three versions of honest, all asking the same question in different voices.

She thought about the caller from two nights ago, the girl terrified of being loved for the real thing instead of the performance. She thought about her mother's porch and Dele's steady, familiar arm and the reservation he'd already made for an anniversary that suddenly felt like it belonged to someone else's relationship. She thought about Aro's hand over hers in the diner booth, six years of easy midnight drives suddenly reframed as something he'd been quietly carrying the whole time. She thought about a boy who paid closer attention to her than he should, walking out of a classroom and leaving the decision entirely, generously, in her hands.

Temi Adewale had built her whole life around being the easy daughter, the correct girlfriend, the invisible voice on a low frequency signal who only got to be true between midnight and two a.m.

Sitting alone in that empty classroom, for the first time in longer than she could remember, she let herself actually consider what it might look like to be true the rest of the time too.

She didn't have an answer yet. But for the first time, she wasn't afraid of looking for one.