Suya

don't eat her

We were standing at the suya spot on the way back from nowhere when she said it.

‘Do you think we would still be friends? If we were strangers. If we met today for the first time.’

The aboki was wrapping our order in old newspaper. I didn’t know they still used Newspapers. I watched him do it and thought about my answer and decided honesty was probably the wrong move here.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You hesitated.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘You were deciding whether to lie.’

I looked at her. She was already looking at me with that face she makes when she already knows something and just wants to watch you arrive at it. I hate that face. It’s also one of my favorite things about her.

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘If I’m being honest.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’d try to sleep with you and you’d hate me for it before we became anything.’

She laughed. The real one, not the polite one. The kind where she has to look away and collect herself.

‘You’re so stupid.’

‘I’m answering your question.’

‘You’re using honesty as a way to flirt with me.’

She wasn’t wrong. I didn’t say anything.

We walked back toward her gate. The street had gone quiet the way it does after ten, that hour when the generators have been running so long nobody notices them anymore. She held the suya with both hands like she’d won it from somewhere.

‘I think we would though,’ she said. ‘Still be friends.’

‘You just want that to be true.’

‘Maybe.’ She tore a piece off and handed it to me without asking. I’d finished mine twenty minutes ago. ‘But I think you’d still say something that made me need to know what you meant. You do that. You say something and I can’t tell if you’re serious and I stay to find out.’

I chewed and said nothing. Partly because she was right. Partly because I’d learned that staying quiet at exactly the right moment was the only move I had left with her.

We stopped at her gate. She started looking for her key the way she always does, like it surprises her every time that she has to unlock it.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I said.

‘You never ask before you ask.’

‘Do you ever think about it. The version of us that didn’t happen.’

She stopped looking for the key. Stood there with her hand still in her bag.

‘Sometimes,’ she said.

‘When.’

‘When things are boring.’ She found the key. ‘Don’t make it mean more than that.’

‘I’m not making it mean anything.’

‘You’re doing the quiet thing. That’s how you make things mean something. You just go quiet and let me sit in it.’

She turned to look at me properly then. And I looked back and neither of us did anything useful with it.

‘You’d have broken my heart,’ she said. Not like it hurt. More like she’d made her peace with a thing that never even happened.

‘Probably.’

‘Definitely.’

‘Okay. Definitely.’

She smiled, short, and turned toward the gate. ‘Good night, Bashir.’

‘Good night.’

I stood there until I heard the bolt. Then I walked home thinking about what she hadn’t answered.

Not whether she thought about it. I’d heard that.

The part where she said when things are boring and then took it back so fast, like she’d handed me something by accident and needed it returned.

Whether she was bored right now.

Should I have gone in with her?