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“Malika?” a voice asked as she hovered over the pre-made salads. “That you?”
When she turned around, she had to look up, way up. Nicholas was six feet, five inches and towered over her like those new high-rises next to shorter, older buildings in her former neighborhood in Brooklyn.
“Nicholas, right?”
He pulled his head back and made a face, incredulous to her pretending not to know him.
“Yeah,” he said, releasing a short laugh. “Well, I just go by Nic now. N.I.C.”
Malika realized how stupid it was to feign ignorance to her memory of him. She could never forget him. She hated when people referred to Black people in terms of food: brown sugar, mocha, chocolate, but Nic really was what she and Kya used to refer to as “chocolate on a stick”.
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