“See?” I nudged her as we passed a booth selling roasted nuts. “You not dead.”
She kissed her teeth. “Yet. The jury’s still out.”
But her shoulders were looser. Her eyes were soft. Every now and then, I caught her staring at the lights with that old look I remembered from high school—like she loved Christmas, was excited for it. The way Aziza looked at those trees.
I liked seeing that look on her beautiful face again.
We got cocoa and split a funnel cake “just to taste it.” She ate most of it. Powdered sugar dusted the corner of her mouth. I reached out and wiped it away before I thought about it. She went still. My thumb dragged over her bottom lip. Soft as I remembered. She swallowed and looked at me, eyes dark and complicated.
“You got it?” she whispered.
I nodded. “I did.”
We stood there like that a second too long, just looking at each other while people moved around us. I cleared my throat first.
“Our forty-five minutes been up. You ready to go back to your villain lair, Grinch?”
“Please. Before somebody changes their mind and decides to organize that prayer circle around me,” she quipped, saucy and pretty, with one hand on a thickly curved hip.
Down, boy, I told me and the man below. “Let ’em. I’ll flip the whole circle over.”
She snorted. “You so ghetto.”
“I thought that’s what you bougie types liked,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t deny it.
On the way back up the hill, it was quiet in the truck. Not uncomfortably quiet. Just… thick, tense. Like we wanted to say stuff that we didn’t say. Like we felt stuff we shouldn’t feel. Christmas lights faded behind us. Trees rose up on both sides. I checked the time. Still early for them to be done at the museum and dinner. I’d already texted Serena. Yeah, Braeden had gotten me her number, all their numbers. I’d sent preliminary texts already.
Me:
How long y’all gone have my baby out?
Serena:
Children’s Museum til 5. Then dinner. We bringing her back nice and tired. Why
I typed:Thinking about cracking her mama’s back.
I deleted that though.
Me:
Just checking. Be safe.
Now, in the truck, Kyleigh hugged my hoodie tighter around herself even though the heat was on.
“You dropping me or you coming to lurk around my house like security?” she asked.
She tried to make it sound light, but I heard the nervousness under it.
“You tell me,” I said. “You want me to wait up there ’til they get back or you want me to go?”
She looked out the window, thinking. “I know you wanna see her when she comes home. You might as well wait at the house.”
That “might as well” was a front, but I let her have it.
“A’ight. I’ll stay out your way. Mostly.”
