None of it fixed the noise in his head.
Juniper Falls was too damn quiet for him. Sometimes silence gave him anxiety. When you’d lived in a war zone all your life, that was all you knew, the only way you knew how to thrive.
He lay there in just his shorts, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other resting on his stomach. The quietness pressed forward. No freeway hum, no occasional gunshot or siren in the distance, no neighbors yelling through the thin apartment walls, no Mama hollering at the TV and no homies downstairs arguing over a game of spades.
Just crickets, wind, the faint rumble of Ray’s old pump kicking on and off, and his own thoughts.
His body was stuck in alert mode.
He kept his gun on the nightstand, not tucked deep in a bag, not hidden under clothes but right there…close enough to graze with the tip of his fingers. He’d tried to keep it holstered on his hip when he first walked into the guest house, but somethingabout setting it down - fully visible, untouched…told his nervous system he could relax for a second, except he wasn’t relaxing.
His wrist ached in that dull, angry way that always hit him when the day slowed down. The tape Ray had wrapped him in helped but didn’t erase the way it throbbed beneath the skin. It was a reminder of what he’d risked, and what the league now claimed he’d jeopardized.
His career…his endorsements…his image.
He exhaled with pinched brows. “Man…”
The last month played in flashes…the press conference and the judgmental faces in linen and ugly shoes. The commissioner’s non-smiling face. The brand reps who wouldn’t look him in the eye after they’d happily cut their checks when the ratings spiked.
Zaire, your behavior does not align with the league’s values.
We’re concerned about the direction of your personal brand.
We need you to meet people halfway.
Halfway where?he thought. They never came his way. They just wanted him to shave himself down into something their mamas would clap for on Sunday afternoons.
He shifted, jaw working, hand riding over his chest where that knot stayed tight. Golf had been his way out and somehow it turned into just another room where he had to fight for his life. Same him…different course.
He dragged his hand over his face and rolled onto his side.
From the little window over the bed, he could see a slice of the main house and. one corner of the porch. He noticed a faint glow from a bedroom window upstairs.
He wondered if it was her window…pretended that it might be.
He imagined her there. Thought about the ways she moved through her room. How did it look and smell? Zaire just let himself imagine he knew.
He could still hear her voice from breakfast earlier. Soft with an edge. Snapping at her Daddy one second, worrying about her Mama the next, then turning around and frying bacon like she didn’t have the weight of the damn world stuffed in her bonnet.
His lips pulled in the dark.
Meadow walked heavily but quickly through the house. She rolled her eyes fast, talking even faster. She had this way of filling a room even when she tried to slide in quietly. He’d peeped how she checked the stove twice, lifted her mama’s cup to see how much tea she drank, wiped down the counters without being asked.
Snappy...sweet…stressed…all at once.
He’d been around a lot of women - some loud, some quiet, some who wanted him for his name and some who wanted to be seen next to him when the cameras were out.
Meadow, on the other hand, didn’t seem to want shit from him.
If anything, she wanted him gone so she could breathe again.
That did something ugly and good to his chest.
“Chill,” he warned to himself, dragging his hand down his face again. “You just got here.”
He was a man at the end of the day and would always appreciate the curve of a Black woman…the strength of a Black woman…the soft edges she had that she thought no one noticed.
Instead of thinking about the way Meadow’s laugh filled him in the kitchen, he closed his eyes, thinking about the swing Ray helped him find earlier. He focused on the feel of the club in his hands, the way his body fell into that old rhythm when he stopped thinking about who was watching and just hit the damn ball.
