“That where you go to hide?” he asked.
“No. That’s where I go to breathe.”
The grass was softer here…lush, deep green from years of shade and quiet. A small clearing opened between the tree roots. It felt private, safe…like a place built to overhear secrets.
Meadow sat first, smoothing her shorts under her. Zaire dropped down beside her, legs stretched long, body relaxed in a way she hadn’t seen until now.
“You really got a whole world out here.” His eyes swept across the scene.
“That’s what I mean,” she smiled softly. “I don’t hate it. I just…sometimes feel trapped in it.”
He nodded once. “I know that feeling.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” His gaze dropped to his hands. “Golf saved me, for real. But the more I got into it, the more it trapped me too.”
“How?”
He breathed through his nose. “If I lose, my whole hood mad at me. If I win, the league mad at me. If I talk, they say I’m too hood. If I don’t talk, they say I’m ungrateful. I can’t win nowhere.”
Meadow felt him in a way she didn’t have words for. His pain wasn’t hers, but the burden? The exhaustion? The way a soul gets stretched from holding everybody else together…that was shit she knew intimately. No one ever talked about the quiet grief of being strong for people who never asked if you wanted to be. No one mentioned how heavy it was to live in a body worn down before it ever had a chance to be free.
Zaire wasn’t just a star.
He was a man trying not to get lost in a world that had never been created with him in mind.
She placed her plate down, twisting her body just a little towards him. “Zaire…”
He looked up at the sound of his name in her voice.
“You’re better than the rooms trying to shrink you, make you think.”
His eyes held hers…steady, hungry, grateful—unsure all at once.
“You ain’t gotta pep talk me.” He leaned back on his hands, a little humor in his voice.
“That wasn’t a pep talk,” she sassed. “That was the truth.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Aight…thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
The two of them just sat there, soaking in the sun and the words between them—the shared pain.
“You ever think about leaving it all?” she asked once she found the courage to dig deeper in him and herself.
“All the time,” he confessed very blasé. “But then I think…this the one thing I’m good at…the one thing I ain’t ruin.”
“You didn’t ruin nothin’,” she said. “People ruin shit for you then ask you how you became so damaged.”
His gaze dropped to her lips by accident, then lower…to her throat, her collarbone, the place her chest rose and fell. Zaire looked away with a devilish smile on his face.
He was always a man. And when fine women talked fine words, men like him started to look at them in a different way. They started to notice every little detail of them. The heart shaped face, the button nose, and plush lips he had become desperate to kiss.
Meadow felt it in her stomach and between her thighs…everywhere.
“You eat like a bird,” he taunted, clearing his throat in hopes of clearing his mind of the dirty shit he wanted to do to her.
