“If you want him to keep breathing,” he said, “then it’s exactly what you’ll do.”
I searched his face for something that told me he was exaggerating.
I didn’t find it.
I got out of the car.
Stood in the parking lot for a second after his door closed and watched his taillights as he pulled away like he had somewhere to be and this had all been a quick stop on the way there. My heart was in my throat and something else was happening in my body that I was not going to examine right now.
I drove to CVS.
Walked the aisles and put things in my basket that I didn’t need. Grabbed dog food. Grabbed a few other things to make the trip look like what I said it was and stood in the checkout line staring at the display rack in front of me without seeing any of it.
He had just told me that Brendon’s safety depended on what I decided to do next. And the most disturbing part was that I believed him. Not because he seemed unstable or out of control, but because he seemed like exactly the opposite. Calm. Certain. Like this was already settled in his mind and he was just waiting on me to catch up.
I came home and went straight to the bathroom and turned the shower on hot.
Stood under it and let the water run and finally let myself feel everything I had been holding back since I got in his car. The adrenaline started to come down and underneath it was something more complicated. Because nobody had ever made me feel the way I felt in that car. Not once in three years with Brendon, not with the two men I’d had before him. Griz looked at me like I was something he had already decided on and was just handling the logistics around it. Now, something in me that had been asleep for years had woken all the way up behind it.
But Brendon was inside this house right now, getting ready for bed with the woman he thought was his innocent fiancée, planning a September wedding and he had done nothing wrong. He was a good man. He was my good man. And I was standing in his shower trying to wash off another man for the second time in less than two days.
I pressed my hand flat against the tile and stood there.
I didn’t know what my next move was.
What I knew was that Griz wasn’t bluffing. I had grown up around enough dangerous men to know the difference between a threat and a promise.
And what he had said in that car was a promise. I didn’t want him to kill this innocent man because of me. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
I pulled out of that park, got back on the road and my mind was still back there in that same spot with Ivy.
Couldn’t shake it. Didn’t particularly want to either.
Ivy had come out that house on whatever lie she had to tell that nigga in order to creep out. She had gotten into my car and handled herself in a way that had me gripping the steering wheel right now just thinking about it. No hesitation, no performance, just her doing exactly what she wanted to do like she hadn’t spent the last twenty four hours trying to convince herself that she didn’t want to fuck with me for real.
She fucked me like her life depended on it tonight, and that shit didn’t make no sense. That was the thing about Ivy. She didn’t truly know what the fuck she wanted, so I was gonna tell her what it was gonna be. Once she made up her mind about something she moved, and what she had decided in that parkinglot told me everything about where this was actually going regardless of what her mouth kept saying.
Now, I was sure she was gonna be on some regret shit again, but I wasn’t going for that with her ass.
She was back in that house right now though. That was the part that sat wrong with me. Walking back through that door, back to that nigga, climbing into whatever bed they shared, going through whatever the rest of the night looked like for them like she hadn’t just been two blocks away with me. The thought of it moved through my chest in a way that had me gritting my teeth. I didn’t try to talk myself out of feeling it because I already knew it was pointless.
That nigga was going to have to go. One way or the other. I wasn’t going to keep revisiting that decision because it was already made. He could walk away on his own terms and allow me to have her or I could arrange different terms for him and either outcome worked fine for me. What wasn’t happening was Ivy spending another six months in that house building toward a wedding with somebody who was holding a spot that belonged to me.
I knew how that sounded. I had known her for a combined total of maybe twenty-four hours spread across two encounters separated by fifteen years. If I explained this shit to anyone else, they’d say that I had no claim on this woman. May even say that a nigga is delusional. That was a lie.
But rationality had nothing to do with what I felt sitting next to her at that bar. Some things didn’t need time to be true. The vibe I got from her was like we’d spent the last ten years together every day. She felt that shit too and that's why she got in the car with me.
I let the thought go and drove home, after a while my mind shifted. It always did that when things were quiet for too long.
Cherish came up in my mind.
I let her surface instead of pushing it out of my mind. I had learned that trying to keep something buried only gave it more power. I thought about that room that I’d killed her in. Her sitting behind her father’s desk watching the clock, completely unbothered when I walked through that door like she had been expecting me and had already decided how the night was going to end for her.
The way she smiled when she held up that phone showing me the police call like she had just played the winning hand.
And then what she said before that.
She sat there and told me with her own mouth that I had been a tool. A scapegoat. An exit strategy. That there had never been a version of her that genuinely chose me. Said it without flinching, almost like she was proud of how clean the execution had been.
