Brendon was a good dude. I had come to that conclusion and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. He was genuine and he was solid and he was completely in love with a woman who wascurrently sitting across a dinner table thinking about me. That wasn’t his fault. It was just the situation. I chose to do this dinner date, to show Ivy that her nigga could be touched, and easily accessed. I warned her way ahead of time.
I had decided to buy those houses from him regardless of how everything else played out. The least I could do was make sure his business didn’t suffer from what was coming. I had the money and I needed the properties anyway and it was the closest thing to fair that I could offer a man I was about to take something from.
I texted her the address to the hotel as soon as I pulled out the restaurant parking lot. She told me to give her an hour. And that was all she had.
I checked into the hotel, left the key at the front desk with specific instructions. ID required. Her name only. Nobody else gets information about the room.
I went upstairs and sat in the quiet and waited.
Exactly an hour later I heard the key card on the door.
She came in and looked around the room first before she looked at me, which told me she was still in her head even after everything. Then her eyes landed on me where I was sitting and she stood there in that black dress with her shoes still on and just looked at me for a second.
“What are we actually doing?” she said. “I need you to tell me. For real. Because I can’t keep—” She stopped. “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what you want from me beyond what’s obvious. And I need to know because I have a whole life, Griz. A real one. And you’re in it now without being invited and I can’tmake decisions about anything until I know what you’re actually asking me for.”
I looked at her standing there.
“Come here,” I said.
“No.” She crossed her arms. “Answer me first.”
I stood up and she held her ground, which I expected. I walked over to her and stopped close enough that she had to look up at me slightly and I looked at her face, this woman I had known since we were children, who had been a dream I buried a long time ago and who was standing in front of me right now real and present and asking me a real question.
“I want all of it,” I said. “Everything. You in my house, your dog in my house, your clothes in my closet, your name attached to mine. I don’t want the hotel rooms and the parking lots. I want the whole thing.”
She stared at me.
“I know that’s not a small thing to ask,” I said. “I know you got a life built that I’m asking you to walk away from. I know he’s not a bad man and walking away from somebody who’s not a bad man is harder than walking away from somebody who is.” I held her eye. “But you called me every day for ten days. You showed up at that restaurant tonight and the first thing you did was go to the bathroom and try to call me before you sat down. You have been trying to reach me since the minute I stopped being reachable and that tells me what I already knew.”
She was quiet.
“You already know what this is,” I said.
“You’ve known since the bar. I need you to stop pretending you don’t.”
“You terrify me,” she said. It came out honest and direct and I could tell she hadn’t planned to say it exactly like that.
“I know,” I said.
“You showed up at my job. You sent roses to my house. You sat across the table from my fiancé tonight like you had a right to be there. You don’t operate like a normal person. Yo ass is crazy. The scariest part of it all is that I really like it.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t operate I like no crazy person, I operate like a man who knows what I want.”
“That should make me want to run.”
“But it doesn’t,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment and something in her face shifted, the last of whatever she had been holding between herself and this moment releasing all at once.
“No,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
I reached up and took the pin out of her hair and watched it fall and she stood there and let me. That was the answer to every question either one of us still had.
She dropped her dress, then slid out of her shoes. She was made for me, and just for me. We kept ending up in the same space, doing the same shit. I couldn’t let her go.
—
The hotel room had been exactly what we both needed.
