She looked at me sideways. “Please. Your mother was the mayor. You grew up rich. You probably had a nanny and a trust fund and a pony.”
“My mother was the mayor,” I repeated. “You’re right about that. And she used every single one of her children as chess pieces in whatever political game she was playing at the time. She threw my brother away when he was thirteen years old. Let him go to prison as a kid and didn’t visit once. Not once.” I took a sip of my ginger beer. “And me? She kept me close, but it wasn’t out of love. I ain’t gon get into the horrible shit she did. But my childhood ain’t one for Disney movies.”
“That’s not what I expected you to say,” she admitted.
“What did you expect?”
“Something arrogant. Something about how you built yourself from nothing despite your silver spoon. The bootstraps speech.”
“Nah. I’m not going to sit here and pretend my pain was worse than yours. It wasn’t. But it was mine, and it shaped everything I am, same as yours did for you.”
She picked her fork back up and took another bite. The silence that followed wasn’t heavy like before. It was different. It wasn’t comfortable exactly, but not hostile either. Like two people who had been circling each other from a distance and accidentally ended up standing in the same spot.
“This oxtail really is good,” she said. Still not looking at me. But her shoulders had dropped. And the switchblade on the table had migrated about an inch further from her hand.
“Told you.”
We finished eating without saying much else. When the check came, I paid it before she could tell me again that I was paying. We walked out into the cool night air and stood in the parking lot the way two people do when the conversation isn’t quite done but neither one knows how to keep it going.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said, and it sounded like it physically hurt her to say it.
“Thanks for not stabbing me. Well—not stabbing me a second time.”
“The night’s still young.”
“Goodnight, Mean-har.”
“Don’t call me that.”
I just winked at her.
She turned and walked to her car without looking back. Same way she’d walked out of the warehouse.
I stood there and watched her pull out of the lot. Her taillights disappeared around the corner and I was alone in a parking lot for the second time tonight. I got in my car. Sat there for a second. Looked at my phone—no new messages from Mekhi about the snake tattoo, nothing from Justice, nothing from anyone who needed me to solve something or fix something or be something.
Just quiet.
And the faint smell of her perfume that had somehow gotten on my jacket during the bear hold and was now filling up the interior of my car like it had every intention of staying.
9
GUESS WHO
I was walking home, mind somewhere else entirely, when I glanced through the window of a restaurant on Rhode Island Avenue. And there she was.
Mehar. Sitting in a booth near the back, next to a man. Not across from him. Next to him. Same side, close enough that their arms could brush if either of them shifted an inch. She was eating, and something about the way she was sitting made me stop on the sidewalk, like my feet had decided for me.
Her shoulders were down. I’d never seen that before. Every other time I’d seen this woman, she carried herself like she was bracing for something. Her jaw was usually tight, her posture rigid. It was so constant that I’d started to think that was just who she was. That the tension was permanent and welded into her bones. For all of her dominatrix shenanigans, the bitch needed one good fuck.
But here she was with her shoulders dropped and her face doing something I couldn’t quite name. Soft wasn’t the right word because the bitch was never soft. But the sharp edges had blurred. Maybe it was him or the food, but it had reached something in her that I didn’t know was reachable.
I should have kept walking, but I moved closer to the window instead, staying to the side where the streetlight wouldn’t catch me. And I watched. I told myself I was just curious. That this was nothing. That people see people they know in public all the time, and it doesn’t have to mean anything.
But my feet wouldn’t move and my chest was doing something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Something hot and tight that spread from my sternum to my throat and tasted like metal. Jealousy and rage welled within me. She had something of mine.
I rushed to the other side of the street out of view when I saw him pay the check. She came out first. Walked to her car without looking back at him. She got in, sat there for a moment, then pulled away heading east.
I watched her taillights disappear and stood there longer than made sense for someone who was just curious.
