I walked home and got into bed and closed my eyes and saw her face through that window. I replayed it over and over, adjusting the angle each time, trying to see more than the glass had given me.
I told myself it was nothing. I told myself I’d forget about it by morning.
But when my alarm went off the next day, the first thing I did was think about her. And the second thing I did was start figuring out how to make sure I never had to wonder where she was again.
10
MEHAR
I woke up thinking about that man’s arms and I was immediately pissed at myself about it.
I rolled over and stared at the ceiling and tried to redirect my brain to literally anything else—my grocery list, my class schedule, the water bill I needed to pay, but my body wasn’t cooperating. My body was still in that parking lot, pressed against Quest Banks’ chest, thrashing and fighting and completely unable to break free.
And the part that made me want to scream into my pillow was that somewhere between the thrashing and the fighting, my nervous system had done something it had no business doing. It had relaxed. For maybe half a second, buried under all the adrenaline and rage, something in me had registered that his arms weren’t hurting me and had responded to that information by going warm in places that had nothing to do with safety.
I hated it. I hated that my body had betrayed me like that. I hated that I could still smell his cologne on my jacket because I’d tossed it on the chair by my bed instead of hanging it up like a normal person. And I hated that I’d sat next to him in a booth and eaten oxtail and almost smiled at his stupid jokes and told him about my childhood like he’d earned that. He hadn’tearned anything. He was a Banks. And being with the last Banks man I trusted had literally broken me—broke my body, broke my spirit, broke my ability to trust my own judgment. Thad was a lesson I was still paying tuition on, and I was not about to enroll in the same class twice.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My switchblades were on the nightstand where I always left them, one on each side of the lamp like bookends. I looked at them and thought about last night—how fast Quest had disarmed me, how he’d twisted the blade out of my grip like I was handing him a pen. Three months of self-defense classes and I couldn’t get out of a bear hold. Three months of training with knives and a man had taken mine away in two seconds without breaking a sweat.
The knives weren’t enough. I needed to start carrying my gun.
I’d been keeping it in the safe in my closet since I got it, only bringing it to the range on Thursdays. But last night proved that a blade only works on someone who’s scared of getting cut, and Quest Banks was clearly not that person. The next man who grabbed me might not be as gentle about it, and I needed to be ready for that.
I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and stared at myself in the mirror for a second while the water dripped off my chin. The woman staring back at me looked tired but functional. Concealer would handle the rest.
I showered, moisturized, threw on leggings and an oversized hoodie because today was a school day and I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I pulled my box braids into a high ponytail, did minimal makeup, and grabbed my bag from the closet. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and sparked a joint because some mornings required a little herbal assistance before I could deal with the world, and this was absolutely one of those mornings.
I puffed on a sativa blend. It was something light that kept me focused without making me paranoid. I took two pulls, let the smoke settle in my chest, and felt the edges of the morning soften just enough to be manageable. Quest’s arms faded to background noise. Thad’s cage faded to a problem I’d deal with later. The guilt from Janelle’s couch faded to something I could carry without it crushing me.
I grabbed my keys, my bag, my switchblades and my gun.
Most people didn’t know I was in school. Zainab knew. Prime knew because Zainab told him everything. But the rest of the world, including my clients, had no idea that Dame CoCo spent her Tuesday and Thursday mornings in an aesthetician program at a beauty academy in Silver Spring, learning about chemical peels and microneedling and laser treatments.
Dame CoCo was a means to an end. The dominatrix money was good—great, actually—and it served a purpose beyond paying bills. It gave me control, it gave me power, and it funded the thing I was actually building toward. Within the next two years, I was going to open a medspa. A luxurious one. High-end, Black-owned, and near Zainab’s bakery.
Women would beable to get facials, injectables, body contouring, skin treatments, and so much more. I’d been saving aggressively, studying the business side on my own time, and building a client list of women who wanted luxury skincare from someone who looked like them and understood their skin.
The dungeon was the engine. The medspa was the destination. And nobody needed to know about the road between them.
Class was fine. Four hours of dermaplaning technique and exfoliation science that I genuinely enjoyed because skin was fascinating, and I was good at this. My instructor, Mrs. Pak, wasa tiny Korean woman who had been in the industry for thirty years and did not tolerate laziness, which I respected deeply. She also complimented my hands once and told me I had the steadiest grip she’d seen in a student, which made sense given my extracurriculars, but was still nice to hear.
By the time class let out around one, I was feeling almost normal. The joint had worn off hours ago, but the day had replaced it with something close to momentum. I had the rest of the afternoon free—no clients, no bookings, nothing on my schedule until tomorrow’s session with Janelle. I walked out of the building into the parking lot with my bag over my shoulder and my keys in my hand, already thinking about whether I wanted to go to the range or just go home and do nothing for once in my life.
And then I felt it.
That prickle at the base of my skull that I’d learned to trust more than anything else in my life. Someone was watching me. I could feel the weight of their attention on my back like a hand pressing between my shoulder blades, and my entire body shifted into that mode it went to automatically. My pulse was up, jaw tight, fingers already reaching for the blade in my right pocket. Pulling out a gun would’ve been overkill in front of all of these people.
The parking lot was full of people. Students walking to their cars, a couple sitting on a bench eating lunch, a woman loading bags into her trunk two rows over. Broad daylight, public space, witnesses everywhere. But my body didn’t care about context. My body only cared about the fact that someone’s eyes were on me and I couldn’t see whose.
I spun around with my hand on my knife, ready to cut whoever was behind me the same way I’d cut Quest last night, and I was fully prepared to deal with the consequences.
But the face I saw made my hand drop to my side.
“Bryce?”
He was standing about fifteen feet away, hands in the pockets of a black hoodie, grinning at me with that same lopsided smile he’d had since he was a little boy. Taller than the last time I saw him—he had to be about six feet now—with a lean build and a fresh fade and our father’s cheekbones sitting underneath eyes that came from his mother, Khadija.
“What’s good, sis?” He opened his arms like a hug was a given.
