“And I’m grateful for that,” she said quickly. “But that doesn’t mean that what’s happening now doesn’t hurt.”
I ran a hand over my face. “I’m trying,” I said. “I’m trying to handle this the best way I know how, Prin.”
She turned away from me and looked at the skyline. “It just feels funny,” she admitted quietly. “Amora keeps popping up on my feed. Her and the baby. It just feels weird.”
“You think I control that?” I asked.
“No. But it still feels weird.”
“I’m not responding to her, and you shouldn’t let that bother you,” I said. She folded her arms and turned back to me with a scowl on her face. I quickly corrected myself. “I mean, . . . damn, Princess, I don’t know the right shit to say, okay?” I exclaimed. She looked down again, and I exhaled before I lowered my tone. “Look, I took the test already. We’ll know soon enough.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “And if he is yours, what does that mean for us?” When she looked up again, I noticed tears in her eyes.
“That doesn’t change the way that I feel about you. It never will.” I cupped her cheek with my right hand and stared into her eyes. “Nothing will ever come in between the feelings I have for you. Not space, time, or distance between us. It’s always been you, girl. I’ll take the blame. Me being in survival mode and pouring everything into my career has made me an awful man to date. I be puttin’ my life on hold, trying to get my shit straight, and I see that I’ve been going about it wrong. When I was a teenager, I never believed that I could trust anybody to love me, and you did it anyway. I don’t ever want to quit trying either. Even if that sounds fucked up.”
I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t want to mess up the moment either. I let the silence sit between us until she spoke again.
“It seems like we can never get this right.”
Before I could respond, Yana burst through the doors. “Dad!” she yelled.
We both turned. I dropped my hand from Princess’s face, and she took a step back. We both dropped our heads as if we had just been caught. Yana didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she didn’t even give a damn.
“Auntie Kennedy is calling for the wedding party to do some TikTok dance,” she said, voice serious. “Please go get her before she embarrasses us on the internet!” I blinked. Princess held back a laugh. “I’m serious!” Yana added. “This why y’all need supervision!”
I walked to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulder.
“Alright, come on,” I said. “I’ll save you from the old folks.”
She leaned into me like it was second nature.
Princess followed behind us as we walked back inside. For a moment, it almost felt normal again. The space between us still existed, but I started to understand that breaking a cycle wasn’tjust about confronting the past. It was about learning how to stay present when love got complicated.
However, it was something I was willing to figure out.
17
It was a few weeks after Kennedy’s wedding. Surprisingly, the time passed without too much drama. There were occasional blog posts about Amora’s baby and photos of me around the city, taken by camera crews, but it wasn’t anything too dramatic. It wasn’t anything I had been used to. Princess and I had been cordial since then. Nothing was back to normal, but it didn’t feel as cold as it did before, either. We texted more, even called sometimes, but it was always short conversations that didn’t dig too deeply.
“How was the studio?”
“Cool.”
“You eat yet?”
“Yeah. You?”
Small, safe things. I gave her the space she asked for. I didn’t push or try to fix things overnight, like I usually would when I felt something slip.
She was in Atlanta, finishing up edits on her newest book. I was back in Los Angeles, buried in production sessions and brand meetings.
The house was quiet, as always, that morning. The sunlight hit the hardwood floors in long, bright streaks that illuminatedthe space. I stood in the kitchen with no shirt and gray sweatpants. I poured coffee into a black mug that read “Detroit vs. Everybody.”
My phone buzzed on the counter. I glanced at it instinctively, expecting Kam or a label email. As I read the subject line of the email across the screen, I almost dropped the mug on the counter.
In capital letters were the wordsLab Results Ready. For a second, it seemed as if everything in the room stood still. I stared at the notification until the screen went black. I took a deep breath, and then I picked up the phone.
Alright, let’s do this.
