She looked at me for a second and then looked at the empty space behind me in the hallway and understood without me saying another word. She slid out from under Gutta’s arm carefully and grabbed her robe off the chair and followed me out pulling the door closed behind her.
We got to the front door and she crossed her arms and looked at me.
“He left,” I said.
“I know. I seen him leave.”
“While I was sleep though?”
“Bri.” She said my name the way she said it when she was about to tell me something I needed to hear and wasn’t going to want to. “How many times has that man shown up for you? How many times has he put himself out there and you left him standing somewhere waiting on you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“That dinner he cooked, you sat outside his building for forty five minutes and drove home leaving that man heartbroken.” She wasn’t being mean about it. That was almost worse. She was just saying it straight the way Simone said everything. “You have been leaving Street Hendrix since you were teenagers and every single time he has come back because that man loves you in a way that I have never seen him love anything else in his life. I have to see him through Gutta, and in all these years he hasn’t taken anybody seriously enough to bring around.” She paused. “You can’t keep doing that and expect him to keep being there when you’re ready. At some point people get tired Brielle. Even people who love you.”
I looked at the door.
“Go home,” she said quietly. “And figure out what you actually want before you keep going back and forth with him. Because he deserves better than in between.”
She hugged me and went back to her room and I walked out into the early morning air alone.
—
The drive home was thirty minutes and I spent all of it inside my own head.
I thought about the first time I knew I loved him. Thirteen years old, second week of school at Westfield, and this boy from the hood sat down next to me in homeroom like he belonged there even though everything about the way he moved said he knew he didn’t.
He didn’t try to impress me. Didn’t act like he wanted to fit in at the private school. He just talked to me like I was regular and I hadn’t realized until that moment how tired I was of people treating me like I was something to protect.
I thought about prom. About the way he looked at me in that gymnasium before everything fell apart. About the Hilton room after. About giving him something I had never given anybody else and knowing even then that I never would give it to another person the way I gave it to him. Not because I planned it that way. Just because nobody else was ever going to be Xavier to me.
Nobody ever had been.
I had tried. God knows I had tried to feel about somebody else the way I felt about Street. Marcus was proof of that trying. Marcus was what happened when you let other people’s expectations become your decisions. His father and my father had been doing business together for years and when Marcus came into the picture my father had practically pushed me toward him before we’d had a real conversation.
He was everything that my family said I should want. Educated, established, connected, from the right kind of family. He was safe in all the ways that Street would never be safe and I hadtalked myself into believing that safe was what I wanted and needed.
But Marcus didn’t make me feel anything.
He was kind, he was attentive and he was genuinely good to me but still, I felt nothing. No electricity, no pull, none of the things that happened in my chest every single time Street was in the same room as me.
Marcus was fine. Marcus was comfortable. And comfortable had started to feel like a slow suffocation to me.
The thing that bothered me most about Marcus lately was the fact that he followed Street’s career like it was personal.
He followed Street obsessively. Watched every fight. Knew every record, every opponent, every statistic. For a man who knew that Street and I had history — and Marcus knew, I had been honest about that much — the level of attention he paid to Street’s career felt wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate. Not fan energy. Something more calculated than that. Like he was monitoring something instead of admiring it.
I had pushed that feeling away every time it came up because I didn’t know what to do with it.
I pulled into our building parking garage and sat in the car for a few minutes before I went up. Marcus was at home when I left for the hospital. I had lied and told him that a friend of mine and Simone had an emergency and I was going to check on the family. Not a lie exactly. Just not the whole truth. He jumped up and rushed out with me. I couldn’t tell him no without it looking suspicious.
I had rushed out without thinking about how it would look to bring Marcus because all I knew was that Melo had called meand said Mazi was in the hospital and my first instinct had been to go. The twins had always felt like family to me.
I hadn’t thought about what it would mean to show up with Marcus until I walked through those hospital doors and saw Street sitting there in his fight shorts with blood on his face and everything stopped. I could see why he left my ass. Once I took Marcus back to the house, I told him I was going to check on Simone since she never came to the hospital. It was all part of my lie because Simone was never supposed to come in the first place.
—
I took a shower when I got in and didn’t get in the bed. I had just left Simone’s house with Street and I couldn’t bring myself to be trifling enough to go lay down with Marcus. I just laid on the couch with the lights off and stared at the ceiling. I felt guilty in too many ways at once.
