“Yesenia helped me get away. She put her job and reputation on the line to help me,” I murmur. “He always said if I ever left him he’d kill me, but I didn’t give him the chance—I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him do it.”
That word I hate slips out with ease like it did when we sat on his back porch and I told him about Mama and Tony. I don’t feel its sharp edges as it climbs up my throat anymore. It doesn’t ooze with Mama’s blood or eat away at my confidence when I say it. It’s just a word again.
He grabs my hand and squeezes it until it balls into a fist again. I keep my thumb on the outside like he taught me.
He presses his lips to my ear. “My tough baby.”
“Just know that if we get on a plane tomorrow, I’ll have those nervous first-time jitters too. We’ll hold hands the whole flightand…and I’ll fall asleep under your arm until we land wherever God says we need to,” I whisper, clenching my fist harder. “I don’t want to hold on to distant memories of you while I torture myself with some man who can’t give me all the things you do. I chose to rewrite my legacy, just like you can choose to rewrite yours. It’s a choice, Rich. You can choose a different path.”
I press my ear against his chest, listening to the rhythm of his heartbeat that I’ve memorized while he stares out the front windshield with his hand behind his head.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I mutter.
A group of girls strolls next to the driver’s side window, yelping at the hissing and booms from the firecrackers while his eyebrows furrow.
I reach up and smooth them out. “Tell me…”
“I’m…I’m thinking. About you. And Vegas,” he blurts in a strange staccato that makes me sit up.
“What about me and Vegas?”
“Do you like it there? The weather…the city…the people,” he murmurs.
“What…what are you talking about, Rich?”
“I…” He swallows, swiping his hand across his face as the fireworks light up his dark eyes. “Faye said Chico knows a dude out there that might be able to train me, but I… I’d have to go and live up there.”
“And you want me…” my words drift off.
“I want you with me. I want you to come with me.” A red firework sails across the sky, and his eyes follow it until it explodes into hundreds of tiny red dots and disappears over the city.
“Why not train here, though? I know Kenny isn’t our favorite person in the world right now, but why would we need to go to Vegas?”
He gulps, turning from the bright sky and looking at me. That terror lurks in his eyes again as he grabs my hand, pulling it to his mouth.
“Do I scare you, mama?” he asks, kissing my fingers.
“No. It just scares me how much I scare you,” I reply breathlessly as he drops my hand and threads our fingers together. “But you’ve never raised a finger at me, you pay for whatever I need without holding it over my head, you feed me before you feed yourself, you make love to me, and you let me trauma dump on you when I really should get a therapist. You know better than to ask me that.”
His face falls as if I said something disappointing, and he opens his arms, rasping out a “c’mere.”
I curl my body into his, sliding my arms around him.
“Faye thinks I’d fare better with this dude in Vegas since me and Kenny ain’t seeing eye to eye,” he mutters in my ear. “She says we have to talk to Kenny about it—convince him to get Chico to set me up with the guy. I have to show him I want it. I have to show him I wanna be a boxer before he puts his reputation on the line for me. What you think about that?”
There’s no clusterfuck of emotions in my stomach—just a deep sense of longing for a normal life with Rich Lovelace Jr.
My stomach jumps.
The thing about learning how to feel again is that I forgot how jarring emotions are. With AJ, life was like a disappointing rollercoaster ride, where I didn’t feel the rush of adrenaline and excitement anymore. Life with Rich is like a Merry-Go-Round, though. We spin at an easy pace, where he makes my emotions curl around my limbs and explode inside of me from just the thought of us riding together. With him I feeleverything—lust, pleasure, happiness, jealousy, and this other light and dark feeling I still can’t pinpoint.
“I think we need to have a conversation with Kenny and Aunt Faye tomorrow,” I whisper, burying my nose into his chest and inhaling.
“You know what tomorrow is.”
“I do…but you’re finally telling me youwantdifferent, and that there’s a way for you tohavedifferent, and I can’t wait another day for you to take the first step. You deserve different, Rich.”
“But I…I can’t just walk away. It don’t work that way. I have to take care of some things first. I still have to work.”
