“Right now? Nothing. I’ve got Mehar. She’s safe. That’s all I care about tonight. But I’m telling you this one time and I need you to hear me clearly. This shit ain’t over. Out of love and respect for you, I ain’t fuckin’ snap her neck after that shit with that baby years ago. I swallowed my pride and tried to let it go. But this shit just brought up all those old memories. She’s a threat to my future and I’mma neutralize that muhfuckin’ threat, patna.”
There was more silence. It was longer this time. I could hear the hospital noise filling the gap between us, all that sterile chaos swirling around a conversation that was quietly ending a twenty-year friendship. I knew he was processing the war that was to come. But I was more than ready.
“You been through a lot and I’mma let you sleep on that bullshit you just said. Because if you think I’m gonna let you kill my sister, you got another thing coming.”
He hung up.
I sat there in the dark with his name still on my screen and the silence of the house pressing in on me. I was prepared to go to war over her. This was going to cause some rifts in the business but she was worth it. Any mothafucka that even looked at her wrong would get their eye snatched out. I wasn’t about to play with her.
I had a real chance at love and a family with her. This was some shit I had been avoiding. Shit I was vehemently against for years. And for the first time I was envisioning that life withher. I had trust in her. Now, if she fucked me over like Camille or Janelle did, that would be the death of her. But in my heart I knew she was real.
I plugged my phone in, turned it face down on the coffee table, and walked back down the hall. Climbed into bed behind Mehar and pulled her against my chest. She stirred but didn’t wake up, just made a small sound and pressed herself back into me and kept snoring.
I lay there in the dark holding the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with and tried not to think any negative thoughts about us. I had my demons and shit to overcome, and she was worth going to hell and slaying them.
12
Serenity
The Residence Inn off Route 50 was not the Four Seasons. It wasn’t the Ritz. It was not even the Marriott downtown that Quest kept a permanent suite at for business guests. It was a hotel with a mini fridge, a microwave, and a shower that took four minutes to get hot, and Julius had insisted on paying for it even though I had money in savings and told him three times I could handle it myself.
“You called me,” he said when he booked it. “Let me do this.”
And I let him because I was too tired to argue and because a small, stupid part of me liked that he still wanted to take care of something for me. Even after everything. Even after the divorce, the cheating, the finger my brothers cut off, his hand was nothing but a nub. Even after all of that, Julius showed up with a room key and a bag of groceries and didn’t ask me a single question about where I’d been or why I looked so weary.
That was always his gift. Knowing when not to push.
He came by the next morning to check on me. I’d slept for eleven hours straight, the longest uninterrupted sleep I’d had since before Mega, and I woke up feeling human for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit. I showered, put onthe leggings and oversized Howard sweatshirt I’d packed in my rehab bag, and opened the door for him looking exactly like what I was: a woman starting over with nothing but thirty days of sobriety and a secret growing inside her.
Julius looked good. I hated that I noticed but I wasn’t blind. He’d put on some weight in the right places, filled out through his shoulders and chest. His beard was neat and his hairline was fresh and he was wearing a simple crew neck and jeans that fit well. He looked settled and stable, like a man who’d done his own healing and come out on the other side of it looking better than he had any right to.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“I’m fine. I just need a little time to recalibrate, then I’ll reach out to my brothers.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I just didn’t want to face my brothers right now. Besides, you owe me so much more.”
“I know I do.”
He smiled and it was that same smile that got me when we were seventeen. Same dimples, same warmth. We’d met at Ashford Academy, the all-girls boarding school in Connecticut that my mother shipped me off to when I was thirteen. Julius was at the boys’ school next door, Whitfield Prep, and we’d started talking at a joint mixer our sophomore year. In a sea of uptight white kids who hailed from wealthy families all over, he was one of the few black boys.
I hated my mother for forcing me to go to that school but in retrospect I got a better deal than my brothers. I knew I was her favorite but the way she showed it was horrible.
Julius’ parents were very well off. His mother was an attorney and his father was a lobbyist. For a rich kid raised with a silver spoon, he had swag. He wore the freshest Jordans withhis uniform, kept a low-cut Caesar — waves always popping. All the girls liked him, but he had a thing for me.
The only other five black boys at Whitfield messed with white girls. If the girl didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes, they didn’t want them. Julius was different in that way. He wanted me, a caramel-complexioned woman with deep coal-colored eyes.
I spent so much time feeling isolated up there. I had a few friends but boarding school made us so competitive. We were Mean Girls on steroids. There was so much backstabbing and underbiting that the only true friend I had was back home. And that was Ivy. I’ll never forgive that bitch for what she did to me.
But he was the first boy who ever made me feel normal. After everything that had happened at Ashford, after the things I couldn’t talk about and the people I couldn’t name and the secrets my mother had buried so deep they might as well have been in a casket, Julius was fresh air after suffocating. Easy to laugh with, always calling me late at night from his dorm, stealing time to be with me. He was the one good thing about that place.
“I never got to really apologize to you,” he said. “Not properly. The way everything went down with us, with Ivy, with your brothers showing up and…” He held up his left hand where the prosthetic finger sat. “It all happened so fast and then we were divorced and you were gone and I never got to sit across from you and say what I needed to say.”
“Julius.”
“I’m serious, Ren. I fucked up. I know I fucked up. And I know I don’t get to blame the circumstances, but things were strained between us for a long time before Ivy. You know that. We both know that. We got married too young and we were carrying too much from Ashford and neither one of us knew how to talk about it so we just… didn’t. And the silence turned into distance and the distance turned into Ivy and I’m not excusing it,I’m just saying I understand now why it happened and I’m sorry it happened to you.”
