Undertow
My phone buzzed against my thigh and pulled me out of a light sleep. For a split second a cold shot of adrenaline froze in my chest. My security system had flagged movement at the front door and instantly I felt exposed. I was in my two year old daughter’s room, slumped in the rocking chair across from her bed. At some point I had fallen asleep watching her breathe. Those quiet moments were the only real peace I got these days.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a gun anywhere near me. I kept heat tucked away in strategic spots around the house, yet none of them were within reach right now. I was wide open, slipping.
I swiped onto the live feed bracing myself for trouble. Instead Amina stood on my porch.
“What the fuck?” I muttered into the dark.
My joints popped as I stood and headed downstairs. When I pulled the door open my baby mama looked like she had stepped straight out of an Fashion Nova Instagram post. A black lace jumpsuit hugged her frame like a second skin and the scent of tequila reached me before she even opened her mouth.
“I came to get Demi,” she slurred.
“You said you’d be here in the morning,” I snapped.
“Nigga, it is morning.” She rolled her eyes and leaned against the doorframe to steady herself.
Technically she was right. The clock was pushing two.
“The baby is asleep Amina. Come back when the sun is up.” I started to shut the door but she stepped forward before it could close.
“I’m already here and I’m tipsy. Just let me crash,” she said, her voice softening into something almost sincere.
“Why the hell would you drive across the bay drunk?” She lived in Mobile where the bachelorette party was. I was all the way in Point Clear. That was a long drive across the water to gamble with her life over nothing.
“I just miss my baby,” she whined.
I sighed and stepped aside, though my eyes stayed locked on her every move.
“Don’t come in here waking my daughter up. I mean that.”
Amina stepped into the foyer wearing a slow grin, her gaze sliding over me like she had a whole plan already mapped out. She looked good. I wasn’t going to lie about that. Still, I hadn’t touched her since the day she told me she was pregnant, and I had no intention of starting tonight.
I was ninety nine percent sure she had tampered with that condom. I could never prove it and probably never would, but I knew what I knew.
Getting tangled up with Amina in the first place had been my own fault though. She had made herself available and I had let convenience do the thinking for me. She wasn’t my type on paper. Too loud, too much, never comfortable just being still. I had always been drawn to natural beauty and quiet confidence, a woman who didn’t need to announce herself when she walked into a room.
Jamaica threw me off, at least for a little while. Watching Amina stroll around the resort in those tiny string bikinis all weekend, flirting every chance she got, did something to my focus. Somewhere between the heat and the open bar, I stopped thinking straight. The morning of Kyson and Paris’s wedding, she showed up at my door talking about needing a phone charger. I knew what she really came for. I made a bad decision, kept it moving, and didn’t look back.
By that night I had completely forgotten it happened.
That was because of Nique.
I’d been sitting on feelings for her for years and never said a word. Our friendship ran too deep, and risking that over something she might not even feel kept me quiet way longer than it should have. Walking her down the aisle that afternoon, her in that yellow bridesmaid dress, that’s when it finally hit me. I was done pretending.
After the reception we slipped away from the crowd and found a quiet stretch of beach. She had got some Jamaican bud she scored from the bartender, and we sat out there passing it back and forth while the waves rolled in. That smoke had a way of peeling back everything I’d been holding in. Before I could stop myself, I was telling her things I had never said out loud. How I’dbeen sitting on feelings for her since we were young. That it had always been her for me.
The energy shifted the moment I said it.
There was no slow burn between us. It was consuming fire from the first second. Her body fit against mine in a way that made everything else feel like it had been practice. Being with Nique felt like finally getting something right after years of getting it wrong. I fell asleep that night believing I had turned a corner.
By sunrise I had burned the whole thing to the ground without even knowing it.
Standing in my foyer now watching Amina drift toward my kitchen, that same regret found me right where I left it .
“You want some water?” I asked, forcing myself back into the present.
“I want you Dex,” she said, turning to face me. “You know you miss this.”
