“Is it?” He tilted his head, studying me. The humor disappeared.
“Yes.”
Booda shook his head slowly. “Nah. Look how you living. This ain’t you.” He gestured around the empty space. “Remember their faces.”
I froze for a second, then kept eating like I hadn’t heard him.
“Think about their faces,” he repeated.
“I said I don’t know what you talking about.”
He pushed off the wall and moved closer to me. “You do. I need you to remember for me, baby. I can’t get at those niggas for what they did to you if you can’t tell me who they are.”
“Why? What good will that do?”
“A lot. And it’ll also help you understand why I did what I did. Until then, anything I say will be just words,” he said. “Plus, that’s part of our history, our love story.”
“Booda—” I groaned, already feeling the pressure mounting.
“Don’t fight me on this,” he cut in. “I need every face. Niggas don’t get to fuck us over and live.”
I looked away and forced myself to keep eating, but my mind didn’t stay quiet. Faces started surfacing in quick flashes, slipping in and out. I slowed down, chewing just to give myself something to focus on.
A man behind a counter came first. He was tall and slim, caramel-colored, with lots of tattoos, wearing a gold chain, and his gold-toothed smile stretched wide before the image disappeared.
Another followed right behind him. He was older, bald, with yellow eyes and a nose too big for his face. Then he vanished just as fast.
My appetite faded, and I set the sandwich down.
“Let it go,” I snapped, my breathing growing heavier as the sense of danger increased.
“No. You need to remember,” Booda replied.
Another face pushed through and stayed this time. Dark skin. Beard. A scar cut across his cheek. My grip tightened until the plate slipped from my hands and hit the floor, scattering chips across the carpet. I stared at the mess, and the back of my neck tingled.
I said leave it alone,” I snapped, because the more I saw, the worse the feeling in my stomach became. “Every time something comes back, it’s not just the memory. A feeling is attached to it, too.”
I dragged a hand across my face and looked away from him.
“And what if I don’t like who I was before all this?” I asked. “What if that person deserved what happened to her?”
I swallowed hard and looked away from him.
“Don’t say no shit like that,” Booda said as he grabbed my chin and turned my head back around, forcing me to look at him.
“You hear me?” His eyes searched mine. “I don’t care what we did, who we robbed, or how ugly shit got. Nothing that happened to you was deserved. You was solid before that accident, and you still solid now. You loved hard, rode hard, and stood ten toes behind the people you cared about. That ain’t something to be ashamed of.”
His thumb gently brushed my cheek.
“You think I’d still be ready to lay down the world for you if you were a weak-ass woman I couldn’t respect?” he asked. “Nah. I loved you because of who you were, not in spite of it.”
I held his gaze, trying not to let him pull me under the way he always did.
“Now stop running from your head and tell me who you saw.”
My breathing gradually slowed, but the ache still lingered. However, I still tried again because Booda had asked me to.
The memory pulled me under harder this time. The leather seats creaked softly every time I moved, and the air conditioning chilled my skin while the smell of Booda’s cologne lingered inside the car. The windows were tinted dark enough to hide me from the street, but I could see everything clearly through the windshield.
