It was uncomfortable.
Painfully uncomfortable.
Healing sounded soft when people talked about it online, like lighting candles and journaling feelings and shit. In reality, it was looking at somebody who hurt you deeply and deciding not to weaponize that pain anymore.
We also had to admit something ugly.
We hadn’t just been destroying each other.
We had dragged everybody else into our relationship too.
Maya. Raziel. Kael. Caine. Diamond. Zaire. Even Cooly.
Everybody had been forced to pick sides, clean up messes, hide bodies, talk us down, or survive the fallout every time me and Malachai had a problem.
Some days we did good.
Some days we argued over stupid shit and ended up on opposite sides of the house for hours. Some days he looked at me too long when my phone buzzed and I felt myself getting defensiveautomatically. Some nights I woke up from nightmares about Sasha, the baby, New York, blood, all of it, and he’d just pull me against his chest without saying a word.
We stopped trying to become normal people.
That helped the most.
We weren’t normal.
We were two violent, emotionally damaged people.
And somehow… it worked.
Now I was standing on the beach. The sand was warm beneath my bare feet. The Caribbean stretched out in front of me, impossibly blue, impossibly calm, like the whole ocean was holding its breath just for our day.
I never thought I’d go back to Jamaica. I hadn’t been here since I was a child. Zaire had finally told me the truth about this place. My momma had run away from Gao when I was little and taken me with her, hiding out on the coast. This estate had belonged to her parents before they died.
The house my momma left me sat on the rugged cliffs behind me. Some estate lawyers had called me out of the blue three weeks ago to tell me my momma had left it to me in her will. Zaire didn’t even fight it. He signed the legal papers giving me outright ownership of the property without a single word of protest.
Once a week, he called my phone. They were short calls. Him asking if I was okay. Maybe one day he’d feel like my brother for real again, like when we were little.
I rested my hand over my stomach. My baby bump was impossible to ignore now. I was twenty-eight weeks.
We found out three weeks ago that it’s a girl.
Malachai had stared at the ultrasound screen for so long the technician actually got nervous. His facial expression hadn’t changed a fraction from hard, but he had squeezed my hand hard enough that I thought he’d break the bone. He didn’t say a word the whole drive home, but he hadn’t let go of my hand either.
I turned around.
Malachai stood a few feet behind me, barefoot in loose black linen pants and a crisp white button-down, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. We were minutes away from standing in front of a Jamaican justice of the peace and starting our life all over again.
“Malachai.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of doing this again,” I whispered, the wind catching the hem of my dress. “Of messing it up. Of waking up one day and realizing I hate you all over again.”
“You won’t.”
