Then I thought about Kaseem.
I had watched him walk out of that house, cross that driveway and look through that car window at a dead body of someone close to him and his face hadn’t moved. Not one muscle. He looked at that dead man the same way you looked at something you needed to deal with before you moved on to the next thing. Processed it. Made decisions. Gave instructions in a voice so calm it was almost worse than if he’d been screaming.
Then he turned around and walked back toward me like he hadn’t just seen something that would have destroyed most people.
That’s when I understood what kind of man I was dealing with.
Not the kidnapping. Not the taking my phone. Not even the blindfold in the truck. All of that was control. This was something different. This was a man who had been built for a world where death was just another variable in the equation and he had made his peace with that a long time ago. To say that I was scared, that was an understatement. I needed this man to let me go before anything worse than today happened.
His mammy hated me already and I wasn’t too fond of her ass either. She had a snobby and privileged attitude. I couldn’t stand to see that on an older woman. But, if I wanted to get my privileges, I had to sit and fake through the bullshit. Breakfast had drained me, and now this. All I wanted was to go home.
Not run. I had tried running and we both saw how that went, I ended up kidnapped. I needed something smarter than running. If I wasn’t getting out of this shit, then I needed information. I needed to understand exactly what I had walked into — what Kadeem Carter was really running, how deep it went, who was coming for them and why — because the more I knew the more options I had. And options were the only thing that mattered right now.
I looked around the room.
They had taken my phone. My laptop was back at my house probably still in the backseat of my car. I had no way to access anything from here with what they’d given me. The room was set up well — comfortable, stocked, everything I needed to exist, but nothing I needed to do any work.
I paced the room for hours, trying to think of a plan and constantly coming up blank.
I walked back and forth, wall to wall, running everything through my head until my legs got tired and my thoughts started blending into each other. I sat on the edge of the bed. Then I laid back. Then I was staring at the ceiling thinking about my father, thinking about Kaseem and that dead man in that car and Nariyah and the person on the phone who was already squeezing me for more money and the man I’d been dating for the last six months who had no idea where I was right now—
I was asleep before I even realized I’d closed my eyes.
—
The room was dim. Evening light coming through the blinds. I’d been out for a few hours at least.
I grabbed the clothes I’d picked out earlier and went into the bathroom. I was literally in prison, confined to one room withstrict instruction. I felt like that nigga on the movie Life, I was ready to run across the gun line and just take my chances and get the hell out of here. This was too much right now. I went into the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it. I got in and stood under it for a long time trying to wash the whole day off me. The uncomfortable ass breakfast. The body at the gate. The look on Kaseem’s face when he read that note. All of it going down the drain with the steam.
I dried off, wrapped the towel around me and walked back into the room.
He was sitting in the chair by the window when I walked back in.
I stopped.
He was leaned back, eyes locked on me intensely, looking at me with that same flat expression he wore for everything. Like he’d been sitting there long enough to get comfortable and hadn’t felt the need to announce himself.
“You could have knocked and announced yourself. What if I would have come out the shower naked?” I said.
“I own the door and everything in my house. I’ll never knock. You could have came out naked, I wouldn’t have bit you.”
I pulled the towel tighter and stood my ground because I was not about to scramble around this man like he was my damn master or something. “What do you want?”
“To talk.” He nodded toward the bed. “Sit down.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. Waited.
“I know you heard everything that happened outside today,” he said. “I know you know what that was. I’m not gone sit here and pretend you didn’t see what you saw.” He held my gaze. “What happened out there stays out there. That’s not your worldand it’s not your business. You don’t repeat it, you don’t ask questions about it, and you don’t let it change how you move in public when you earn your privileges back. You understand?”
“I understand,” I said. Because I did. But earn my privileges back? This man was really on a power trip and I didn’t know if I hated it or if I was actually intrigued by it. I had to play along to make him think he was in control if I wanted to get anywhere with this man.
He nodded once. Then he shifted in the chair and something about his posture changed. Just slightly. Like he was moving from one mode into another.
“Tomorrow morning we’re going to sign for the marriage license,” he said. “After that, the ceremony is yours to plan. I don’t care what it looks like, I don’t care what it costs. You want flowers everywhere and a ten piece band, do it. You want a small private ceremony, do it. Whatever you want, make it happen. But it has to be done within the next thirty days.” He paused. “Or we can skip all of it. Fly out, take a trip, sign the papers, come back married. Your choice.”
I looked at him sideways. “Eloping?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
