Page 37 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

He looked at me.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Keep going.”

“I’m not performing for you.”

“You’re not. That’s the thing.” I rested my chin in my hand. “You get weird when something is actually personal. You just said something personal, and your instinct was to take it back.”

He was quiet for a second.

“You pay attention,” he said.

“I’ve had to,” I said. “It’s in my interest.”

Something moved across his face—acknowledgment, maybe, or something adjacent to it. He refilled my glass without asking.

Somewhere around the part of the night when we’d moved to the upper deck, and the city was a low glow to the south, and I was leaning against the railing with my glass, and the stars were doing their best, Amai told me about the only time he’d ever been genuinely scared of a place.

Not a person. A place.

“The old Storyville properties,” he said. He was next to me at the railing but not crowding me, leaned on his forearms, looking out at the water. “Near Basin Street. Some of them are still standing, some torn down. My grandfather used to walk me through there when I was small, and there was a specific smell—I couldn’t tell you what it was. Mold and something else. Some buildings smell like they’re still occupied.”

“That’s not nothing,” I said. “Some of those buildings are still occupied. Not by people.”

He looked at me sideways.

“I grew up in the Fifth Ward,” I said. “I know what old New Orleans smells like when it’s angry.”

“You believe in that?”

“I was raised to not disrespect certain things,” I said. “Which isn’t the same as what I believe. But I grew up going to my grandmother’s house on Desire Street, and there were certain rooms you didn’t run in and certain things you didn’t ask about. When I was old enough to understand why, I understood.” I looked back at the water. “There’s a house off Derbigny—my grandmother’s neighbor’s house, the one that’s been abandoned since I was small—that I have never walked past after dark. Not once. Not even now.”

Amai had gone still the way he went still when something caught him off guard.

“What’s on Derbigny?” he asked.

“Nothing anymore, I think. But there was a family there. This would’ve been the seventies, and—” I shook my head. “It’s one of those stories that gets told different ways depending on who’s telling it, but the constant in every version is that the house makes a sound at night. Not wind. Not the structure settling. My grandmother called it a cry that didn’t need a mouth.”

He was quiet.

“She made us cross the street,” I said. “Every time. Even in the daytime. Cross to the other side, don’t look back until you’re past it.” I paused. “She died before I got old enough to ask her what she actually knew about it. But I still cross the street. I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s just—I get to that block, and my legs go to the right.”

“I believe you,” Amai said. He said it simply, like he was reporting something.

“You don’t have to.”

“I said I do.” He looked at me. “You could tell me specifically which block. and I’d cross the street too. That’s not superstition. That’s—” He paused. “Some things left a record in a place. That’s real.”

I looked at him for a second.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t know you were like that.”

“Like what?”

“The kind of person who doesn’t argue it away.”

He turned back at the water. “I’ve done enough in my life to know that there are things people don’t come back from. In places, in people, in whatever you want to call it.” He picked up his glass. “I’m not going to argue with your grandmother about a house on Derbigny.”