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“I just got a lot on my mind.”

“Like what?”

I looked at her for a moment. There were things I could tell Maliah and things I couldn’t. That was something that I had already accepted. But lately, it felt like every time she asked me what was wrong, I gave her the same answer. Nothing. I was tired of saying it. Especially when there was something I had been carrying around long before Ghost had ever been a problem.

“Remember when we first started dating, I told you my daddy kicked my mama out?”

“Yeah, I remember.” She nodded.

“I ain’t never tell you why, though.”

“No, you didn’t.”

I looked at her for a moment before turning my attention back toward the television. I didn’t know why I was having such a hard time getting the words out. I had been through a lot of shit in my life, and there wasn’t much I was afraid to talk about. But this was different. This was something I had spent years trying to forget, and even thinking about it right now made me feel like I was seventeen all over again.

“You remember when you gave some money to my mama outside the grocery store?”

“Of course I remember, baby.”

I nodded while rubbing my hands together.

“Seeing her like that fucked me up more than I let on.”

“I figured it did. You were quiet the whole ride home.”

“She ain’t always look like that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she had her problems back then, but seeing her standing outside that store looking homeless and drunk…” I shook my head. “That shit was crazy.”

Maliah moved closer and rested her hand against my leg.

“I know that had to be hard.”

“It was. Especially after everything that happened between us.”

She studied my face.

“What happened?”

I took a deep breath because telling this shit always did something to me.

“When I was seventeen, my mama did some shit that a mother ain’t supposed to do to her son.”

Maliah didn’t say anything, but I could feel her watching me.

“She started acting funny toward me when I got older. Making little comments about my body and how much I was starting to look like my daddy. At first, I ain’t think nothing of it. That’s my mama, you feel me? I wasn’t looking at her no type of way.”

I rubbed my jaw, remembering how uncomfortable things had gotten in that house.

“But then she started touching me.”

Maliah frowned.

“Touching you how?”

“Like putting her hands on my chest, rubbing on me when she’d walk past. Shit that ain’t have no business happening between a mama and her son.”

Her hand went still against my leg, and I looked away.

“I used to think maybe I was tripping. Like maybe I was making something out of nothing. But I knew how that shit made me feel, and it wasn’t right.”