Chapter One

The mirror told the truth whether she wanted to hear it or not.

Alora James stood in front of the tall one propped against her bedroom wall, studying herself the way she always did before church…careful, quiet, a little too critical.

But tonight wasn’t church. Tonight was something else entirely, and no matter how many times she smoothed her hands down the front of her pink gingham dress, she couldn’t get her reflection to look like somebody who belonged where she was going.

The dress was soft. The fabric light and airy, the square neckline modest like her mother taught her, the full skirt falling a few inches below her knees in gentle, pretty waves. She’d picked it out three weeks ago for a family dinner, not a kickback on the east side. But it was the nicest thing she owned that wasn’t saved exclusively for Sundays, and Teyana had told her to just wear something cute, Lo, not a ball gown.

So. Pink gingham it was.

She turned to the side, exhaled slow.

You look fine, she told herself. It’s just a house. Just people. Just one night.

But her stomach didn’t believe her.

“You look beautiful, baby.” Her mother’s voice floated from the hallway, soft and sure the way it always was – like she had never once doubted anything in her life. “But remember what your daddy said. No later than eleven o’clock. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The answer was automatic. Trained into her bones somewhere around age six.

She reached for her jewelry box and pulled out the small silver hoops she wore to Bible study. Then the delicate tennis chain – white gold, tiny stones – that her grandmother had pressed into her palm on her nineteenth birthday with the words, You carry light, Alora Grace. Don’t you ever let nobody dim it.

She fastened it at the back of her neck and stared at herself one last time.

Big soft curls falling around her face. Natural makeup, just a little mascara, a swipe of clear gloss because even her lipstick felt too much tonight. She looked soft. She looked safe. She looked exactly like a pastor’s daughter from the east side of nowhere who had never once stepped outside the lines her upbringing drew around her.

The restlessness moved through her chest again…something she couldn’t name, something she’d been feeling for months now. Like the walls of her careful, protected life had gotten a little closer. Like the air in her bedroom, in this house, in this routine – Sunday service, Wednesday Bible study, Friday youth group, repeat – was slowly running thin.

She wasn’t ungrateful. She loved her parents. She loved God. She loved who she was.

She just… wanted to know what else was out there. Just once. Just a little.

It’s just a kickback, she reminded herself. People do this every weekend and survive just fine.

She heard footsteps stop at her doorway.

“Alora Grace.”

Her father’s voice was different from her mother’s. Where her mother’s was warm and round, her father’s carried weight. That pastoral weight, the kind built from years of standing behind a pulpit and speaking things into existence.

She turned to find him leaning in the frame, arms folded loosely, eyes steady and gentle and knowing in that deeply unfair way fathers had.

Bishop Marcus James. Fifty-one years old. Six feet even. Still handsome in the distinguished, silver-at-the-temples way, still broad-shouldered in his Saturday t-shirt. He looked at his daughter and she could see him taking in the curls, the dress, the purse already in her hand.

“Yes, Daddy.” she said before he could ask.

He almost smiled. Almost.

“You know whose daughter you are.” he said simply.

“I know.”

“Then you know what that means, even when nobody around you does.” He pushed off the doorframe and straightened up, studying her with those calm, ancient eyes. “Go on and have your fun. But don’t let the world tell you it’s smarter than what you already know.”

He kissed her on the forehead.

That settled in her chest and stayed there.

She grabbed her little white purse, slipped on her simple white sandals, and walked out before she could talk herself out of going.

•••

Teyana’s beat-up Honda Civic was already at the curb before Alora made it down the porch steps, music thumping loud through the cracked windows, her cousin waving an arm out the driver’s side like she was flagging down an airplane.

“Girllll. Finally. I been sitting out here for ten whole minutes.” Teyana dropped her arm and grinned huge as Alora slid into the passenger seat.

Her cousin was wearing a bodycon dress in deep burgundy, gold hoops big enough to fit a wrist through, and edges laid so perfectly it should’ve been illegal. She smelled like body butter and vanilla perfume and pure confidence.

“Okay, wait – you look cute though. Real cute. Very… cottage core meets Sunday school but cute.”

Alora laughed before she could stop herself. “It’s just a dress, Tey.”

“It’s the dress, babe. You clean up different than regular girls. It’s giving soft and unbothered.” Teyana reversed out the driveway, checking her lip gloss in the mirror at the same time. “Some of them boys out there tonight gon’ lose their whole mind when they see you.”

“That’s not really what I’m going for.”

“I know, that’s the thing. You not even trying and that’s what makes it worse.” She cut her eyes over, smirking. “Just don’t start quoting scriptures if somebody offers you a drink, okay? Be normal.”

“I am normal.”

“Alora. Baby. You know I love you.” Teyana pressed her hand to her chest dramatically. “But you went to prom with your youth group because you didn’t wanna make your daddy feel left out. You are not normal. You are adorable and special and I love you, but normal ain’t the word.”

Alora twisted her purse strap in her lap and said nothing, mostly because Teyana wasn’t entirely wrong.

The drive was twenty minutes and felt like five. The closer they got to the east side – past the corner stores and the low-lit barbershops still open at nine, past the tall apartment buildings with their lit-up windows – the more Alora’s stomach started doing something complicated. Not quite fear. Not quite excitement. Something squeezed between the two.

She could hear the music two houses down.

Heavy bass, the kind that sits in your chest. A type of energy in the air she didn’t know how to explain. It wasthick and alive and moving like weather. Cars lined both sides of the street for half a block. People stood on the porch and spilled onto the lawn.

“Whose house is this?” Alora asked.

Teyana waved her hand vaguely. “One of Darius’s homeboys. Don’t worry about it. These is good people, Lo. Just relax and breathe.”

Good people. She filed that somewhere she could retrieve later if she needed it.

They parked halfway down the block and walked up. The closer Alora got, the more aware she became of her own outfit. The softness of the fabric, the way the skirt moved, the way she looked next to Teyana who owned every sidewalk she stepped on.

She straightened her back and held her purse.

You know whose daughter you are.

The porch was crowded. People made way for Teyana automatically, laughing, throwing her name. Alora smiled at anyone who looked her way and kept moving. Inside the front door, the volume doubled and the air changed completely. Music so loud it lived in her back teeth.

Weed, liquor, cologne and sweat all pressed together into something heavy and warm. Bodies everywhere – dancing, talking loud, moving through each other in that fluid, comfortable way that people who belonged to spaces like this always moved.

The second she cleared the doorway, she felt the shift.

Eyes found her.

Not all at once…more like ripples. The woman by the speaker who paused mid-sentence. The group of men near the stairs who looked and then looked longer. A girl in a red dress who swept her gaze from Alora’s curls to her sandals and back again. Not hostile, but not warm either. Just the specific, unfiltered assessment of people who could tell immediately she was not from around here. Not this world. Not these streets.

She stood out like a white candle in a dark room.

Teyana was already hugging someone, already folded into conversation. She turned back to flash Alora a quick grin.

“Stay right here, I’ll be back in literally two minutes. Get comfortable!”

And then she was gone. Swallowed by the crowd like the water closed over a dropped stone.

Alora stood near the entrance with her purse held in both hands and tried to look like she wasn’t standing near the entrance holding her purse in both hands.

Two minutes, she told herself. She said two minutes.

She smiled at someone who caught her eye. They smiled back, confused. She looked at her phone. Nothing. She looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack running from the light fixture to the window.

She was counting the seconds when her eyes drifted…the way eyes always did when you were somewhere new and trying not to look lost…and found him.

He was across the room.

She almost looked away. She almost did.

He was posted against the far wall near the hallway entrance, one shoulder dropped back against the paint, arms loosely at his sides. Tall – even from across the room she could tell he was tall – with a broad, easy stillness to his frame that had nothing to do with peace and everything to do with confidence. The kind that didn’t need to announce itself. The kind that was just there.

Black fitted cap pulled low over dark, intense eyes. Long locs – thick, well-kept – fell past his shoulders, the tips bleached a honey gold that caught the low light every time he moved. The green shirt he wore was simple, fitted, the sleeves pushed back to expose arms covered forearm to elbow in dense, detailed ink. Silver chain at his throat, thick and heavy. Two watches on his left wrist, one stacked on the other. Rings on his fingers catching the light.

He wasn’t dancing. Wasn’t really talking. Just watching the room with that calm, calculating attention that told her he saw everything and was moved by none of it.

People moved around him like water around a rock in a stream. Like they knew instinctively that they needed to give him his space without anyone having to say it. Men who walked past gave that small nod – not friendly exactly, but respectful. The kind that meant something different than just being polite.

She shouldn’t have kept looking.

She knew that. Felt it with the same instinct that told her she shouldn’t be at this party, shouldn’t have let Teyana talk her into it, shouldn’t be standing here in her pink dress holding her purse like she was waiting for an usher to show her to her seat.

But she kept looking.

And then – slow, deliberate, like he’d felt the weight of her eyes before he turned – he looked back.

His gaze found her directly. No searching, no scanning the room. Straight to her, like he’d known she was there the whole time and had simply chosen this moment to acknowledge it.

Dark eyes. Quiet and sharp at the same time. The kind that had already decided what you were before you opened your mouth.

He didn’t smile.

He didn’t look away.

He just looked at her, for exactly long enough to make her feel the full weight of it, and then his gaze moved on like she was just another thing in the room he had assessed and filed away.

Alora’s pulse was doing something strange.

She looked down at her phone. Pulled up her messages. Read nothing. Put it away.

Teyana. Come back. Please.

But Teyana did not come back.

The crowd shifted, someone stumbled back laughing, a group pushed through the center of the room and Alora stepped sideways to get out of the way and bumped directly into a wall of chest.

“Oh-” She stepped back fast, startled. “I am so sorry-“

She looked up.

The breath went out of her.

It was him. Up close. Right in front of her, close enough now that she could see the detail in the ink covering his arms – portraits and lettering and geometric patterns that seemed to have their own language – and the slight tension in his jaw, and the way his eyes moved over her face in that same slow, assessing way she’d felt from across the room. Except now there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to look that wasn’t directly at him.

He smelled like expensive cologne and something darker underneath it. Fresh. Warm. Too present.

He looked at her the way people looked at things that didn’t quite make sense…not unkind, but completely unimpressed. From her soft curls to the modest neckline of her dress, down the length of the skirt where it moved at her knees, then back up to her face.

His lips curved. Not a smile. Something adjacent to one. Something with amusement in it, but not the kind that was warm.

“Who the hell let you in here dressed like that?” His voice was low. Rough, like it had been worn down from something. The question wasn’t polite. It wasn’t exactly hostile either. It was the tone of someone who found something strange and said so plainly, with no concern for how that landed.

Alora blinked. Felt the comment settle against her skin.

Her mother would have stiffened. Her cousin would have clapped back immediately, already loading the next round before the first one landed. But Alora had been raised to believe that grace wasn’t weakness and that the first response was almost never the right one.

“I came with my cousin.” she said, simply. Softly. Her voice steady. “I didn’t mean to bump into you. I’m sorry if I’m in your way.”

He stared at her.

Flat. Unreadable.

He expected something and gotten something else entirely and wasn’t sure yet how to categorize it.

“Your cousin.” He repeated it like he was testing the words. “That’s what you got?”

“I’m sorry?” She genuinely didn’t follow.

“I say something to you like that and you gon’ just-” He stopped. Looked at her. “You not even gon’ say nothing back?”

“I wasn’t planning to argue with you.” she said. “I don’t know you.”

A short, quiet exhale through his nose. Not a laugh. Almost.

“Girls like you,” he started, and already the words had an edge, “act all sweet and quiet until somebody not payin’ you enough attention. Then all the sudden you got a whole personality.”

Alora felt something flicker in her…not anger exactly, more like a small, quiet noticing.

“That’s not really a fair thing to say about someone you just met.” she replied. Still soft. Still steady. Like she was having a completely different conversation than the one he thought he was leading. “You don’t know what kind of girl I am.”

The jaw again. That tightening.

He stepped closer – not threatening, but deliberate. Intentional. The kind of step that was a test, that was meant to make her flinch or back up or show some flicker of discomfort so he could locate the thing she was protecting.

She didn’t move.

She held his gaze. Not bold, not challenging…just… present. Like she wasn’t afraid of the space between them even though every reasonable part of her was reminding her that she probably should be.

“You think you better than everybody in here?” he said, and the words were lower now, more direct, brushing close to her ear in the way of someone who knew exactly how the reduced distance and volume changed the weight of what they were saying.

“No.” No hesitation. No shaking voice. “I really don’t.”

“Then why you standing here looking like you at the wrong place?”

Something shifted in her expression. Soft. A little sad, almost. “Because I probably am,” she said honestly. “But I’m here, so.”

The silence between them stretched just a second too long.

It was loud in that house. Music shaking the walls, conversations piling on top of conversations, someone shouting across the room. But right there, in the three feet of space between Alora James and a man she did not know, something had gone quiet in a way she couldn’t explain.

He was still looking at her. But it was different now. Not the flat, mocking look from before. Something else had crept into it – something she didn’t have a name for, something almost like confusion – and she could tell from the way his brow had barely shifted that he didn’t like it.

She became aware of exactly how close he was standing. Close enough that if she breathed too deep, she’d get another wave of that cologne. Close enough that she could see the faint tiredness around his eyes, the shadow along his jaw, the way the chain at his throat moved when he swallowed.

She looked away first.

Looked down at her hands, still wrapped around the strap of her purse, and let out a slow breath.

“I should probably go find my cousin.” she said quietly.

“Probably.” he said. His voice was strange now. Like something had been pulled out of it.

Before she could move, his name cut across the noise – someone calling from deeper in the house, urgent and specific, the kind of call that meant something needed handling. He cut his eyes toward the sound, jaw working, the easy stillness of him replaced for just a moment by something alert and sharp.

He looked back at her.

Spent one more second on her face. Eyes moving the way they had when she first bumped into him, except slower now. Quieter. Like he was memorizing something against his own better judgment.

“You don’t belong here.” he said.

Not loud. Not cruel. Not even really mean. More like… a fact he was reporting. Like he’d assessed the whole situation, weighed everything, and that was the conclusion.

Then he was gone. Brushed past her, shoulder just barely grazing hers as he moved and dissolved into the crowd like he’d never been there at all.

Alora didn’t move for a moment.

Her heart was still doing that thing. That unsteady, embarrassingly irregular beat. She pressed her fingers briefly against her sternum like she could calm it from the outside.

She should’ve felt embarrassed. A man she didn’t know had called her out twice inside of sixty seconds, told her she didn’t belong, and walked away from her mid-conversation like she was something to deal with rather than someone worth speaking to.

She should’ve been embarrassed. Or angry. Or at least quietly offended.

She wasn’t.

She was thinking about the look on his face right before he’d turned away. That half-second of something beneath the surface – something uncertain and curious and almost, almost human – before he locked it back down and became that wall again.

She was thinking about the way nobody in this room had spoken to her like she was a real thing to contend with until he had. Mean as it was. Disrespectful as it was.

“Lo!” Teyana popped up at her side, drink in hand, grinning. “Why you standing here looking like that? Girl, I told you two minutes, I was gone like five tops-“

“I’m fine.” Alora shook herself gently, turned to her cousin, and smiled. “I’m okay. I just need some water.”

“Okay, yes, the kitchen’s right through-” Teyana squinted at her. “Why is your face like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like… you just thought something you’re not ready to say out loud yet.”

Alora laughed softly, shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But across the room, without meaning to, without deciding to… her eyes found him again.

He was already in conversation, leaning against a different wall now, talking to two men who both stood a little straighter when he addressed them. His face was closed again. That flat, settled calm back in place like nothing had happened.

Like she was already forgotten.

Like their whole interaction had cost him nothing.

She felt something strange move through her – not quite hurt, not quite intrigue. Something that sat between the two and didn’t have a label she recognized yet.

She turned away before he could catch her looking.

He was the rudest person I’d ever met in my nineteen years of life.

And I spent the rest of that night pretending I wasn’t watching the door every time someone walked through it.

Just in case it was him leaving.

Just so I could watch him go.

---

Church Girl

Chapter Two

Kash Bennett didn’t do soft.

He didn’t do polite. He damn sure didn’t do whatever the hell that pink-dress girl had just pulled on him.

He pushed through the crowd with his jaw locked and his shoulder doing the talking, catching two different people in the chest who didn’t move fast enough. Neither of them said a word about it. They knew better. He moved through that party the way he moved through everything.

Like the space already belonged to him and everyone else was just borrowing it.

He stepped out the back door into the night air before the irritation crawling under his skin turned into something he’d have to explain.

The porch out back was quieter. Darker. A few people posted up on the steps, somebody’s music bleeding from a Bluetooth speaker propped on the railing. His boys Dre and Smoke were out there, blunt passing between them, already looking up when the door swung open.

Neither of them said anything. They knew his energy.

Kash pulled out his own blunt and his Zippo – matte black, initials engraved on the side, a gift he’d bought himself because nobody in his life gave him things like that – and lit it without sitting down. He stood at the railing and looked out at the dark yard and let the first pull burn slow and deep into his chest.

It didn’t help the way it usually did.

“I came with my cousin.”

Soft. Even. Like he hadn’t just clocked her from across the room for ten minutes and then said something deliberately rude to her face. Like his words had rolled off her and dissolved before they even landed. He’d been disrespectful on purpose. The kind of disrespect that was specific, designed to produce a reaction and she’d looked at him like he was a child who’d spilled something.

Not afraid. Not impressed. Not performing unbothered for the attention.

Just… actually unbothered.

That was worse.

Kash exhaled smoke slow through his nose.

He’d been doing this since he was sixteen. Reading people. Figuring out in the first thirty seconds what they wanted, what they feared, what buttons would make them go which direction. It wasn’t something he’d been taught. It was something the streets had beat into him over years. The only real education he’d gotten that stuck. Know who you’re dealing with before they know they’re being dealt with. Stay three steps ahead. Find the crack and remember where it is.

Girls especially. He could read women in his sleep. The ones who wanted to fix him. The ones who wanted the money and didn’t care about the danger attached to it. The ones who played hard to get because they thought it would make him chase. The ones who were genuinely scared but stayed anyway because scared and attracted felt like the same thing when you were young and stupid enough to confuse them.

He knew the types. Had catalogued them young. None of them surprised him anymore.

She surprised him.

And he hated it. The way you hated something that got in your head without asking permission.

“That’s not really a fair thing to say about someone you just met.”

Who said shit like that? Who stood in the middle of somebody’s crowded house, pink dress and all, and calmly told Kashout he wasn’t being fair? Like fairness was something he owed her. Like he’d agreed to some terms she was now holding him to.

He took another long drag.

She’s nothing. Some weak little ass girl. A church girl who wandered into the wrong zip code because her cousin had bad judgment and she didn’t know how to say no. She’d go back to her Bible study and her Sunday dresses and whatever safe, small world she came from, and she’d tell this story to her church friends like it was exciting. I went to this party and this guy was so rude to me. And they’d gasp and thank God she got home safe and that would be the end of it.

He’d forget about her name by morning.

Probably couldn’t even remember it now.

Alora.

He’d heard the cousin call it across the room when she was looking for her toward the end of the night. He hadn’t been listening for it. He just had good ears and a habit of retaining information without meaning to.

That was all.

“Yo.” Dre’s voice, low and even. “Who was the girl?”

Kash looked over. Dre was watching him with the careful, sideways attention of someone who knew better than to ask directly. Dre had been running with him since they were fourteen, knew every tell he had, and was smart enough to never say so.

“What girl?” Kash said flatly.

Dre just took a pull of the blunt and said nothing. Which was his way of saying nigga, you know what girl.

Kash turned back to the yard. “Nobody.”

“Mm.” Dre passed the blunt to Smoke. “Cause you been out here looking like you trying to light something on fire with your eyes, so.”

“Mind your business.”

“That is my business. I don’t want you in a bad mood all night over nobody.”

Kash said nothing.

He stayed outside until the irritation leveled out into something flat and manageable, then went back in and handled what he’d actually come here to do.

A conversation with a particular somebody in the back hallway about money that had gone missing and the short window of time they had to make it right before that became a much more serious situation. He kept his voice low. Didn’t raise it once. The guy on the receiving end looked like he’d aged five years by the time Kash walked away, which was the intended effect.

Business. That was what tonight was supposed to be.

He didn’t go looking for her again. Didn’t let his eyes drift to where he’d last seen her standing. He worked the room the way he always did and when he finally decided he was done, he did one last automatic scan of the space.

She was gone.

The entrance where she’d been standing near the beginning of the night, the spot where the collision happened, the wall he’d been leaning against when he first noticed her across the room…all empty. She’d left without him seeing her go.

Good, he thought. Smart girl.

He left twenty minutes later, jaw still set, hands loose at his sides, nodding at the right people and ignoring the rest.

He didn’t think about her on the drive home.

Much.

•••

Sunday morning in Greater Hope Baptist Church moved the same way it always had…slow.

Alora sat in the third row on the left in a pale lavender dress this time, a large white satin bow pinned near the crown of her head where her curls had been gathered back into a soft, full style that fell past her shoulders. Silver earrings. The tennis chain from her grandmother. She looked like she always looked on Sunday mornings…graceful, modest, put-together in the way that made the mothers of the church pat her hand and say you are just the picture, baby.

She sang during praise and worship with her eyes closed and her hands lifted, the way her mother had taught her. She greeted the people around her with genuine warmth, held the door for an elderly woman with a cane, helped pass the offering buckets down the row.

She did all of it automatically.

Because her mind was doing something she couldn’t quite shut down.

It kept circling back to Friday night. To the party. To three minutes in a loud room that should not have been difficult to let go of, and yet somehow had followed her home and spent the weekend rearranging the furniture of her thoughts without asking.

She’d prayed about it Saturday morning. That felt like the right first step…bring it to God before it became something. She’d sat at the edge of her bed with her hands folded and said, clearly and plainly, Lord, I don’t know what that was, but please take it away from me.

She thought she’d meant it.

She still wasn’t sure it had worked.

Her father stepped up to the pulpit after the praise break, and the congregation settled with the specific, respectful hush that always followed Bishop James to the front of the room. He was a tall man with a commanding presence and the kind of eyes that made you feel like he was looking slightly past the surface of you at whatever you were keeping underneath. Alora loved that about him most of the time.

Today it made her sit up a little straighter.

“Today,” he began, voice low and unhurried, the way it always started before it built to something, “we are talking about discernment.”

Alora folded her hands in her lap.

“Proverbs 4:23. Above all else, guard your heart. Not some of the time. Not when it’s convenient. Above all else. That means even when what you’re protecting your heart from doesn’t look dangerous. Even when it presents itself as just curiosity. Just interest. Just wanting to understand something you don’t.”

The woman next to Alora murmured mhm. The fan in the back of the sanctuary stirred the air.

“The enemy has never been foolish enough to come wrapped in something ugly.” her father continued, moving slowly from one side of the pulpit to the other. “That would be too easy for discernment to handle. No, he comes wrapped in something interesting. Something different. Something that makes you feel like you’ve been standing inside the same four walls for too long and here is finally a window.”

Alora looked at her hands.

“And the window looks real. Feels real. The air coming through it feels real. But discernment, the gift God gives those who are submitted to Him. His discernment lets you ask the questions your feelings are too distracted to ask. What is this actually? Where does this lead? What am I trading, and for what?”

She thought about the look on his face right before he walked away.

I wasn’t planning to argue with you. I don’t know you.

She didn’t know why that had come out of her so calmly. It was true. But she’d said it without thinking, without the nervous edge that usually showed up when she was around people who felt dangerous. She’d just… said it. Like she wasn’t afraid.

Like part of her hadn’t been afraid at all.

That was the thing that stayed with her more than anything else. Not him, specifically – not his face or his voice or the way people moved out of his way without being asked. But her own reaction. The steadiness she’d felt when she should have been unsettled. The curiosity that had moved through her when she should have felt warned.

That was what she needed to bring to God, she thought. Not him. Herself.

“Guard your heart.” her father said again, quieter now. “Because the condition of your heart determines the direction of your life. You cannot afford to be careless with it. Not for excitement. Not for novelty. Not to feel something new.”

Her mother reached over without looking and covered Alora’s folded hands with her own.

Alora held on and stared at the pulpit and tried to listen with the part of her brain that wasn’t
miles away on a back wall in a crowded house watching a man watch her like she was a problem he hadn’t decided what to do with yet.

She tried.

•••

The rest of Sunday passed the way Sundays did.

After service there was the usual hour of lingering – talking to members, hugging the mothers, watching her father shake hands and pray with whoever needed it. Then home, and Sunday dinner, and the Sunday afternoon quiet that settled over their house like something holy and unhurried.

Alora helped her mother in the kitchen, set the table, sat across from her father and answered his easy questions about her week. She smiled. She laughed. She passed the rolls.

She did not mention the party.

She cleared the dishes, washed her share, kissed her parents goodnight at a reasonable hour.

Then she lay in her bed in the dark and stared up at nothing and thought about the one thing she’d been trying not to think about all weekend.

You don’t belong here.

Not said like an insult. Not said to hurt her. Said like a fact. Like an observation he was reporting with the same detached certainty he probably brought to everything.

And he’d walked away from her like punctuation.

Like she was already resolved.

She didn’t know why that bothered her more than the actual disrespect had. He’d said worse things. He’d stepped into her space on purpose and talked down to her and told her girls like her were fake. That should have been what stuck. That should have been what she was lying here chewing on.

Instead it was the way his eyes had moved over her face in that last second before he left. Slow. Quiet. Like he was memorizing something he hadn’t decided to memorize.

Alora pulled her comforter up over her chest and told herself she was being ridiculous.

She didn’t know him. She didn’t want to know him. He was rude and dismissive and wore danger the way other men wore cologne…casually, without thought, like he’d long since stopped noticing it on himself.

Teyana had told her enough. She didn’t need more.

She closed her eyes.

Girls leave him messed up. Questioning everything.

She believed that. She did.

She just kept hearing her own voice in her memory, calm and clear.

And she kept wondering what he’d thought of her words. What he’d actually thought, underneath the jaw tightening and the deliberate step closer and the flat, unreadable stare he used like a shield.

She wondered, and knew she shouldn’t, and wondered anyway.

Sleep took a long time coming.

•••

Kash sat in the back corner of a halal spot on the east side at quarter to eleven on Sunday night, plate barely touched, listening to his runner Polo explain – for the second time, because apparently once wasn’t enough – why the count from Friday had come up short.

The restaurant was mostly empty this late. One older man near the window, some teenagers in the front booth. R&B on the TV mounted in the corner, sound low. The woman behind the counter knew Kash by face and knew to bring his order without being asked and knew not to linger.

Polo was twenty years old and talking too fast, the way people talked when they were nervous and trying to fill the silence before something bad came to live in it.

“- and I’m saying it wasn’t me skimming, bro, on everything I love it wasn’t me, it was Lil Darius moving sloppy with the drop and I told him-“

“Stop talking.” Kash said.

Polo stopped.

Kash picked up his fork, turned it once in his hand, set it back down. He looked at Polo the way he looked at most things…like he was deciding rather than reacting.

“You’re responsible for your runners.” he said, voice even. Low. “I don’t care what Lil Darius did or didn’t do. That’s your problem to handle. What I care about is that money comes back correct every single time. Not most times. Every time. You understand me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Kash, I understand, I just-“

“I said stop talking.”

Polo stopped again. His leg was bouncing under the table. He was smart enough to be scared and Kash noted that with neither satisfaction nor mercy – it was simply useful information about where Polo’s limits were.

“You got until Wednesday.” Kash said. “The rest of that count. Correct. Wednesday.”

“That’s-” Polo started, then looked at Kash’s face and changed his mind. “Okay. Wednesday.”

“Go.”

Polo left faster than he’d sat down.

Kash ate in silence after that. The food was good. It was always good here. He’d been coming to this spot since he was seventeen, back when his pockets were light and the owner had looked the other way a few times when Kash was short on the bill. He’d paid that back a long time ago. With interest. Because he didn’t owe people things – he especially didn’t owe people kindness – but he paid his debts.

He finished eating, paid cash, nodded to the woman behind the counter on his way out.

His Tahoe was parked half a block down. He walked to it with his hands in his pockets and the kind of quiet alertness that was just his baseline now – head not down, eyes easy, aware of everything without looking like he was watching anything.

He got in. Started the engine. Sat.

He pulled out his phone and, without really examining the impulse closely enough to talk himself out of it, opened Instagram and typed Alora James into the search bar.

The profile came up third. Private. Small follower count. Profile picture small enough that he could just barely make out the curls and the soft smile before he’d need to follow her to see more.

He stared at it for a moment.

Put his phone face-down on the passenger seat.

Started driving.

She was a distraction. The kind you indulged once and then cut off, except he hadn’t even indulged it once – she’d just been there, in the wrong place, unbothered when she should’ve been bothered, and his brain had made it into something it wasn’t.

She was a pastor’s daughter. Nineteen years old. Probably never been in any real trouble in her life. The type to leave a space like his worse off for the experience.

She was exactly the kind of person this life ground down eventually. Softness didn’t survive out here. Kindness didn’t survive. That steady, quiet grace she wore like it was just how she naturally existed…it would get stripped away piece by piece until she didn’t recognize herself.

He’d seen it happen.

He’d been the reason it happened more than once, if he was being honest, which he generally wasn’t.

Best thing for her was to stay far away from anything attached to his name.

He knew that.

He also knew that he’d checked her profile. That the image was too small to see clearly and some part of him had registered that before he put the phone down.

He drove home through streets that knew him and kept his mind on the week ahead. What needed handling, who needed reminding, what was coming in from where. His world was full of things that required his actual attention. Real things. Things with real stakes.

Alora James was somebody’s sheltered daughter who’d bumped into him at a party and said something unexpected.

That was all.

He parked in front of his building, killed the engine, and sat in the dark for a minute.

Then he picked up his phone. Looked at the profile again.

Put it back down.

That’s the last time, he told himself, not for the first time tonight.

He went inside.

---

Chapter Three

Teyana parallel parked the Honda in the first open spot she found, which was half a block down, and cut the engine before she even finished pulling in all the way.

“We are literally running in and running out.” she announced, checking her lip gloss in the visor mirror. “I need my gummies, two sodas, and then I got somewhere to be by seven. So don’t stop to talk to nobody, don’t hold the door for every single person you see, and don’t-” she pointed a warning finger, “-make eye contact with the man behind the counter like he’s your personal pastor. You always end up in a whole conversation.”

“I just asked him how his week was going.” Alora said.

“For forty-five minutes.”

“He’d been having a hard time-“

“Alora.”

“Okay. In and out. I hear you.”

Teyana grinned and pushed open her door, and even that looked different when Teyana did it. Like she’d rehearsed it.

She was wearing a sage green two-piece set, the cropped top sitting just above her waist, the matching skirt hugging her hips and stopping mid-thigh. Gold jewelry heavy at her throat and stacked on both wrists. Her edges were laid with the kind of precision that looked effortless only because the work behind it was invisible. Long, voluminous curls – dark and thick and full – fell past her shoulders, the kind of hair that moved with her like it had its own intention, glossy even in the flat afternoon light. Her skin was deep brown, smooth and even, the kind that looked like it had never in its life seen a blemish. Full lips, a nude gloss that made them look naturally soft, lashes curled and thick. She was the type of beautiful that wasn’t shy about itself. The type that had learned somewhere early on that confidence was the whole point, and had been operating on that knowledge ever since.

Men looked at Teyana the way they were supposed to look at her – openly, respectfully, trying to figure out the right angle of approach.

Alora loved her cousin. She also sometimes wondered what it was like to move through the world like that. Like gravity worked differently on you. Like every room had been waiting.

She stepped out on her own side in her soft baby-blue sundress, the fabric catching the faint afternoon breeze, her loose curls falling down her back with a white ribbon tied near the crown. Small silver hoops. The tennis chain from her grandmother. Her tiny white purse. She looked like she’d wandered off the set of something gentle and accidentally ended up here.

The contrast between them was immediate and total and, based on the way heads turned from outside the corner store, not lost on anyone.

A handful of guys were posted up near the entrance. Some leaning against cars, a couple sitting on upturned milk crates, one standing with his back to the store window like he’d been there since morning and would likely still be there by evening. Music bled from a black Impala parked sideways near the curb, bass low and unhurried.

“Damn.” The word came from a guy in a white tee, and he didn’t try to lower his voice. “Who is that?”

Teyana didn’t even look over. “That’s my cousin, nigga. So chill.”

General laughter. Someone made a sound of appreciation that Alora chose not to decode.

She offered a small, composed smile at the space in front of her and stayed close to Teyana’s side as they moved toward the entrance. An older woman was coming out at the same time, both plastic bags pulling heavy at her wrists. Alora stepped forward automatically and held the door, taking one of the bags before the woman could protest.

“Let me get that for you.”

“Oh – oh, thank you, sweetheart.” The woman smiled the way only older women smiled, with their whole face, like they had the time for it. “God bless you.”

“Yes, ma’am. You have a good rest of your day.”

Behind her, she heard one of the guys near the curb say, “She talking to Ms. Barbara like she knows her. She don’t even know Ms. Barbara.”

“She just- she’s just like that.” Teyana called back, already inside. “Don’t stress it.”

•••

The store was small and cold the way corner stores always were. An older man behind the thick plexiglass counter was watching a small TV mounted in the corner. He glanced at Alora over his glasses when she walked in and said, neutrally, “How you doing today?”

“I’m doing well, thank you. How’s your-” She felt Teyana’s hand close around her elbow. “I’m well,” she finished instead. “Thank you.”

The man behind the counter looked amused.

Teyana moved through the store like she had the layout memorized. Alora picked up a water and stood there for a moment studying the chip options with a focus that was only partially about chips.

Her mind was still doing that thing.

It had been doing it since Friday. Since the party. Since three minutes in a loud room that should have dissolved by now. She’d prayed about it. She’d sat through a whole sermon about discernment and guarding your heart. She’d spent two days actively choosing to think about other things.

The chips were not helping.

She grabbed a small bag of kettle chips and went to find Teyana.

“Okay,” Teyana said, dropping her things on the counter. “That’s everything. In and out. We’re doing great.”

“We’re doing great.” Alora agreed.

They paid. They walked back outside.

And the air changed.

•••

She felt it before she saw it.

The black Tahoe was parked at the curb where the Impala had been. She didn’t notice the truck first. She noticed the guys near the store entrance standing slightly different than they had before and she followed that noticing to its source.

Kash Bennett was standing at the front of the store.

He was talking to two men she didn’t recognize, his posture easy, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a half-smoked blunt burning low between his fingers. He was dressed in dark jeans, a black shirt, gold chain, and a watch on his wrist. Cap pulled low in the front. Locs falling past his shoulders, the honey tips catching gold in the sun.

He looked exactly like he had at the party. Like he’d stepped out of a world that ran by entirely different rules than the one she knew, and had never once lost sleep about that.

She would have looked away.

She should have.

But he turned and his eyes landed on her before she could.

He went still.

She watched it happen. Watched the recognition move through him, fast and unwelcome. The slight adjustment in his posture, the way the blunt paused halfway to his mouth. The flat, assessing gaze that moved over her from the ribbon in her hair to the soft swing of the blue dress to the tiny white purse and back up to her face.

Next to her, Teyana muttered, “Shit.” under her breath.

Kash said something low to the two men beside him, barely moving his mouth. Both of them stepped back just slightly and then he walked toward her.

No rush. No performance. Just that heavy, deliberate pace that said he was arriving exactly when he meant to.

He stopped a few feet away and looked at her the way someone looked at something they hadn’t decided whether to address directly or ignore until it went away. He took his time about it.

“You lost again?” His voice was low, rough, the same specific shade of dismissive that she remembered. Like her presence here was a mild inconvenience dressed up in a sundress. “What is it – you just wander around the east side now? This your little field trip?”

One of the guys near the wall snorted. Someone else cut their laugh short when they read Kash’s expression.

Teyana squared her shoulders. “Kash, we just came to grab some drinks.”

He didn’t look at Teyana. Stayed locked on Alora.

Alora looked up at him.

She remembered, from the party, how she’d felt in the first second of seeing him up close. She felt it again now, out here in broad daylight where there was nowhere to hide it behind party noise and low lighting. She felt it and noted it and held it at arm’s length from anything she planned to do with it.

“Hi,” she said. Gently. “I remember you.”

Silence.

Then from somewhere behind Kash, a low voice, “She said hi. Yo, where the fuck is she from?”

A few people nearby exchanged looks. Someone covered a smile.

Kash’s jaw shifted. The mocking edge in his expression sharpened into something less amused and more focused.

“Yeah.” He let the syllable sit for a second. “And you still out here dressed like you going to Easter Sunday.” His eyes moved over her again, slower this time, not kind but not nothing either. “What, your daddy don’t know you out here wandering around in people’s neighborhoods? You playing tourist or you just don’t know no better? Why the fuck you keep coming out here?”

Teyana’s chin lifted. “Okay, that’s enough-“

Alora touched her cousin’s arm with two fingers. A quiet, gentle press that said I’ve got it.

Teyana looked at her. Looked at Kash. Looked back at Alora.

“Lo-“

“It’s okay, Tey.” Her voice was soft but not uncertain.

She turned back to Kash and met his gaze with the same level of calm she’d had at the party, the same unhurried steadiness that she could see was doing something to him that he didn’t appreciate. His eyes had that same quality they’d had before.

She held his gaze for a quiet moment.

And then she said, “I’ll pray for you.”

The block went sideways.

“PRAY FOR HIM?” The guy nearest the wall lost it first, loud and genuine. “She said she’ll PRAY for Kashout?!”

Laughter cracked open across the small strip of sidewalk. Someone repeated it in disbelief. A woman walking past slowed down to figure out what was happening. The two men beside Kash exchanged a look that was half-entertained and half-careful, because they knew better than to laugh too long in his direction.

Kash didn’t laugh.

He looked at her.

Not the flat, cataloguing look from before. Something different – sharper, with an edge she hadn’t seen yet. Like she’d said something that landed somewhere real.

He killed the distance between them in one step, close enough now that she had to adjust her gaze upward.

Close enough that the cologne hit again. The same one she’d filed away from Friday night, dark and expensive, almost contradictory against the weed smoke threaded through it.

“Pray for me.” He repeated it low, each word measured. “You sound real fucking dumb right now.” His voice dropped further, somewhere past dismissive into something deliberate and mean. “You one of them dumb ass bitches who think life sweet ’cause your daddy up there preaching fairy tales every Sunday? Think you gon’ come down here with your little ribbon in your hair and your little dress and save somebody?”

Somebody nearby went quiet. Not everyone, but the ones who were paying attention had heard the shift in his voice and understood what it meant.

Teyana stepped forward, gold earrings catching light, eyes hard. “Kash. I’m not playing. Chill.”

“Teyana.” Alora’s voice came out even. Steady.

Her cousin looked at her, jaw set, clearly not happy about any part of what was happening.

“I’m fine.” Alora said quietly.

She looked back at Kash.

She should have been afraid. She knew that. Everything about him right now was communicating something she was supposed to respond to in a specific way.

She just… didn’t.

“You honestly don’t have to call me out of my name.” she said. Simple. Clear. No performance around it, no hurt making her voice unsteady. “I didn’t disrespect you.”

Kash said nothing.

She held his gaze.

“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” she said, softer now. Like she meant it because she did. “I think you’ve just been through things that make you act like one.”

The laughter stopped.

All of it. Clean.

The corner went quiet in the particular way spaces went quiet when something unexpected happened in them. Not the quiet of nothing, but the quiet of people not wanting to miss whatever came next.

Kash looked at her.

She watched it happen underneath the hardness. Where something moved through his expression that wasn’t controlled, wasn’t calculated, wasn’t whatever he usually handed people when they got too close to something real.

Then it was gone. Locked back down. Jaw tight enough that she could see the muscle working in his cheek.

He leaned in, just slightly, just enough to close the final inch of distance so that his next words landed private even in a public space.

“You don’t know shit about me.” he said. Low and cold. Almost soft.

“You’re right,” Alora said. The same volume. The same calm. “But God does.”

Silence.

A man in a car two spots over turned his music down without knowing why.

One of the guys near the wall looked at his shoes.

Teyana grabbed Alora’s arm, grip firm, done negotiating. “We are leaving. Now.”

This time Alora let herself be pulled.

She turned with her cousin, purse in hand, the blue dress swaying with her steps. She didn’t look back. She walked the way she always walked…like she hadn’t just said something that was going to sit in a stranger’s chest all night.

Behind her, the commentary started low.

“Teyana, you better keep her in the house. Real talk.”

“Shorty said God does. Yo. She crazy or she saved, I can’t tell.”

“Both. That’s both. She deff in the church heavy.”

“Nah. She got heart. Deadass. I ain’t ever seen nobody talk to Kash like that and just walk away.”

Teyana said nothing until they reached the car. She unlocked it, got in, and sat for a second with both hands on the wheel before she looked at her cousin.

“Alora Grace James.” she said.

“Teyana.”

“You looked Kash fucking Bennett in his face and told him God knows him.”

“It’s true.”

“That is absolutely not the point-“

“Teyana.” Alora set her water and chips in her lap and buckled her seatbelt. Her hands were perfectly steady. “I’m fine. Can we go?”

Teyana studied her for a long moment. The soft set of her jaw, the ribbon sitting neat in her curls, the small tennis chain catching the sun coming through the windshield. Searching for something shaken and not finding it.

“You are so fucking weird.” Teyana finally said. “And I mean that with my whole chest. You are so fucking weird.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment, Lo.”

“I know. Can we go?”

Teyana started the car.

•••

On the sidewalk, nobody moved for a moment.

Kash stood exactly where she’d left him, the dead blunt still between two fingers, eyes on the Honda pulling away from the curb. The blue dress. The ribbon. The way she’d walked with no hurry, no performance, no glance back to see what she’d left behind.

He stood there.

The street slowly restarted around him – conversations picking back up, someone turning their music louder again, his runners gravitating carefully back toward their positions.

Dre appeared at his shoulder. Quiet. Careful. With the patience of someone who knew when to say nothing at all.

Kash dropped the dead blunt and crushed it under his shoe.

You’ve just been through things that make you act like one.

He didn’t let himself feel things. He’d stopped doing that young enough that he barely remembered learning how to stop. It had just happened. Not a decision exactly. More like an adaptation. More like the body learning what it needed to survive the conditions it was living in.

He wasn’t a terrible person.

At least he liked to believe that.

He also wasn’t good. He didn’t pretend to be, didn’t spend energy defending himself to people who thought otherwise. He was what he was. The streets had made certain choices obvious, and he’d made them, and he didn’t lose sleep.

She’d said it like she was sorry about it.

Not pity. Not the condescending softness of someone who thought they were better. Just… sorry. Like she was looking at something that could have gone a different direction and was genuinely sad that it hadn’t.

Nobody had ever been sad about him without wanting something from it.

“You good?” Dre asked, eventually.

“Yeah.” Voice flat.

“She’s the pastor’s daughter.” Dre said, not like it was news…Kash already knew that. But like it was a reminder.

“I know what she is.”

Dre said nothing else.

Kash turned back toward the store, pulled the door open, went inside. Bought a water he didn’t need.

God does.

She’d said it like it wasn’t a weapon. Like it was just a fact she was offering. Take it or leave it. No investment in what he did with it.

He left the store, got in the Tahoe, and sat with the engine off.

He wasn’t thinking about her. He had things to think about that actually mattered. Real things, pressing things, things that kept his name respected and his business moving and the wrong people scared enough to stay at a distance.

He pulled out his phone.

Locked screen. Notifications. The usual.

He put it face-down on the passenger seat.

Picked it back up.

Alora James.

The search pulled up the same private profile it had Sunday night. Same small profile image. Same soft expression, same curls.

He stared at it.

Put the phone down.

Started the truck.

She didn’t know anything about him. Said it herself. And she was right…she didn’t. She’d talked to him twice, both times for under ten minutes, and both times he’d been deliberately rude to her and she’d responded like he was someone worth the patience.

It was naive. It was the specific naivety of someone who had never had the softness beaten out of them. Who had grown up behind walls that held, with a father who protected and a God she actually believed in and a world that had, so far, confirmed enough of her goodness back at her that she still trusted it.

She didn’t know who he was.

If she did, she wouldn’t look at him like that.

And some part of him…the part he didn’t acknowledge, the part he’d trained himself to run business on top of so it couldn’t surface… wanted to make sure she never found out.

Not to protect her.

He told himself it wasn’t that.

He just didn’t want to see the look change. Didn’t want to watch the calm go out of her eyes the way it always eventually did, in everyone who got too close to what he actually was.

He pulled off the curb.

He wasn’t thinking about her.

He was done thinking about her.

He thought about her the entire drive home.

---

Chapter Four

Teyana’s room was warm and loud with vanilla body spray and the specific controlled chaos that followed her everywhere she went. Megan Thee Stallion played from a portable speaker on the dresser.

Not loud enough to carry down the hall, but loud enough to set an intention. Gold hoops and lip liners and eyeshadow palettes covered the surface of the vanity.

Teyana herself stood in the center of the room in a satin robe with her arms folded, studying Alora like a contractor studying a renovation that had gone wrong somewhere in the planning stage.

Alora stood in the middle of the floor in her soft baby pink dress, white ribbon still neat in her natural curls, and looked back at her cousin with the patient expression of someone who knew an intervention was coming and had decided not to fight it.

“Yeah,” Teyana said finally. “No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this.”

“Tey-“

“Baby Pink.” Teyana said it like it was a sentence. Like it explained everything.

“What’s wrong with Baby Pink?”

“Nothing. If we were going to a baby shower.” She walked a slow circle around Alora.

Teyana’s skin was deep and smooth under the warm overhead light, the kind of brown that photographs like a painting and in person was almost impossible to look away from. Full lips, edges perfectly maintained, small diamond studs in her ears. Even in a robe at seven in the evening, Teyana looked like she’d shown up to something.

“The ribbon,” she said, stopping. “Lo. The ribbon.”

“The ribbon is cute.”

“The ribbon is precious. There is a difference.” She held up one finger. “Sit down. We got maybe forty minutes before we need to leave, and I’m not showing up to this block function with my cousin looking like she’s about to read from Psalms.”

Alora laughed softly and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t know why this matters so much to you.”

“Because,” Teyana said, already moving to the vanity and pulling out a paddle brush, “you are literally the most beautiful girl I know and you dress like you’re trying to make sure nobody notices. It’s a crime. It should be illegal.” She settled behind Alora and started working through her curls with the kind of focused attention she brought to very few things. “Hold still.”

“I dress modestly.” Alora corrected.

“You dress like you’re apologizing for existing. There’s a difference.” The brush moved through in long, smooth strokes. “You got all this hair. All this face. This whole – all of this going on-” she gestured vaguely at Alora’s general situation, “and you been hiding it under ribbons and prayer cloth since birth.”

“My daddy likes the ribbons.”

“Your daddy is a pastor. His opinion is biased.” Teyana reached for the edge roller. “And before you say it because I know it’s coming. No, this isn’t about impressing anybody. This is about you looking like yourself. The whole self.”

Alora looked at her cousin’s reflection in the vanity mirror. Teyana was focused, brush moving with precision, her expression carrying the specific kind of care that she only showed when she thought nobody was paying attention to it.

“Tey,” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

The brush slowed for half a second. Then continued.

“What do you mean?”

“About tonight. You’ve been acting weird all day. Who’s going to be there?”

Teyana smoothed the last section down and stepped back to examine her work. She said nothing for a moment.

“People,” she finally answered. “Darius and them. The usual crowd.”

“Teyana.”

“Hold your head still, I need to-“

“Teyana Renée.”

Her cousin looked up and met her eyes in the mirror, and for just a flash, something shifted behind them. Something careful. Something that looked a little like guilt and a little like I’m not telling you because I already know you won’t listen.

“I’ll tell you who’s NOT going to be there,” Teyana said pleasantly, picking up an edge brush. “Your problem. So you can relax.”

She said it with enough confidence that Alora almost believed her.

Almost.

•••

Twenty-five minutes later, Alora stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of Teyana’s closet door and did not recognize herself.

The dress was Teyana’s. It had never been worn, still had the tag tucked into the back seam. Pink, the same shade as the inside of a seashell, the fabric a soft satin mesh that caught the light when she breathed. Thin straps over her shoulders. A deep scoop neckline. The material moved over her body like it was designed for it…following the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips, falling just to her mid-thigh in a way that wasn’t vulgar but wasn’t subtle either.

Teyana had straightened her hair and now it laid flat and glossy, parted clean down the center, falling long and dark past her shoulders. A strand tucked behind one ear. Her face was her face but Teyana had added a soft gloss that made her mouth look fuller, a little highlighter on the tops of her cheekbones that made her skin glow. Her layered necklaces caught the light. The gold bangles Teyana had stacked on her wrist caught it too.

She looked like herself. But louder. Like someone had turned the volume up on every feature she’d spent years not drawing attention to.

“Tey.” she said softly.

Teyana appeared beside her in the mirror, now dressed in her own outfit, wearing a deep burgundy corset top and wide-leg slacks, gold hoops bigger than the last pair, her thick curls freshly fluffed and falling huge and dramatic down her back. Her skin gleamed under the light, lip gloss fresh, presence fully assembled. Two beautiful girls in a small bedroom mirror.

“You look like you.” Teyana said, resting her chin on Alora’s shoulder. Her voice had shifted into something serious. “Just the version of you that exists when your daddy ain’t watching.”

Alora looked at herself a moment longer.

The ribbon was gone.

Something about that felt like stepping to the edge of something she hadn’t decided to step off of.

“Just so we’re clear,” she said. “This is just going to a block function. Normal people do this all the time. We’re going to go, we’re going to stay together, and we’re going home at a reasonable hour.”

“Absolutely.” Teyana agreed.

“And you’re not leaving me alone.”

“Would I do that?”

“Teyana. Yes.”

Teyana picked up her keys. “Let’s go.”

•••

The block function was already moving when they pulled up.

Music hit first. The street itself was the party. Grills set up in two driveways. Cars lined bumper to bumper with doors open, more music threading out from inside them. Red cups. Lawn chairs. People clustered in groups across the grass and sidewalk, conversations overlapping, laughter cracking through the warm evening air.

The sun was just going down.

Teyana parallel parked at the end of the block and turned to Alora.

“You ready?”

“Define ready.”

“You look amazing. You’re safe. I’m with you.” A pause. “Also don’t be weird.”

“I’m never weird.”

Teyana gave her a look that said we have very different definitions of weird and pushed open her door.

Alora followed.

The second she cleared the car, she felt it.

“Oh – hold on, hold on-“

“Bro, who is that?”

“That’s Teyana’s cousin. The church girl.”

“That’s not the church girl. Church girl don’t look like that.”

“That’s HER, I’m telling you!”

“Nawww.”

A guy in a white tee and black joggers actually stepped off the porch to get a better look. Another one said something to his friend that she didn’t catch but could feel from ten feet away.

Alora kept walking. Kept her chin high. Held the strap of her purse and stayed a half step behind Teyana, who was already greeting people, already folding into the block’s existing rhythm with the ease of someone who’d never once had to figure out how to enter a room.

“Teyana! Come here!”

“Oh, you came! I didn’t think you was coming.”

“Girl, you look good!”

Teyana moved through the crowd, touching shoulders, throwing out compliments, laughing loud and real. Alora stayed close, smiling when people acknowledged her, nodding politely at the ones who were staring too openly to pretend they weren’t.

A man in a red durag appeared at her left side, smooth and deliberate, the kind of approach that had been rehearsed enough times to look casual.

“Aye, pretty. What’s your name?”

Alora smiled politely. “I’m okay, thank you.”

“Nah, come on.” He reached for her arm, fingers closing around her wrist light but certain, the touch of someone who expected the gesture to land without objection. “Don’t be like that. Just tell me your name.”

She felt it before she heard it.

A different kind of energy. Pressure, almost.

Then, “Get your fuckin’ hands off her.”

The voice was low. Not loud. Not shouted. The kind of voice that didn’t need volume because it carried something underneath the words that made volume feel redundant.

The hand dropped off her wrist like it had been burned.

Alora turned.

Kash was crossing the grass toward her from the direction of the tricked-out Charger parked at the end of the nearest driveway. It was dark blue, rims catching the last of the evening light. He wore a white t-shirt, fitted, the fabric clean against his broad frame. His red fitted cap pulled at an angle, the brim low. The locs – thick, twisted, falling in heavy ropes past his shoulders, the tips honey and brown, moved with him. The chain around his neck was different tonight. He wore a heavy diamond Cuban link, a pendant hanging from the center, ice catching every available light source and throwing it back. Two watches on his wrist, stacked. Bracelets. Rings. Multiple tattoos covering both forearms in dense, overlapping ink that moved like its own language when his hands did.

He stopped in front of her.

Or more precisely, he stopped in front of the man who had touched her. The man in question had backed up two full steps without appearing to make a decision about it.

“My fault, Kash, I didn’t know she was-“

“I said get the fuck away from her. Now.”

The man left. Not walked away… left. With intention and speed.

Nobody nearby said anything for a second.

Alora looked at Kash.

He was already looking at her.

And she watched it happen. That same look she’d seen twice before, the recalibration, the involuntary adjustment that moved through his expression before he could contain it. His eyes moved over her face first. Then down. Slow. Taking in the straight hair falling past her shoulders, the pink dress and where it sat on her body, the layered necklaces and the gold bangles and the way she was standing in it all with the same steady, unbothered posture she brought to everything.

Something shifted in his jaw.

It wasn’t appreciation. Or not only appreciation. It was something that looked more like controlled irritation. The specific irritation of someone confronted with a problem they hadn’t planned for.

“What the fuck you got on?” he said.

Not a question. Flatter than a question.

Alora blinked. Looked down at the dress briefly, then back up at him. “It’s a dress.”

“I can see it’s a dress.” His eyes dragged over her body again, slower, meaner. “Why the fuck you dressed like that out here? Who told you to come out here looking like a whole snack for these niggas?”

Alora studied his face. “My cousin.”

“Your cousin.” He said the word like it had personally offended him. His gaze flicked toward Teyana for half a second, then locked back on Alora. “Next time your cousin tells you to wear some shit like that, you tell her to mind her fuckin’ business before you step out the house.”

Alora tilted her head. Just slightly. “You don’t get to tell me what to wear.”

“I’m not telling you what to wear,” he said, stepping closer, voice dropping into a low, dominant growl. “I’m telling you that you standing on my block in that dress is a problem. You look like you begging for attention you ain’t built to handle.”

She looked around briefly. He wasn’t wrong about the looking. She looked back at him.

“Including you?” she asked.

The silence that followed was exactly half a second too long.

Kash’s eyes went flat and dark. “You funny as hell,” he said, voice low and cutting. “Nah. I’m not looking at you like nothing. You’re not my type, church girl. Too soft. Too fuckin’ innocent. I break shit like you for fun.”

“Okay.” Simple. Easy. Like the words hadn’t touched anything.

He stepped even closer, crowding her space, towering over her. “Stop coming around places like this.”

“I was invited.”

“So were a lot of people who know better than to be here.” He was close enough now that she caught the familiar scent of his cologne. That dark, expensive scent that she’d filed away from the first night and apparently hadn’t managed to delete. “You keep wandering into spaces that belong to me, dressed like you don’t belong, acting like nothing can touch you. Something eventually will. And when it does, don’t say I didn’t warn your ass.”

She held his gaze. “Is that a threat?”

“It’s a fuckin’ fact.”

“You say a lot of facts,” she said softly. “For somebody who doesn’t know me.”

The muscle in his cheek moved.

She watched it happen. Like she’d said something that caught him off guard and he was angry about being caught off guard and angrier still that she’d noticed.

Teyana appeared at Alora’s elbow with the timing of someone who had been watching the whole exchange from a careful distance and had chosen this moment to intervene.

“We’re going to Rico’s after this.” she announced, inserting herself into the space between them.

Kash didn’t even glance at Teyana. “Don’t go to Rico’s.”

Teyana blinked. “…Excuse me?”

“I’m talking to her.” Still locked on Alora, voice hard. “Don’t go to Rico’s. That’s a different crowd. Darker. Drinks heavier. You don’t need to be in there looking like a whole meal. Go home.”

Alora looked at him for a long moment.

“I appreciate the concern,” she said, genuinely. “But I’m a grown woman.”

Kash stared at her, jaw tight. “You’re nineteen.” he said flatly. “And you don’t know shit about grown. Now do what the fuck I said and stay your ass out of Rico’s.”

Somebody nearby made a sound that was close to a laugh but thought better of completing it.

Kash’s eyes stayed on her face. “You’re going to do whatever you want,” he said finally, low and dangerous. “You’re going to keep showing up in spaces like mine until something happens that I’m not going to be around to handle. You understand that?”

She looked up at him. “You’ve handled something twice now.”

“I noticed that.”

“So did I.”

Another one of those silences that went on a beat too long. His jaw working. His eyes doing that thing where they said something his mouth hadn’t decided to say yet.

“Don’t come to Rico’s, Alora.” he said again, voice final. Then he turned and walked back toward the Charger without waiting for an answer.

Teyana watched him go. Then she turned to Alora very slowly. “He said don’t go to Rico’s.”

Alora watched Kash’s back. “I heard him.”

“So we’re not going to Rico’s.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Teyana closed her eyes briefly. “Alora Grace James, I swear on my whole edges-“

“You said it was a kickback.”

“It IS a kickback-“

“Then let’s go.” Alora turned to her cousin and smiled, small and soft. “You said I needed one night out.”

Teyana looked at her. Looked at the space where Kash had been standing. Looked back at Alora.

“I’m going to need you to understand,” she said carefully, “that if anything happens tonight, your mother can’t know I was involved.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“You keep saying that.”

“And I keep being right.”

Teyana grabbed her arm. “Let’s get a drink first. I need to prepare myself.”

•••

Rico’s house was a different world from the block function.

The block function had been open and loud in the way of something that had nothing to hide. Public enough that the energy stayed at a particular level.

Rico’s was closed in. Darker inside. The bass from the speakers hit lower and heavier. The lights were dim and red-tinged in the main rooms. More people in a smaller space, the heat of bodies and liquor and smoke creating something dense and close that settled on your skin the second you walked through the door.

Alora had taken two steps inside and felt the atmosphere change around her.

She wasn’t afraid exactly. More like alert.

Teyana’s hand found her arm. “Stay close.” she said, and this time it wasn’t a joke.

They moved through the main room, Teyana nodding at people she knew, her curls drawing eyes and her presence carving out space with the easy authority she always carried. Alora stayed a half step behind and held her purse and kept her expression composed and watched the room the way her father had always told her to watch unfamiliar spaces…with eyes that see without staring.

They found a spot against a side wall that had a reasonable sightline to the door. Teyana produced two drinks from somewhere – soda for Alora, something else for herself – and they stood there for a while, talking over the music, watching the room.

It was maybe forty minutes in when Teyana got pulled into a conversation with a group of girls she knew from somewhere, the natural gravitational pull of her social life doing what it always did…expanding outward, drawing her away degree by degree from the place she’d started. Alora stayed where she was, back against the wall, nursing her soda, watching.

She was thinking about leaving, actually. Running the logistics of it – whether she could get a rideshare from here, whether her parents would ask questions if she came home before Teyana, whether she could frame a prayer about it that felt more like honesty and less like negotiation with God.

Then she felt it.

She already knew what it was before she turned.

Kash was across the room.

He’d changed into a black hoodie now instead of the white shirt, the red cap still there, the diamond chain still present and heavy and ridiculous in the best way. He was talking to two men near the hallway, his back partially to her, and she could tell from the body language of the men he was speaking to…this was business and not conversation.

She looked away.

Looked at the ceiling. At her phone. At the drink in her hand.

Looked back.

He was looking at her.

Direct. No pretense of having just happened to glance that direction. He was looking at her the way he always looked at her. Like she was something that kept appearing in places she had no business being and he hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.

His jaw was set.

He said something to the men beside him without looking away from her. Both of them drifted back and gave him room. Then he pushed off the wall and walked toward her, steady and unhurried, the way he moved through every space…like he’d already decided how it ended.

Alora’s pulse did its thing.

She straightened up. Kept her expression neutral. Held the soda in both hands like it was something to hold on to.

He stopped in front of her. Close. Closer than necessary, closer than the crowd required. He braced one arm on the wall above her head, caging her in completely.

“I told you not to come here.” he said, voice low and rough.

“You did.” she agreed.

“And you came anyway.”

“I did.”

He looked at her for a moment, eyes dark.

“Why?” he said.

Alora blinked. That wasn’t the response she’d been prepared for. She’d expected another version of the disrespect she’d gotten at every other encounter. Not a genuine question asked in a genuinely quiet voice.

“Because I wanted to.” she said honestly.

“Because you wanted to.” he repeated, mocking. “And because somebody telling you not to do something doesn’t automatically mean they’re right about it.” He leaned in closer, breath brushing her ear. “You’re a preacher’s kid, standing in the middle of a trap house holding a Sprite like you belong here.”

“I’m standing against a wall, and it’s ginger ale.”

The look on his face said he did not find this distinction meaningful.

“Alora.” Her name. Said flat, like he’d been holding it somewhere and hadn’t meant to use it. “You need to go. Now.”

She felt the sound of it do something to her that she wasn’t going to think about right now.

“You keep saying that to me,” she said. “In different ways. And you keep showing up wherever I am.”

“I was already here.”

“At the block function too.”

His jaw tightened. “That’s different. Stop fuckin’ testing me.”

She watched the frustration move through him and waited.

His free hand came up, not touching her, but hovering close enough that the heat of it was unmistakable. “I wanna ask you something…” he said, low and dominant.

“Okay.”

“And I want you to answer it straight. No church shit. No pretty little answer. No grace. Just honest.”

She looked up at him. “I’m always honest.”

Something shifted in his eyes.

“You’re not scared of me.” he said. “Why the fuck not?”

Alora considered that.

“Is that a real question?”

“What else would it be.”

She was quiet for a moment. Really quiet.

“Because being scared of someone doesn’t tell you who they are.” she said finally. “It just tells you what they want you to feel.”

The silence between them stretched.

Kash looked at her with an expression she couldn’t fully name. Something that didn’t have a clean word.

“You think you got me figured out, huh?” he said, voice edged and rude. “You don’t know shit about me.”

“No, I don’t.” she said simply. “I don’t think that at all.”

“Then what the fuck do you think?”

She held his gaze. “I think you work very hard to make sure nobody stays long enough to know you. And I think most people cooperate because it’s easier. And I think-” she paused, something moving through her voice that softened it further, “I think that works for you. Until it doesn’t.”

Kash stared at her.

He was close enough that she could see the detail in the ink on his forearm braced above her. Close enough to see the tiredness that lived permanently around his eyes. Close enough that she could feel the quality of the attention he was giving her – completely focused.

Watching her.

Just her.

His eyes dropped to her mouth.

Brief. Gone so fast she almost could have told herself she’d imagined it.

But she hadn’t.

“Stop coming around here, Alora.” he said, voice rough and final. “Before I make you regret it.”

Alora looked at him for a long moment.

“Or you could stop showing up where I am.” she replied softly.

He pushed off the wall.

Stepped back. Rebuilt the distance. Put the closed, assessing look back on his face like he was replacing a mask that had slipped.

“Go find your cousin.” he said, flat and commanding. “And go the fuck home. Before I drag your ass out of here myself.”

He walked away before she could answer.

She watched him move through the crowd, until his red cap and the glint of his chain disappeared around the corner toward the back hallway.

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Her ginger ale was warm. She looked down at it.

Then she looked at the space where he’d been.

She thought about the way he’d said her name. Flat, like he hadn’t meant to. Like it had come out before he could route it somewhere safer.

She thought about his eyes dropping to her mouth for half a second and then snapping back up with the deliberateness of someone correcting a mistake.

She thought about stop coming around here said in a voice that sounded like the exact opposite of what the words meant.

She set her cup on the nearest surface, pushed herself off the wall, and went to find Teyana.

She was not thinking about him.

She was absolutely thinking about him.

And the most alarming thing…the thing that would probably keep her up again tonight, staring at the ceiling and asking God to explain Himself…was that she didn’t entirely want to stop.

---

Chapter Five

She told herself it was curiosity.

That’s what she said when she was lying in her bed at two in the morning. The house was quiet and dark and her brain doing the exact opposite of sleeping. She told herself she just wanted to understand. That it wasn’t about him specifically. It was about the questions she couldn’t stop turning over. About why someone chose to live the way he lived. About what made a person decide that being like that was easier than being something else.

It was curiosity. Educational, almost. Like a field study.

She believed that for about three days.

By Thursday she’d stopped pretending.

•••

Teyana answered on the second ring, which meant she wasn’t asleep yet.

“Hello?”

“Where does he go?” Alora asked.

Silence.

“…Who?”

“Teyana.”

A longer silence. The kind that had a whole conversation inside it.

“Alora Grace James.” Teyana’s voice came out slow. Careful. Like she was walking across a floor she wasn’t sure would hold. “It’s eleven thirty on a Thursday night and you’re calling me to ask where Kash Bennett goes?”

“I just want to understand him.”

“Oh my God.”

“Teyana-“

“No – no, I need a second.” A pause. Alora could hear her cousin sitting up in bed. “I need you to hear yourself right now. You want to go find the most dangerous, rude, disrespectful ass nigga on the east side because you want to understand him. Alora, I know he hasn’t been as aggressive with you, so you don’t know how he gets down but I promise…that motherfucker can get real serious and quick. And you want to go looking for him? At midnight. On a school night.”

“I don’t have class until noon tomorrow.”

“That is not the point and you know it.”

Alora was quiet. She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her sleep shorts and an oversized t-shirt, bare feet on the cool floor, phone pressed to her ear. She’d been staring at the wall for the better part of an hour working up the nerves to make this call.

“I can’t stop thinking about him,” she said. And saying it out loud felt like something she couldn’t take back.

Another silence.

Then Teyana exhaled, long and deep, the sigh of someone who had already decided what they were going to do and wasn’t happy about it.

“Get dressed, I’ll be there soon.” she said. “And Lo – don’t wear anything that’s going to make this worse. Please.”

•••

She wore the black Louis Vuitton jersey Teyana had left two weeks ago. The oversized one with the red lettering across the chest, the kind of piece that was effortless and expensive and said something without trying to. Black leather shorts that hit mid-thigh. Her silver Cuban chain, the one she’d bought herself last year with birthday money, sitting against her collarbone. White low-top sneakers. Her hair was down tonight – a soft, bouncy bob that Teyana had sewn in and pressed earlier in the week, the ends flipping just slightly, the part clean and straight. Simple gold rings on two fingers. Nothing else.

She looked at herself in the mirror for maybe ten seconds.

She didn’t look like the church girl from Sunday school.

She still looked like herself. But the version of herself that made people do a second take. The version Teyana kept insisting existed underneath all the sundresses and ribbons.

She picked up her keys. Put them back down. Picked them back up.

You know whose daughter you are. Keep it cute.

She pressed her lips together and went downstairs.

•••

Teyana was parked at the curb in the Honda with the engine running and her arms folded, wearing a silk bonnet and a look on her face that said she had fully accepted her role in this situation and was not at peace with it.

Alora got in.

Teyana looked at her. Looked at the outfit. Looked at her face. Looked back at the road.

“You look good, Lo.” she said flatly. “I hate everything about tonight.”

“Teyana-“

“I’m taking you.” She pulled off the curb. “I’m not happy about it. And when this goes wrong, I’m going to remind you of this exact moment every single day for the rest of your life.”

“It’s not going to go wrong.”

“Lo.” Teyana looked at her sideways. “You are a pastor’s daughter who has never been kissed, going to find a man who has never been saved, at midnight, because you can’t stop thinking about him. Tell me what part of that goes right.”

Alora didn’t answer that.

Mostly because she didn’t have one.

She watched the east side pass through the window. Streets she hadn’t known two months ago. Streets that felt less foreign now in a way she hadn’t planned for.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Spot called Lando’s.” Teyana said. “It’s not a club. It’s like a lounge, low-key. His boys own the back room. He’s there most Thursday nights when he doesn’t have business.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“Because I pay attention and I stay in my lane simultaneously, something I will need you to learn before the night is over.” Teyana tapped her nails on the steering wheel. “I’m serious, Lo. You’re going to see a different side of him tonight. Not the version that pops up wherever you are and acts like he’s not watching you. The real version. Kashout. Not Kash.”

Alora turned from the window. “What does that mean?”

“It means-” Teyana paused, choosing words. “It means he’s going to be in his element. Drinking. Reckless. Running his mouth. Treating people however he wants because there’s nobody around who’ll check him for it.” She glanced over. “He’s not going to be happy you’re there.”

“He’s never happy when I’m somewhere.”

“This is different from the other times.” Teyana’s voice was quiet, more serious than her usual tone. “Just – stay close to me. Don’t engage unless he engages first. And if I say we’re leaving, we’re leaving. No negotiating.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it, Alora.”

“I know. Okay.”

Teyana looked at her for one more second, then turned back to the road.

“The things I do for you, Lo.” she muttered.

•••

Lando’s was on the south end, tucked between a pawn shop and a closed chicken spot, the kind of place with no sign out front and a line of cars down the block that told you more than any sign could. The exterior was plain. Dark. A single red light above the door. Two men outside who clocked Teyana’s Honda the second it turned onto the street.

Inside was dim and close and bass-heavy in the way of places that wanted to set a mood rather than play music. Low booths along one wall. A bar running the length of the back. A few tables. The lighting was amber and warm and made everything look like it was made out of something expensive. People were dressed for it. Not flashy exactly, but intentional. The kind of crowd that didn’t come here by accident.

Alora walked in behind Teyana and felt the difference from the first second.

This wasn’t a party. This wasn’t a block function or a kickback. This was something that had a structure to it. An order. People knew who sat where. People knew which spaces were theirs.

She felt the eyes immediately, the way she always did. But here the assessment was different – slower, quieter, more deliberate. Like the people in this room were better at it.

Teyana navigated through with her chin up and her hand loosely around Alora’s wrist, pulling her toward a booth near the middle with the confidence of someone who’d been here before.

“Sit here, Lo.” Teyana murmured. “Don’t move. I’ll get us drinks and find out where he is.”

“Teyana-“

“Stay.” She pointed at the seat the way you pointed at a dog. Then she softened it with a look that said I’m not actually mad, I’m scared for you. Then she was gone.

Alora sat.

She put her hands in her lap and looked at the room without staring and breathed slowly the way she’d learned to breathe in situations that felt bigger than she was ready for. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. An old trick her father had taught her for the moments right before she sang a solo.

She found him without meaning to. The way she always found him.

He was in the back.

Not the main room. There was an open doorway at the far end without a door in it, a back room that was more private, the amber light a little lower in there. He was in a booth in that back space, visible from where she was sitting if she looked at the right angle. Three other men with him. Drinks on the table. The red cap still on, turned to the back now, the locs falling forward. The chain catching the light.

He was talking. Laughing at something one of the men said.

He looked different like this.

Not dangerous in the way he usually looked dangerous with that controlled, deliberate danger, the kind he wore like a choice. This was looser. Something had been set down that he usually carried. The calculating stillness was still there, but underneath it something else was present…something rawer. Less managed.

She watched him lean back in the booth, one arm stretched across the back of the seat, drink in his hand, the tattoos on his forearm catching the amber light. Watched him say something that made the men with him react. Watched him tip the glass back, unhurried, drain most of what was left.

She had been watching for maybe thirty seconds when his head turned.

Not toward the door. Not scanning the room the way he usually did.

Directly to her.

Like he knew exactly where she was before he looked.

The change in his expression was immediate and complete. Whatever the mood had been – loose, present, off-duty in his way – it locked back down in an instant. His jaw set. His hand stilled on the glass. He stared at her across the room with an expression that had no warmth and no curiosity and nothing she’d seen in him before.

Just flat, black anger.

He set the glass down.

Said something short to the men beside him without looking away from her face.

Stood up.

•••

Teyana materialized at her elbow at the exact wrong moment, two sodas in hand, and followed Alora’s line of sight.

“Oh.” she said.

Then she sat down fast.

“Okay,” she said, quieter. “He saw you.”

“I know.”

“He looks-“

“I know.”

“Lo, we can still-“

“Teyana.” Alora’s voice was steady. “It’s okay.”

Teyana looked at her. Then looked back toward the doorway where Kash was moving through the room, unhurried, people shifting out of his path without being asked the way they always did.

“It’s really not okay.” Teyana said.

He stopped in front of the booth.

Up close, the difference was even more apparent. His eyes were different tonight – not just flat but carrying something she hadn’t seen before. Something less controlled. Less calculated. The drinking had done something to the thin line he usually kept between what he felt and what he let show, and what was showing now had no softness in it at all.

He looked at her the way you looked at something that had crossed a line.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said.

Not loud. Never loud with her. But the low register of it, the specific weight it carried tonight…that was different. That was something that had teeth.

Alora held his gaze. “I wanted to see you.”

The booth went very still.

Teyana looked at her soda like she was considering climbing into it.

Kash’s expression didn’t shift. He stared at her with that blank, angry attention for a long second. Then he reached down, grabbed the edge of the table, leaned in so the distance between his face and hers was something she had to work to hold her ground on.

“You wanted to see me?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“You came to my spot. At midnight. Because you wanted to see me.” Each word came out flat and deliberate, like he was laying them down one at a time so she couldn’t miss any of them.

“Yes.”

He let out a slow breath through his nose. His jaw moved. Something moved through his eyes that she couldn’t name.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, Alora.” he said.

“I know where I am.”

“You don’t.” The words came out harder now, the edge in them sharper. “This isn’t the block. This isn’t a kickback. This is my space, Alora. My people, my business, my world. You don’t walk in here-” he stopped. Jaw tight.

He straightened up. Took a step back. Like he’d caught himself getting too close to something.

“Go home, now.” he said. Flat. Final.

“I’m not ready to go home.”

Teyana made a small sound under her breath that was either a prayer or a curse.

Kash looked at her and whatever was moving through him right now, whatever the combination of drinks and anger and the specific frustration of finding her here was producing, it came through in his eyes in a way that wasn’t filtered. That wasn’t managed. That was just there, raw and hot and wrong in the exact directions she was starting to understand.

“You think this shit is cute?” he said, voice dropping. “Coming here looking like that, thinking I’m going to-what. Talk to you? Be nice? Fuck with you? Tell you what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want you to be nice.”

“Then what the fuck do you want? Why are you fucking here?”

The question sat between them.

And she realized she didn’t have an answer she was ready to say out loud.

She knew what she wanted. She just hadn’t built the language for it yet. Hadn’t been anywhere in her nineteen years of church and Sunday dinners and modest dresses that had taught her how to name the thing currently happening in her chest and her throat and somewhere south of both.

She wanted to understand him. That part was still true. But it had stopped being the only thing that was true somewhere around the moment his face had locked onto hers from across the room and the anger in his eyes had done something to her that fear was supposed to do and didn’t.

She didn’t have the words for it.

So she said nothing.

And the silence was an answer of its own.

Kash read it. She could see him read it. She watched the way his expression shifted and then something got harder in his face. Something meaner.

“Get up, Alora.” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Get up. Both of y’all.” He stepped back from the booth, eyes still on Alora. “You’re not staying here.”

“Kash-“

“Don’t.” The word cut off whatever she was going to say clean. “I’m not doing this shit tonight. I’m not your little project, I’m not your field trip, I’m not whatever you keep coming around here looking for.” He said it rough and low and with a kind of finality that was different from before. “You want to understand me? Here.” He spread his hands slightly, a gesture that meant this and all of it and look around. “Understand this. This is what I am. This is where I live. This is what my nights look like. You don’t belong in it.”

The three men in the back booth were watching. Not making a show of it, but watching.

The bartender had found something very interesting to look at on the other side of the room.

Alora looked at Kash. At the drinks on his table. At the men who moved out of his way without question. At the way this whole room organized itself around him without being asked. At the anger in his eyes that had layers underneath it she wasn’t trained to read but could feel, the way you felt weather change before you could see it in the sky.

She looked at all of it.

And she should have felt warned.

She should have felt what Teyana wanted her to feel. Scared, or sobered, or finally convinced that this was too far outside her world to keep reaching toward.

Instead she felt something warm and restless move through her that she had no category for.

It started somewhere in her stomach and moved up. Her skin felt different. Her pulse was in places she didn’t usually notice her pulse. Something had pulled tight in her chest and wasn’t releasing.

She recognized the shape of it the same way she recognized words in a language she’d never studied.

She pressed her knees together under the table.

She looked at the surface of the booth. Then back up at him.

He was still watching her. Still angry. Still that wall.

And that was not making it better. Was somehow making it significantly worse.

She had not been prepared for this.

Nobody had prepared her for this. Her mother hadn’t. Her father’s sermons hadn’t. Teyana had come closer than anyone but even she had described Kash in terms of emotional damage, not – whatever this was. Whatever was currently happening in Alora’s body at nineteen years old in a dim lounge on the south end of the east side.

She swallowed.

Smoothed her hands over her thighs.

Stood up.

“Okay, I’ll go.” she said. Her voice came out mostly normal. Mostly.

Kash’s eyes moved over her face like he was looking for something. Like whatever answer she hadn’t said out loud was still visible somewhere in her expression.

His jaw tightened.

“Teyana.” He said it without looking at her cousin. “Take her home.”

“Already on it.” Teyana said, and had her purse on her shoulder before the sentence was finished.

Alora stepped out of the booth. She was close to him for just a moment – the booth was narrow, the exit was where he was standing, and there was a second where she had to move past him and the space between them was smaller than it should have been.

She felt the heat of him. The cologne. The specific weight of his attention when it was this close.

She didn’t look up.

She walked past him toward the exit with Teyana’s hand at her back.

Behind her, she heard him exhale.

Short. Sharp. Like something he was containing.

She didn’t look back.

She made it all the way to the parking lot. Made it into the passenger seat of the Honda. Heard Teyana get in and start the engine and pull out of the lot before a single word passed between them.

They drove for three full minutes in silence.

Then Teyana said, very carefully, “I need you to talk to me right now.”

Alora was looking out the window. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her pulse was still going at that frequency she’d never felt before. The leather shorts felt warm. Everything felt warm.

“I’m fine, Tey.” she said.

“Alora.”

“I’m fine, Tey.”

A pause.

“You’re not scared.” Teyana said.

It wasn’t a question.

Alora pressed her lips together.

“No, I’m not.” she said quietly.

Another pause, longer this time.

“Lo.” Teyana’s voice was careful in a way it almost never was. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now. I need to know what I’m working with.”

The streetlights passed one after another outside the window. Amber and dark and amber and dark.

“I don’t have the words for it yet, Tey.” Alora admitted.

Teyana gripped the wheel.

“Okay,” she said. Steady. Measured. The voice of someone processing something that required processing. “Okay. So what you’re telling me is-“

“I don’t know what I’m telling you.”

“Alora Grace.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes for a second. “Teyana, I know. Okay? I know.”

“Do you? Because from where I was sitting-“

“I know.”

A long silence.

Then Teyana said, quietly and with the specific resignation of someone who had seen this coming and hoped very hard they were wrong, “He is so bad for you.”

“I know.”

“He’s not going to be gentle with you. He doesn’t know how.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to make you feel things and then make you feel stupid for feeling them.”

“Teyana-“

“I’m serious, Lo. Whatever that is-” she gestured vaguely toward Alora’s general situation, “-whatever you’re feeling right now? He will use that. Not because he’s evil. Because he doesn’t know how to do anything else.” Her voice got quieter. “And you are the last person who deserves that.”

Alora opened her eyes and looked at her cousin in the dark of the car.

Teyana’s profile was serious. The big curls, the sharp edges, the face that always looked beautiful even when it was worried. She was gripping the wheel a little tighter than the road required.

She wasn’t trying to be mean. She wasn’t trying to be dramatic.

She was scared. For real.

“I hear you, Teyana.” Alora said softly.

“But?”

Alora turned back to the window.

“No buts.” she said.

But there was a but. They both knew it.

She just wasn’t ready to say it yet.

Because the but was…she’d looked at him across that room tonight. She’d seen him drunk and reckless and cold and commanding. She’d seen the way people arranged themselves around his anger. She’d seen the version of him that had no interest in being anything other than exactly what he was.

And her heart had done something it had never done before. In church or at youth group or in nineteen years of a careful, protected life that had kept her far away from men like him.

She was not ready to say that out loud.

Not yet.

She pressed her temple to the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes and asked God, quietly and with genuine humility, what exactly was happening to her.

God, as was His habit lately, did not answer immediately.

She figured that was fair.

---

Church Girl
Chapter Six

She woke up Friday morning with intention.

That was the word she kept coming back to. Intention. Like if she held onto it firmly enough it would work the same way prayer did. Not just a feeling but a direction. A decision made before the day had a chance to complicate it.

She laid there for a few minutes in the early light and made herself think through it clearly. Not with the soft, avoidant thinking she’d been doing for the past few weeks but the kind that circled things without landing on them, that let her feel things without naming them. This was actual clear-eyed honesty.

Here were the facts.

She had gone to a lounge on a Thursday night to find a man who had told her, on multiple occasions and in multiple ways, to stay away from him. She had stood there while he was mean to her. Again. And the meanness had done something to her that she was not equipped to handle and did not understand and could not explain to anyone, including herself. She had gone home and laid in her bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about him until almost two in the morning on a school night, which was something she had never done for anything that was actually good for her.

Those were the facts.

The conclusion was obvious.

She was done.

Not dramatically done. Not the kind of done that announced itself and therefore had to be maintained in front of an audience. Just quietly, privately, with full conviction done. She was going to recommit to the life she’d actually been living before this started. Her studies, her family, her church, the version of herself that didn’t spend Thursday nights in lounges looking for men who had the combined energy of a natural disaster.

She was going to Bible study tonight and she was going to be present for it and she was going to let God put the last few weeks back in order.

She got up and made her bed with the hospital corners her mother had taught her.

That was that.

•••

She spent the morning quietly. Helped her mother with breakfast. Read. Finished an assignment that wasn’t due until next week. Called her grandmother and talked for forty-five minutes about nothing important, which was its own kind of therapy.

By the afternoon she felt better. Genuinely better. The kind of better that came from the inside rather than the kind that was just distraction stacked on top of a problem.

She was choosing herself. She was choosing the life she understood. That was not weakness. That was wisdom, which was what Proverbs had been trying to tell her for weeks and she had been too distracted to receive properly.

She pulled out her white dress. The good one, the midi length with the eyelet detail at the hem and the delicate buttons down the front, the one she wore for church services because it made her feel like herself. She laid it across the bed and looked at it.

This. This was who she was.

She did her hair soft – her natural curls loose and gentle, the way she wore them when she wasn’t trying to be anything other than what she already was. Small pearl earrings her mother had given her. The tennis chain. Simple white heels. Her Bible already in her bag, the worn one with her name printed on the cover that she’d had since she was eight.

She looked at herself in the mirror.

You know whose daughter you are.

She exhaled.

Yeah. She did.

•••

Teyana had agreed to drive her. Bible studies were sometimes a whole evening thing and her parents had a deacons meeting that ran late. Teyana showed up in the Honda at six-fifteen looking like she’d come straight from somewhere else, gold hoops and all, engine still warm.

She looked Alora over when she got in.

“White dress, okayyy.” she said.

“White dress.” Alora confirmed.

“Pearl earrings.”

“Yes.”

“Bible.”

“It goes to Bible study, Tey. That’s the point.”

Teyana put the car in reverse. “You’re recommitting.”

It wasn’t a question. Alora didn’t bother denying it.

“I’m putting things back where they belong,” she said. “I went off course. I’m going back.”

Teyana was quiet for a moment, which was rare and therefore noticeable.

“Okay.” she said.

“You’re not going to argue with me.”

“No.” Teyana glanced over. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here. I was starting to worry you weren’t going to.” A pause. “I love you, Lo. I should’ve said earlier – the Lando’s thing was too far. I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

Alora looked at her. “I asked you to.”

“I know. I still shouldn’t have.” Teyana’s jaw was set in the specific way it got when she’d decided something. “You were right about needing to step back from it. He’s not-” She stopped. Started over. “The version of him you saw last night is the real version. Not a bad night, not just the liquor. That’s who he is. And who he is would eat who you are and not feel anything about it.”

Alora thought about that.

About the crack she’d seen in him at Lando’s. That half second of something underneath the surface, something tired and real and almost human before he’d sealed it back up and sent her away.

She chose not to mention it. She’d been turning it over in her private thoughts and she knew that talking about it would keep it alive longer than it deserved to stay.

“I know, Tey.” she said.

And this time she meant it.

She held her Bible in her lap the rest of the drive and looked out the window and let herself feel the quiet, solid comfort of choosing right. It settled in her chest the way good things settled. Not exciting, not charged with that terrifying electricity she’d been chasing, but warm and real and actually hers.

This was the right choice.

She was sure of it.

•••

Greater Hope Baptist on Friday evening had a different energy from Sunday morning.

Sunday was full and formal and glorious in the way of something that had been built up over years. Fridays were closer. The sanctuary half full, the lights a little softer, the people sitting near each other the way people sat when they weren’t performing worship but actually in it. The Bible study group was mostly women, a handful of men, the usual faces she knew by name.

She settled in her seat and opened her Bible and felt her shoulders come down from somewhere near her ears.

This. This was where she belonged. This quiet, this community, this specific peace that didn’t require her to be anything other than exactly what she was.

The study moved through Proverbs 4 – which at this point felt less like coincidence and more like God having a very specific sense of humor – and she wrote notes in the margins and asked a question that made one of the older women smile approvingly and genuinely lost herself in it for an hour in a way that felt like coming home.

By the time it wrapped up she felt clean.

Not fixed. Not like the last month hadn’t happened. But clean, the way she used to feel after a long honest prayer. Like something had been set back in alignment.

She walked out to the parking lot chatting with a girl from the youth group about a community outreach project, her Bible tucked under her arm, the warm evening air moving soft through her curls.

Teyana fell into step beside her from the side door, scrolling her phone.

She was about to say something about the outreach project when Teyana stopped walking.

Just stopped. Like a wall had appeared in front of her.

“Teyana-“

“Oh he is sick.” Teyana’s voice came out strangled. Not loud, almost involuntary. “He is actually, genuinely, clinically sick.”

Alora followed her cousin’s gaze across the parking lot.

The black Tahoe was parked at the far end, sideways near the curb the way a vehicle parked when it wasn’t planning on staying long. The windows were tinted. The engine was off. The driver’s side door was open.

Kash was leaning against it with one shoulder dropped against the frame, arms loose, a blunt burning low between two fingers. Blue cap. Chains. The locs falling past his shoulders. Dark jeans and a black tee. Every piece of him arranged in the specific way of someone who had arrived exactly when they meant to and was not in any kind of hurry.

In the church parking lot.

On a Friday night.

While Bible study was letting out.

The girl from the youth group said something. Alora didn’t hear it. She murmured something back that she hoped was coherent and the girl moved on toward her own car, and for a moment Alora just stood there with Teyana beside her and the warm evening air moving through her curls and her Bible under her arm and something cold moving slowly down her spine.

“He looked you up.” Teyana said quietly.

“What?”

“He didn’t wander here, Lo. He doesn’t just wander. He looked up your church.”

The cold thing moved deeper.

She made herself take a breath. Made herself walk forward. Her heels clicked against the pavement in a way that suddenly felt very loud and very slow.

He saw her coming.

He was already watching – had probably been watching since they came through the door – with that same flat, calm attention he brought to everything. His eyes tracked her across the parking lot and she watched him do that thing he always did. Reading her.

She stopped a reasonable distance away.

He looked her up and down.

From the soft curls to the white eyelet dress to the heels to the Bible tucked under her arm. Slow. Deliberate. The same way he’d looked at the pink dress, at the jersey and shorts, at every version of her he’d catalogued so far. Except this time something else moved through it…something colder, meaner.

His mouth curved. Not a smile. That thing adjacent to one, the one that carried pure mockery.

“This the version your daddy gets,” he said, voice flat and cold. “Cute. Real fuckin’ holy.”

Not a question. Said like he’d found something out and it amused him in the worst way.

Alora kept her face calm. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah?” He took a long drag of the blunt, exhaled slow, not looking away from her. “Why the fuck not?”

“This is a church parking lot.”

“I can see that.”

“On a Friday night.”

“Mm.” He turned the blunt in his fingers. “You done telling me things I already know, church girl?”

Behind her she could hear Teyana making a sound that was being held back from being a full sentence by sheer will.

“Kash.” Alora kept her voice even. “This is my father’s church. This is-” She stopped. Started over. “You can’t be here.”

He pushed off the Tahoe in that unhurried, dominant way he had. Not rushing anything, just moving because he’d decided the conversation was happening on his terms and stood up to his full height. The chain caught the parking lot lights. Two watches. Rings. Tattoos on full display.

“You came to my world twice, Lo.” he said, voice low and cutting. “You showed up at spots you had no business being. Sat in rooms you knew you shouldn’t be in.” He took another slow pull. “Don’t stand here looking scared now that I stepped foot in yours. I go where the fuck I want.”

“I’m not scared.”

“You got your Bible held like a shield.” His eyes flicked to it, then back to her face. Cold. “Cute.”

She looked down. She was holding it pressed against her chest without having decided to do that.

She lowered it.

He watched her lower it and something meaner moved through his expression.

“I want to go,” she said. “Please move.”

“I’m not in your way.” He wasn’t. Technically. But he was Kash Bennett in the parking lot of her father’s church and the world felt approximately four feet wide right now and none of those feet felt clear.

She started walking anyway.

He fell into step beside her.

Not touching her. Not grabbing her arm. Just there. Beside her. Matching her pace with that calm, total dominance. His presence pressed against the side of her space like a threat she couldn’t outrun.

She kept walking.

“I wanted to see it,” he said, conversational in tone but nothing kind about it. “Your world. The little safe bubble that made you this soft, obedient, Bible-carrying version of yourself.”

She kept walking. “And?”

“And I wanted to see how you walk through it.” A pause. “Whether you’re the same obedient little church girl when nobody’s watching.”

She stopped.

She hadn’t planned to. It just happened. Her feet stopped and she turned to look at him standing there beside her in this parking lot that smelled like cut grass and the memory of every Friday night she’d spent here, this man who belonged so completely to a different world that the contrast was almost violent.

“Am I?” she asked. “The same?”

He looked at her for a moment, eyes flat.

“Yeah,” he said, and there was nothing warm in it. “That’s what I thought. Still the same fragile little thing pretending the world can’t touch her.”

She didn’t know what to do with that so she started walking again.

He stayed beside her.

“You think coming here does something,” she said, keeping her eyes forward. “Like seeing this changes what I am or what I think or how I look at you.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“Why not.”

“Because I’m not impressed or scared by either world, Kash.” she said. “Yours or mine. I’m just – in them. I’m just a person in them.”

He was quiet for a few steps.

“A person in them,” he repeated, voice colder. “Dressed like that.”

“This is what I wear to Bible study.”

“I know what it is.” His voice had shifted by a degree. Quieter. Meaner. “That’s not what I meant.”

She glanced at him.

He was looking forward now, the blunt down to almost nothing, jaw set like he was deciding how much more of her he was willing to tolerate.

In the lot of her father’s church.

The absurdity of it should have made her angry. She’d told herself she was done. She’d put on the white dress and picked up the Bible and driven here with intention and spent an hour in the Word and felt clean and good and put back together.

She could feel all of that starting to complicate itself.

“I should go back.” she said.

“To who?”

“Teyana. My-” She glanced back. Teyana was standing by the Honda with her arms folded and an expression on her face that could only be described as deeply pained. “My cousin.”

“She can wait.”

“Kash.”

“I’m not keeping you.” He stopped walking. She stopped too, half a step ahead of him, and turned. He was looking at her with that heavy, flat attention. No warmth, no mercy, just cold possession. “You said something to me last night.”

She held still.

“At Lando’s.” He looked at her.

She knew exactly what he was referring to. She’d been hoping, quietly and somewhat desperately, that the drinking had blurred it for him. That it had passed through without sticking.

She could tell from his face that it had stuck.

“You said you weren’t trying to survive me.” He tilted his head, just slightly. “What the fuck did that mean.”

“It meant what it said.”

“Say it again.”

She held his gaze. Kept her voice even. “I meant that I wasn’t looking at you like something to get away from. I was looking at you like something-” She paused. Chose the word carefully. “-worth going toward.”

The silence stretched.

Somewhere across the parking lot a car started. A woman called out a goodbye. The ordinary sounds of the ordinary world her ordinary life was made of.

Kash looked at her.

Something moved through his expression that was different from anything she’d gotten before.

He stepped closer.

Not crowding her the way he usually did. This was different. This was close in a way that wasn’t a test. This was ownership.

“Careful,” he said, and his voice was low, rough, and stripped down to pure dominance. “You keep talking like that, church girl-” His eyes stayed on hers, dark and direct and utterly without warmth, “-I’ma start treating you like you meant it. And I don’t play nice when I take something I want.”

The words landed and sat there.

Not a threat exactly. Not a promise. Something in between that was heavier than either one – cold, final, and completely in control.

Alora felt it move through her the same way the last few weeks had been moving through her. Warm and low and deeply inconvenient, starting somewhere in her chest and traveling before she could stop it.

She did not step back.

She knew she should. Everything in her…everything her father had built and her mother had prayed over and her grandmother had spoken into her and God had planted was pointing at the exit.

She did not step back.

“Maybe I did mean it.” she said quietly.

His jaw tightened so hard she could see it.

He looked at her for a long, still moment.

Then he took one controlled step back.

Then another.

He turned away from her and pulled open the driver’s side door of the Tahoe in one motion, smooth and fast, the movement of someone who was removing himself from a situation before he did something he hadn’t decided to do yet.

“Go back to your cousin.” he said. Not looking at her. The door was half open between them, his hand on the top of the frame, knuckles tight. “Now.”

“Kash-“

“Alora.” His voice was quiet and had all its teeth in it. “Go back to your cousin. Go back inside your daddy’s church. And stop saying shit to me you can’t take back.” He looked at her over the top of the door then, one last time. Eyes dark and settled and burning with something she didn’t have a name for. “Because I don’t give them back.”

He got in.

The door closed.

She stood in the parking lot of Greater Hope Baptist Church in her white eyelet dress with her Bible in her hands and her pearl earrings and her soft curls and watched the black Tahoe pull out slow, no rush, no hurry, and ease into the street.

She watched the taillights until they turned the corner and disappeared.

She stood there for another few seconds after that.

Then Teyana was beside her, appearing without sound like she’d been waiting at a careful distance the whole time, which she had.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“Lo.” Teyana said finally.

“I know.”

“You were recommitting.”

“I know.”

“White dress. Pearl earrings. Bible.”

“Teyana.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. More honest than she intended. “I know.”

Teyana looked at the empty street where the Tahoe had been.

“He found your church, Alora.” she said.

“I know.”

“He looked it up. He came here on purpose.”

“I know.”

“To see you.”

Alora pressed her free hand briefly against her neck. The warmth was still there. Stubborn and specific and completely uninterested in her intentions.

“He said he wanted to see what kind of place made me the way I am.” she said quietly.

Teyana absorbed that.

“And?” she said. “What did he decide?”

Alora thought about the moment he’d said that’s what I thought.About the way it had come out without warmth. About the way he’d stepped back like the words had come too close to something he kept further from people than that.

About I’ma start treating you like you meant it in that low, dominant voice standing in the parking lot of her father’s church.

She thought about the way he’d driven away.

Fast. Like he needed to.

“I don’t know.” she said.

But somewhere underneath the words, quiet and stubborn and not quite ready to be spoken yet, she thought maybe she did.

Teyana looked at her.

“You’re not recommitting, are you?” she said.

Alora looked at the corner where the car had been.

She thought about the white dress and the intention she’d woken up with and the hour in the Word that had felt like coming home.

She thought about the way he’d said her name like it cost him something. The way he’d warned her like he already owned the consequence.

“I’m trying,Tey.” she said. And that, at least, was completely true.

Teyana took her arm gently.

“Lord have mercy on you, Lo.” she said under her breath.

“I’ve been praying for that too.” Alora said.

“Pray harder.”

---

Church Girl
Chapter Seven

She told herself it was about the apology.

That was the version she repeated in her head while she was getting dressed, while she was doing her hair, while she was standing in front of the mirror trying to decide if what she was putting on was appropriate for what she was telling herself this was.

An apology. Simple. Clean. That was all.

She owed him one, she’d decided. She’d spent the last two days turning it over from every angle and kept arriving at the same conclusion. She had gone into his spaces uninvited, twice, and said things that weren’t hers to say yet, things that had made him get into that Tahoe and drive away fast like he was fighting something he hadn’t asked to fight. That wasn’t fair to him. Whatever this was, whatever she’d been pulling him into with her soft eyes and her steady voice and her I’m still not leaving and that wasn’t fair.

She just wanted to say sorry.

That was the version she was working with.

She did not examine it closely enough to find the other version underneath it.

She didn’t call Teyana.

That was the decision that separated this from everything else she’d done in the last month. Every other time she’d had sense enough to bring Teyana along. To use her cousin as both navigation and conscience, the person who would grab her arm when she was about to go somewhere she couldn’t come back from. Teyana was the buffer. Teyana was the voice of God when God’s actual voice was being drowned out by something she didn’t have a name for yet.

She didn’t call her because she already knew what Teyana would say.

She knew it the same way she knew her own heartbeat.

No. Absolutely the fuck not. That’s a big no. Pray about it, Lo.

So she didn’t call.

She stood in the mirror and looked at herself. The True Religion crop tee, white with the red and navy lettering across the chest, Baddie Tour spelled out below it in rhinestones that caught the light when she moved. Low-rise jeans, light wash, sitting right at her hips. The hem of the tee stopping high enough that a strip of her stomach showed. Her hair fell straight and glossy, parted in the middle. French tip nails. The iced watch on her wrist. The small red bag that had been an impulse buy she still wasn’t fully at peace with.

This was something Teyana would wear.

That was the point.

She looked like a different girl from the one in the white eyelet dress on Friday night.

She looked like somebody who had been slowly moving toward something and hadn’t decided yet whether to admit it.

She picked up the red bag.

She went out before she could talk herself back in.

•••

The spot was called Ray’s.

It was a late-night food place that operated all day Saturday and Sunday. They were known for their jerk chicken, rice, wings, the kind of food that smelled like a whole neighborhood when you walked past the exhaust fan outside. Small inside. Maybe twenty tables, a counter up front, a television mounted in the corner usually playing sports. The kind of place with regulars and plastic menus and styrofoam cups that had survived longer than most of the businesses around it.

Teyana had mentioned it once, casually. Thrown out as information, not an invitation. The kind of detail that had settled into the back of Alora’s memory and stayed there without her deciding to keep it.

She found parking half a block down and sat in the car for a moment.

The street was busy. People moving past, music from a car further down, kids on the sidewalk across the street. Normal Saturday energy. The kind of regular, unhurried life that existed around the edges of everything she’d been chasing for the last month.

She looked at Ray’s through the windshield.

Just go in, say what you came to say, and leave.

She got out of the car.

The smell hit her first. The deep comfort smell of food that had been made the same way for decades. The place was packed, the kind of Saturday crowd that filled every table and spilled commentary between them. The TV in the corner was showing a game. Someone near the window was laughing too loud at something on their phone. Two older men at the counter were in a debate that had clearly been going for at least half an hour.

She stepped fully inside.

Felt the eyes.

That was the thing that had stopped being surprising. The way she registered in rooms now. Not just in Kash’s world, but anywhere that wasn’t the controlled environment of church or school or home. She’d started to notice it more clearly, the way attention moved toward her before she’d decided anything about herself in a given room.

She straightened up and looked around.

She was looking for the locs. Looking for the chain. Looking for the particular gravitational pull she’d learned to identify before she even located the source of it.

She found him.

Booth near the back right wall.

And her heart did the thing it always did when she found him. Except this time it completed differently. Because this time, in the second her eyes landed on him, they also landed on everything else in the frame.

He was sitting in the booth with his arm along the back of it. He was relaxed, loose, a version of him she hadn’t seen before. He was wearing a black t-shirt, fitted and simple, tattoos out on both arms, a black checkered beanie pulled back on his head so his locs fell free underneath it in thick, heavy ropes past his shoulders. The Cuban link at his throat. One watch. He was smiling – actually smiling, the real version, the one she’d never seen pointed in her direction, the kind that showed teeth and reached his eyes and made him look for a fraction of a second like a completely different person.

She had never seen him smile like that.

She should have had a few more seconds to absorb that information before the rest of it hit.

She didn’t get them.

Because the smile was directed at the woman beside him.

She was in the booth on the same side as him, and close was too neutral a word for the distance between them. She was pressed into his space the way someone pressed into space they’d been given permission to occupy. Light-skinned, beautiful in the specific way that announced itself. Long dark hair blown out and curled at the ends, full lips with a nude gloss, contoured in the careful way of someone who spent time on their face and meant for it to be noticed. A lavender bodycon top that left nothing ambiguous about her figure. Diamond ring on her right hand, iced watch on her wrist, a blue LV bag sitting on the seat beside her. Tattooed hand resting on Kash’s forearm.

Touching his arm.

Like she was used to being allowed to do that.

Like it was the kind of thing that happened in the normal course of existing near him.

The woman laughed at something. It was loud, easy, the laugh of someone completely comfortable and leaned into him, and Kash said something low that Alora couldn’t hear from across the room and the woman laughed again and her hand moved up his arm.

Alora stood in the middle of Ray’s on a Saturday morning with her red bag and her crop tee and her French tips and felt something she had absolutely no business feeling hit her somewhere between her chest and her stomach.

She should leave.

The thought was clear and obvious and appeared without being summoned, the way correct thoughts sometimes did before everything else got in the way.

She should turn around right now. Walk back to her car. Drive home. Text Teyana and say absolutely nothing about where she’d been. Go to church tomorrow. Recommit. Meaning it this time.

She should leave.

She did not leave.

Her feet did the opposite. They took two steps further into the restaurant, moving to the side near the counter, putting something solid at her back while she figured out what to do with herself.

Which is when Kash looked up.

He had that thing…she’d noticed it every time. The awareness that didn’t require effort. He scanned the room without appearing to do it, took in everything without appearing to look. And his eyes, sweeping from right to left across the space with the practiced ease of someone who had made it a survival habit, found her.

He went still.

The smile stayed on his face for exactly one second after his eyes landed on her. Just long enough for her to see it while it was still there and then it was gone.

Not faded. Gone. The way a light went out when you cut the power.

His jaw set.

The woman beside him felt the change in him without understanding the cause. She looked up at his face, then followed his eyeline across the room, and found Alora.

She looked Alora up and down with the flat, practiced assessment of a woman who had been in enough situations to know immediately what kind of situation this was.

Alora made herself hold still.

Made herself not look away first.

Made herself breathe.

Kash said something to the woman beside him. It was short, quiet, not looking at her when he said it. The woman’s expression shifted. She picked up her bag from the seat beside her, said something back that carried an edge Alora could read even from across the room, and slid out of the booth.

She walked past Alora on the way toward the counter.

The look she gave her was not warm.

Alora held still and let it pass.

Across the restaurant, Kash was already standing. He picked up his phone off the table, pocketed it. Dropped some bills beside his food without looking at them. And started walking toward her.

No rush.

No performance.

All teeth and no smile.

The closer he got the more the air changed. She felt it the way she always felt it when he was coming toward her, that atmospheric pressure that preceded him and arrived before he did. Except today it was different. Today it was all wrong-side energy. The smile she’d seen – the real one, the one that had been there for someone else – had packed up completely and what replaced it was something she’d seen before but never quite like this. Never this controlled and this close to losing the control at the same time.

He stopped in front of her.

She had to look up.

He looked down at her and said nothing for a moment. Just looked. From the crop tee to the strip of stomach to the jeans to the red bag to her face, with an expression that was so flat and so cold it barely qualified as an expression at all.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said.

“I wanted to-” She stopped. Steadied herself. “I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have-“

“You wanted to apologize.” He repeated it, and something in his voice had that stripped-down quality she heard before. Except this time there was no liquor in it. This was just him. “So you came here. To this spot. By yourself.”

“I just wanted to say-“

“How’d you know to come here.”

She held his gaze. “You know how.”

He looked at her for a moment. “Teyana.”

“She mentioned it once. I remembered.”

“Teyana mentioned it.” He nodded once, slow. “And she’s not with you.”

“No.”

“Because she would’ve told you not to come.”

Alora didn’t answer that. The answer was obvious and they both knew it.

Kash stepped to the side – not toward her, but past her, angling his head toward the door. “Outside.”

Not an invitation. Not a request.

She followed him out.

•••

The side of the building had a narrow strip of sidewalk between Ray’s and the laundromat next door, out of the main foot traffic, facing a brick wall across a small alley. Kash stopped there and turned around.

She’d seen him angry before. She’d seen him cold, dismissive, deliberately mean in a way that had a calculated quality…like he chose the disrespect and applied it with intention.

This was different.

This was controlled in the way a fire was controlled when it was being held back by something that was getting tired of holding.

He was looking at her the way he’d looked at things he found fundamentally unreasonable.

“Let me ask you something.” he said.

“Okay.”

“What is this to you.” Not a question. The kind of flat declarative that just happened to be shaped like one. “What do you think is happening right now. Between you and me. What do you think this is.”

Alora held his gaze. “I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know.” He let out a short breath through his nose. Not a laugh. Nothing close to one. “You come to my spots. You show up at my places. You say things to me that you shouldn’t be saying. And you don’t know yet.”

“I wanted to understand-“

“You think this shit is cute, Alora.” he said, and the words came out low and quiet and with a specific, deliberate force that hit harder than volume would have. “You think this is some kind of- You think I’m mean because I don’t know how to flirt?”

Something about the way he said it made her chest tighten.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think that.”

“You act like it.” He stepped closer. Not the crowding step she knew, not the test. This was something different. This was tired. This was frustrated in a way that had been building for longer than she’d been aware of it. “You keep showing up in front of me with that soft face and those big eyes like you’re waiting for me to say something that makes sense to you. Like if you just stay calm enough and look at me long enough I’m gonna-” He stopped. Started again. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“You don’t.” His voice dropped lower. “You really don’t, Lo.”

She held still.

“I came to apologize.” she said again. Quieter now. The version of her voice that was most honest, the one that didn’t have edges. “I’m sorry for showing up in your spaces. I’m sorry for the things I said at the parking lot. That wasn’t – I wasn’t being fair to you. I was pushing into something I don’t have the right to push into and I-“

“Stop.” He said it flat.

She stopped.

He looked at her.

In the narrow side-street light, close like this, she could see the details of him she could only see at this distance. The ink at the side of his neck disappearing into his collar. The checkered beanie sitting back on his head, the locs falling underneath it. The specific quality of his eyes right now, which was not the cold assessment she usually got. This was something that had been worn thinner by the last few days and was showing it at the edges.

“You’re apologizing for showing up,” he said. “That what you came here to do.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not why you came here.”

She looked at him.

“You came here because you saw an opportunity and you took it without thinking about what you were walking into,” he said. “Same as every other time.” He paused. “And now you’ve walked into something.”

“I can leave.” she said.

“You saw her.”

It was simple. Direct. No road around it.

Alora didn’t look away. “Yes.”

“And what you felt about that is exactly the problem,” he said. “Because you shouldn’t feel nothing about it except relief. You should look at that and understand why you’re standing here apologizing to me like I’m somebody who deserves it from you.”

She was quiet.

He shook his head…one slow motion, something tired in it. “You don’t got no self-preservation instinct. None.”

“I have it,” she said softly. “I just-“

“You just override it every time I’m involved.” He leaned slightly back against the brick behind him, arms loose, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t fully read. “Let me tell you something. And I need you to actually hear it because I’m not saying it twice.”

She waited.

He was quiet for a second. Not the calculated quiet he usually used – the kind that was a tool. This was the other kind. The kind that happened when someone was deciding how much of the real thing to let out.

“I’m not mean because I don’t know how to be anything else,” he said. The words came out low and completely controlled. “I know how to be other things. I’ve been other things. And every single time it went wrong in a way that you don’t survive easy.” He looked at her directly. “I’m mean because softness gets people killed around me. You understand what I’m telling you? Not hurt. Not heartbroken. Killed. The people around me who have soft things – who love things, who trust things, who walk around the way you walk around thinking the world means well – they don’t last. They become targets. They become leverage. They become the thing that somebody uses to get to me.”

The alley was quiet between his words.

Somewhere past the brick wall, Saturday moved on. Cars passing. Someone’s music. The ordinary sounds of the city that didn’t know it needed to stop for this.

“And you,” he continued, voice dropping further, “keep bringing yours right to my door. Like I’m safe. Like being near me is not the most dangerous choice you could make.” His jaw tightened. “I’m not safe. What I do, what I’m in, what follows my name around – none of it is safe. And a girl like you standing next to it paints a target on everything soft about you.”

Alora felt the words land. Actually land – not bounce off the wall she’d been keeping up without fully knowing she was keeping it up. They went through.

She thought about leverage. She thought about what that meant in practical terms – in the terms of his actual life, the one she’d been circling the edges of without knowing what lived at the center. She thought about what it meant for someone like him to have something he wanted to protect.

She thought about what it meant that he was standing here telling her this.

“Why are you telling me this?” she said quietly.

He looked at her.

“Because,” he said, and something that wasn’t quite anything she’d seen before moved through his expression, “every time you show up I send you away and you come back. And I’m-” He stopped. “I’m running out of ways to send you away that you actually listen to.”

The silence that followed was a particular kind of heavy.

Alora looked at him. At the beanie pulled back, the locs falling free, the tattoos and the chain and the iced watch and all the things that announced who he was before he had a chance to be anything else. At the tiredness around his eyes that sleep didn’t touch. At the way he was leaning against the brick right now like he’d set something down for a moment that he couldn’t usually afford to set down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Genuinely. “For making it harder.”

He looked at her.

“Go home, Alora.”

Not mean. Not cold. Not the usual version of those words that were a wall. Just the words.

“I know.” she said.

She adjusted the strap of the red bag on her shoulder. She held his gaze for one more second – long enough for him to see that she’d heard him, actually heard him, not the surface of it but the thing underneath.

Then she turned.

She walked back toward the front of Ray’s and out onto the sidewalk and down the half block to her car.

She got in. Closed the door. Sat with both hands in her lap.

She thought about softness gets people killed around me.

She thought about the way he’d said it – not to scare her, she understood that now. Not the kind of mean that was meant to push her away. Something that told the truth because it was the only thing left to try.

She thought about the woman in the lavender top with her hand on his arm, and the smile she’d seen on his face before it went out. And the very specific, very inconvenient thing that had happened in her chest when she’d seen it.

She needed to call Teyana.

She needed to go home.

She needed to pray harder than she had been praying, which had already been more than she’d prayed about anything since her grandmother got sick two years ago.

She took out her phone.

She started to call Teyana.

She stopped.

Sat there in the quiet of her car and thought about the last thing he’d said.

I’m running out of ways to send you away that you actually listen to.

She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel.

Because what she’d heard underneath it – what she couldn’t unhear, couldn’t unfeel, couldn’t lay down no matter how many times she tried – was something that wasn’t in the words but lived right next to them.

That he’d been trying.

That sending her away had taken something.

That he’d been counting the times.

She sat up. Started the car. Pulled out into Saturday.

She called Teyana.

“Hey,” Teyana answered. “What are you up to?”

Alora stared at the road ahead of her.

“Nothing,” she said. “Can I come over?”

A pause. The specific pause of someone who knew her voice well enough to read what nothing was doing in a sentence.

“Lo.” Teyana said. “What did you do?”

Alora tightened her hands on the wheel.

“I’ll tell you when I get there.” she said.

---

Chapter Eight

Teyana opened the door before Alora knocked.

That was the first sign. Teyana didn’t sit by her front door on Saturday afternoons. She had things to do. People to text back. The fact that the door opened before Alora’s hand reached it meant she’d been listening for the car, and listening for the car meant she’d been worried since the phone call.

She looked at Alora’s outfit.

She didn’t say anything about it.

That was the second sign.

She just stepped aside.

Alora came in. Took her shoes off at the entryway because Teyana’s mother kept the carpets clean and Alora had been raised to know that. Set her bag on the little bench. Followed her cousin past the kitchen and down the hallway and into Teyana’s bedroom.

Teyana closed the door.

Sat on the edge of the bed.

Folded her hands in her lap like a woman about to take a deposition.

“Tell me.” she said.

“Tey-“

“Sit down first.”

Alora sat. The corner of the bed, leaving a gap of comforter between them. She kept her hands in her lap. She looked at the rug for a moment. The cream-colored one Teyana had begged her mother for two birthdays ago.

“I went to Ray’s.” she said.

She heard Teyana’s breath stop.

“By yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Today.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Lo.” Teyana’s voice was already flat in the specific way it got when she was holding something. “Why?”

“I told myself I was going to apologize to him.”

“Apologize for what?”

“For Lando’s. For the parking lot. For-” Alora stopped. Tried again. “For showing up in his spaces. For saying things I shouldn’t have said. For making it harder for him to send me away.”

Teyana was very still.

“Go on.”

Alora pressed her palms flat against her thighs.

“He was there. With another girl.”

The breath Teyana had been holding came out slow, controlled.

“What kind of girl?”

“Light skinned. Pretty. Older than me, maybe. She had her hand on his arm.” Alora swallowed. “He was smiling, Tey. Not the way he smiles at me. A real one. Like he was a different person.”

“And what did you do?”

“I stood there.”

“You stood there?”

“I didn’t move. I knew I should. I just-” Her voice did something it hadn’t done all morning. It got thinner. “I just stood there, Tey.”

“And then what?”

“He saw me. He sent her off. He took me outside.”

Teyana closed her eyes briefly.

“Outside where?”

“The side of the building. By the laundromat.”

“Alora Grace-“

“He didn’t touch me. He didn’t try to. He was just- he was angry. But not the way he usually is. He was tired, Tey. He looked tired. And he told me-“

She stopped.

She couldn’t get the sentence out the first time. She had to back up and walk into it again.

“He told me that softness gets people killed around him.”

The room went so quiet she could hear the air conditioner shift cycles.

Teyana didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Her hands stayed folded.

“He said I keep showing up like he’s safe and I’m not safe near him. That what I am – soft, the way I am – that walking around near him paints a target on it. He said he’s running out of ways to send me away that I actually listen to.”

Alora looked up.

Teyana was staring at the rug.

“Tey?”

“Don’t talk for a second.”

Alora didn’t.

The silence stretched out and got heavy and stayed there.

When Teyana finally spoke, her voice was low. Quiet. Worse than yelling. The kind of quiet that meant she was choosing every word like it cost her something.

“You went alone.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“I knew what you’d say.”

“You knew what I’d say.” Teyana repeated it slow. “And that’s why you didn’t call. Because you knew it was wrong. You knew, and you went anyway, and you put yourself in a corner with that nigga in an alley by yourself, and now you sittin’ here telling me he gave you a speech about softness getting people killed and you looking at me like that’s romantic.”

“I’m not-“

“You looking at me like that’s a love confession, Lo.”

Alora pressed her lips together.

“Listen.” Teyana’s voice didn’t rise but something in it changed shape. “Listen to me right now. Because I have been letting you find your way through this and I have been holding my tongue and I have been trying not to be the one who tells you what you can’t see, but I’m not going to keep doing that.”

“Okay.”

“You keep thinking God sent you to save him.”

Alora opened her mouth.

Teyana held her hand up.

“What if the devil sent him to study you?”

The line landed.

It dropped into the room and refused to dissolve. Alora felt it move through her chest.

“Tey-“

“Think about it.” Teyana wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at her own hands. “He’s appeared everywhere you’ve been since the night you met him. Not by accident. He found your church. He came to a Bible study parking lot in his Tahoe like that’s a normal thing for a man like him to do. He looks you up on Instagram. I bet he did. He knows your schedule, your cousin, your daddy’s name.”

“He told me he doesn’t want me near him.”

“Did he?” Teyana looked up. “Because from where I been standing, every time he told you that, he came closer. Every time he warned you off, he warned you off in a way that sounded like an invitation if you turned your head right. You really think a man who wanted you gone couldn’t make you gone?”

Alora was quiet.

“He’s been trying to send me away.”

“Lo.” Teyana’s voice cracked, just slightly, on the syllable. “Warnings don’t always come from love.”

Alora looked at her.

“Sometimes men warn you so later they can say you chose the damage.”

The sentence sat there.

“You hear me?” Teyana said. “Some niggas tell you you can’t handle them so you stay around to prove you can. Some niggas tell you they’ll hurt you so when they hurt you they get to say I told you. They get to say I tried. They get to walk away clean because the documentation is on you. He’s been documenting you, Alora. Every time he tells you to leave, he is writing down for himself that he warned you.”

“I don’t think he’s like that.”

“You don’t know what he’s like.”

“Teyana-“

“Stop.” Teyana held up her hand again. “Stop saying his name like you know him. You don’t. You’ve talked to him five times. Five. You know what I know about him? You know what people don’t say out loud about him? Because they don’t. That’s the thing about Kash. People don’t talk about him directly. They talk around him.”

She took a breath.

“There was a girl.”

Alora went still.

“I don’t remember her name. Nobody does. She was around him for a few months. Not his girl, not officially, but around. Enough that people started thinking she might be his girl. Enough that somebody decided she might matter to him.”

“What happened to her?”

“She got jumped, Lo.” Teyana’s voice was flat. “Outside her job. Three of them. Hospital for almost two weeks. Broken jaw, broken ribs, the kind of beating that’s a message, not a robbery. They didn’t take her purse. They didn’t take her phone. They beat her up in a way that said this is for somebody else.”

Alora felt her stomach drop somewhere.

“Was it for Kash?”

“Nobody asked.” Teyana said. “That’s what I’m telling you. Nobody asked. Because asking that question out loud was its own kind of dangerous. She got out the hospital, her family moved her down south, and that was the end of the story. People stopped saying her name. Like she’d never been there. Like the lesson was the whole point and the girl was just the medium it got delivered in.”

Alora’s hands had started shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs again.

“He didn’t do it to her.”

“I know he didn’t. That’s not the point. The point is that being near him is what got her hurt. Whoever he had a problem with, she was the cheapest way to send him a reminder. That’s what soft things become around men like him. Not because he’s evil. Because the world he lives in makes them currency. You understand what I’m saying?”

Alora nodded. Small.

She thought about Kash in the alley by Ray’s. Tired. Patient in a way she hadn’t seen before. Telling her softness gets people killed around me. Not as a metaphor. Not as a poetic line he’d been saving. As a fact. He had specific evidence for it.

She thought about a girl whose name she didn’t know in a hospital bed for two weeks because somebody had decided she might matter.

He hadn’t been being dramatic.

He had been telling the truth, and she had heard it like a song.

“Oh.” she said, quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Tey.”

“Yeah, Lo.”

Her eyes were burning and she wasn’t going to cry, she’d decided that on the drive over, but the burning was happening anyway and she pressed the heels of her hands against them for a second to stop it.

When she lowered them, Teyana was watching her.

“I love you.” Teyana said. “You know I love you.”

“I know.”

“And because I love you, I’m gon’ say something and you’re gon’ be mad at me for it. And it’s okay if you mad. I’d rather you be mad and alive than nice to me and ruined.”

Alora waited.

Teyana sat up straighter. Her voice steadied. The cousin was gone. What was sitting on the bed across from Alora now was the older version of family. The one who had decided to be the bad guy because somebody had to.

“Either you leave him alone.” she said. “Or I’m telling your daddy.”

Alora’s head came up.

“Tey.”

“I mean it. I will go to Bishop James, I will sit in his office, and I will tell him every single place his daughter has been the last month. I will tell him about the parking lot at his own church. I will tell him all of it, and he will do whatever he has to do to make sure you don’t get to make this choice anymore.”

“You wouldn’t-“

“I would, Alora. I will. Don’t test me on this one.”

“Why are you-“

“Because you’re too pure, Lo.” Teyana’s voice cracked, finally. The first real break of the whole conversation. “Don’t fuck up your future for no man. Especially not him. You hear me? Especially not him. You got a whole life. You got school, you got a daddy who’d lay down in traffic for you, you got a calling on you that everybody who’s ever met you has felt before they even know what they’re feeling. Don’t trade that. Don’t trade it for some street nigga who already told you he can’t be soft with you. Don’t make me watch you become the next girl whose name nobody says out loud.”

Alora didn’t say anything.

She couldn’t.

There was something happening in her chest that wasn’t a thought yet. It was the shape of one. The pressure of something trying to form. And she knew, the way she knew her own pulse, that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be the answer Teyana wanted.

She also knew that didn’t matter for right now.

Because the answer she gave out loud and the answer that lived underneath it were going to have to be two different things until she figured out which one was actually her.

“Okay.” she said.

Teyana looked at her.

“Okay what, Lo. I need you to say it.”

“Okay. I’ll leave him alone.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I’ll leave him alone, Teyana.”

Teyana studied her face for a long moment. Looked at her cousin and tried to read her the way she’d been reading her since they were seven years old, riding in the back of their grandma’s car together, sharing the same juice box.

Alora held her eyes.

She did not let her face do anything that wasn’t agreement.

After a moment, Teyana exhaled.

“Okay.” she said. “Okay, baby. Okay.”

She reached across the gap in the comforter and took Alora’s hand.

Alora let her.

They sat there for a while in the quiet of Teyana’s bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, two cousins on the edge of a bed, one of them holding the other’s hand like it would keep her there.

•••

Later – after they ordered food, after Teyana insisted she stay for dinner, after Alora had been watched closely enough by her cousin to know she was being watched – Alora drove home.

She drove with both hands on the wheel.

She thought about a girl whose name nobody said anymore.

She thought about Kash in the alley with his beanie pulled back and his locs falling free, telling her something true in the only voice he had to tell it in.

She thought about her father.

She thought about her mother.

She thought about the calling Teyana had said everybody felt on her before they even knew what they were feeling.

She thought about all of that.

And underneath it, like a current that didn’t care what she was thinking on top of it, was the other thing.

He had been counting the times.

He had been trying to send her away.

He had stepped back from her in that alley like she was something he didn’t want to break.

She got home. Parked in the driveway. Sat in the car with the engine off.

Took out her phone.

Looked at it.

Put it face-down on the passenger seat.

Picked it back up.

Put it face-down again.

She did not call anyone. She did not text anyone. She did not look anyone up.

She got out of the car and went inside her house and ate dinner with her parents and laughed at her father’s joke about the deacons meeting and helped her mother with the dishes and went up to her room and closed the door and sat on the edge of her bed in the dark.

She tried to pray.

The words didn’t come.

That was new.

She sat with her hands folded in her lap for a long time, eyes closed, waiting for the shape of a prayer to come together. Waiting for the sentence that would let her hand it to God and ask Him to fix it.

She couldn’t find it.

Not because God wasn’t there. He was. She knew that the way she knew her own bones. But the prayer she was trying to say wasn’t coming together because she didn’t yet know what she was asking Him for.

Make me stop, Lord, would have been a prayer.

But it wasn’t the only one.

There was a second prayer. Quieter. Underneath the first one. Tucked behind it like a child behind a door.

She wasn’t ready to say what it was.

Not even to Him.

Especially not to Him.

She lay down on top of the covers in her clothes and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

Outside, the night kept happening.

She watched it through the window and waited to find out who she was going to be in the morning.

Church Girl
Chapter Nine

She woke up Sunday and remembered immediately.

That was the worst part. There was no soft transition, no few seconds of gray sleep before the world rearranged itself. She opened her eyes and the whole week came back at once.

She lay there for a moment staring at the ceiling and waited to see if any of it had moved overnight.

It hadn’t.

She got up.

She did her hair the way she always did it on Sundays. Soft curls, gathered loose, the small barrette her grandmother had given her for her sixteenth birthday set near the side. She put on the lavender dress with the pleated skirt – modest, mid-calf, the one her mother had complimented at Easter. Pearl studs. The tennis chain. Light gloss. Mascara only because she’d cried a little Saturday night and the eyes needed help.

She looked at herself in the mirror.

She looked exactly like she always looked on a Sunday.

That was the unsettling part. Not the part where she felt different. The part where she didn’t, on the outside. Where the version of herself she was supposed to be had survived the last few weeks intact and was still right there waiting to be put back on, like a uniform that didn’t know what its wearer had been doing in it.

She picked up her Bible and went downstairs.

•••

Her father was already in his Sunday suit, navy with the burgundy tie he wore when he was preaching the kind of sermon he thought he was. Her mother was in the kitchen cooking the breakfast that they would eat half of and pack the rest of into containers for after service. The house smelled like grits and coffee and the clean detergent her mother used on everything that touched skin.

“Mornin’, baby.” Her mother kissed the side of her head. “You sleep okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You sure? You look a little-“

“I’m fine, Mama.”

Her mother studied her for half a beat. Then nodded and went back to the eggs.

Her father did not look up from his coffee.

That was how she knew.

Bishop Marcus James didn’t miss things. That was the inconvenient gift of having a father who pastored. He read rooms for a living. He read faces for a living. He had been reading hers since the day she came home from the hospital. She could feel his attention on her the way she could feel weather, sitting at the table eating eggs she didn’t taste, trying to keep her shoulders the same height they always were.

He didn’t say anything.

That was worse.

If he had asked, she could have lied. She had worked out the lies. They were small, they were close to the truth, they would have moved past him easily. She had a whole inventory of plausible Saturday afternoons ready to deploy.

He didn’t ask.

He drank his coffee and read his notes for the sermon and said good morning when she came in and that was the whole conversation, and somehow it was louder than any other version of it would have been.

•••

The drive to church was quiet.

Her father drove, her mother sat in the passenger seat with her purse on her lap, Alora was in the back with her Bible across her knees. The radio played the Sunday morning gospel station her mother always insisted on. A choir was singing about being washed.

Alora looked out the window and watched the city she’d grown up in pass and tried to figure out exactly what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

The question kept getting bigger.

She kept making it smaller. Just today. Just this Sunday. Just get through this service. Just sing the alto part. Just hug the mothers and pass the offering and laugh at her father’s corny dad jokes. Just be the version of yourself the room expects.

She could do that.

She had been doing that.

She was very, very good at doing that.

•••

The sermon was about wisdom.

Of course it was about wisdom. She was beginning to suspect God had a sense of humor, the kind that didn’t go for cheap laughs but didn’t mind a long setup. Her father stood up there in his navy suit and read from James 1:5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach.

He paced slow across the platform the way he always did. The fan in the back stirred.

Alora sat in her usual seat and watched her father’s face from the third row and felt the same thing she always felt when he preached.

Pride.

Comfort.

That this was her father, and he was good at this, and she was lucky to be his.

And underneath it, today, something else. The slow knowledge that he was going to find a way to ask her about it before the day was done. He hadn’t asked at breakfast. He hadn’t said anything in the car. He was the kind of man who waited for the right moment, and the right moment was coming.

She didn’t know yet what shape it would take.

But she could feel it on the horizon the way you felt a storm before the sky changed.

•••

The right moment turned out to be twelve forty-five in the afternoon, after the recessional, after the receiving line, after her mother had been pulled aside by Mother Wallace for a long conversation about the women’s ministry retreat.

Her father came up beside her in the lobby and put his hand briefly at her shoulder.

“Ride with me.” he said. “I need to grab the food from Sister Patrice. Your mama gon’ be a minute.”

It wasn’t a question.

It also wasn’t a command.

That was the specific weight her father moved with. He invited you in a way that made declining feel like a different kind of statement than just no thank you.

“Yes, sir.” she said.

She kissed her mother goodbye on the cheek. She walked with her father out to the car. She got in the passenger seat. She buckled her seatbelt. She set her Bible and her clutch in her lap and folded her hands over them.

He pulled out of the parking lot.

She watched the church get smaller in the side mirror.

For a long time, they did not speak.

He had the radio on low, that same gospel station, the volume turned just under conversational. He kept his hands at ten and two the way he had taught her to. He looked at the road. He let the silence sit.

She knew this silence. She had grown up inside this silence. It was the one her father used when he was waiting for her to be ready, and it always worked, because she was always ready before he was.

He did not even have to do much.

She had already opened her mouth twice to say something and closed it both times before they reached the second light.

It was at the third light that he finally spoke.

“Baby.” he said.

His voice was low. Gentle. Pastoral but not pulpit. Her father, the way he sounded when he was just her father.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Your spirit has been noisy lately.”

She did not answer.

She could not.

The breath she had been holding got caught somewhere in her chest and her throat closed up around it and her eyes filled, fast, without her giving permission for any of it. She kept her face turned toward the side window so he wouldn’t see and she pressed her lips together hard and she held very, very still.

He did not look over.

He let her have that.

After a moment, when she hadn’t said anything and the light had turned green and he had eased through the intersection, he spoke again. Still soft. Still even.

“I’m not asking you what’s going on.”

“Daddy-“

“I’m not.” His voice was kind. “I’m not asking. I’m telling you what I see, because I’d be a poor father if I saw it and didn’t say so. That’s all I’m doing. Hear me?”

She nodded. She couldn’t trust her voice.

He drove for another block before he spoke again.

“Sometimes,” he said, “temptation doesn’t show up looking like sin.”

She closed her eyes.

“If it did, baby, it’d be easy. Wouldn’t nobody fall for it. You’d see it coming a mile out and turn the other way. The Lord made discernment for the obvious things, but the obvious things ain’t usually what catches us.”

He paused at a stop sign. Looked both ways. Eased forward.

“Sometimes temptation looks like responsibility.” he said. “Looks like, well, somebody’s got to do it, might as well be me. Looks like the Lord put me here for a reason and this is the reason. Looks like I’m the only one who can see what this person needs.”

The tears were coming faster now. Quietly. She kept them out of her breath. She kept her shoulders still. She had been raised in a house where you cried with dignity, and even now, even broken open in the front seat of her father’s car, she remembered how.

“Sometimes it looks like compassion.” he said. “Looks like, well, who else is gonna love them? Who else is gonna see them the way I see them? If I leave, what happens to them? It dresses itself up in the language of what we know is good. So we don’t recognize it. So we welcome it in.”

A pause.

“Sometimes it looks like believing you can love somebody into safety.”

She made a small sound.

She didn’t mean to.

It was the smallest thing but it came out of her without permission and she heard it in the quiet of the car.

Her father didn’t look at her.

He reached across the console and put his hand, palm up, on her thigh.

She put her hand in his. She didn’t know when she’d decided to. She just did. His hand closed around hers, warm and dry and steady the way it had been every time her hand had ever been in it. She held on.

He drove for another minute without saying anything.

Then, soft, almost like he was talking to himself, “Baby. Any man who requires you to hide from the people who love you is already costing you too much.”

The sob she’d been holding back broke without sound.

Just her shoulders, and her face, and the inside of her chest. Her hand tight in his hand. The radio playing low. The car moving slow down a Sunday afternoon street.

He didn’t say anything else.

He didn’t need to.

He drove.

•••

They got the food.

Sister Patrice had two big foil pans wrapped in foil and a smaller one with the rolls on top. Bishop James loaded them into the trunk with the same careful patience he did everything with, and Sister Patrice told him to make sure his wife knew the macaroni had a little extra cheese the way she liked, and he laughed his good Sunday laugh, and Alora stood at the side of the car with her clutch in her hand and her eyes a little red and smiled politely at Sister Patrice when Sister Patrice waved at her.

If Sister Patrice noticed anything, she didn’t say.

That was the other gift of growing up in church. People who noticed and didn’t say.

They got back in the car. Her father pulled out of the lot. He didn’t return to the conversation.

He turned the gospel up a quarter of a notch.

A choir was singing about peace.

Alora put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes and let her eyes leak quiet for the rest of the ride.

•••

The afternoon went on the way Sunday afternoons went on.

Her mother got home. The food got laid out. Three of the deacons came by, the way they sometimes did. Alora ate a plate she barely touched and refilled glasses and laughed at the right places and was useful in the way she had always been useful in this house. Her mother kept looking at her sideways when she thought Alora wasn’t paying attention.

Her father didn’t look at her sideways at all.

He had said what he had to say.

He was leaving the rest of it where it belonged, which was between her and God.

By eight o’clock the deacons had gone. Her mother was in the kitchen humming. Her father was in his study with the door cracked, doing what he always did on Sunday nights. He was reviewing the week, writing notes, the soft yellow of his lamp leaking out into the hall.

Alora went up to her room. Closed the door.

Sat on the edge of her bed.

Took off her pearl earrings and set them in the dish on her dresser. Took off the tennis chain and laid it carefully across the dish. Put on her sleep shorts and an oversized t-shirt. Sat back down.

Picked up her phone.

Put it down.

•••

Here was the thing nobody had taught her.

She had been raised on every other thing. She had been taught how to set a table and how to fold a fitted sheet and how to take notes in a sermon. She had been taught the books of the Bible in order, both Testaments, twice. She had been taught how to sing alto and how to pray for the sick and how to pass the offering down a row without spilling it. She had been taught how to sit, how to stand, how to receive a compliment without making it about herself.

She had not been taught this.

Nobody in her house had ever sat her down and told her what it was supposed to feel like when you wanted somebody. Her mother had told her about her body in a clinical, careful way when she was eleven, all of it framed inside marriage and the future and waiting, and that had been the whole conversation. There hadn’t been a follow-up. There was no chapter on what to do with the part of yourself that woke up at nineteen and discovered it had opinions.

She didn’t know what this was.

That was the truth she had been circling for weeks and had not, until now, been able to look at directly.

She didn’t know him.

She really didn’t know him. Teyana had been right about that part. She had a few conversations with this man, all of them adversarial, none of them more than ten minutes. She didn’t know his middle name. She didn’t know what his mother looked like. She didn’t know if he had ever loved anybody in his life or what songs made him cry, if anything did. She didn’t know him.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

She had never felt this before.

Not for the boys at her school. Not for the boys at church, the deacons’ sons her mother sometimes hinted at. Not for the youth pastor’s nephew who had been polite to her for an entire summer. Not for anybody. Her body had been quiet her whole life. She had assumed quiet was the default. She had assumed this whole department of being a person was something that would eventually turn on at the right time, like a light in a room she would walk into when she was supposed to.

Apparently the room had been full of him without her permission for a month.

She didn’t know what to do with that.

She didn’t know who to ask.

She couldn’t ask her mother. She couldn’t ask her father – not really, not the actual question, not after the conversation in the car. She couldn’t ask Teyana, who would burn the whole house down before she would allow this to be examined honestly. She couldn’t ask anybody at church. There was nobody, in the entire careful, protected architecture of her life, who had ever been positioned to receive this question from her.

She had been raised inside walls so high she could not see over them, and now there was a thing inside her that wanted what was on the other side, and she hadn’t been given a single tool with which to handle it.

She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and felt the unfairness of that move through her.

It was not God’s fault. She knew that. God had given her free will and a brain and a Bible. Her parents had loved her. They had done what they thought was best.

She just didn’t know how to be a person who wanted something, and she wanted something, and she didn’t know what to do with herself.

•••

She picked the phone up at nine-fifteen.

She told herself she wasn’t going to do anything. She told herself she was just going to look. Looking wasn’t doing.

She opened Instagram.

She typed his name.

His profile came up. Public. He hadn’t bothered with a private account. The handle was just kashb with a number. The profile picture was a side-shot of him at night, the cap, the chain catching a flash. The bio said three words. Long live us.

She scrolled.

She didn’t let herself click on faces. She let the grid be a grid. She took in the shape of a life she didn’t know – cars, parties, a Tahoe, a Charger, men around him whose names she didn’t know, a few women whose names she also didn’t know but whose existence in the grid she registered and then made herself not look at.

He posted rarely. Mostly nights. Mostly after midnight.

There was a picture of his hand. Just his hand. On the steering wheel of a car. Three rings. She stared at it longer than she had any business staring at it.

She closed the app.

She put the phone face-down on the bed.

She lay back and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about her father saying any man who requires you to hide.

She thought about Teyana saying the next girl whose name nobody says out loud.

She thought about Kash in the alley, tired, telling her the truth.

She thought about her hand in her father’s hand on a Sunday afternoon and the way she had not been able to make a sound when she cried because she had been raised to cry quietly even in front of the people who loved her.

She thought about all of it.

She picked up the phone again.

•••

She found his profile a second time. She tapped the message button before she could think about it. The empty thread opened. The cursor blinked.

She typed: I’m sorry for showing up at Ray’s.

She deleted it.

She typed: I don’t know why I’m doing this.

She deleted it.

She typed: Are you okay?

She deleted it.

She put the phone down. She picked it back up. She turned off the lamp on her nightstand. The room went dark. The screen of the phone was the only light. Her face in the screen was a ghost of itself.

She typed:

You said you were running out of ways to send me away. I’m letting you stop. If you want me to leave you alone, tell me here and I will. If you don’t, tell me that too. I’m not going to come find you again.

She read it three times.

She moved the cursor to the end. She added one more line.

I just need to know which one is the truth.

She looked at it for a long moment.

Her thumb hovered over send.

She thought, very clearly, this is the thing you can’t take back.

She thought, very clearly, you told Teyana you would leave him alone.

She thought, very clearly, your father said any man who requires you to hide.

She thought all of those things, and they were all true, and she heard them, and she sent the message.

The blue arrow moved.

The thread updated. Sent.

Below her message, a small word appeared that had not been there before.

Seen.

Then: typing.

Then: typing stopped.

Then: nothing.

She held the phone in the dark and watched the screen go quiet and waited for a response that didn’t come.

She waited a full minute. Two. Five.

The screen went black on its own.

She didn’t turn it back on.

She set the phone face-down on her nightstand and rolled onto her back and pulled the comforter up to her chin and stared at the dark ceiling and tried, very honestly, to be sorry that she had done it.

She couldn’t get there.

Not yet.

Maybe in the morning.

She closed her eyes.

Outside, the night kept on.

Inside, she lay very still and waited for an answer she wasn’t sure she wanted.

---

Church Girl
Chapter Ten

She didn’t sleep.

She slept the way people slept when they were waiting for something, which was barely. She drifted under at maybe two, surfaced at three, drifted again, sat up at five-thirty and looked at the phone before her brain had even fully caught up with the day.

Nothing.

Just her message at the top of the thread. The little Seen still sitting under it.

She set the phone down.

She lay back.

She picked it back up.

Same screen.

She told herself, very firmly, that she was going to stop. That he had a life. That it was the middle of the night. That nothing was urgent. That he could take a few hours to respond if he was going to respond at all.

Then she opened it again.

Same screen.

•••

Six o’clock looked like five-thirty.

Seven o’clock looked like six.

By the time she had to actually get out of the bed and put on jeans and a long-sleeved tee and the gold hoops her cousin had left at her house, she had checked the thread fourteen times and was making serious progress on a deeply uncomfortable understanding of her own behavior.

She was a sociology major.

She was studying a course this semester literally called Self and Society. She had a midterm in three weeks on the construction of identity through interaction. She had highlighted whole pages about validation and reciprocity and the small, recursive ways human beings sought confirmation from each other.

She knew, theoretically, what was happening to her.

That was the maddening part. She had the vocabulary. She could have written a paper about it. She could have nodded along, in a discussion section, while somebody else talked about it.

She just could not, for the life of her, stop refreshing the thread.

•••

Class was at nine.

Dr. Akinyemi was talking about Goffman. The presentation of self in everyday life. Front stage, back stage, the performance of identity. What we do for the audience versus what we do alone. Alora had read the material. She had highlighted three things. She had made a margin note that said remember this for the midterm.

Today the words were going past her like cars on a freeway.

She kept thinking about what he had been doing when he saw her message and didn’t answer it.

The whole semester was suddenly about her.

She wasn’t enjoying that.

She made it through the lecture by writing down everything Dr. Akinyemi said, verbatim. She didn’t understand most of what she wrote. She would understand it later. She had to keep the hand moving so the rest of her had something to do.

When class let out, she walked to the courtyard, sat on a bench by herself, and opened the thread again.

Seen.

She closed it.

She opened it.

Seen.

A girl from her cohort waved from across the courtyard and Alora waved back with the wrong intensity, too bright, the wave of someone who had been caught at something and was overcorrecting. The girl smiled and kept walking.

Alora put the phone face-down on the bench.

This is what it feels like to be made small by someone, she thought. This is the thing.

She had read about it. She hadn’t, until this exact moment on this exact bench, ever lived inside it.

She picked the phone back up.

Seen.

•••

Kash’s phone vibrated face-down on the counter while he was at the stove.

The girl was sitting cross-legged on the counter beside it. She was not supposed to be there. She had let herself in with the spare he kept on top of the doorframe, the one he hadn’t changed even though he should have. She was eating a piece of pineapple out of his fridge and scrolling on her own phone and pretending not to be doing what she was doing, which was waiting.

The phone vibrated.

It was nothing. Most of his phone was nothing. Numbers without names. Burner attention. She didn’t actually mean to look. His phone was just there, lit up for two seconds and then dark.

Long enough.

Alora James.

She heard about her from her girls.

She’d been circling Kash for a few weeks now.

She set the pineapple down.

She didn’t say anything to Kash.

That was the first thing she had ever been good at. Not saying things to Kash.

Later, in her own car in her own driveway with the engine off and the radio low, she opened Instagram and went to the page she used. The one with no face on it. The one with the screen-grabbed picture of a sunset and a bio that said nothing. She found Alora James in the search bar and pulled up the profile and looked at it for a long time before her thumb did anything.

Then her thumb did something.

•••

The first DM came in at three forty-seven in the afternoon.

Alora was in the library, in a study room she had reserved for two hours and was using zero percent of, with her textbook open to a chapter she had now read the first paragraph of eleven times.

The notification slid down from the top of her screen.

Instagram. New message request.

She tapped it.

The page that opened had no face. No name beyond a string of numbers. The message was three words.

stop texting men who don’t claim you

Alora stared at the screen.

She read it again.

She felt the air in the study room change density. She felt her own pulse in places her own pulse had never been before. She put the phone face-down on the textbook and pressed her palm flat against the back of it like she could hold the message inside the device by force.

A minute passed.

Then her phone vibrated again.

She turned it over.

he didn’t answer because he knows better. you should too.

•••

She didn’t move.

She sat in the study room with the phone in her hand and read the second message and did not move for what was probably a full minute.

Someone in the world she had been touching the edge of for the last month had her name. Had her face. Had – based on the timing – knowledge of the message she had sent in the dark of her bedroom. Knowledge specific enough to mock its existence.

That was the part she couldn’t get her brain past.

Whoever this was knew she had messaged him.

Which meant whoever this was had been close enough to his phone to see it.

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a long second.

She thought about Teyana on the edge of the bed Saturday afternoon. She got jumped, Lo. Outside her job. Three of them. The kind of beating that’s a message, not a robbery.

She thought about her father in the car. Any man who requires you to hide from the people who love you is already costing you too much.

She thought about Kash in the alley. Softness gets people killed around me.

She had thought, very privately, that he had been overstating it.

She had thought she could be the exception to a thing she didn’t yet fully understand.

She sat in the study room and looked at two anonymous sentences on her phone and understood, for the first time, that she wasn’t the exception to anything. She was just newer than the last one.

She didn’t respond to the messages.

She turned the phone face-down on the table and didn’t pick it up again for an hour.

•••

She didn’t tell Teyana.

This was the second decision in twenty-four hours she made in direct violation of her own better judgment. She knew she should call. She knew her cousin would already be on the way over by the time she finished saying hello. She knew Teyana would handle it with a competence that would make Alora feel held in a way nothing else in her life made her feel held.

She still didn’t call.

She told herself she didn’t have enough information. She told herself she had a paper due Wednesday. She told herself she would call her cousin if it happened again.

What she didn’t tell herself, because she wasn’t yet ready to say it, was that she didn’t want anybody to make her stop.

She drove home with the radio off.

She ate dinner with her parents. She laughed at the right places. She helped her mother fold a load of towels. She kissed them both goodnight and went up to her room and closed the door and sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the wall for an unreasonable length of time.

She didn’t check Kash’s profile.

She didn’t check the message thread.

She turned the phone all the way off.

She slept.

It was the first real sleep she had gotten in two days, and she didn’t understand why, except that maybe the body decided sometimes, on its own, that you had earned it.

•••

Tuesday she did her hair.

She did it the way Teyana had taught her, parted clean, smoothed at the edges, falling soft and dark past her shoulders. Small gold hoops. A simple long denim skirt that hit her ankles, a fitted navy top with little white polka dots and a square neckline, the small gold cross her grandmother had given her. Black sneakers. Her watch.

She looked, in the mirror, like she had her whole self together.

She didn’t.

She made it through her morning class. She made it through her afternoon class. She kept her phone in her bag the entire time, only checking it during the breaks, and only twice. She told herself this was progress. She didn’t entirely believe herself.

She was walking out of Pierce Hall at three-fifteen when she saw the Tahoe.

It was parked at the curb just past the visitor lot, in a spot that wasn’t really a spot, the kind of half-legal parking that said the driver had decided the city’s opinion didn’t apply to him today. Tinted windows. The wheels she had started to recognize. The slow, expensive presence of it sitting completely at home in a parking strip surrounded by old Hondas and beat-up Camrys and one campus security cart.

He was leaning against the driver’s side door.

Tan hoodie pulled up over the cap underneath it, the locs falling forward past his shoulders, the heavy chain visible at the V of his collarbone. Both watches. Hands tucked into the kanga of the hoodie. Posture loose, expression flat, the same heavy stillness he carried into every room.

In the middle of her campus.

In the middle of the afternoon.

Like he had been waiting for two hours and would have waited two more.

Her stomach did something that wasn’t fear, exactly, although fear was a component. It was the first thing she had felt in two days that was bigger than the messages.

She walked over.

She didn’t think about it. She didn’t bargain with herself. She didn’t pretend, even for a second, that she was going to walk past him and pretend she hadn’t seen him. She had stopped lying to herself about this on the bench yesterday and apparently the new policy was going to hold. She walked straight across the parking strip with her bag on her shoulder and her textbook clutched against her chest and her pulse already where it had been for forty-eight hours.

She stopped about three feet away.

He looked at her.

He didn’t say hello. He didn’t ask how she was. He didn’t apologize for the silence. He didn’t perform a single ordinary thing.

“You wanted the truth?” he said.

His voice was quiet and flat and stripped of everything decorative.

She made herself breathe.

“Yes.”

He looked at her for a long second. The kind of look she had felt before from him, the one that took her in piece by piece. Today it had something else under it. Something tired. Something that had been losing a fight for two days.

“Truth is,” he said, “if I was a better man, I would’ve blocked you.”

It landed.

It landed in her chest the way the heaviest things landed, not all at once but in stages, the surface first and then the actual weight a second later. She kept her face still. She kept her hands tight on her textbook. She didn’t let her eyes do what her eyes wanted to do.

He watched her receive it.

She wanted to believe he hated saying it.

She couldn’t entirely tell.

“Okay.” she said.

“You ain’t hearin’ me.” His voice was lower now, edged. “I’m telling you I had the option, Alora. I had it Sunday at one in the morning. I had it yesterday. I had it this morning. I knew exactly what to do. I been doing it my whole life. I push buttons, you disappear, problem solved. I’ve done it to people who meant more to me than you do.”

She felt that one too. She didn’t flinch.

“And I didn’t do it.” he said. “I sat there and I didn’t do it. You know what that means?”

“Tell me.”

He looked at her. Something moved through his jaw.

“Means I’m not better.” he said. “Means I’m selfish. Means every time you look at me like I still got something worth saving in here-” he tapped the center of his chest, two fingers, hard, “-I want to prove you wrong just to watch your face change.”

The parking strip went quiet around them. Or maybe it didn’t and her hearing was just doing the thing it did when something had gone wrong inside her chest.

She made herself stay there.

She made herself look at him.

She made her voice come out at the volume she wanted it to come out at, which was small but leveled. The voice she used in church when she was answering her father from the front row.

“That’s not okay.” she said.

“I never said it was.”

“I know.”

“Then what are you doing?” His voice had teeth in it now. The mean version, the one she had seen before and had still managed to misread as armor. “What are you standing in a parking lot listening to it for? I just told you I wanna ruin you for sport. Why are you not in your car right now?”

“Because I asked you a question on Sunday and you didn’t answer it.”

“I’m answering it.”

“Not yet.”

His jaw worked.

She took a breath.

“Do you want me to leave you alone, Kash?”

He looked at her.

He didn’t answer.

The cars kept moving past them on the access road. Somebody on the lawn was laughing at something on a phone. The campus security cart rolled past in the lot behind him, the driver’s eyes flicking to the Tahoe and then away, the small assessment of a man who had decided this was somebody else’s problem.

She held still.

“Say it.” she said.

It came out steadier than she felt.

He looked at her for what felt like a full minute. She watched something move under the flat surface of his face. She watched him almost say it. She watched him decide, in real time, between two answers, and she watched the second one win.

“No.” he said.

The word was low. Final. With nothing decorative on it.

She felt it move all the way through her body.

She didn’t know, in the moment, whether what she felt was relief or terror or the third thing those two things made when you stacked them.

She didn’t say anything for a second.

“Okay.” she said again.

He let out a slow breath through his nose. Not a laugh. Not anything good.

“Get in the car, Alora.”

“What?”

“Get in the car.”

She looked at the Tahoe. She looked at him. She looked at the Tahoe again.

“I have my car.” she said. “It’s in the lot.”

“I’ll drop you at it. We’re not having the rest of this conversation in front of a fuckin’ Toyota.”

She thought about it.

She thought about it for maybe two seconds.

She walked around to the passenger side.

He pulled the door open for her. He didn’t look at her while he did it.

She got in.

The inside of the Tahoe smelled like him. The dark cologne, the faint thread of weed underneath, leather, something else she did not have a word for. The seats were soft. The dash was clean. There was nothing in the cup holders. There was a phone face-down between the seats. There was a small black gun in the door pocket on the driver’s side that she pretended she didn’t see and then couldn’t stop knowing was there.

He closed her door.

He walked around the front of the truck.

She watched him through the windshield and her hands shook in her lap and she pressed them flat against her thighs.

He got in.

He started the engine.

He didn’t pull out yet.

He sat with both hands on the wheel and looked through the windshield.

“You shouldn’t have got in.” he said, quietly.

“I know.”

“Two of us, sittin’ here knowing the same thing, doing it anyway.”

“I know.”

He was quiet for a long second.

“Who texted you?” he said.

She turned her head.

He still wasn’t looking at her.

“What?”

“Who texted you, Alora. Yesterday. Or this morning. Either way, I know someone hit you up.”

Her stomach dropped somewhere it hadn’t dropped yet today.

“How do you-“

“Because I know how this works.” His voice was completely flat. “I know who’s been around me the last few days. And I know who saw your name on my phone. I know what they would do with it. So tell me what they said and don’t leave anything out.”

She opened her mouth.

She closed it.

She thought about Teyana.

She thought about her father.

She thought about every reasonable instinct she had developed in nineteen years of careful, protected life, and she thought about how each of those instincts was telling her to get out of this car right now and walk back across this parking lot and never go anywhere near him again, because he had just told her he wanted to ruin her on purpose, and the people in his orbit were already starting to come for her.

She thought about all of that.

She picked up her phone from her lap.

She turned the screen on.

She found the thread.

She handed it to him.

He read it once.

His jaw did the thing it did when he was deciding whether to break something.

“Okay.” he said, quietly. “Okay.”

He handed her the phone back.

He put the truck in drive.

“Buckle your seatbelt.” he said.

She buckled her seatbelt.

He pulled out of the parking strip slow, smooth, into the access road, the campus moving past her window like something she had stopped belonging to as soon as she sat down.

She didn’t know where they were going.

He hadn’t told her.

She hadn’t asked.

She would think, later, that this was the moment. This. The buckling of the seatbelt. The not asking.

The not asking was the choice.

She would follow without question.

Outside the passenger window, the campus rolled by.

She watched it all go by, and she didn’t turn her head, and she didn’t say a word.

Beside her, his hand stayed on the wheel.

He didn’t say a word either.

They drove.

---