Hello everyone! Sorry to disappoint that this is not an actual post. However, this post is related to the decline in uploads. Long story short, I am trying to find inspo. Usually that comes with watching some new form of media and the ideas just start flowing from there.
I still do have a passion in writing, so this is not the end of my page. But more so like a short pause.
Curse writer's block!!
However if you have any media, tv shows, movies, etc etc for me to watch. I'd love any suggestions.
Thank you for all the likes, reposts, and comments. I don't take them for granted and it warms my heart. Everyone remain safe and keep reading, cause I know I will.
The Moore last name had become synonymous with trouble the minute Josephine found out she was expecting. The young woman was only 23 years old when she had her first son, a sharp contrast to her husband, Adam, who was nearing his mid-thirties. Adam was a taxi driver, working long hours to make ends meet. Going to work with a smile on his face, just to be treated subhumanely for multiple hours of the day. Josephine took odd jobs as a seamstress to help relieve the financial pressure she faced. Her turnaround time spoke for itself, keeping her busy when she wasn’t raising her son. Her life was grim, but motherhood provided a light that she couldn’t stray away from.
So when she learned she was expecting another baby, she was ecstatic, even though Elijah was only two years old. Despite the internal joy she felt with this baby, this pregnancy would be significantly harder than the first one. She struggled to keep anything down that wasn’t saltine crackers. Her feet, face, and fingers swell as she packed on thirty pounds. Movement was nearly impossible, and the doctor advised her to have strict bed rest.
Rest was a privilege she couldn’t afford. With the upcoming addition to her family, she couldn’t afford to work. In the days leading up to the birth of her son, her symptoms would only worsen. She’d lose her breath if she walked more than ten steps. Headaches pounded, forcing her to keep her movements to a minimum.
It was reading one of the books in the prison library that Elijah learned that this condition was called pre-eclampsia. A deadly hypertensive disorder that could have catastrophic results if left untreated. In the case of his mother, it was fatal. He lost count of how many times he heard relatives recall how ill his mother looked in the moments before her water broke and his little brother, Elias, was born.
He could recite the story by heart now. But seeing the clinical description on the page, so cold and matter-of-fact, did something to him. Anger clawed at his chest as he realized how powerless his mother must have felt, suffering while everyone else missed the signs. Grief welled up, sharp and overwhelming, like he was losing her all over again. If only someone had known, if only things had been different—he couldn’t help but wonder how many moments had slipped by that could have changed the outcome.
While he was locked up, he wondered how different his brother's and his life would have been if she were still alive. If her presence would keep the monster that his father became in the years after her death. If her words would prevent his knuckles from colliding with his rib cage when he scored poorly on a test. Maybe she could even reassure him when the world was a little harder on him than usual.
His upbringing was filled with memories he would rather forget. Yet there was one place where he could find an escape and pretend he was normal. He could act like he wasn’t fighting demons when he returned to his home.
That place, of course, was school.
He could guarantee that there would be two warm meals ready for him and his brother. He was spared at least nine hours of peace, during which he didn’t have to keep his guard up, wondering whether his father would use him or his brother as punching bags.
The school also provided him with an outlet he never realized he needed, and writing. More specifically, speech and debate, finding fallacies in his opponent's argument and countering them intellectually, created a thrill in him.
He took the skills that he learned from his speech and debate elective and applied them in real life, in the streets. He worked part-time at a club owned by a family friend. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, served drinks, swept the floor, and occasionally was security.
Maybe one of the few positive attributes that he inherited from his father was his build. Nearing six feet as a junior in high school. His size alone caused drunken grown men to think twice if they wanted to scuffle in the grassy backyard of the club.
As much as Elijah liked solving his problems with his words, he knew that when he got home, his words were useless with his father. With the surge of puberty hormones, he now stood a chance against the man. The fights only intensified.
Elijah felt the need to hold his punches cause at the end of the day, the man in front of him was his father. He never wanted to hurt him.
Now, as he left Clarksdale Correctional Facility—his home for 12 years—the world behind him felt distant. It had been so long since he’d worn normal clothes. The cotton of his sweatpants felt like a luxury compared to the dry and smelly orange jumpsuit that had probably been cycled through more times than he’s been alive.
His beard was now full and thick; the muscle made him look swole. He looked older than he thought. His hair had grown out, making him look like he was picked up from the 70s. He could barely recognize himself, and an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment washed over him.
Standing before him now was his younger brother, who still had his baby features, just as he remembered the day before his sentence began.
“Smoke.” The childhood nickname brought a wave of nostalgia to his ears. His brother, many of whom confuse them for being identical twins. ‘Smoke-Stack’ was a nickname given to them by kids in their neighborhood.
“My brother.” He embraced his brother for a hug. They held onto each other. Elias couldn’t help but look up to his brother with admiration.
“Cmon man.”
Stepping outside, Elijah felt emotional, feeling the crisp October breeze. His mind was barely processing that he was free. He knew he had to return to his cell. He never realized how much he took for granted until it was all taken away from him.
The moment he sat in the passenger seat, his eyes watered. He couldn’t help it. It was early in the morning, and the sun was about to rise. The pink hue across the horizon signals a new beginning. A second chance at life as a free man.
Elias glanced over, a lopsided grin on his face, trying to bring some lightness to the heavy morning. “All right, man, what’s first? You want pancakes? You want to hit the barbershop? I was thinking we could walk around the city, maybe hit up the park—whatever you want. You’re free, bro. We can do anything.”
Elijah let out a shaky laugh, still blinking away tears. “It all sounds good. It just… feels weird, you know?”
Elias nodded, reaching over to squeeze his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll take it slow. I just want you to feel normal again. We've got all the time in the world.”
Elijah stared out the window as they drove, the city waking up around them. He was quiet for a while, soaking in the feeling of freedom, letting the hum of the car and his brother’s excited chatter wash over him.
But as they got closer to the heart of the city, Elijah shifted in his seat. “Hey, uh… can you drop me off somewhere?”
Elias looked surprised. “Yeah, course. Where to?”
Elijah hesitated. “Just a house. Not far from here. I’ll text you the address.”
Elias shot him a curious look, trying not to pry. “You got people waiting on you?”
Elijah just shook his head, a small, private smile on his lips. “Not exactly. I just… need to see someone.”
Elias wanted to ask more, but he could tell Elijah wouldn’t say. He let it go, trusting his brother. “All right, man. Whatever you need.”
The rest of the ride was quiet, anticipation and unspoken questions hanging in the air. When they reached the house, Elijah turned to Elias, gratitude softening his features. “Thanks for this, Eli. For everything.”
Elias nodded, still burning with curiosity but letting his brother have this moment. “Don’t be a stranger, all right?”
Elijah flashed him a grin as he stepped out, closing the door behind him. He stood there for a minute. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem like a good idea to come to this house. He doesn’t even know if she is here. It is in the middle of the week during work hours.
As if you could have heard the doubts in his mind, you opened the screen door. You stood barefoot on the woodened stoop. A floral blouse with a deep plunge, with loose black trousers. A toddler in your arms, brown curls messy, being flipped by the wind.
The toddler is distracting you from noticing him sooner, as you put him down gently. When you did see him, he could see the smile you just had peel away. Your eyes squinted like you were still trying to identify him.
“Elijah?”
The uncertainty in your voice caused an uncomfortable burn to rise up his chest.
“Go back inside the house, honey.” She ushered the little boy, closing the door, and slowly approaching Elijah.
You stood toe to toe in front of Elijah, staring up at him. For the twelve years he was in prison surrounded by murderers, thieves, and hardened career criminals, he never felt fear around them. He would rather deal with that feeling than the hot seat your eyes were putting him in.
Up close, you could see the time on him. Not in a physical sense, but in the new scars that were now behind his eyes.
It was in the way he held himself, like he was waiting for impact.
“You’re really out,” you said, almost like you were convincing yourself.
His mouth tilted.
“Looks like it.”
Behind the screen door, the little boy pressed his face against the glass, peeking at Elijah with curious eyes.
You glanced back.
“Boy, quit bein’ nosy.”
The child laughed and disappeared back into the house.
Elijah’s eyes followed him.
“It’s so good to see you.” You whispered, bringing his body closer to yours.
Stunned, Elijah wrapped his arms around your body. Afraid that if he touched you, the kindness you were showing him now would end. Per usual, you had a way of reassuring his thoughts. Bringing his hands to your back, Elijah lowered his chin to your neck.
“It’s even better to see you.”
You pulled away from the hug first.
Not because you wanted to.
Because if you stayed there any longer, pressed against him with his arms around you like no time had passed, you might’ve let yourself forget where the last twelve years went.
Elijah let his hands fall slowly, reluctant.
“Is that your son?”
“No, but he stays with me.” You answered quickly.
Not a lie.
Not the entire truth either.
Elijah caught it.
You could tell by the way his eyes narrowed just slightly.
But he didn’t push.
Not yet.
He looked back at you.
Twelve years.
And somehow standing in front of him again made it feel like twelve minutes.
You folded your arms.
“When’d they let you out?”
“This morning?” You raised a brow. “So you came all this way…”
His eyes stayed on you.
“Yeah.”
That's simple. Yet it didn’t explain anything. Not much anyway.
You shifted on your feet. “For what, though?”
“I just needed to know you were good.”
“That’s random.”
“Not to me.”
Your heart picked up its pace, but you awkwardly laughed it off.
“Well, as you can see…” You gestured toward the house. “I’m alive. Got bills. Responsibilities. Same old.”
Elijah studied you like he knew that was a deflection. It was always moments when there was so much to say that he didn’t know what to say.
Wrong.
He knew what he wanted to say, but he lacked the courage to say the words. Every day he spent in his cell, thinking about what he would say to you when you were eventually reunited.
His bunkie had convinced him that memorizing a script would sound ‘robotic’ and rehearsed. That was when he saw you again, the words would just spill and there would be no heavy lifting on his end.
Wrong again.
Maybe the two of you would reminisce about the moments y'all shared as eighteen-year-olds.
Back when things were fresh and exciting. Back when the ‘nothing’ between the two of you was becoming ‘something’.
Then he got locked up.
“I thought about you.”
“Elijah-”
“For twelve years.”
“That was a long time ago.”
His face hardened a little.
“Wasn’t that long for me.”
You hated how honest he sounded.
“You don’t even know me anymore,” you said.
He looked at you like that was the dumbest thing you could’ve said.
“I know enough.”
You laughed, but it came out shaky.
“The woman who prefers to be barefoot despite the number of copperheads that lurk in these woods.”
You couldn’t hide the smile on your face if you tried.
Your eyes drifted toward the house.
The little boy popped back up at the window.
Watching.
Waiting.
A distraction.
A shield.
You grabbed onto it.
“You should probably go be with your family or somethin’. Your brother probably got plans.”
Elijah’s jaw ticked.
“You want me to go or somethin’?”
“I just want to know the real reason you are here?”
Your shoulders stiffened.
“Because what exactly are you expecting from this?” you asked. “You came here, okay. You saw me. I’m good. You’re good. What now?”
Elijah stared.
Really stared.
Like he was trying to figure out how much clearer he could be.
“Damn.”
“What?”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. For a moment, Elijah just stared, the words stuck in his throat, his hands balling into fists at his sides. The fear of laying himself bare, of ruining whatever fragile connection remained, swirled inside him. He glanced away, jaw tense, that old urge to run—or to cover it with a joke—scraping along his nerves.
Heartbeat pounding, he let himself look at you. The weight of twelve years heavy on his chest, years that held back everything he wanted to say. He wished he could hide how much this mattered, how much you still mattered, but nothing about him was hidden now.
He stepped in closer, close enough that you had to tilt your head back.
Close enough that your chest tightened.
“So you're gonna make me say it.” His voice dropped, rougher now. “I love you ✰. I. Love. You.”
The world went quiet.
Even the wind seemed to stop.
“I loved you before they took me. I tried to stop thinking about you. Told myself that twelve years was enough to kill it. But it didn’t.”
Elijah wasn’t sure what to make of the silence. Were you trying to find the words to let him down easily?
He technically never even asked if you were spoken for. But there wasn’t a ring on your finger.
Or even worse, you weren’t interested in speaking to him.
“I’m happy you’re out,” you said softly.
Elijah’s face softened.
“Yeah?”
You nodded.
“I missed you, too.”
His eyes closed for a second like he needed that.
Needed proof that he hadn’t carried all of this alone.
Inside the house, the little boy banged on the window, breaking the moment.
Every university had that signature party that was the highlight of the semester. The one event that made even the most stubborn homebodies come outside, put on their shortest shorts, and soak in the sun. At Florida State University, it was the LDOC party. Graduation was right around the corner, and all everyone wanted to do was enjoy the last weeks of their undergraduate experience. Or that’s the justification your friends were giving you.
But for you, saying yes to the party never felt that simple. A quiet tug-of-war was playing out in your mind: half of you wanted to stay in, avoiding the crowd and the noise, wanting to keep things easy. The other half hated the thought of missing out on one of the last chances to feel young, carefree, and surrounded by your people before real life started. What if the night was one you’d remember for years? Or what if you ended up on the edge of things again, just watching everyone else have fun from a distance?
Your heart fluttered with a mix of curiosity and anxiety, making it hard to tell where hope stopped and worry began.
Your friends, Halle and Jade, took multiple pictures with the digital camera. The theme this year was 90s Freak Nik, and their outfits were perfectly in line with it. Halle wore a multicolored one-shoulder leotard. Box braids in pig tails with bright pink bow-bows. Her shoes were simple, white Air Forces with thick white slouch socks. Jade, on the other hand, wouldn’t be caught dead in any ‘skimpy’ outfit. Her words.
In all the years you’ve known her, she hasn’t owned any clothes that weren’t black. For her, dressing in black wasn’t just a style choice—it was almost a quiet statement. Jade liked to keep things simple and direct, never feeling the need to stand out with colors or follow anyone else’s rules for how girls should look. In her typical fashion, she wore a tank top and knee-length cotton shorts. Her honey blonde locs were crinkled in a half-up, half-down style. Her bronze complexion contrasted nicely with the silver studs that were newly pierced in her nostrils. Jade always said she didn’t care what people thought, and you believed her; she carried herself like she knew exactly who she was.
You on the other hand, were nowhere close to being ready to go out. Still contemplating if you wanted to go in the first place. A feeling you wouldn’t dare voice out to your friends on the other side of the door. You looked to your phone, seeing a new message from Tyriq. He forwarded you the LDOC flyer and sent a question mark.
Tyriq, a boy you had been talking to since your sophomore year. It started off casual, speaking in passing whenever you crossed paths. Following each other on social media and interacting with each other’s posts. You attended his probate when he joined Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated, his fraternity.
There was one moment last semester, at a mutual friend's apartment, where you shared a kiss. A private moment, just the two of you, after everyone had gone to sleep or returned home. It happened so quickly, and you couldn’t be sure who leaned in first, but for a few breathless seconds, nothing else mattered. As soon as it ended, a flood of feelings hit you: surprise, followed by an embarrassing rush of hope that maybe Tyriq felt something too. But that hope tangled with doubt, and the awkwardness in the air was almost too much to stand. You tried to play it cool, but every time you remembered it, your stomach twisted with a mix of excitement, confusion, and a weird kind of shame for letting yourself care that much.
Tyriq never brought up that kiss, and you followed in his lead. Taking the rejection in silence, you withdrew a little from Tyriq, determined not to show you were upset. Not entirely, because you still shared mutual friends and didn’t want to make it awkward for everyone else. Regardless, the message felt clear, and you told yourself there was no reason to mope about it, even though part of you still wondered, late at night, what that kiss had really meant.
Maybe if you weren’t in the middle of your moping, you could have moved your hips in time to avoid the hefty slap from Halle.
“Oww!” You groaned, holding your right cheek in your hand. Shooting a dagger at your friend, the sting travels across the area. She returned a mug of her own, her hand still elevated like she was considering laying another smack to your bottom. Rolling your eyes started getting dressed. The year you were born in a spray-painted fire print, shorts, and Converse. Your hair was in a slicked braided ponytail, courtesy of Halle last night.
“Ready.” You shrugged.
“Not quite.” Halle started pulling down your baby hairs with a rat-tail comb, then grabbed some edge control and made dramatic swoops across your temples. She squeezed a glob of gloss on your lips and instructed you to apply it. Switching out your small studded earrings for jumbo hoops, she then moved down to your outfit. Unpopping the front buttons of your shorts, pulling your underwear on top of your hips. Pull up your bra to the top of your shirt, revealing the solid black bra.
“Now you’re ready.”
—
“Take a shot, everybody!”
Is the first thing Jade said once y'all stepped out of Ken’s car. Waterfalling the spiked punch into everyone’s mouth. You scrunched your face.
“Don’t make a drink ever again.” Halle patted her chest rapidly, trying to decrease the burn.
“Or invest in some ice, please.” You laughed at Halle’s reaction.
“You don’t drink alcohol for the taste, you do it for the aftermath.” Jade defended.
“The aftermath that makes you text your ex.” You playfully responded.
“Exactly.” She tilted her glasses down her nose and smirked.
The three of you split up to scope out the party. Ken and Halle went left, and Jade wandered off to the right. The party was hosted on a wide, grassy open field, the kind where the grass stuck lightly to your bare shins when you brushed past. There was already a decent crowd swaying between fold-out tables scattered with half-empty cups, melting ice, and the sharp, sticky smell of spiked fruit punch. Someone nearby had a grill going, wafting smoky hints of charred hot dogs and sweet barbecue sauce through the humid air. Every few steps, you caught snatches of laughter and overlapping conversations: someone loudly recounting a finals horror story, squeals over a missed summer internship, a group debating which song would really get people moving.
The DJ was weaving 90s classics into the popular music on the radio, the thump of bass vibrating up through your sneakers. The summer beats blasting made you feel like you were at a real block party—the kind your mother reminisced about, roasting in the sun with her girlfriends and cheap 40s on the stoop back in the early 90s. Everything felt alive: the sweat beneath your arms, the dry scrape of straw poking out from the makeshift photo booth, and the sugary tang that stuck to your lips after every sip.
You waved at your friends as you passed them. Taking sips of their drinks and finding yourself loosening up. You could tell when the Greeks arrived by hearing the respective stroll songs start to play. A natural interest formed near the DJ speakers. You weren’t sure how you found yourself toward the front of the crowd. It was almost your coincidence that you heard the whistle. Coming down the line, a group of alphas. The girls behind you stared with interest, and part of you wanted to slip behind them so they could be front row.
Especially once you noticed Tyriq in the stroll line. He was the tallest one in the line, and I’m sure you could confidently say he was one of the tallest people out there. He looked so focused, hitting every move with precision. A cockiness to his moves, that he didn’t have anything to prove. He enjoyed every moment. And as he passed you, he made eye contact.
You were spotted. He saw you. That shouldn’t have frightened you as much as it did, but your stomach dropped, your chest tightening like you’d been caught doing something you shouldn’t. Heat rushed to your face, an uneasy cocktail of anticipation and dread. Suddenly, it felt like an invisible timer was ticking down, counting the seconds until Tyriq would find you again. You tried to steady your breath, telling yourself to play it cool, but your heart was racing and your thoughts tangled between hope and anxiety.
What would he say? Did he still remember that kiss? Would he act like nothing had happened, or would this be the moment things changed between you? Unable to stand still, you took a step backward, searching for a place to hide the nerves sparking under your skin. You found solace in the open field while the music and chants from the Greeks faded into the background. You saw Jade again, hanging out with her friends. Almost taking refuge from the heat, you stood underneath the shady area, half-listening to Jade's conversation, trying to will your emotions back under control. You only tuned in when you heard one of Jade’s friends call over Tyriq.
He acknowledged his friends when he came over, but he didn’t spend much time talking to him. His focus was on you.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” You face was warmed and you couldn’t even look at him. All of a sudden eye contact was becoming a big ask.
“Can we talk?” He pointed with his head away from the lingering eyes.
You nodded quickly, following Tyriq as he led you toward a quieter patch of grass, further from the crowd. The moment you were alone, the air between you shifted—buzzing with something electric, something unspoken.
“So you been dodging me?” Tyriq grinned, his voice low and teasing. He leaned against a tree, arms folded, eyes locked on yours. “I know you saw me out there.”
You laughed, trying to play it cool, but you couldn’t hide the way your cheeks heated. “I haven’t been dodging you. Maybe you just haven’t been looking hard enough.”
Tyriq stepped closer, just enough to make your heart pick up speed. He smirked. “Nah, I always see you. You just act like you don’t want me to.”
You glanced down, fighting a smile, but Tyriq wasn’t having it. He tilted his head, searching your face. “Why you always act so distant with me, huh? You tryna make me work harder?”
Your breath caught. You forced yourself to meet his gaze, letting your feelings show for once. "Maybe I just want to know you mean it."
Tyriq’s expression softened. He brushed a stray braid from your face with the back of his hand. “I do. For real. I’m tired of the games, you know? I want us to be official. If you want that too.”
You bit your lip, trying—and failing—to contain your giddiness. Butterflies exploded in your stomach. “You mean that? Like, for real for real?”
He grinned, a little shy, but certain. “For real for real. So, what you think?”
You couldn’t hide your smile. "I think I want that too."
Tyriq laughed softly, eyes shining. "Say less then. It’s us now."
You both stood there, grinning, the world around you fading out as something new and thrilling bloomed between you.
fratboy satoru gojo gets too possessive during sex because of his secret. 18+ (part two)
satoru gojo, the man whom you had given your heart to after he had been courting you for two months. at first, it didn’t make sense to you nor your friends.
satoru gojo, the man in the fraternity, who would ingest vodka in a shot while having a marlboro adorning his fingers.
satoru gojo, who would be known to satisfy himself to the exploding basses of incoherent music, flashes of purple, green and red lights embracing his party freak nature.
satoru gojo who would have a (new) girl every week, her grasping on to his sturdy forearm as they stumbled in to cramped dorms.
satoru gojo, who had the reputation of being a charmer who couldn’t obtain a relationship— not because there was something lacking within him, but, because he never understood the importance of having some sort of romantic established connection.
so, you did wonder as to why satoru would try to get your attention, your time, your words. you were nothing like him.
in fact, you guys were truly polar opposites. your faculties didn’t align (he was in business, you were in humanities), your personalities didn’t align (he was an extrovert, you were an introvert) and most of all, your reputation (he was a fraternity member, you were known as the quiet, shy girl who refrained from engaging with men without necessity).
so, truly, how did it get here?
where your cheeks were pressed on to the mellow cotton of the pillow. where the white sheets of the bed were heavily wrinkled because of the way you clenched it within your fists. where you tried to mutter out his name in any way possible, “sa-satoru—mhm”. where you didn’t know if you wanted him to slow his pace down or keep going at this rate like a brute animal.
his cock was expanding in your hole it seemed, the firm veins were pulsating against your plush walls. his tip, the oh so pink tinted head of his cock you had come to love was stimulating your cervix. his balls were slapping on to your pounded pussy while both his hands held on to your waist, preventing you to move from the maddening position he had you in.
you felt it. his hands had shifted. one of them, framed with veins, had come around to feel the bulge on your womb— signifying to you, that he was in you, too deep. while the other hand spread its large palm on one of your ass cheeks.
“fuck yeah doll, wan’ me to put a baby in this huh?” he groaned, his breath cutting between the words. “wan’ me to, fuck, make you full? leakin’ from me? shit just say yes baby.” you had rested your flustered cheek on to the pillow, your iris moving to the corner to see him. god. he was a vision of pure ecstasy. his white hair too frivolous, the bangs had been plastered on to sweaty forehand, his chest heaving with red scratches from the previous sessions.
you saw the bridge too, not vivid, just a slight blur but enough to make blood rush hastily into your face. creamy paste clustered around the rim of his cock, the base was too slimy, an evidence of the lustrous passion. “no one’s havin’ you like this, fuck, only me. only me. only” he groaned as he slapped against your rim faster and faster.
“shit, i swear i’m gonna marry you, my wife” “need you, ugh, in the mornin’s, noons and nights in my fucking house ’nd my fucked up life” he wouldn’t shut up, not at all. his groans gritted. his voice going sore.
“nobody gets this. this pussy. this body. no one will have you. no one” his breath cut hard. you gasped as he hit the spot too perfect, his entire length inside you. he was ramming into you as his fingers gathered both your dainty wrists behind your back in a single grip.
slap sounds of his skin meeting yours echoed too loud. tomorrow might be awkward with your neighbors.
“i’m never leavin’ you, ngh, never. yer’ not goin’ anywhere from me” he was close, you could tell. his thrusts were way faster now, too fast. rapid with the way he moved while biting his lower lips, plumper shade of red now.
you had already came earlier than him while he had to remove himself and stroke to milk out even the littlest remaining bit.
you were gasping, for air and dissatisfaction from the loss of contact. he was too rough today, contrasting to his usual self— the sweet, the careful and the softly doting.
his clammy palm had slithered its way on to your waist, turning you around. your back on the mattress, your front to his view. you noted around. clothes scattered on floor while the condom box sat lonely on the bedside table because satoru wanted to go raw this time, just to “feel you”.
satoru had finished wiping you with the wet towel, throwing it on the little table, knocking off the durex box. he planted himself beside, close. too close like he wanted to be your second skin. his head rested low on to your chest as you giggled. he had always been very clingy after sex. always liked having his hair played with by you. only you.
“was something wrong today? you were a bit .. rough..” you tentatively asked with a shy gaze on to him, only able to see the slope of his nose and the outline of his lips. he scrambled deeper in to your embrace, his breath exhaling on your spent nipple making you shiver.
“no, just, i love you. so fucking much” it was true. he did love you. you were his first girlfriend in a long time, since middle school.
he loved you. completely and irrevocably.
hence, it haunted him. what if you found out?
what if you found out that the two of you existed together only because of a stupid bet made between him and his friends during an alcoholic stupor.
drinks paid for the whole year if he took your virginity.
For the first time in a while, the hospital room was quiet. Ten hours had passed since Tyriq and his wife arrived at the Florida Memorial Children's Hospital. Today was an anticipated day.
Today was an anticipated day. Their son would soon enter the world—their first child together. Only a couple of hours had passed since you found a comfortable position in the hospital bed, not realizing how much the Queen-sized bed and jumbo pregnancy pillow had impacted her sleep. The quiet allowed reflection, linking the present calm with the anticipation in the air.
On your left, you rubbed your stomach in your sleep. A slight twinge of discomfort appeared on your face. Seabass, as you and Tyriq affectionately called your pre-born son, was always more active at night. Your stillness was his cue; he started karate chopping your ribs and break dancing on your bladder. Clearly, he was not happy that you had stopped moving.
A gentle rub was usually all that was needed to soothe him. It was a silent way for her to beg him to settle down, maybe by letting her heartbeat and soft white noise relax him.
Tyriq, camera in hand, quietly recorded the scene. For nine months, he'd compiled snippets of your pregnancy with friends. He knew his role as a content creator meant little privacy, but documenting this journey mattered. Now, as a new father, every frame felt more important. He wanted to freeze memories—soft smiles, laughter, anticipation—and weighed them against the anxiety of living publicly.
When Tyriq only looked after himself, filming and posting for millions felt natural. Now, new protectiveness made him hesitate—should these moments be shared? Parasocial relationships grew from harmless posts, and exposing his child—even pre-birth—gave him pause.
Balancing the impulse to share and the urge to shield his growing family was becoming a silent internal struggle, one that colored every decision he made about what to record, what to edit, and what to keep just for themselves.
Tyriq's thoughts on love as a public figure were cynical. His public name denied him a fairy-tale romance like his parents. 'Putting yourself out there' required calculation and caution, with consequences for carelessness.
Luck wasn’t the word Tyriq would use to describe how he met you that fateful day in line for the concert. Musiq Soulchild was going on tour for the first time in years. The set list included so many classic songs that Tyriq’s attendance was non-negotiable. The venue—a small amphitheater in Orlando—had perfect August weather for a concert. As he prepared to experience the show, little did he know that this night would take on a significance entirely different.
Concert-goers sat on blankets, singing along. Tyriq stayed on the left, hiding behind a trucker's hat, aviators, and a hoodie. He relaxed, enjoying every moment, unaware of the woman walking his way.
Before he saw you, Tyriq noticed your scent—a blend of cocoa butter and caramelized honey. Curious, he glanced over to spot you.
Sunlight glowed on your collarbones. Your moss-green top revealed a thin black bra strap; brown leggings settled over your stomach. Your hair stood out—box braids in four buns upfront, the rest on your shoulders—like a makeshift crown fitting your earthy palette.
He braced for you to see through his weak disguise, wondering if you'd want a picture or an autograph. Instead, you surprised him by asking him to take your picture.
Polite, he took the pictures, rotating your phone to find your best angle—which didn't take long. Your smile was captivating, a twinkle in your eye. He questioned his strict rule against giving his number to strangers. Nervousness would usually warn him, but he felt only ease.
He returned your phone but still debated asking for your number. As you reviewed the photos, nodding in approval, he weighed pros and cons.
You thanked him and walked away without a backward glance. Regret pooled in Tyriq—nervousness rising. His body urged him to chase after you.
He quickly devised a plan, jogging to catch up and calling out, hoping he wouldn't regret this impulse.
You glanced back and stopped, smiling gently as Tyriq approached. He suddenly realized he'd forgotten to plan what to say.
"Could I have your number?" Tyriq managed to say, hoping he didn't make himself look foolish.
"Can I see your face first?" you asked, pointing at his glasses, clearly teasing. Tyriq removed them.
He feared you would see through him; what felt like a chance connection now risked being lost. He squinted, eyes unused to the strong sunlight.
"Good enough?"
You nodded excitedly. Tyriq laughed and offered you his phone so you could add your number.
That small act of bravery brought countless moments of happiness and laughter. You and Tyriq talked for hours and texted constantly. Love was easy—the foundation built on friendship.
Tyriq was your best friend, and you were his. Two months after the concert, you officially started dating. A year later, you got engaged. The memory stayed vivid: Tyriq led you to your apartment rooftop under city lights, gave you a gold-ribboned box, and said, "I want to do life with you," before kneeling. Tears blurred your vision as you nodded, laughter and disbelief mixed. You still remembered his hands trembling as he slid on the ring.
Eight months later, you were happy newlyweds. Jasmine scented the Florida breeze as you danced barefoot, friends and family celebrating around you. Tyriq grinned constantly, spinning you to your favorite song until you were breathless.
After Tyriq's breakout with films like 'Him', career wins became more than headlines. You joined him at his first premiere, fingers entwined as flashes filled the air. "We really did this," he whispered, smiling widely. You both chased simple joys—rainstorms huddled under one umbrella, sunrises at the beach, laughter echoing over the water.
You returned to school for a second counseling degree. At night, Tyriq quizzed you, both dissolving in giggles at technical language. Successes felt sweeter because you shared them.
On your third anniversary, you gave Tyriq a note and card announcing your pregnancy, just five weeks along. You chose to wait until the second trimester to share news beyond close friends and family.
It was still hard to imagine that your love story with Tyriq had led to this moment. Returning to the present, the sterile scent of antiseptic lingered in the air, mixing with the faint trace of your cocoa butter lotion. Your protruding belly peeked out from the matching pajama set you picked out, the fabric slightly scratchy against your stretched skin. The gentle hum of the monitors blended with the distant, muffled voices from the hallway, filling the room with a constant, low background noise.
The ache in your back is a sharp reminder of how much your body was holding. Even the crisp sheets felt extra rough against your sensitive skin. Yet, Tyriq pointed out your natural beauty every day, finding something to admire in the soft flush of your cheeks and the fullness in your face. It was reassuring when you couldn't see your feet over your belly, when your fingers tingled from swelling, or when going up a flight of hospital stairs left you breathless and warm all over. He was with you every step of this pregnancy, steady as the soft beep of the heart monitor in the quiet room.
"Ty," she called out softly.
"Yes, my love," Tyriq replied. He stopped recording and came to bed.
"Can you help me out of bed? I need to move." He could hear the grogginess in your voice. The night shift nurse had just checked your dilation and concluded that you were at 7cm. There was still a little more to go before your son was expected to arrive.
He could see you were trying to keep a good spirit, but you were never good at hiding your pain. You tried to use the breathing techniques and distraction tricks your OBGYN had taught you. Slow, patterned breaths—sometimes in for four counts, out for six—helped anchor you during contractions. At times, Tyriq would massage your lower back in slow circles, just as the nurse suggested.
You alternated between sitting upright, leaning forward on the overbed table with a pillow, and standing to rock your hips back and forth. Squeezing a stress ball or focusing on a calming playlist helped you work through the tougher waves, especially when you repeated affirmations to yourself under your breath. It was part of the reason you allowed Tyriq to bring his camera into the hospital. Eventually, you wanted to show your son the pregnancy documentary. From watching your belly grow from the size of a walnut to a watermelon.
"If you are lightheaded, then you need to stay in bed." He helped you sit on the side of the bed. In the hospital, your swollen feet were issued grippy socks. Your exaggerated breaths were signs that you were working through
Crouching down in front of your belly, Ty covered your hand with his bigger one. Placing a kiss on your belly.
"Hey, big guy." Ty greeted your son like he always did. Pressing his foot against your abdominal wall, you took a deep breath. Finding comfort in his arms, you snaked your arms around his shoulder. Rocking side to side.
Tyriq pushed your slipping scarf off your forehead, planting a kiss there. This past week in particular has been difficult for you. An ultrasound scan revealed that your son was measuring large for his gestational age. Perhaps it was the karma of having a baby with a man who was 6'5. Your medical team reassured you after the appointment, explaining they would monitor you closely with more frequent checks.
The nurses and doctors reviewed your birth plan and discussed the possibilities for safe delivery, making sure you understood each step. They explained what to expect with a larger baby, how they would watch for signs of distress, and promised additional support during labor if it became necessary. Knowing your care team had a plan in place brought you and Tyriq both relief and comfort in the days leading up to labor.
After that appointment, it felt as if your body was being stretched to its capacity. Your body felt heavier with each passing day, and every moment with your unborn child was becoming more painful.
"You know I love you, right?"
"Yeah." The softness of your response tugged at Tyriq's heartstrings. He wishes he could absorb some of the pain you were going through. It was not easy watching the love of his life in pain. Pain that he caused but was spared from feeling. If only he could do more than hold your hand and whisper reassurances. He wondered if he would always carry this guilt, knowing your body bore the cost for both of them, knowing he was on the outside looking in while you endured it all.
The unfairness of it all pressed on him, making him desperate to help, but all he could offer was his presence and love.
Your forehead was against his chest, and you were saying something that he couldn't quite make out. Pulling back slightly, he watched your brows furrow. Your eyes were closed shut, his eyes went over to the monitor watching a contraction occur before his eyes.
"Distract me." You grunted out. Your hips pushed back, seeking any relief from the increasing pressure on your pelvis.
"Talk to me about the baby."
"Who do you think will come to the house first?”
“It’s gonna be a tie between your mother and my sister.” You laughed. Your son is the first grandchild on both sides of the family. Everyone was ready to spoil him. Your younger sister had been excited to become an auntie since you first called your parents to let them know you were pregnant.
“My mom is probably camping out in the driveway right now,” Tyriq added, thinking about his mother’s gold Camry.
“She’s been having Amazon packages arrive at least twice a week.”
A burning pain crept up your back, silencing you from the joking tone you had set. The pain was severe and unlike any of the previous contractions you had experienced. The sudden change rang alarms in his mind.
It was good timing that the nurse entered the room. She helped Tyriq get you back into bed. Pulling down your pants to examine your dilation now. She was cheerful to declare that you had reached 10 centimeters.
It was game time. The lights were turned on, and you could hear your nurse paging for the OB to come to the room.
Tyriq remained on your side. Now was not the time for him to succumb to his nerves and pre-parental anxiety. He could see the growing pain on your face and needed to pull himself together.
“Oh, God!” You cried out, fists wrapped around the rails on bed. You pulled yourself up, feeling the urge to push.
The pain intensified, rolling through her in relentless waves, but Tyriq never left her side. He pressed a cool cloth to her forehead, whispering encouragement, his hand gripping hers with gentle strength.
“You’re doing so good, baby,” he murmured, voice thick with awe and worry. “Breathe with me. That’s it… We’re almost there.”
You squeezed his hand, her knuckles white. Sweat beaded on her brow, and she gasped for breath between contractions, her body trembling with exhaustion and anticipation. Nurses bustled around her, voices calm but urgent, the room humming with focused energy.
“Okay, couple more big pushes,” the doctor said, voice steady. “You can do this.”
Tyriq leaned close, brushing a kiss to her temple. “You got this. I’m right here. Just a few more, sweetheart.”
She bore down, teeth clenched, every muscle straining. There was a rush of pressure, then a sudden, miraculous release. The baby’s first cry split the air.
You collapsed back against the bed, sobbing with relief and joy as the doctor guided their tiny, wailing son into the world. Tyriq’s eyes shone with tears, his face breaking into a smile so wide it seemed to light up the whole room.
The nurse wrapped the newborn in a soft blanket and placed him in Tyriq’s arms. He stared down in wonder, hands trembling as he cradled his son for the first time.
“Hey, little man,” Tyriq whispered, voice choked with emotion. “Welcome to the world.”
He looked over at you, his eyes meeting hers. In that moment, everything else faded away. He walked carefully to her bedside, lowering their son into her arms, and pressed a reverent kiss to her forehead.
“You did it,” he whispered, brushing her hair back with shaking fingers. “He’s perfect. You both are.”
You gazed at their son, a tiny, furious miracle nestled against her chest, and then up at Tyriq. Together, they marveled at the family they had created.
Amidst the chaos of your own emotions, you found pockets of peace as you watched Tyriq talk to your son. Introducing himself to the newborn. Making promises to always care for him and to never stop loving him.
Even as exhaustion settled into your bones, you didn’t pay any attention to the medical professionals tending to your perineum. All you could do was just watch the human being your body had nurtured and protected for nine months. Still not dawning on you that your son was now born and no longer in your belly.
You exchanged a nervous yet joyful glance with your husband. Your first steps into parenthood were now, and who knew what the journey would hold on the other side. Yet with how attentive Tyriq was so far, you were confident you’d be able to handle whatever comes your way.
Cameron didn’t flinch when he heard the car door slam outside his apartment. He was in his bedroom, stretched out. Neck leaning on the headboard with one arm behind his head. Instagram stories passed by as he watched your car lights turn off.
You moved quickly, barely glancing at the cracked concrete walkway as you made your way to Cameron’s door. The night air was thick, still holding the heat of the day, but a shiver ran down your spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. Every step felt like a test—were you here to end things, or to find a reason to stay? He could practically draw lines above your head to show how angry you were.
Despite it all, you were still put together. A yoga set with a matching headband. Skin with a light gleam from your extensive skin care routine. Your mini braids are tucked into a low bun at the back of your head. Your keys rattled in your hand as you went to the front of the door. Getting off the bed, Cameron walked down the staircase. Opening the door before you had the chance to press the doorbell.
The hallway smelled faintly of laundry detergent and the lingering spices from Cameron’s last meal. You remembered how, when you first started seeing each other, you loved the comfort of his space. Now, that same familiarity made you uneasy. Cameron had a smug look on his face. You stepped into his house, giving a half-assed attempt at a shoulder check.
Cameron was amused at your behavior over the past couple of days. The missed calls and the deactivation of your Instagram account. He must have gotten underneath your skin this time.
You stared at him, searching for any sign of guilt or remorse, but his features gave nothing away. The silence between you seemed to stretch and fill the house, pressing in on you from all sides.“Well, hello to you, too.” He said in a calm voice.
You folded your arms across your stomach. No words were currently coming to your mind. Despite the essays you were writing in your mind about what you were going to say to him. How were you going to tell him about yourself? Recognize your worth, and make it the last time you set foot into this house.
You were in the kitchen, looking around, not wanting to meet the man's gaze. Losing your nerve, the longer the silence continued. The anger that fueled your quick decision to drive to his house in the near middle of the night was giving way to nerves.
You picked at a spot on the countertop, the cool stone grounding you. Memories of happier nights here flashed through your mind—quiet dinners, laughter, the feeling that you belonged. Tonight, it all felt far away.
Another beat passed. Cameron shook his head and closed the front door. He took a couple of steps towards you, and even barefoot, he significantly towered over you.
“You wanna tell me why you ghosted me?” The professional athlete oozed confidence. Confidence that attracted you to him. It made you feel secure and reassured you that he might be different from the other men you'd dated in the city.
Even now, the attraction between the two of you was present. No matter how many times you broke up with him, you found yourself getting back in touch and falling into a pattern that grew harder and harder to leave.
“Are you serious, Cameron?”
His jaw flexed. “Yeah. I am.”
You hesitated, the words sticking in your throat. All the times you’d told yourself to be strong seemed far away now, but you pushed through, determined to get answers.You took your phone out of your pocket. Your memory was now jogged with the reminder of why you nearly sped over to his house.
“Explain this to me.”
Your screen displayed a picture. It was him. No denying it. In the center of the room. Shirt removed, compression underwear shorts hiked up high on his thigh. A tie wrapped loosely around his neck as two women in their bras and panties tugged on the tie.
He didn’t appear to be in any distress. No signs of trying to remove himself from the women. Instead, he was making direct contact with one of the women, who looked like an Instagram model. One that held the waistband of his shorts. Lust enveloped her eyes.
You watched his face as he looked at the photo. His expression didn’t change much, but his shoulders hardened.
“Where’d you get this?” he questioned. Swiping along the phone to see multiple different angles of the scene. Each one growing blurrier, like the person taking it was moving when the picture was snapped.
“Does it matter?”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he insisted, but his voice was too quick, too practiced. You wondered how many times he’d said those words before.
Your eyes bucked in bewildered meaning.
“Cameron, you are literally in your underwear being touched by two women.”
Saying it out loud almost robbed you of words again. Your face felt hot as you heard your voice swell with emotion. Your inner thoughts fussed over how quickly your willpower melted. Pressing the inner part of your eyelids, you tried to hold back the tears that formed.
A heavy silence settled between you. Cameron looked at you, his brows furrowing as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know how. You could feel the weight of everything unsaid pressing into your chest. The room seemed colder, harsher, as you tried to steady your breathing.
He started to speak, then stopped himself, running a hand over his face. You both stood there, locked in a standoff that neither of you wanted but couldn’t seem to escape. Finally, you found your voice. But then exhaustion broke through your anger. "I'm so tired of this, Cameron," you said quietly, your voice trembling.
"I don't understand how you can treat me like this—like I don't matter. You keep me wondering, always guessing how you feel."
Cameron’s expression softened, regret flickering across his face. He reached out as if to touch your arm, then hesitated, letting his hand fall to his side. He seemed almost lost for a moment, his usual morale replaced by apprehension.
You stepped back, trying to gather yourself, but the exhaustion was too much to hold in any longer. You shook your head, wiping at your cheeks. "I just don't know how much longer I can keep doing this. I'm tired of feeling like the only one fighting for us."
Before you could pull away further, Cameron stepped closer. He reached out, gently guiding your hand down from your face. His touch was unexpectedly soft, his eyes searching yours.
His eyes searched your face, desperate for you to believe him. The air between you felt charged with possibility and pain, the past and the future colliding in this moment.
You wanted to believe him—wanted to go back to when things were simple, and you felt safe in his arms."I'm sorry," he said, voice low and sincere. "I know I've messed up. I don't want to hurt you. Sometimes I just get caught up in it all—the attention, the pressure."
He cupped your cheek, thumb brushing away a stray tear. "I love you. I swear I do. You have to know that."
He offered a small, hopeful smile. "I see you as my wife one day, you know that? You're the only woman I want."
Your heart soothed upon his words. His lips are directly above your ear. His body was warming yours as he slowly rocked you side to side. It was like a siren, seducing its unsuspecting victim with its song.
Pulling your head back to look at him. Cameron placed a kiss on your lips.
"I'm sorry I've made you doubt that.”
His lips pressed against yours, gentle at first, then deepening as you responded. The tension between you and Cameron twisted into a hunger that neither of you could deny. His hands framed your face, pulling you closer, melting away the pain of moments before.
Your arms slipped around his neck, drawing him nearer as his mouth traced a path of apology and longing along your jaw. He kissed you like he was both sorry and desperate, as if he could pour all his regrets and promises into you. Somewhere between his whispered assurances and the heat of his touch, you let yourself fall—just for a moment—into the illusion that everything could be fixed by this closeness.
Cameron's hands found your waist, guiding you back against the kitchen counter. His body pressed flush to yours, and you felt the familiar electricity spark beneath your skin. He murmured your name, his voice thick with wanting. Clothes were tugged and loosened, breaths grew heavier, the ache inside you answering his every move.
But as his kisses trailed lower, and your back arched to meet him, a flicker of doubt pulsed through your mind. Were you letting him off the hook too easily? Was this just another cycle—hurt, apology, then drowning it all out with pleasure and connection? You tried to focus on the way he worshipped your body, the way he whispered that you were everything, but the question lingered: Was this love, or was sex a tool he wielded to win you back?
Even as you surrendered to him, a part of you watched from the outside, wondering if you could trust this feeling—or if you were being seduced into forgetting the pain.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Realizes that he can tolerate the heat a lot better than the kids. This week alone, two campers were experiencing symptoms from the climbing temperatures. His group was supposed to spend the day on a lake, but for safety reasons, they stayed near the cabins. He single-handedly started a water war at the campsite. He took a bucket of ice-cold water and poured it over the head of his counselor's bunkmate. Now, for the rest of the summer, different camp groups were trying to one-up each other. Keep track on who has gotten soaked and who hasn't.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Always makes the camp kiddos play random games that come to mind. Lunch is delayed? The kids are playing Red light-Green light. Outhouse line is long? Best believe the kids are playing Simon Says. Cameron keeps the kids on their toes, always.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: On a daily is bombarded with questions about college living. He answers them as honestly as possible. While sitting at the arts and crafts, he is sitting with three of his most rambunctious campers.
"What type of food is at college?"
"They have pizza, burgers, pasta, and salads. Lots of variety?"
"Chick-fil-A too?"
"Definitely."
"Imma eat there every day." The kid gleamed.
"I heard they have unlimited ice cream at college too."
Cameron nodded his head, confirming. That sent the kids in multiple directions with their conversations. Discussing which flavors they would mix and which toppings are socially acceptable for middle schoolers, and which were for 'babies.'
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Brags to his other counselors, including his girlfriend, that he got invited to the marshmallow roast. An activity that the campers had taken upon themselves to do every Sunday evening. They would sit around the campfire and share their favorite memories. Cameron just so happened to be one of the counselors invited to the one this week.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Was relieved to see that you were also invited to the marshmallow roast. You promptly threw his words from the previous day back in his face. He made it up to you by making you the perfect s'mores.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Should have known it wasn't just a pure coincidence that you both were selected to be the counselors for this week. The minute you sat beside Cameron, they all started giggling and pointing. Confused about what you missed, you looked to Cameron for answers.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: He wasn't dodging any of the questions the campers asked. The girls were invested in learning how you too met, while the boys were teasing Cameron for being so expressive with his feelings. Like, he's not supposed to be happy he's in a relationship with a girl he likes.
Middle Schoolers.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: Would purposefully exaggerate things about life to get a good kick from the campers' reactions. One of the campers asked him how he got so tall. Instead of saying the truth, like genetics, he goes on a tangent describing an unrealistic routine.
"Every morning I would wake up and stretch my arms forty times over my head. Drink five cups of milk. Two shots of growth hormone."
A statement he would later have to take back when a camper asked the camp director where he could get growth hormone.
Summer Camp Counselor Cameron: He has definitely put his life on the line for his campers. Two of his campers weren't in their bunk beds by curfew. Luckily, they weren't up to anything crazy, just eating snacks. Ushering them back to the cabin, Cameron is stopped dead in his tracks when he sees a crocodile. His adrenaline is going into overdrive, deciding on whether he should flee in the opposite direction or risk getting bitten by the reptile.
With the quick thinking of the campers, who tossed a handful of chips in the air. Gaining the attention of the reptile that waddled after it. Cameron, without saying another word to the campers, he led them back to the cabins. All three of them promised not to speak of this moment.
⋆.ೃ࿔ YOU'RE ALL I SEEᝰ
In which we see the day Tyriq decided he wanted forever
tw: descriptions of hearing impairment
pairing: Tyriq Withers x Nalani Deveraux (oc)
nala's too pure for this world... i love her so bad
There comes a moment in a man’s life when all the static finally drops out—the excuses, the what-ifs, the exit routes he’s been keeping in his back pocket—and the knowing settles low and heavy in his chest: this is the woman I’m going to marry. No ifs, no ands, no clever little buts dressed up as logic. Just a clean, bone-deep certainty, the kind you don’t need to run by your boys, or workshop over wings, or cross-check against some podcast thread about “male psychology.” For all the think pieces trying to turn them into a thesis, men are simple creatures at their core; either that knowing clicks into place, or it doesn’t, and everything after that is just them trying to live with the truth their heart already decided.
Tyriq could pinpoint the exact day that knowing stopped being a soft, hazy maybe and crystallised into a sharp, undeniable I’m going to marry this girl. Long before that, forever had already started haunting the edges of his mind—hovering like a low, persistent hum under everything else. It would slip in at the strangest times: on long drives with the radio low, in the half-quiet after a table read, when he was stood in the grocery aisle staring at cereal and thinking about what she’d eat. Little flashes of a life that didn’t exist yet, but felt more real than whatever city he was standing in—an old, slightly crooked white picket fence that needed repainting, a dog that adored her more than it did him, five loud, barefoot kids tearing through a house that was somehow always theirs even when the rent said otherwise, a small tribe of people who all carried her eyes, her mouth, her impossible, reckless heart.
At first, it was just a whisper—a scrap of daydream he’d duck into when the world felt too sharp, like slipping into the back row of a movie he’d already seen. The reels never changed: Nala in his hoodie in their kitchen, hair tied up, stirring something on the stove and fussing at him for trying to taste it too early; Nala curled up on their couch, blanket half on the floor, one leg thrown over his lap as she pretended to watch a film and actually watched him; Nala standing in the front yard, hands on her hips, yelling at kids with his ears and her attitude to get off the damn roof before she came up there herself. But slowly, almost without his consent, that whisper grew teeth and roots. It stopped being an idle fantasy and turned into a place he retreated to when life went sideways—when the calls didn’t come, when the scripts dried up, when the industry felt like a rigged machine and he was one loose screw away from falling out of it. In those moments, the future he saw with her wasn’t decoration or distraction; it was the only reality that made sense, the one fixed point his orbit kept correcting back to every time the rest of his universe threatened to come apart.
He was sitting with her in their little kitchen that evening, one of those unremarkable, softly lit nights that never make it into movies and somehow end up shifting the axis of your whole life. The overhead bulb was too warm and a little dim, humming faintly like it had seen better leases; the sink held exactly two plates and one fork soaking in suds; some forgotten playlist murmured low from his phone on the counter. Nala was at the wobbly table in one of his old FSU shirts, the hem swallowing her thighs, bare legs curled under her on the chair, slowly working her way through a plate of reheated leftovers. She kept nudging pieces of food around with her fork more than she was actually eating, humming under her breath in that absent-minded way she did when her brain was off chasing lyrics somewhere else. He leaned back against the counter in socked feet, one hip pressed to the laminate, phone balanced between his shoulder and his ear as he talked to his niece.
She was bright-eyed and stubborn, that baby—his sister’s whole face copy-pasted onto a tiny body, her father’s dimple stamped in one cheek, and a smile so wide it could rearrange the worst day just by landing on you. She’d come into the world partially deaf, something his sister had not been ready for, and the grief that followed had hovered over those first months like a low, unshakeable storm cloud. Every time she stood over that crib at two in the morning—looking down at this perfect, blinking, curious little person—there was a sharp, secret voice that slipped in under her ribs and hissed you failed her, a mean, lingering ache that made motherhood feel like an exam she’d somehow already flunked before they’d even handed her the paper.
So it became a family project—no, a quiet family covenant. If the world was going to make things harder for their girl, then home would be the softest place on earth. One by one they started learning ASL, grown adults with stiff fingers and tired eyes sitting at kitchen tables and on living room couches, phones propped up against salt shakers as YouTube videos slowly walked them through alphabets and basic phrases. At first it was clumsy and awkward—hands tangling over the simplest words, missing letters, laughing through the mistakes as they practised more and tired and I love you until the shapes stopped feeling like borrowed choreography and started to live in their muscles. Group chats turned into video calls where everyone took turns signing badly and cheering each other on. Nobody wrote it down, nobody made a speech, but the vow settled over all of them just the same: this child would never have to stand in a room and wonder if anyone there could really hear her the way she needed to be heard.
He remembered thumbing the call over to FaceTime without even thinking about it, muscle memory by now—the screen flicking from his sister’s tired, makeup-rubbed-off smile to a slightly shaky view of his niece, curls in full rebellion, one hearing aid already dangling loose at the edge of her ear and the other almost certainly flashing its last red warning at 2%.
“Hey, mama,” he’d grinned, setting the phone down against the sugar jar so both hands were free, the cheap countertop grain blurring behind her. “Look at you.”
Her whole face lit up at the sight of him, sound only half-catching in her ears but joy blazing through untouched—mouth stretching wide, eyes crinkling, shoulders bouncing like she could barely stay still under the weight of her own excitement. Somewhere in the background he could hear his sister fussing, voice muffled and exasperated—I told you to charge them, didn’t I tell you?—pots clinking, TV low, the familiar soundtrack of their childhood home. He just shook his head, that soft, indulgent uncle thing settling over his features as his fingers began to move almost of their own accord.
He slipped into signing the way some people slipped into a native tongue: not perfect, not polished, but fluent in intention. Hi. Miss you. What did you do today? His hands carved the air between them—small flicks of the wrist, gentle taps, curved fingers and raised brows turning silence into whole sentences, meaning carried in the shape of his hands and the warmth of his expression instead of volume.
From the couch, Nala watched him. She was tucked into the corner like a cat in a too-big hoodie, legs folded up, one ankle bouncing absently over the other. The college apartment hummed around her with its usual low-grade chaos: the cheap lamp casting a soft yellow cone over the coffee table, the faint hiss of something simmering on the stove, the distant thump of someone’s music through the wall. They’d only been together three months then—just long enough for her to have a toothbrush in his bathroom and a drawer with her name on it, not long enough to have seen all the places he’d been broken.
Her thumb paused on her phone screen mid-scroll when she realised he wasn’t just talking anymore. His voice had dropped out; his mouth was still moving, but his hands were speaking louder—fingers spelling, palms opening, brows lifting in a grammar she didn’t know yet. She lowered her own phone slowly, gaze sharpening, and for the first time she saw not the campus golden boy or the easy-smiling athlete, but a man rooted in a cramped kitchen, shoulders relaxed, eyes soft, signing patiently to a little girl three states away so she would never feel like she was too hard to love.
Her phone slipped a little in her grip, forgotten, the screen dimming against her palm as she watched him move. He padded back and forth across their tiny kitchen in socks, the frayed hem of his sweats skimming the tile, shoulders loose in that easy way he only ever had around family. His mouth was soft, corners tipped up, eyes crinkled into those familiar half-moons as he laughed and signed at the same time, hands cutting gentle shapes through the air—bridging the distance between his niece’s quiet little world and his with a language he’d chosen, deliberately, to learn for her.
He remembered the way it felt in his own body—standing there in that cramped, flickering kitchen with its buzzing overhead light, a plastic colander abandoned on the counter, textbooks sprawled open and face-down on the table like they’d long since given up. Switching the call over to FaceTime so his baby girl could read his hands when her hearing aids tapped out didn’t register as sacrifice or hassle; it was just muscle-deep instinct, an unbothered, bone-level okay, cool, we’ll do it this way instead that slid into place without resentment or second thought.
And he remembered, more sharply than anything, the weight of Nala’s gaze on him: wide and intent and almost reverent, seeing past the campus golden boy and the easy swagger everyone else knew, past the athlete who joked in locker rooms and charmed professors, to the uncle in a dim little kitchen who signed slowly and patiently so a half-deaf toddler three states away would never feel like she was too much work to be understood.
It slipped into their lives so casually he almost missed it.
He was mid-conversation—hands moving, wrists flicking, eyebrows lifting in time with each question he signed—when a small voice, tinny and far away, crackled through the speaker.
“Who dat?” his niece asked, the consonants soft and smudged by distance and hearing loss, a chubby finger jabbing toward the back of the frame where Nala sat curled on the couch. The sound hit the mic warped, but the curiosity in it was crystal clear.
Tyriq glanced over his shoulder.
Nala was still in the exact same spot, one leg tucked neatly under her, the other dangling off the edge of the cushion. Her hoodie sleeves swallowed half her hands, thumb resting on the lip of her phone even though she hadn’t actually scrolled in a while. Her head was tipped just slightly to the side, that tiny crease between her brows carved deep—the one that only appeared when something had hooked her full attention and she was trying very hard to pretend it hadn’t.
He felt his mouth curve before he’d even decided to smile.
“That’s my friend,” he told his niece out loud, the word sitting flimsy and inadequate on his tongue even as he repeated it in sign, fingers spelling out F-R-I-E-N-D with careful precision. From just off-camera his sister gave a low, knowing little mmhmm at his choice of label, the kind of sound that said, sure, Jan, but didn’t call him on it. “You wanna say hi?”
The little girl nodded so hard her hair puff shook, curls bouncing around her cheeks like they were cheering too.
He looked back at Nala. “Come here a sec,” he called, keeping his voice easy, offhand, like he wasn’t suddenly hyperaware of his own heartbeat thudding in his ears. “Somebody wanna meet you.”
She startled, just a little—eyes widening, shoulders hitching—then slid off the couch, phone abandoned beside a forgotten notebook. She padded barefoot across the beat-up rug, the hem of his old FSU shirt skimming the tops of her thighs, until she reached the counter. Up close, the kitchen light did that soft, forgiving thing it always did with her: caught on the sheen of gloss clinging to her mouth, glowed along the faint oiliness at the end of the day that made her skin look dewy instead of tired, brushed over the sleepy brightness still hanging in her eyes like she hadn’t quite come down from whatever she’d been creating before he called.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice automatically dropped into that gentler register she reserved for kids and late nights and the softer parts of him. She leaned into the frame, palm braced on the chipped laminate next to the phone, shoulder brushing his arm. “Hi, beautiful.”
On his niece’s side of the world, the camera tilted just enough to show chaos—a couch drowning in throw blankets, toys spilling across the carpet, cartoons yammering in the background, his sister moving in and out of frame like a comet. On their side, it was a cheap off-campus kitchen with one buzzing overhead bulb, a pot simmering behind them, and a stack of dishes in the sink. Somehow, with both girls squeezed into the same small rectangle of glass, it felt like a chapel.
His niece blinked at Nala’s face, then split into a grin so wide her hearing aid nearly launched itself off again, little hand flying up to push it back into place.
“This my niece,” Tyriq said, glancing between them like he was introducing heads of state instead of two people who had just met through a cracked iPhone screen. “Tell Nala your name, mama.”
The little girl announced it proudly, the syllables half-spoken, half-shaped, her voice a beat behind her fingers as they carved each letter into the air.
Nala’s eyes softened, lashes lowering for a heartbeat like she was swallowing around something thick in her throat.
“Nice to meet you, baby,” she said, warmth spilling into every word—and then, without doing that performative look how kind I’m being thing, she angled her body a fraction closer to Tyriq, gaze dropping to his hands like they were a textbook she trusted. “How you say that?” she whispered, tilting her head toward him, breath brushing his shoulder, the question hanging between them as a quiet, private vow: teach me so I can talk to her right.
He showed her slowly, the way you do when something matters. One big hand came up to guide the air in front of her smaller one, his palm cupping over the back of her fingers as he nudged her into the right shape—thumb tucked in a little more here, curl that knuckle there, loosen this wrist. Up close she could smell the last of his cologne and the faint onion from dinner, feel the warmth of him at her back, but her eyes stayed on his hands with the ruthless focus she usually reserved for studio notes and bad contracts.
Then she turned back to the screen and tried it herself. The sign came out a little clumsy—one finger a touch too stiff, the movement not quite as fluid as his—but unmistakable.
His niece lit up.
She clapped, delighted, the sound bursting out of the phone tinny and too loud, and Nala laughed, the sound low and bright in their little kitchen, like this tiny girl’s approval had just stamped some huge, secret blessing across her chest.
“Again,” Nala murmured, eyes never leaving the screen now. “Show me nice to meet you?”
He did. His hands moved slower this time, breaking the phrase down into pieces: the soft glide of one palm along the back of the other for nice, the two index fingers stepping forward and touching for meet. His chest did something he didn’t have a word for as he watched her mirror him—hand sliding gently along her other hand, fingers meeting and pulling apart; her mouth shaped the words quietly under her breath as she signed them, as if she was trying to tuck sound and movement into the same drawer in her brain.
She stumbled over the last bit, fingers tangling, brows knotting. For half a second frustration flickered—then she reset, exhaled, and tried again, stubborn as gravity, refusing to move on until her muscles remembered the right path.
On the couch two states away, his sister went very still. The TV kept chattering in the background, but she’d stopped moving, stopped fussing, the kind of quiet that said she was watching this stranger with wet eyes and biting the inside of her cheek to keep from crying.
“There you go,” Tyriq murmured when Nala finally nailed it, pride swelling for both of them at once. “You got it.”
He eased back a step, shoulders resting against the counter, letting Nala fill the frame. For the next few minutes, he watched as she and his niece pieced together a conversation out of half-sound, half-sign, and whole-hearted guessing.
Nala threw her whole face into it, exaggerating her expressions the way he’d been taught to do—eyes wide, eyebrows jumping, mouth rounding around silent ohs and wows. His niece giggled every time, then copied her, both of them overacting like two tiny theatre kids trying to outdo each other, joy ricocheting between them.
When the little girl signed H-O-R-S-E with grave seriousness to tell Nala about the cartoon she liked, her small fingers spelling the letters a beat behind her enthusiasm, Nala listened like she was being entrusted with state secrets. She nodded along slowly, lips parted in awe, shoulders leaning closer to the screen as if she could climb through it.
“You like horses?” Nala said aloud, then glanced sideways at Tyriq, eyes flicking down to his hands. “How you say it?”
He showed her again, more slowly this time, his fingers looping and tapping against the inside of her wrist, shaping the sign there like writing on her skin. His touch lingered half a beat longer than necessary, and she let it, then practiced it once, twice, under her breath.
She turned back to the phone and did it for his niece, the movement still a little careful but clear. The little girl nodded so hard her curls bounced, then started signing faster, newly convinced this beautiful stranger in her uncle’s kitchen understood her entire life story.
The kitchen seemed to shrink around them. The bad overhead bulb softened; the humming fridge and the tick of the cheap clock faded to nothing. The simmering pot on the stove hissed and threatened to burn, utterly forgotten. All the sharp edges of the room blurred until there was only this little triangle of light: Nala, his niece, and the river of language running between them.
Nala laughed again, quieter this time, delighted and a little breathless, cheeks warm, eyes bright as his niece tried to teach her a new sign now. Their hands were out of sync, movements tangled and imperfect, but their joy sat perfectly aligned, like they’d been doing this for years instead of minutes.
“That’s my girl,” Tyriq heard his sister whisper from the other side of the call, voice thick—not meaning the toddler this time.
He didn’t correct her. He couldn’t.
He just stood there in that too-small kitchen, leaning against laminate and bad paint, watching the two loves of his life build a bridge out of crooked fingers and shared laughter—and felt the floor of his future shift to make room for what he already knew was coming.
The moment wasn’t big enough to be the moment—not the thunderbolt, not the slow-motion epiphany he’d one day point to and say right there, that’s when I knew I’d marry her—but it was another stone in the path, warm and solid underfoot. Another small, luminous scene he’d tuck away and return to later when he was trying to explain to himself how the hell they’d gone from a cramped college kitchen to an altar.
At one point she glanced up at him over the top of the phone, while his niece was enthusiastically signing something about snacks, her little hands flapping and tangling over themselves. There was a softness in Nala’s eyes that almost startled him—this quiet, steady I will help you carry your people, too softness that slid through his ribs and took a seat right next to his heart.
What’s she sayin’ now? Nala mouthed, smile tugging at her mouth, careful not to interrupt the girl’s stream of half-sign, half-squeal.
He tore his gaze from her long enough to look at the screen. “She askin’ if you comin’ to visit,” he said, voice coming out tight and light at the same time. “She said you pretty and she likes your hair.”
Nala’s smile wobbled at the edges, the way it did when something hit her somewhere tender.
“Tell her…” she said, eyes dropping briefly before she lifted them back to the little girl, raising her hands, ready to copy whatever signs he put in them, “tell her I’d love to.”
He expected it to be a phase—the way it always was before. A sweet first impression, a couple of cute FaceTimes with his niece, and then life would get loud again; people drifted back into their own orbits, attention thinning out the way it always did when the novelty wore off.
But Nala had never been built for halfway.
She didn’t know how to love in trial sizes. She didn’t know how to show up for people in anything less than full colour. Once she decided you were hers, that was it—she was learning your language, literally and figuratively, scribbling your favourite snacks into the Notes app on her phone so she wouldn’t forget, rearranging her day to catch the five-minute window where you were free between appointments. She poured herself out with both hands, not as a performance but as a default setting, like generosity was just how her blood moved.
And standing there in that yellowed kitchen light, watching her lean closer to the screen as his niece babbled on about a future sleepover, Tyriq understood—maybe for the first time—that the world might be careless with what she gave. But she wasn’t. She loved like this on purpose.
He was still trying to decide how he felt about that—about how willingly she peeled her heart out of her chest and laid it on altars that hadn’t earned it, how she kept extending herself toward a world that had proven, over and over, it didn’t know what to do with that kind of devotion. But if there was one constant in the chaos of everything they’d lived through, it was this: Nala was love personified, love in walking, breathing form; it lived in her hands when she signed slowly for a little girl straining to understand, in her voice when she fussed and forgave in the same breath, in the tiny, deliberate ways she tried to make heavy things feel lighter—everywhere she went, love went too, like a field of wildflowers stubborn enough to grow through concrete.
Six months later, he finally brought her home.
A cookout in Tallahassee, officially “just because the weather’s nice” but, if anyone was telling the truth, thrown in quiet honour of meeting her.
By four in the afternoon the yard behind his parents’ house was already swollen with summer—Florida heat sitting thick and sticky on bare shoulders, air shimmering over patches of sunburnt grass. Charcoal smoke curled up in lazy ribbons, tangled with the smell of seasoned meat and sweet BBQ sauce; bass from somebody’s speaker thumped low under the sharp crack of dominoes slamming against a plastic folding table. Little cousins pinballed between lawn chairs and grown folks’ legs with Popsicle-stained mouths and sticky fingers, shrieking around a sprinkler that had been dragged out “just for the kids” and promptly soaked half the adults. Aunties held court under the big oak, bright dresses and louder voices, talking over one another as foil pans were uncovered, potato salad debated, and plastic cups of sweet tea and Hennessy were passed down invisible assembly lines. His father manned the grill in a “Kiss the Cook” apron nobody had ever tested, tongs clicking like punctuation as he flipped chicken and ribs with the easy authority of a man who knew everybody ate on his timing; his mother flowed between kitchen and yard with practiced grace, refilling bowls, straightening tablecloths, kissing cheeks, making sure no plate stayed empty long enough for anyone to feel disrespected.
And in the middle of all of that—of laughter and smoke and clinking ice and half-finished stories—stood Nala. One hand curled lightly into the back of his T-shirt like an anchor, the other smoothing invisible creases from her sundress as her eyes swept the yard, wide and bright, trying to drink it all in at once. The late-afternoon sun loved her on sight: caught on the gloss slicking her bottom lip, winked off the gold at her throat, threaded itself through the loose coils of her hair. Nerves fluttered in the fine muscles of her jaw, in the way she shifted her weight from foot to foot, but every time someone called her “baby” or “sweetheart” or, with a grin, “so this the famous girl we been hearin’ about?” she met them with that shy, sharp little smile—half dimples, half dare—that said she was flattered, grateful, and more than ready to hold her own if anybody tried her.
Tyriq watched her move through his family like she’d been dropped into the middle of a constellation he’d spent his whole life mapping.
His grandmother got to her first, of course—shuffling over in her church flats, tugging Nala into a hug that lasted one Mississippi, two, three, patting her back and murmuring something low and country-soft in her ear that nobody else caught. He saw the way Nala’s shoulders, tight with polite nerves, loosened just a fraction at whatever was said.
His mother was next, materialising at Nala’s elbow like she’d been summoned, eyes doing a quick, thorough scan—hair, dress, shoes, the ring of nervousness around her mouth—before dropping to the plate in her hand. It held exactly three things. Unacceptable.
“Mm-mm,” his mama frowned, already reaching. “You not leavin’ here hungry, I don’t care how small your waist is.” She scooped on mac and cheese, a scoop of greens, one more rib, the plate growing heavier with love disguised as bossiness while Nala laughed and shifted her grip to keep from dropping it.
And then his niece saw her.
One second she was in the middle of a ragged little pack of kids by the sprinkler, curls haloed wild, Popsicle melting across her wrist; the next she broke formation entirely, beelining across the grass like a shot. Her light-up sneakers flashed with every determined stomp, hearing aid already slipping a little behind one ear, cheeks flushed strawberry-bright from heat and excitement. Even before she reached them, her hands were lifting—those small, clever fingers already starting to shape hello in the air, muscle memory outrunning her voice.
Nala—without hesitation, without that moment of self-conscious oh God, everyone’s watching—shifted her plate into one hand and bent down in her pretty sundress until they were nearly eye-to-eye. The noise of the cookout seemed to dim around them, the chaos folding back like a curtain until there was just this: a little girl catching her breath, chest heaving; a woman in gold hoops and lip gloss, knees in the grass his mama watered; and the space between them, waiting to be bridged.
His niece barreled the last few steps like a comet on impact, light-up sneakers squeaking in the damp grass as she skidded to a stop. Up close, he could see the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the freckles the sun had kissed across her nose, the tiny smear of Popsicle near her mouth. Her chin tipped up with that fierce, unfiltered curiosity she’d had since the day she arrived screaming her displeasure at the hospital lights.
Her hands flew before her mouth even remembered to join in—quick, excited shapes he could read from halfway across the yard, fingers carving meaning into the air with all the solemnity of a sermon and all the joy of a playground secret:
Hi.
You’re so pretty.
Are you Uncle Ty’s girlfriend?
And Nala—standing there in a sundress the colour of melted sherbet, hem flirting with the backs of her knees, gold hoops glinting whenever she turned her head, lip gloss catching the sun like she’d gone and put shine on her mouth on purpose—Nala, who had just stepped into a backyard full of people who didn’t know her yet, in a world that had never once slowed down enough to make room for her softness—simply… slowed herself down to meet this little girl.
She shifted her flimsy paper plate into one hand, fingers adjusting around the weight of ribs and mac and cheese so nothing toppled, careful not to drip baked beans onto her sandals. Then she dropped into a soft bend at the knees, sundress pooling slightly, until their eyes were almost level. The whole cookout seemed to tuck itself back for a moment—the bass from the speaker dulled, the clack of dominoes blurred, the chatter of aunties faded—like someone had reached over and turned the volume down on everything except this one small circle of air.
Then her hands came up.
No hesitation. No little scrunched-up wait, what’s that one again? face. No quick, embarrassed dart of her gaze towards Tyriq, waiting for him to bail her out. Just clean, confident motion—fingers, wrists, and expression moving together, the language sitting in her body like something she’d been carrying for years instead of months.
Hi, baby. I’m Nala. I’ve heard so much about you. I like your hair, she signed, her mouth shaping the words softly along with her hands so they landed twice—once in sound, once in silence.
There were tiny imperfections, the kind only he would ever notice—an extra bounce in the wrist here, a sign a shade too textbook there—but to his niece it might as well have been a full choir in her mother’s voice.
The effect was instant.
His niece’s eyes went huge, dark irises swallowing up everything. Her whole face lit from the inside like somebody had flipped a switch behind her ribs and flooded her with daylight. She stared at Nala’s hands, then her face, then back again, as if she couldn’t quite believe the two were connected—that this pretty stranger in the orange sundress was speaking her language. Joy hit so fast her voice couldn’t keep up; it burst out of her anyway in a high, delighted shout, the word ragged and perfect, like it had sprinted from the centre of her chest to get out in time.
“Again!”
But her hands said, You sign. You sign like Mommy.
Nala laughed—soft, a little shy, dimples threatening at the corners of her mouth—and lifted her hands again, slower this time so the little girl could drink in every shape, every curve of her fingers.
I’ve been practising, she signed, movements deliberate, eyes warm. I wanted to talk to you for real.
For real. Not filtered through him. Not passed along via his sister. Not pieced together from exaggerated mouth-shapes and hopeful guesses.
Just… her and this child, meeting in the middle.
Tyriq stood there with a plastic cup sweating between his fingers, condensation rolling down onto his knuckles. The smell of charcoal and honeyed barbecue hung thick in the heavy Florida air; his uncle was still arguing over spades at the card table, somebody’s old-school playlist crackled through cheap Bluetooth speakers, cousins hollered near the sprinkler—
—and none of it landed.
The whole world seemed to zoom out like a camera on a crane, blurring the edges of the scene until there was only one frame in brutal focus:
His niece, grinning so hard her hearing aid was hanging on for dear life, cheeks flushed, hands flying clumsy and eager as she reached for Nala in the only language that had ever felt like home.
Nala, knees pressed into the grass, sundress spilling around her like melted sherbet, moved her fingers with the kind of reverence you reserve for holy things, as if every sign she shaped was a small, deliberate offering laid at this child’s feet.
And him—just standing there, useless plastic cup in hand—suddenly, viscerally aware that his heart had quietly picked itself up, shuffled the furniture around, and rearranged its entire layout to make space for a new truth.
This wasn’t some girl who’d picked up a couple of cute phrases for Instagram captions or to look impressive at family functions; this was a woman who had sat up alone in the blue glow of her laptop, YouTube videos on repeat, textbooks splayed open, fingers swollen and red from practising the same motions over and over, rehearsing in an empty dorm room so that one day, in his mama’s backyard, a little deaf Black girl with half-charged hearing aids would not have to claw her way to understanding.
He felt it then—that slow, tectonic shift in his chest—like the plates under his life were grinding against each other and finally, mercifully, tilting a few degrees to make permanent room for her.
The sunlight, the grill smoke, the chatter of cousins, the clack of dominoes on the folding table—all of it peeled back, sound sinking to a muffled hum as if someone had thrown a heavy quilt over the whole cookout and left him standing alone in the one clear, echoing pocket of air where this moment was happening: his girl, in the grass his mama watered every Saturday morning, carrying on a full, fluent conversation with his niece in a language he had not been the one to give her.
Because yes, she’d asked questions months ago—sprawled upside down on their busted college couch, notebook open on her stomach, toes digging absent-mindedly into his thigh while his hands were trapped between hers, tongue peeking from the corner of her mouth as she tried to coax her fingers into matching his. Yes, she’d watched him sign on FaceTime, brows knit in fierce concentration, lips moving silently along with the shapes his hands made, like she was sounding the words out in her head and filing them away for later.
He’d written it off as new-girlfriend sweetness, the kind of temporary tenderness people wrap themselves in at the start: learn a couple of words—hi, I love you, pretty dress—a little party trick to make his sister smile, something light you could shrug off when life got busy again.
A gesture, he’d thought. A phase.
And here she was, proving it had never been either.
He had not, in his wildest, dumbest dreams, clocked that she’d taken that idle curiosity and sprinted with it straight into the dark—into quiet 2 a.m. study sessions where the only light was her laptop glow and the only sound was video after video repeating the same shapes; into nights where her knuckles ached and her fingers cramped from tracing the same motions until they stopped feeling like someone else’s language and started settling into her bones; into pages of scribbled diagrams and arrows and little notes in the margins—eyebrows up here, soften your face there—all so that one day, in his mama’s backyard, a little deaf Black girl would not have to claw her way to understanding in a world that already made her work too hard.
Now, standing in a strip of shade beside the picnic table, condensation from his cup dripping onto his fingers, he watched months of secret labour bloom in real time right in front of him like a field of flowers he’d had no idea she’d planted. Nala’s hands moved with this careful, deliberate confidence—not smooth enough to be textbook-perfect, not polished enough to look rehearsed, but sure in the way that mattered most: fluent enough that his niece didn’t have to squint and guess or glance over at him, desperate for translation. Her fingers shaped school and dance and favourite colour like she’d practised them in the warped bathroom mirror while he brushed his teeth, wrists flicking, resetting, trying again in the quiet hours he’d lazily written off as her just “scrolling.”
You dance? Nala signed, shoulders swaying with the gesture, enlarging the concept with her whole body so there was no way to miss it. Show me later?
His niece nodded so hard her curls bounced, her answer tumbling out in a rush of tangled fingers and half-remembered signs that would’ve made an interpreter sigh and smile at the same time, and both of them laughed—bright, loose laughter that rang through the air like windchimes caught in a good breeze.
Across the yard, his mother froze mid-pour, the plastic pitcher of sweet tea hovering just above a row of plastic cups, ice waiting. Her eyes slid toward that small constellation by the table: her son, rooted to the spot like someone had nailed his sneakers to the lawn; her granddaughter, vibrating with a happiness so pure it almost looked like light; and the girl in the yellow sundress, knees pressed into St. Augustine grass, moving her hands with a steady, stubborn grace, as if language wasn’t a brick wall to bounce off but a bridge she’d quietly decided—night after night, plank after plank—to build all the way across.
His mother’s mouth softened, the hard, practical line she wore for overdue notices and bad news loosening into something almost tender, like someone had quietly turned the dial down on all the years that had hardened her. She didn’t call out, didn’t make a scene; she just shifted her weight, nudged his father with her elbow, and tipped her chin toward the little tableau in the grass. He followed her gaze, took in the sight in one clean sweep—their granddaughter lit up like a little sun, the girl in the sherbet dress kneeling in the lawn his wife babied, their son standing there like he’d just been hit by revelation—and he let out a low grunt, half approval, half overwhelmed. Then, because he was a man who had never known what to do with his hands when his heart got loud, he turned a piece of chicken that was already perfectly done, tongs clicking uselessly against the grill like applause he didn’t quite know how to give out loud.
Tyriq swallowed, the motion rough, as if his throat had been lined with sandpaper and sawdust and something dangerously close to awe; the simple act of getting air past it felt like dragging it through a field of sharp, glittering emotion he wasn’t prepared for.
He thought, then, of every woman he’d ever brought home before—girls who had bent down and cooed over his niece in that bright, shallow way adults sometimes did with kids, fingers ruffling her curls like she was a pet, not a person; girls who had maybe learned hi in sign if they were feeling extra generous, their hands forming the shape once or twice before boredom tugged them back toward the promise of better lighting and fresh lip gloss in the bathroom mirror. Nice girls. Fun girls. Girls who liked him, liked the trajectory he seemed to be on, liked the glittering idea of a life that might someday be loud and shiny if they stuck around long enough. But none of them—not one—had ever stopped to ask what it meant to live where his niece lived, in that thin, fragile strip between sound and silence, translating the world as you went because nobody had bothered to meet you halfway.
Nala had.
Nala was out here, knees denting his mother’s lawn, learning an entire language his niece needed just to move through the world without drowning—and she hadn’t told him a single word about it. Not once. Not a casual oh, I’ve been practising tossed over dinner. Not a shy look what I learned on FaceTime.
And it wasn’t because she wanted to pull off some grand surprise for clout, or because she was angling to impress his family and rack up invisible points on some scoreboard only she could see. She wasn’t performing for the aunties, or auditioning for the role of Wife in front of the cousins, or trying to secure a spot at the family table with a neat little party trick.
She was doing it the way she did everything that mattered to her: quietly, thoroughly, for the person at the centre of it and no one else—learning his niece’s language in the dark the way some people learned hymns, so that when the moment came, she could look that baby in the eye and say I see you without asking the child to do a single extra ounce of work to be seen.
Because in Nala’s universe, love was never a thing you declared from a stage, it was infrastructure; when she loved you, she quietly learned the terrain of your world and then went out, alone and unannounced, to pour concrete and lay boards in the dark, building ramps where there used to be stairs so that one day you’d show up and wonder why the climb didn’t leave you breathless anymore.
His niece signed something longer then, a whole story trying to fit itself into a pair of small hands—her fingers tripping over the shapes, knuckles bumping, little face scrunching up in frustration when she reached for a sign and came up empty. Nala didn’t jump in and finish the sentence for her, didn’t rush to smooth over the stumble; she just stayed there, anchored in the grass, patient and present, eyes soft and steady as a porch light. When the girl faltered, Nala repeated the sign she was reaching for, slower this time, like she was rewinding the tape—guiding those tiny hands gently through the motion once, twice, three times, until muscle memory caught the thread and tied it back together.
“Good job,” Nala murmured aloud, even as her fingers were already saying it for her, thumbs brushing across her own knuckles as she signed it again, more fully this time: So smart. I’m proud of you. The words sat between them like a blessing, small and shining, sinking into the little girl’s shoulders until they straightened another inch.
That was it.
Tyriq felt something under his ribs click—quiet but absolute, the soft, decisive snick of a lock finally turning or a heavy door swinging shut against a draft that had been leaking in for years. For a single suspended heartbeat, the world seemed to tilt on its axis, everything he’d balanced himself on sliding a few degrees to make room; then it resettled with a new centre of gravity that looked suspiciously, irrevocably like this woman in the grass, sundress stained with barbecue smoke and sunlight, smiling up at his niece like she’d been handpicked for this exact assignment before either of them were born.
He’d thought about marrying her before, of course—little fantasy reels he played in his head when the world got too loud, flickering shots of white dresses and courthouse papers and babies with her eyes, his last name traded back and forth in signatures and credits and school forms like a secret they both kept repeating just to taste it. But this was the first time the thought didn’t feel like a soft-focus dream he might jolt awake from and lose.
This time, standing in his mama’s yard with the smell of charcoal in his clothes and the sun turning her edges to gold, the knowing settled in his bones with the weight and certainty of scripture.
It didn’t feel like a possibility anymore.
It felt like prophecy.
He could see it then with an almost painful clarity—the future that had always hovered at the edges of his mind like a soft blur suddenly snapping into sharp, unforgiving focus, as if someone had reached over and twisted the lens on a camera he hadn’t realised was out of tune.
He saw Nala squeezed into one of those too-small elementary school chairs, knees knocking against cold metal, shoulders hunched under fluorescent lights, signing alongside speech therapists and teachers while his niece sat between them with her little legs swinging, eyes bright and steady in that way kids get when, for once, the room isn’t making them translate themselves to be understood—their world not filtered or approximated, but spoken back to them in their own language, clean and direct. He saw Nala in some future living room that was theirs, the kind of space filled with mismatched throw blankets and toy clutter and the hum of a television left on low—her hair tied up in a lopsided bun, socks not matching, hands moving as effortlessly as her mouth while she told one of their babies to sit down somewhere, the kid ignoring her in two languages at once, and still, somehow, loved right on time in both. He saw her in a softly lit hospital room decades from now, walls painted that bland off-white that tried and failed to be comforting, his mother smaller in the bed than he ever wanted to imagine; Nala at the bedside, shoulders squared, face gentle as she signed each sentence she spoke aloud, refusing to let age or illness or failing ears turn important words into static, refusing to let distance—any kind of distance—swallow the things that needed to be said.
Every table that had ever mattered to him—card tables ringed with trash talk and dominoes, dining tables groaning under holiday food, hospital trays holding lukewarm soup and hard news, school desks etched with pencil marks and prayers—he saw her there at all of them, hands moving, mouth soft, making sure nobody who belonged to him was ever pushed to the edge of the conversation, ever left to guess at what was being said about them or around them.
A warm, almost frightening certainty gathered low in his gut and climbed, slow and inevitable, through his chest like the burn of a strong drink swallowed too fast—searing, steady, impossible to ignore.
This one, the feeling said, clear and quiet as a bell tolling in his bones.
Not one day.
Not if it works out.
Not if we survive graduation, if the career cooperates, if the timing is right and the stars are generous.
This. One.
Nala glanced up at him then, mid-laugh, as if the weight of his stare had reached out and gently taken her by the jaw and turned her toward him. Her hands never stopped moving—fingers quick and sure, wrists loose with familiarity—as she snitched on him to the little girl, signing Your uncle is being weird with a conspiratorial flourish, her grin tugging at one corner of her mouth, eyes warm and bright with mischief that had always, always been a little bit aimed at him.
His niece followed the line of Nala’s gaze like it was a spotlight, clocked the look on his face, and gasped—one of those full-bodied, whole-heart sounds that only children and very honest people make. She flapped one small hand in front of her chest like she was trying to flag down a passing airplane and started signing in huge, messy letters, the kind that would’ve made her teacher sigh and smile at the same time: HE LOVES YOU, each movement big enough to be seen from space, just in case anyone in the backyard had somehow missed it.
Heat streaked under his skin in one dizzy rush, a flush that started at his collar and raced up to the tips of his ears, embarrassment and exposure and something dangerously close to relief colliding in his bloodstream. Instinct reared up on cue—old habits scrambling to the surface, some stupid, easy joke already forming on his tongue, something he could toss into the air to make this less sharp, less honest, less true in front of an audience.
But before he could open his mouth and betray himself with a laugh, Nala just… took it.
She smiled—small and devastating, sun-warm and steady—as if being loved that loudly, that obviously, wasn’t a spotlight but a temperature she’d already acclimated to. Her hands came up again, unhurried, unbothered, and she signed back with the same calm certainty she used for her own name: I know.
No coy tilt of the head, no mock-surprised who, me?
No ducking her chin, no pretending she hadn’t already read it in the way he watched her cross every room.
No performance, no deflection, no shrinking from the bigness of what that little girl had just thrown into the air like confetti.
Just acceptance—quiet, colossal, casual as gravity—his love for her treated not like a revelation but like a landmark on a map she’d been studying for months; not a new river cutting through the landscape, but one she’d already traced to its source and followed all the way to where it widened around her feet. She wore his feelings like weather she’d long ago learned how to dress for.
That was when it hit him—not with the theatrical thunderclap he’d always imagined, no sky splitting open, no invisible orchestra swelling on cue, no cinematic spotlight picking them out from the crowd—but in the simple, tidal way the ocean knows the pull of the moon and can’t help but answer.
Barefoot in his parents’ backyard, barbecue smoke stitched into the cotton of his shirt, paper plate grease drying tacky on his fingers; with the clack of dominoes and the rise-and-fall of cousin laughter blurring into distant noise while, a few yards away, the woman he’d been chasing for three months knelt barefoot in the grass his mama watered and spoke to his niece in a language he hadn’t taught her—as if the world had always contained space for the two of them together—
Tyriq Withers realised he was going to marry her.
Not hope to.
Not try to.
Not if nothing better comes along, not if we don’t outgrow each other, not if life is kind and timing behaves.
He was.
Even if it meant crawling through every jagged version of himself to get there, scraping his knees on his own pride, shedding bad habits and old defenses like dead skin; even if it meant learning, slowly and clumsily, how to be the kind of man a love like hers didn’t just choose once in a sun-struck backyard, but could keep choosing—deliberately, stubbornly, tenderly—over and over again, for every version of the life that waited for them on the other side.
He supposed that was the day Nala stopped being an ordinary woman in his eyes.
Up until then he’d called her amazing, fine as hell, special—human words for a human girl—but watching her in his mother’s grass, hands moving in a language he hadn’t taught her, bending herself toward a child the world kept forgetting to accommodate, something in him quietly laid down its old understanding and did not get back up. In that moment she slipped out of the category of girl I’m dating and into something older, bigger, mythic; a goddess wearing soft cotton and lip gloss, a figure that could not possibly be made of the same impatient flesh and borrowed breath he was, because no ordinary anatomy could explain the way she carried whole people inside her heart and still had room left over. That was the day his human-sized perception of Nala died, and in its place rose this terrifying, beautiful knowing: he was not just in love with a woman—he was devoted to something holy that had decided, for whatever reason, to love him back.
For a moment, the world tipped on its axis and he went a little lightheaded, like his lungs had been pried open from the inside. His chest felt too big for his ribs as he watched her—eyes bright, sundress brushing the grass—never missing a beat, a word, a motion. Even when her fingers stumbled, when a sign came out a little crooked, she didn’t flinch away from it; she let his niece’s small hands catch hers and correct the shape, nodded solemnly like she was being entrusted with sacred knowledge, then folded the new movement into her next sentence so seamlessly it was as if she’d always known it. Each tiny mistake was taken in, honoured, and transformed into fluency, and he stood there dizzy with the realisation that this was how she loved too—listening, learning, adjusting on the fly, determined never to wound the same place twice.
He realised, all at once, that Nala didn’t just like his niece, didn’t just find her cute in the way adults sometimes did with children—they were a decision to her. Nala wanted that little girl to be loved on purpose: deliberately, specifically, with thought and follow-through, the way you water a garden you intend to keep, not flowers you expect to die. This was the moment it clicked for him that love, in her vocabulary, was never a soft, passive noun you sat back and felt; it was a verb, a doing word, something with muscle and breath behind it. It was late nights hunched over a laptop learning a language nobody asked her to learn. It was hands shaping signs until they made sense to a child who lived between sound and silence. It was showing up prepared for a conversation most people would’ve shrugged and opted out of. Standing there in the smoke-sweet air, watching her sign slow and sure, he felt the quiet shame of someone who’d been coasting on feelings while she’d been building proof. It took him a full minute to notice his sister at his elbow, gaze fixed on the same scene, eyes glassy, mouth parted in something halfway between wonder and relief—as if, for the first time, she was watching somebody love her baby the way she’d always prayed the world would.
Because that was the impact Nala left on people—she left you breathless, like you’d just come up too fast from deep water and only realised on the surface that you’d been holding your lungs hostage the whole time.
You talked to her and felt something inside you stand up a little straighter. She looked at you—really looked—and suddenly all your sharp edges and soft spots were laid out on the table like cards, and somehow she made you feel like you were winning with a hand you’d always been ashamed of. She didn’t breeze through rooms; she rearranged the air. Folks would smile, say goodnight, walk away from her and then pause ten steps later like—what just happened? Checking their pockets for something they hadn’t realised they’d given her: a memory, a confession, a sliver of guard they hadn’t meant to lower.
It wasn’t charisma in the cheap, party-trick way. It was gravity. A slow, steady pull that made children lean closer and elders soften, that made men who thought they knew everything about hardness find themselves considering softness for the first time. She sat in your life like a lit candle in a dark room—not loud, not pushing, just… there, throwing light on corners you’d gotten used to ignoring, making dust and damage visible and, somehow, less shameful. With Nala, you didn’t just feel seen; you felt studied, cherished, like all your data was being collected for the sole purpose of loving you more accurately.
So of course his niece had fallen in love with her in four minutes flat. Of course his mother was over by the cooler, pretending to organise sodas while her eyes shone. Of course the cousins had gone quiet, dominoes forgotten mid-slam, watching this woman fold herself into their family language like she’d been written into the script from the beginning. That was Nala’s way—she walked into your world, learned its tongue, and left fingerprints on the walls of your memory that didn’t fade, no matter how hard time tried to scrub. And standing there in the thick summer heat, heart pounding too fast, Tyriq understood that being loved by her was less like being chosen for a season and more like being inducted into a mythology she carried in her chest, a story she’d keep telling—with or without him—until the end of her days.
His sister cleared her throat beside him, a small, unassuming sound that somehow slipped straight through the roar in his head and cracked the moment open.
“Breathe, Ty,” she murmured, still not looking at him, her gaze pinned to the same point in the yard as his. “You starin’ so hard you ’bout to set that girl on fire.”
He sucked in air like she’d just reminded him of the mechanics—lungs expanding around a heart that suddenly felt too big, too loud, like it was trying to pry his ribs apart to get closer to the sight in front of him. The world came back into focus by degrees: the drag of humid air in his throat, the cold sweat on his palm where the plastic cup bit into his skin, the thud of bass from somebody’s speaker thumping faintly under all of it.
“I didn’t know she was learning,” he heard himself say, and his own voice sounded unfamiliar, thinned out and echoing, like it belonged to some other version of him standing a few feet to the left. “She never told me.”
His sister’s mouth curved, slow and knowing, hovering in that space between smug and reverent—like she’d been waiting for him to catch up to something that had been obvious to her from the moment Nala stepped into frame. “’Course she didn’t,” she said, soft but certain. “That’s not why she did it.”
Down in the grass, his niece had dropped any illusion of cool. Her paper plate was now wedged haphazardly into Tyriq’s free hand, baked beans threatening to slide off the edge, while she spun herself into a crooked orbit around Nala—light-up sneakers flashing, curls bouncing, little arms carving big, emphatic shapes into the air. DANCE, she signed, ME, WATCH ME, each gesture so theatrical it could’ve had its own soundtrack, her whole body participating in the sentence.
Nala clapped for her like she had paid for front-row tickets—head tipped back, laughter spilling free, eyes crinkled at the corners, fingers flashing good, again, perfect with exaggerated, almost cartoonish enthusiasm that never once dipped into mockery. She didn’t talk down to her; she simply met the little girl at her volume, at her joy, at her level of drama, as if that six-year-old’s performance was the most important show happening on the planet.
His sister’s hand found his forearm then, fingers resting lightly but firmly enough that he felt the anchor in it. “You know what she asked me?” she said quietly, like she was offering him a secret, not a fact. “Couple weeks ago, when you was on set?”
He tore his eyes away from the scene just long enough to glance at her, but she was still watching Nala and the baby—as if looking away might break whatever delicate magic was knitting itself together in the grass.
“She DM’d me on Instagram,” his sister continued, voice going soft at the edges, like the memory itself had weight. “Asked what books I used when I was learnin’. If there were videos you didn’t have. If there was any signs your niece liked better than others.” Her lashes shimmered, smile wobbling for half a second before she steadied it. “Ty… she been practicing for her. Not for you. Not for us. For her.”
The words settled over him like a warm, heavy coat—too much and exactly right at the same time—pulling every stray thread of feeling tight around his chest until he could barely breathe for the sheer, staggering enormity of it.
He felt that all the way down to his bones—a slow, stunned heat that started somewhere behind his sternum and fanned out through his limbs, like someone had poured sunlight directly into his bloodstream and his body hadn’t quite figured out what to do with it yet.
By the picnic table, his niece rocked up onto her tiptoes, little sneakers squeaking in the grass as her small fingers brushed the back of Nala’s hand to pull her focus. You come my house? she signed, the sentence a little choppy but earnest as a prayer. Sleep over?
Nala’s gaze flicked up to him on instinct, that question flashing quick and vulnerable in her eyes—is this okay?—before she gently folded it away and turned back to the only person who mattered in that moment. Her hands moved, sure and tender, smile blooming as she answered in the language that meant home to the little girl. If your mommy says yes, she signed, shaping each word with care. I’ll come. I’ll braid your hair and bring snacks.
His niece shrieked, joy bursting out of her like a firework that hadn’t been warned about noise ordinances. The sound made three aunties jump and then dissolve into laughter, heads thrown back, plastic cups sloshing. She launched herself at Nala with the full force of her six-year-old devotion, flinging her arms around her neck in a hug that nearly toppled them both, curls smooshing against lip gloss and gold hoops, thin legs lifting clean off the ground with the sheer, unfiltered enthusiasm of the embrace.
Nala hugged her right back, arms winding around that small body like she’d been waiting her whole life for this exact weight. Her eyes fluttered shut, lashes resting against her cheeks, expression soft and almost reverent—as if this sticky, lopsided, barbecue-scented hug was not just affection but benediction, something holy being laid gently across her shoulders.
Beside him, his sister’s fingers tightened around his arm, nails pressing just enough into his skin to ground him. “That right there?” she said, her voice roughened now, scraped raw by emotion. “That’s your wife.”
The word didn’t just land; it ricocheted through his chest, bouncing off bone and memory and every half-formed future he’d ever imagined with Nala, like a bullet that had turned into light mid-flight and was now looking for somewhere permanent to stay.
He looked at her—really looked at her. At the way her hand moved automatically, steadying his niece’s slipping hearing aid with a casual, practiced touch that made no spectacle of itself, like adjusting a crown you’d long since accepted you were worthy to wear. At the way she let barbecue sauce kiss the hem of her sundress and didn’t bother to wipe it, too busy shaping story and tomorrow and I promise into the air with her fingers, like little spells meant to tether this child to a softer world. At the way she laughed with her whole body when the little girl tried to teach her a sign and got it gloriously, spectacularly wrong—head tipped back, shoulders shaking, dimples carved deep, joy ringing out of her like a bell struck clean in the middle of summer.
Standing there in the thick, smoky heat, he had the wild, dizzying thought that if love had to put on flesh and step out into a backyard in Tallahassee, it would probably look exactly like this—bare feet in the grass, sundress stained, hands moving, heart wide open, letting a small girl’s arms nearly knock it off its axis and calling the imbalance a blessing.
For a second, the backyard doubled.
In one layer, it was exactly what it was—July heat sitting thick and humid on bare shoulders, cheap white folding chairs sinking slightly into the grass, somebody’s Bluetooth speaker crackling through an old-school playlist while kids shrieked around a plastic sprinkler that clicked and spat like it was fighting for its life. In the other, laid over the first like translucent film, was a dozen futures playing at once: Nala under a different tree in a different year, calling a toddler of their own over with that same crook of her finger; Nala at the head of a long, chaotic table, teaching their babies how to sign please and thank you and I love you, her hands moving patiently over little wrists so nobody at that table ever felt shut out of a conversation; Nala years and years from now, soft at the edges and silver threaded through her hair, still signing in some softly lit hospital room, fingers steady even when her voice had grown thin, making sure his mama—or whoever time decided to sit in that bed—never lost access to the words that mattered.
He could see all of it with a clarity that almost hurt, like staring straight into the sun and only realising too late that you’d been looking at the centre of your life the whole time.
That’s your wife.
The sentence rang in his head like a bell, simple and seismic. His mouth went dry. His palms did that thing they did before auditions and big games—that slight, damp tremor that meant every nerve in his body had snapped to attention—but this time there was no camera, no crowd, no director yelling action, no scoreboard waiting to tell him if he’d won or lost.
There was just… this. Just his life.
Nala looked up again, like she’d felt his stare land on her neck with the weight of a hand. Their eyes caught across the yard, over paper plates and plastic cups and the shimmer of heat above the grill.
He knew she saw it—the shift. The way something behind his gaze had stopped reaching and simply… settled, the way wondering had quietly folded itself into knowing. Her smile faltered for half a heartbeat, then deepened, slow and sure, like she was watching a line being drawn in permanent ink right there between them.
You okay? she mouthed, brows lifting just a little, teasing on the surface but concern glinting underneath.
He dragged in a breath that shook on the way out and nodded once. Then, because the English language suddenly felt like too blunt an instrument for what had just rearranged his insides, he let his hands do what his mouth couldn’t.
He lifted them, slow and deliberate, every motion heavy with intention, carving the air between them like he was writing on the world itself.
I. His index finger pointing to his chest, the simplest confession of self.
Love. Hand folding over his heart, moving outward like he was physically scooping something out of his ribcage and offering it to her.
You. His finger extending toward her, cutting through sun and smoke and distance until there was nothing left between them but the truth.
.
Her mouth parted. For a heartbeat she looked genuinely startled, even though those three words had lived between them for months in softer, smaller forms—murmured into pillows with morning breath, tossed casually over shoulders on the way out the door, scrawled on neon Post-its stuck to the fridge next to grocery lists and half-finished ideas.
It landed different this time—he could see it hit her. Coming from ten feet away, in the middle of his mama’s yard, with chicken smoke in the air and aunties eavesdropping from behind plastic cups, it wasn’t a habit or a reflex or something you said because the conversation was ending; it was a declaration you could rewind and replay in your head forever, carried not on the safety net of sound but on pure, naked intention carved into the air between them.
She blinked, lashes already a little damp from everything the day had asked her heart to hold, then lifted her hands and signed it back with a tiny, disbelieving shake of her head, like she was both accepting the moment and still half-convinced the universe was playing a very specific joke on her.
I love you.
His niece whipped her head between them, catching on to the shift faster than any adult, delight sparking through her like someone had plugged her straight into the sun. With all the exaggerated subtlety of a six-year-old who had never once experienced the urge to be chill, she flapped one small hand in front of her like she was trying to flag down an airplane and signed huge, messy letters in the air—half-correct, half-chaos, all heart:
HE LOVES YOU SOOOOO MUCH.
The people within earshot broke like a wave. Laughter rolled out from their side of the yard—his cousins hooting and elbowing each other like they’d just hit the jackpot on live entertainment, an auntie somewhere shrieking “WELL, ALRIGHT THEN,” his mother trying and spectacularly failing to look mildly scandalised as she covered her mouth, eyes bright with something that wasn’t embarrassment at all.
Nala covered her face with one hand, shoulders shaking, caught between wanting to sink into the grass and glow from the inside out; her other hand stayed low, fingers twitching unconsciously in the shape of I love you again and again, as if her body couldn’t help but echo what her heart had already answered.
Tyriq didn’t say anything. Didn’t deflect, didn’t joke, didn’t try to water it down. He just stood there with a sweating plastic cup in one hand and his whole life in the other and let the truth seep all the way through—past skin, past bone, down into the deep, quiet place where certainties went to live.
Yes, he thought, in a voice that felt older than he was.
Yes. He did.
That much.
And more.
Sleep never really stood a chance after that.
He lay there that night pretending for a while—on his back with one arm folded under his head like a makeshift pillow, the other still spread wide over her stomach as if he could keep her tethered to him through surface area alone, eyes pinned to the mottled ceiling while the fan over their bed hummed its tired little song and did absolutely nothing about the heat in his chest. The room smelled like her—coconut oil and barbecue smoke and the faint, sugary ghost of her lotion—and the more he tried to breathe past it, the more it slid into his lungs and stayed there, heavy and sweet, like incense in a chapel you hadn’t realised you’d walked into until you were already on your knees.
Every time he shut his eyes, the afternoon didn’t just replay—it unspooled behind his eyelids in cruel, high-definition slow motion: her in that sherbet sundress, hands carving meaning out of thin air like she was plucking stars down one by one and rearranging them into sentences just for his family; his niece’s little face detonating into joy like a sunrise breaking clean over the horizon; his sister’s quiet, reverent that’s your wife slipping into his ear and lodging there like a hook. The reel looped and looped, tightening with each pass, until the edges of it stopped feeling like something that had happened and started to feel like something that had been foretold—a memory wearing prophecy’s clothes.
“I’m gonna marry you,” he’d whispered, like a confession, like a vow he was sneaking past his own fear.
Now his body refused to let him sleep on it.
Nala breathed slow and steady against his shoulder, cheek pressed to his chest, one leg slung over his like she was instinctively trying to pin him to the mattress, to this exact moment, even in unconsciousness. Her mouth was parted the tiniest bit, lashes resting soft against her cheeks, bonnet a little crooked from the drive home and the way she’d dozed off in the passenger seat. Every exhale brushed warm over his skin and sent another small, electric spark skittering along his nerves, like his whole system was a live wire and she was the only current running through it.
He cycled through all his usual tricks like a man flipping through channels—count backwards from a hundred, breathe in for four and out for six, picture routes and coverage and blocking schemes, anything that wasn’t the shape of her hands or the sound of her laugh—but every mental detour curved right back around to her. All roads, all thoughts, all half-formed distractions led back to Nala: Nala throwing her head back laughing up at his niece, Nala’s fingers spelling out I know like it was the simplest fact in the world, Nala’s smile when he signed I love you across his mama’s yard and she caught it like something fragile and ancient.
It was too much feeling with nowhere to put it, like his ribcage had turned into a church too small for the congregation trying to cram inside—love pressed shoulder to shoulder with fear and awe and gratitude until the pews creaked.
“Fuck,” he breathed into the dark, the word leaving his mouth less like a curse and more like a ragged little prayer to whatever was listening.
His fingers flexed against the hem of her hoodie—the faded FSU one she’d stolen and never once offered to return—and he could feel the familiar curve of her waist beneath it, the slow lift and fall of her breathing, the steady, stubborn drum of her heart where her chest pressed to his side. Each beat seemed to knock against his own, throwing it off rhythm, making his heartbeat stutter and trip like it was trying to catch up to a song it suddenly realised it had been written for.
He turned his head, just enough to bring her into focus.
Even sleep-soft and slack, she was too much. The faint sheen of lip gloss still clung to her mouth like the echo of something sweet; the ghost of laughter lingered in the corners of her lips, tucked there like a secret she’d fallen asleep before finishing. A tiny crease rested between her brows, that familiar little line that meant some part of her—no matter how deep under she went—was still thinking, still worrying about other people, still loving them in ways they would never fully deserve.
He wanted to kiss that crease smooth, to press his mouth to it until the tension gave up and dissolved.
He wanted to kiss the laugh back onto her lips, to kiss thank you into her palms for what she’d done today in his mother’s yard, to kiss I see you into every old bruise of doubt she still carried from the girl she’d been long before his family ever learned her name.
He wanted, and wanted, and wanted—want stacking on want until it felt like his ribs were bowing under the pressure—and there was nowhere for any of it to go except into her.
“Baby,” he murmured, the word slipping out before he’d fully decided to speak, vibrating low against her hair.
She hummed in her sleep, not quite waking, just burrowing closer on instinct, nose nudging into the hollow of his throat like some small, trusting animal nosing for warmth. The sound—soft, thoughtless, so sure of him it made his chest ache—punched straight through whatever flimsy restraint he’d been pretending to have.
He lasted maybe three more seconds.
Then he surrendered.
He rolled onto his side, moving slowly, reverently, as if any sudden motion might break whatever fragile, holy thing had settled between them tonight. He eased the arm pinned beneath her free, sliding it out from under her shoulders and then immediately bringing that hand back to her, fingers spanning her waist as he coaxed her gently onto her back.
She made a small, confused noise, brows knitting tighter, one hand reaching for him in her sleep—fisting in his t-shirt like her body thought he was pulling away and refused to let him go.
“Nah, I’m right here,” he whispered, the words coming out soft and hoarse, as if he was afraid of startling the moment away. He caught her groping fingers and brought them to his mouth, kissing her knuckles once, twice, a third time—each press slow and deliberate, like he was sealing something sacred into her skin. “I’m right here, Lani. I’m not goin’ nowhere.”
Her lashes fluttered, little shadows trembling against her cheeks. “Mmh?” she breathed, stuck somewhere between dream and waking, voice barely more than warm air. “Ty?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, and even he could hear how wrecked he sounded—low and rough around the edges, like every word had to scrape past the feeling lodged in his throat. Up this close, there was nowhere for his attention to run; he could see every freckle scattered across her nose, every faint, tired line that the day had etched into the delicate skin beneath her eyes, the tiny smear of barbecue sauce dried at the edge of her chin that he hadn’t noticed in the chaos of the cookout.
His thumb went there without thinking, brushing the spot away with a feather-light stroke, and something in his chest pulled tight, a painful, tender cinch at the sheer intimacy of the gesture—the ridiculous, holy ache of being brought to his knees by something as simple as wiping sauce off her face.
She blinked herself a little further upright in the world, pupils struggling to focus, mouth tugging into a confused, sleepy half-smile. “Why you look like that?” she mumbled, words rough and frayed with sleep, like they were dragging themselves out of her. “You okay?”
No. Yes. Absolutely not. Completely.
He was fine the way a man is fine standing on the edge of a cliff, wind in his face, knowing he’s already decided to jump.
Instead of answering, he bent and kissed her.
It wasn’t smooth or measured or curated for effect—not the kind of kiss he gave her when he’d had time to think about it, plot out the angle and the pressure and how he wanted it to land. It was the kind of kiss that erupts because there is literally nothing else your body can think to do with all the feeling crashing through it, like his heart had finally overflowed and this was the only vessel big enough to hold the spill.
His mouth met hers gently, almost reverent at first, but there was a fierce, hungry insistence braided into the softness, an edge of desperation like he’d been starving without even realizing it and suddenly someone had set the only plate that mattered right in front of him.
She made a small, startled sound against his lips—a tiny, breathy “oh” that tasted like shock and something sweeter—and then it melted into a long, shuddering sigh as the rest of her caught up, sleep burning off in the heat of it. Her hands, which had been lying loose and uncertain at his sides, clenched in the fabric of his t-shirt all at once, fingers bunching the cotton over his ribs, hauling him down as if gravity had just remembered its job and decided he belonged much, much closer.
“Hi,” she breathed when he finally dragged himself back just enough to let oxygen in, their foreheads still pressed together, noses brushing in the narrow space he’d allowed. Her smile was slow and a little crooked, drunk on sleep and him. “That how we wakin’ people up now?”
“Apparently,” he said, and there was a laugh in the sound, sure—but it skimmed over something much rawer underneath, his eyes dark and blown and a little wild, like whatever thin leash he kept on himself had snapped an hour ago and nobody had thought to tell him. He dipped back in before she could read too much there, pressing a lingering kiss to the corner of her mouth, then another along the curve of her jaw, then one on the tip of her nose, like he couldn’t quite decide which part of her to worship first so he was just going to cover all of them and work his way down.
She huffed out a tiny laugh that dissolved into a soft, sharp inhale when his lips found that spot just beneath her ear, the one that might as well have had a switch label printed on it. “Tyriq…” she warned, except there was no heat in it, no real threat; her chin tipped up on instinct, baring her throat to him like an offering, like she’d long since accepted that if he wanted more of her, he could have it.
He took it with the kind of reverence people reserve for altars. His mouth opened against her skin, teeth grazing, tongue smoothing after as he traced a slow, unhurried line along her pulse, feeling the way it jumped under his lips like her heart was trying to knock directly into his. Every tiny reaction—every shiver that skated across her ribs, every quiver in her voice, every change in her breathing—ran straight into him like a live wire; her flinch became his, her soft inhale turned into his stuttered exhale, until it stopped feeling like two separate bodies at all and more like one overloaded circuit, current arcing back and forth between them with nowhere to ground out.
“You can’t sleep?” she guessed, fingers sliding up into his hair, scratching at the nape of his neck in slow, absent little circles that she knew—knew—made his whole spine light up like someone had run a lit match straight along it.
He let out a broken little laugh against her throat, the sound muffled by skin and the steady thud of her pulse. “At all,” he admitted, words frayed at the edges. “I’m wired as hell. It’s like my brain drank six Red Bulls and fell in love at the same time and now everything in there is just—” he exhaled, shaky, “—loud.”
Her hand stilled for half a beat, then softened again, nails tracing calm, soothing arcs over his scalp like she was trying to smooth the static out of him one stroke at a time. “And your solution,” she said, amusement curling around her voice, warm and fond and a little exasperated, “was to attack me with your mouth at three a.m.?”
He lifted his head just enough to really look at her.
The room didn’t change—the same tired fan humming its ragged little lullaby, the same cheap blinds bleeding a thin stripe of streetlight across the wall, the same Florida night pressing humid against the glass—but something in his face shifted, some soft, stupid joke he’d been about to make falling clean off the ledge of his tongue.
“Yeah,” he said simply, and the word landed heavier than it had any right to. “I didn’t really… know what else to do with all this.” His throat worked around the confession, Adam’s apple bobbing as he searched for language that matched the riot in his chest. “So I brought it to you.”
“All what?” she asked, voice gone gentle, as if she’d felt the temperature change in him and was now moving like you do around something fragile—eggshells, bomb wires, a heart you didn’t plan on catching. Her eyes searched his, wide and dark in the low light, trying to read the storm behind them.
He swallowed again, that helpless little half-smile tugging at one corner of his mouth like it belonged to a boy who still thought he could play this off. “All of this,” he said, and it wasn’t eloquent, not in the way she could string words together and make them sing, but he made up for it with the way his gaze dragged over her like a vow—slow, deliberate, cataloguing everything: the crooked tilt of her bonnet, the shine smudged off her lip gloss, the faint crease in her cheek from the pillow, the sleep-heavy squint in her eyes. “All this… you learnin’ ASL in secret, you talkin’ to my niece like she hung the damn moon, you sittin’ in the grass in my mama backyard like you been there since before I was born.”
He huffed out a breath, frustrated with his own limits, and pressed his hand flat against his sternum like he was trying to hold something in place that kept slamming against the bars. “I keep replayin’ it,” he admitted, voice pitched low and hoarse, “and my chest feel… too full. Like somebody overpacked my heart and forgot to zip it, and now it’s just—” his fingers curled against his own skin, nails biting lightly through cotton, “—spilln’ everywhere. I can’t sleep ’til I put my mouth on you enough times that my body believes you real and not somethin’ I made up to get through a bad day.”
Her eyes went glossy, that quick, traitorous shine that showed up whenever emotion hit her too fast to hide it. The sleepy haze she’d been wrapped in cracked straight down the middle; what looked out at him now was bare and sharp and unbearably soft all at once. “Ty…” she breathed, like his name hurt a little on the way out.
“I’m serious,” he murmured, and she could hear it—the way the playfulness had burned off, leaving only the raw metal underneath. He dipped his head and kissed the corner of her eye, catching the first hint of a tear with his mouth like he could swallow it before the world saw it, lips lingering there a second longer than necessary as if he could press comfort straight through her skin. “It’s like…” he exhaled, shaky, searching, “I don’t know where to put all this love, babe. It’s not fittin’ in my head no more. It’s crowdin’ my ribs, my throat, my hands. So I gotta… I gotta kiss it into you or somethin’, I don’t know.”
He laughed then, a small, self-conscious sound that tried to undercut the confession, like he was embarrassed by the size of his own feeling, like he’d just realised he’d opened his chest and dumped the contents on the floor between them. But the attempt at levity barely made it out before she made a sound that was more feeling than word—half-sob, half-sigh, all ache—and lifted her mouth to his again, chasing his lips like they were the only source of oxygen in the room and she’d just discovered she’d been breathing shallow her whole life.
Her hands fisted in his shirt, dragging him down with a kind of desperate tenderness, and in that small, urgent movement she answered him without language at all: fine, then. Put it here. All of it.
This kiss was different—deeper, slower, the kind that felt less like escalation and more like translation, a question and an answer and a thank you all layered in the same unbroken line of motion. She kissed him like something in her had tipped over too, like whatever reservoir she’d been holding steady all day had finally cracked under the weight of what she’d seen in that backyard, and now every soft press of her mouth to his was its own confession: I saw you today, I saw what it did to you, you wrecked me, and I don’t know where to file that either, so I’m putting it here.
He let out a quiet, helpless groan into her mouth, the sound slipping free before he could think to be embarrassed by it, his hand finding her jaw and sliding along the curve of it, thumb resting in that little hollow under her ear as he angled her exactly where he wanted her, like he was trying to align them with the same precision he used for routes and camera marks. Between their bodies, their fingers found each other on instinct, lacing together like they were closing a circuit; his hand engulfed hers, warm and broad and shaking just a little, their rings knocking together in a faint metallic clink that sounded, absurdly, like a tiny bell tolling for some private ceremony only they had been invited to.
She dragged her thumb slowly over the band on his finger, over the small, familiar bump of ink hidden beneath the metal, tracing it as if she were reading a Braille promise, needing the reminder as much as he did that this wasn’t hypothetical, wasn’t one of his late-night daydreams or her what-if scenarios—it was already written into their skin.
“Hey,” she whispered against his mouth when they finally parted far enough to breathe, their lips still brushing with every word. “Look at me.”
He did—of course he did—because he always did when she pulled that particular note out of her voice, the one that managed to be soft and unyielding at the same time, the same tone she used in studio meetings when she needed grown men with egos to shut up and listen. His gaze snapped to hers, pupils blown, chest working like he’d just sprinted the length of a field.
“I’m here,” she said, slow and deliberate, each syllable landing with the clarity of a sign spelled out hand-over-hand. “I’m right here. You don’t gotta… earn me tonight, okay? You already have me. You can just be in love and annoying and insomniac next to me.”
Something in him stuttered at that—some small, frantic animal that had been racing around his ribcage all night hitting a wall it hadn’t known existed and finally, finally sliding down to rest. He laughed, breathless and a little disbelieving, letting his forehead drop to hers so their noses bumped, so he could hide in the warmth of her exhale.
“I’m real annoying right now, huh?” he managed, voice frayed at the edges, half-tease, half-apology.
“A little,” she admitted, her smile curving slow and fond against his mouth, the mockery in her tone softened by the way her fingers were still carding through the hair at the nape of his neck. “But it’s cute. You kiss like you ’bout to go off to war.”
“How you know I’m not?” he murmured, and there was a rough honesty underneath the joke, a flash of something that made her chest pinch. He pressed his lips to the point of her chin, then dragged them down the column of her throat, catching the flutter of her pulse with a reverence that bordered on worship. “Every day I leave this bed is a battle not to act a fool about you in public.”
She giggled, the sound bubbling up bright and startled, her hand smacking weakly at his shoulder in protest even as her neck arched, offering him more of that warm, vulnerable skin like instinct had taken the wheel. “You so dramatic,” she breathed, the words dissolving into a soft inhale when his mouth found that sensitive spot beneath her jaw again.
“And you love it,” he shot back, because it was easier than saying I need you, punctuating the claim by trailing kisses up the side of her neck, along the shell of her ear, across the high plane of her cheekbone—slow, careful presses, as if he were trying to learn her face by heart in braille, mapping every contour with his mouth so that even in the dark, even in his worst, he’d never forget the exact coordinates of home.
She did love it—God, she loved it. Loved him, loved this, loved the ridiculous way a man who spent half his life made of stone could melt into something soft and almost panicked the second you put him in front of something sacred. It was one of her favourite things about him, even when it cost them sleep: how quickly his composure evaporated when the stakes were his people.
Her hands slid down from his hair to cradle his face, palms warm against the rough line of his jaw, thumbs sweeping slow arcs over his cheekbones. They caught on a faint dampness he hadn’t realised was still there—a thin, salt-bright echo of everything the day had wrung out of him—and something in her chest flinched, then wrapped itself tighter around him.
“You really can’t sleep?” she asked quietly, eyes searching his, like she was checking for fever.
He gave the smallest shake of his head, eyes closing for a moment under her touch as if the weight of her hands was the only thing holding him together. “Not with all this in me, no,” he admitted, the honesty landing heavy between them. “Not without… I don’t know. Telling you again. Showing you again. Reminding my body that you’re really here, that I didn’t dream you in my mama’s backyard.”
Her chest pulled tight at that, a sharp, sweet ache—soft and feral all at once, like some protective animal had just opened its eyes inside her. Of course he’d be haunted by goodness as much as by pain; of course his mind would torture him with the possibility that the most tender thing he’d ever witnessed might have been a trick of light.
“Okay,” she breathed, fingers tightening just a little on his cheeks as she tugged him down, closing the space between them until his next exhale landed warm on her lips. “Okay. Then don’t. Don’t sleep yet.”
She kissed him slow—slow enough that every frantic, ricocheting thought had to file single-file through the narrow doorway of their mouths, slow enough that he could pour all of it into her: the backyard, the signing, the way his sister had said that’s your wife like she was pointing out something as obvious as the sky.
His breath hitched, that first shaky inhale catching halfway like it didn’t know whether to come out as a laugh or a sob, relief and desire and gratitude tangling together in his ribs until he wasn’t sure which was which.
“Stay up with me?” he asked against her mouth, and for a heartbeat she could see the boy under the man—the nineteen-year-old who’d biked across campus with no plan except to sit on her floor and talk until his voice went hoarse and his body finally surrendered. The same boy now, just in a bigger frame and heavier with love.
She smiled, lips brushing his as she spoke. “We always do,” she reminded him, voice soft but sure, like she was reciting a rule they’d written years ago. “You and me. We stay up, we figure it out, we kiss through it, remember?”
He did. God, he did—the late nights in tiny apartments, the hotel rooms with blackout curtains and bad room service, the way they’d always used their mouths to build little bridges over whatever fracture the day had carved.
So he kissed her again. And again. And again.
Some were small, almost chaste—little reverent presses to the corner of her mouth, the tip of her nose, the angle of her jaw—like punctuation marks in a sentence he’d been trying to finish for years. Others were deeper, lingering things that curled her toes and made her fingertips dig crescents into his shoulders, the kind of kisses that felt like a door being thrown open, like a whole congregation of feeling rushing in. Every time he tried to pull back, to give her space, to be decent and measured and grown, she chased him—mouth following his, body arching with that unconscious, unembarrassed honesty she’d always had, proving with every lean and sigh that she was just as lost in this as he was.
The room shrank to the radius of their bodies: the soft drag of breath between kisses, the quiet rustle of sheets, the faint squeak of the mattress when he shifted his weight over her. Somewhere between the hundredth kiss on her mouth and the softer one he pressed to the inside of her wrist, to the pulse that always betrayed her before her voice did, he felt it—the knot behind his sternum finally, mercifully, loosening.
All that unbearable too-muchness, all that love with nowhere to go, found its outlet: into her skin, into her bones, into the little breathy laughs she couldn’t hold back when he missed her mouth and bumped her nose, into the way her fingers kept returning to his ring like a touchstone. Piece by piece, it bled out of his overfull chest and soaked into her like the bed was some altar and she was the only offering that made sense.
Eventually, when the air in the room was thick with warmth and the only sounds left were their breathing and those low, involuntary hums of contentment people made when they forgot anyone might be listening, he felt his eyelids start to drag. The adrenaline that had been buzzing under his skin for hours receded in slow, reluctant waves, leaving behind the heavy, pleasant ache of a body finally convinced it was safe.
She felt the shift the way she felt everything with him—as if his nervous system were filed under hers. Her hand, still threaded with his, gave a gentle squeeze, pulling his attention back to her face for one last moment.
Her eyes were half-lidded, mouth curved in a sleepy, incredulous little smile like she couldn’t quite believe the universe had let her keep him this long. She lifted their joined hands to her lips and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, then to the ring, then to the faint bump of ink beneath it, sealing the night with one more tiny ritual.
“Love you more,” she whispered, and even though they both knew it wasn’t a competition, she said it like a promise anyway, like an oath she intended to renew every day they were given. Her thumb stroked over his fingers, slow and steady. “Go to sleep, Ty. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
And with those words—simple as a lullaby, heavy as a spell—the last of the tension finally let go.
She meant it as an ending, a soft little curtain call on the night. For her, it worked; the words slid out of her mouth like a promise and settled her body in an instant, her muscles unwinding against him, breath already lengthening as sleep came to claim her.
For him, it landed like a stone in a lake.
I’m not goin’ anywhere—and suddenly every place she could possibly go started flickering in his mind like bad channels: studios and stages, cities and contracts, new rooms filled with new people who didn’t know they were supposed to handle her carefully. The thought of any universe where he stood on the outside of her life, looking in, made something in his chest seize.
His body pressed the script of sleep—cheek against her collarbone, leg hooked between hers, fingers laced with hers over the beat of her heart—but his mind refused to go along. It paced.
His eyes stayed open long after hers fluttered shut.
Sleep found him in pieces, but only in his limbs. First the weight in his shoulders loosened under the warmth of her body; the knots in his back went slack, his jaw unclenched where it rested against her neck. His hand stayed locked with hers on her chest, thumb twitching once like it had one last I’m here to get out.
But higher up—behind his ribs, behind his eyes—everything buzzed.
The room held them gently, like it understood what it was cradling. Streetlight slipped in through the narrow gap in the curtains and painted a thin silver stripe across the bed: over his back, the long line of her thigh thrown carelessly across his hips, the small domestic chaos of them—hoodies half-off, pillows kicked crooked, his watch abandoned on the nightstand beside her bonnet cap and a half-finished glass of water. Somewhere in the next room, the TV murmured on mute and a playlist spun on low, one of those Lord Huron tracks humming faint and far away—the one about how no matter where you go, no matter what breaks, everything keeps circling back to the same person.
He stared at the ceiling and felt every word of it like pressure behind his sternum.
It all comes back to her. Over and over and over.
Nala slept heavy on his chest, mouth parted the tiniest bit, lashes resting soft on her cheek, breathing in that slow, sure rhythm that said I’m safe here. I’ve decided I’m safe here. With every exhale, warm air skimmed his collarbone; with every inhale, his chest rose to meet hers. After a while he realised his lungs weren’t even making independent decisions anymore—they were just following the lead of hers, like his body had quietly decided, we breathe when she does, or not at all.
He squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t help.
Behind his lids, the day replayed itself in jagged detail: her knees in his mama’s grass, sundress pooling, fingers moving in a language he hadn’t taught her; his niece’s face lit up like sunrise; his sister’s voice in his ear—that’s your wife. It looped again and again until it stopped feeling like memory and slid into something meaner, sharper—like the universe was holding up flashcards and asking, You understand what you’ve been given? You understand you could lose it?
He thought about all the ways he’d watched men fumble love. Uncles who chose pride over apology and ended up living in studio apartments with sagging couches and regrets for company. Old heads at the barbershop talking about “first loves” like ghosts that still sat in the empty seat next to them. His own father, some days, flinching at the way his mother’s disappointment landed heavier than any coach’s anger ever had.
He’d always sworn he wasn’t going out like that. That if he ever got the real thing, the ugly-beautiful, steady, show up on the bad days kind of love, he’d hold it with both hands.
Then Nala had walked directly into his life and started doing exactly that for everyone around him—with or without him—and it terrified him how easy it would be to trust she’d just keep doing it forever, no matter what he did.
What if she woke up one day and realised she didn’t have to keep choosing him?
The thought crept in quiet as a draft and then roared, ugly and loud.
His grip tightened involuntarily where their fingers were linked. She made a soft, half-conscious sound and shifted closer, nose nuzzling deeper into the crook of his neck like she was chasing his scent even asleep. The simple weight of her, the thoughtless way she clung, should’ve soothed him.
It made it worse.
Because this was what he would be asked to protect for the rest of his life—not just her body, not just her career, but this: her unguardedness. The way she gave herself over to rest in his arms like the world had never taught her to brace for impact. The way she believed him when he said I got you.
His mind wouldn’t stop running inventory.
Years from now, there would be other beds in other cities. Trailers on set, hotel rooms with blackout curtains, a house so big you had to call for each other sometimes. There would be more babies—screaming, laughing, stubborn little half-versions of them both—more flights, more scripts, more meetings where strangers said his name like a product. There would be seasons when fear yelled louder than tenderness, days when distance wore different clothes—physical miles, emotional inches—times when the space between them felt like an ocean instead of a bedsheet.
He could see it all too clearly: arguments that lasted days if he wasn’t careful, sharp words landing where her old wounds already ached, the temptation to retreat into himself the way men in his family always had. He could see himself hurting her. He could see the ways the world would try to pull him away from this room, this bed, this woman.
And every version of the future that didn’t end with him right back here—her chest under his hand, his ring on her finger, her heartbeat stubborn and steady beneath his palm—felt wrong, like a film reel that needed to be yanked from the projector and burned.
The love itself hurt.
It wasn’t gentle in this moment; it didn’t feel like soft music and warm light. It felt like pressure against thin glass, like trying to hold back a tide with his bare hands. His brain kept whispering, this is too much, you’re too much, you’re going to ruin this, and his heart kept answering, then learn. Change. Grow. Do whatever you have to do, but don’t you dare let go.
His thumb dragged slowly over the base of her ring finger, over the spot where gold would sit one day—not as a hypothetical, not as a college fantasy, but as fact. He pressed there, subtle but firm, until he felt the bones beneath the skin, until the idea of that future band was as real to him as the one his sister wore, as real as his mother’s.
He imagined metal there, cool and certain. Imagined a mark on himself to match—ink under his skin, something permanent over the vein that ran straight back to his heart, a little reminder that he’d signed himself over to this woman in a way no contract could touch.
An ache rose in his throat and sat there, useless and hot.
“I’m gonna marry you,” he’d whispered in the dark earlier, half to her, half to whatever restless thing in the ceiling might be listening. Now the words came back like a boomerang with teeth, lodging in his chest and unfolding into something that felt suspiciously like a dare.
Okay. Prove it.
Not with flowers, not with some choreographed, ring-box-on-a-rooftop moment engineered for Instagram’s highlight reel, but with the unglamorous, marrow-deep work: with learning how to stay when every old survival instinct in him screamed shut down, disappear, save yourself; with unlearning the cheap, inherited reflex that said hurt back when you’re hurting, make her pay so you don’t have to; with choosing, over and over, to come back to this bed and this woman and this exact point in the night where her pulse beat under his thumb—every single time the world offered him exit routes disguised as options.
His chest cinched so tight around the thought that for one ridiculous second he wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like—this hot, squeezing panic wrapped in devotion, this sense that his heart was too full for its casing and might split right down the middle if he breathed wrong. Then she let out a tiny snore, barely more than a puff of air—soft and earnest and completely unbothered—and something inside him did crack, not in a breaking way, but in the way ice on a river gives way to a current that was always stronger than it looked.
He turned his head, helpless against the pull, and just… looked at her.
At the way her bonnet had surrendered halfway back, curls staging a quiet rebellion along her hairline. At the faint crescent of mascara he’d missed earlier, a smudged half-moon under one eye like the night had signed its name on her face. At the tiny worry-line between her brows that only ever really disappeared when his thumb smoothed over it, the crease easing as if even the sleeping parts of her recognised his touch and decided, okay, we can rest now.
He saw her doubled in time: the girl on her knees in his mother’s yard, sundress damp with grass, fingers signing I wanted to talk to you for real like she was building a bridge plank by invisible plank for a little Black girl the world refused to bend for; and that same girl years from now, a ring sitting where his thumb stroked, maybe furious with him, maybe bone-tired, maybe worn thin by life and headlines and the weight of being loved by a man still learning himself—
but still here.
Still reaching.
Still choosing.
The idea that there existed a version of the future where he fumbled that—where he didn’t become the kind of man capable of holding it without dropping it—pressed against his windpipe like a hand. He could not, under any circumstances, let that possibility slip through his fingers like so many other things he’d told himself weren’t his to keep.
“Always you,” he heard himself say into the dark, the words sliding out before he’d consciously picked them, rough and hoarse and reverent, like a prayer that had been wearing grooves in his bones for months and had finally found its way to his mouth. He didn’t pitch it to wake her; he pitched it just loud enough to make it binding.
His hand tightened around hers, their rings kissing together in the small space between their palms, metal clinking with the soft, definite sound of a promise stamped in gold instead of carved in stone.
She shifted at the faint vibration of his voice, some deep, wordless part of her clearly tuned to him even in sleep. Instinct moved faster than thought; her arm hooked more firmly around his waist, dragging him closer until there was no polite distance left between them, only heat and heartbeat and shared air, her body answering back without language:
Okay.
Then you stay, too.
Something in him unclenched at that—not all the way, not enough to sand down the sharp edge of fear he’d made his uneasy peace with; he suspected that particular ache was just the cover charge for loving her at this volume, the permanent bruise you got from holding something so precious too close to your ribs. But it was enough. Enough that the frantic spin of his thoughts slowed from a hurricane to a storm with a name, enough that the torment stopped feeling like a live wire and settled into a heavy, bearable kind of ache, the kind you could build a life around if you learned how to breathe through it.
Yes, it would all come back here.
Back to this bed and this woman, to this point where her pulse beat steady against his fingers like a metronome reminding his heart how to keep time. Back to the flash in his mother’s backyard when he’d watched her sign to his niece in secret-learned sentences and felt the axis of his life tilt a few degrees toward her forever. Back to this decision—quiet, uncinematic, made in the dark with no witnesses but God and a Lord Huron song bleeding tired and ghostly through a too-thin wall—that he would crawl through every ugly, unfinished version of himself if that’s what it took to keep earning the right to come home to her.
He didn’t drift off so much as fall.
One breath he was staring at the ceiling, chest a riot of devotion and dread and raw, stubborn vow; the next, his eyelids finally surrendered under their own weight, dropping like stage curtains on a play that had wrung every last line out of him. His last waking thought wasn’t even a thought, not really—a sentence without words, more feeling than language, a looping, mulish conviction that no matter what roads they had to walk, what worlds they’d have to cross, what skins they’d have to shed and leave behind on the side of the years—
it would always, always, always have to bend its way back to her,
or it wasn’t a life he was interested in living at all.
@mamasturn @sheinaskirt @authentic-girl03 @k0niiii-blog @trustmymood @glizzymcguirex @ms-mosley-ifunastyyy @blackfemreaderr @blckblossom @trustmymood @unicoo @yourleogf @uniqueoutlierblog @og-goddesstrill @determinednot2fall @melaninhawtie @xoadaraox @thatssokarii @kirayuki22 @the1miscief @plan3tch1ld @daliscrim @szatears @that-one-anxious-mango @sonder-slut ( lmk if you wanna be added or removed!)
𓊆ྀི warnings .ᐟ + word count— 12.0K, original!wifeblackfemreader, husband!onyankopon, (in this au; both reader and onyankopon are 31!) dad!onyankopon, southerncoded!onyankopon, southerncoded!femreader, shy!femreader, giggly!femreader, aggressive!onyankopon, sweet!onyankopon, dominant!onyankopon, riding!, standing doggy style!, pet names, dirty talk, aggressive pet names, squirting, creaming, condomless sex, dick sucking, overstimulation, family drama, minors are not welcome! 𓊇ྀི
メモ。— in the honor of me turning 24 soon, how about some more mature, southern coded family drama? hope y’all enjoy, teehee.
THE CAJUN SPICE OF ANDOUILLE SAUSAGE WAFTS THE ENTIRE HOUSE LIKE A WARM HUG, YOUR HOPES OF IT TASTING AS GOOD AS IT SMELLED FILLING YOU WITH EXCITEMENT. This was your domain—the kitchen, as feeding a growing boy and a constantly growing man became a second job for you. One you loved, of course.
The farmhouse kitchen hums with the sizzle of cayenne and thyme clinging to the air like a promise. Outside, the Louisiana sun presses heavy against the wrap around porch, where tangled bougainvillea bleeds pink against peeling white wood. Your bare feet—toes painted a deep plum—press into worn oak floors as you stir the pot, hips swaying slightly to the hum of Need U Bad by Jazmine Sullivan bumping from the Bluetooth speaker.
That Saints jersey of his—swallowed up by broad shoulders on game days drapes past your thighs now, the fabric still faintly carrying his cologne, something smoky and sweet. Beneath it, the lace of your black thong digs just slightly into the swell of your hips, a reminder of the softness you’ve grown into—womanly curves that he worships with his hands, his mouth, his everything.
Heat now rolls off the stove in waves, curling the baby hairs at your nape into tight spirals, your crinkled jet black lengths parted neatly down the middle, crimped and glossy where they spill over your shoulders. You catch your reflection in the oven door—freckles stark against flushed brown cheeks, lashes brushing them like feather tips, lips glossy from the Chapstick you’d swiped on absentmindedly.
And there it is—your wedding band glints under the pendant light, a simple gold oval he’d slid onto your finger at the courthouse when you were both too young to care what anyone thought. Back then, staying home hadn’t been the plan—but neither was the way he had gripped your waist in that ultrasound room, voice rough when he said, “…Ain’t no way I’m lettin’ you stress ‘bout shit but this baby.”
And here you are now, sixteen years later. Your men won’t storm in for hours yet. No cleats thudding on the porch from that teenager of yours, and no deep chuckle rumbling through the screen door as your husband shakes off work. Just the quiet, the spice in the air, and the thrum of your own pulse—content, for now, in this life you’ve built.
The back of your thumb grazes over the smooth gold of your ring, twisting it absently as memories flash like fireflies behind your eyes—those early days when Onyankopon was still more boy than man, all rough edges and sharper tongue.
Back then, he wore his New Orleans like armor—cornrows fresh, diamond studs glinting against deep brown skin, tattoos still fresh enough to look angry. That fleur-de-lis inked high on his cheekbone was a declaration, a fuck you to anyone who thought they could box him in. You remember the way his Timberlands kicked up gravel outside your mama’s house, or how his voice dropped to honey thick "Shhh, girl", when he pulled you close behind the bleachers.
And now?
Lord. Thirty one looks sinful on him. The same fleur-de-lis, same tattoos sprawling over corded muscle—but now they tell stories. The pelican inked over his heart for Louisiana loyalty, the NOLA ‘til I’m cold scripted down his ribs. His cornrows are neater these days, edges crisp where they taper into the nape of his neck, that low beard trimmed just right. Age settled into him like whiskey in oak—richer, deeper. The kind of man who walks into a room and the air changes.
Your son—Asaud—carries his name like a blessing. Sixteen and already built like his daddy, all long limbs and broad shoulders threatening to outgrow his jersey. Same sharp cheekbones, same slow, cocky grin when he knows he’s charmed an entire city. But where Ony’s edges stayed hard, Asaud softened— mama’s almond eyes, even your freckles dusting his nose.
Those two? Tight as thieves. Asaud trailing Onyankopon like a shadow since he could walk—“Teach me that throw, Pops. Let me hold the drill, I got it.”
The way your husband’s stern “Aight, show me some shit’,” could make Asaud stand taller than any trophy.
But lately…
Your finger stills on the ring.
The creak of Asaud’s bedroom door—always shut now—grates against your nerves like a splinter you can’t dig out. Two weeks straight of it. No more sprawled across the couch with his cleats kicked up, no more leaning over your shoulder while you cooked just to steal a taste. Just that door locked tight as a vault, the muffled bass of his music throbbing through the wood like a pulse you weren’t invited to hear.
He used to be yours—your baby, even when he hit six feet tall. The boy who’d press his forehead to yours after bad games and whisper, “I’m sorry, Momma,” like your disappointment cut deeper than any coach’s scream.
Now? His “Cool,” lands like a slap when you ask about practice. His backpack stays slumped by the door, untouched since yesterday. Homework? Done. Dinner? Not hungry.
And sleep—Lord, the sleeping. You catch him slumped over his desk sometimes when you dare to knock, cheek smushed against his physics textbook, lashes fluttering like he’s fighting to stay awake even in dreams. Other days he doesn’t stir ‘til noon, blankets twisted around his waist, phone clutched in his palm like it holds answers.
Onyankopon misses it. Not because he doesn’t care—hell no. That man breathes for his son. But between welding shifts at the shipyard—arms streaked with soot, muscles aching from hauling steel—he comes home too exhausted to see past Asaud’s “I’m straight, Pops.”
And you? You’re softer. Always have been. The one who smooths his edges when Ony’s tough love ain’t the fix. But lately…
When your hand hovers over Asaud’s door? The wood feels colder than it should.
Your phone buzzes against the countertop, pulling you from your thoughts. The screen lights up with a text from Papa—your husband's contact name forever unchanged since the day he programmed it himself.
Shipyard lettin’ us slide early. Gon’ grab some crawfish, swing by Nana’s for y’all. You want extra butter?
A slow smile curls your lips. You’re halfway through typing your response—but that’s when the screen flashes again. Not another text.
An incoming call.
Principal Guidry—Bonnabel High.
“…Hello?”
“Hey, baby.”
Principal Guidry’s voice is honey thick Creole, the same one that used to holler at y’all for cutting class back in tenth grade. Now it’s laced with something heavy.
“I’m real sorry to call like this—”
Your grip tightens.
“Cherise, what’s wrong? Is Asaud—“
“He’s fine.”
She hesitates before correcting, “Physically, leastways. But…”
A pause. The shuffle of papers.
“My office chair ain’t never felt this heavy. Got yo’ boy sittin’ right here lookin’ like he wanna disappear into the floor. Suspended. Three days.”
Suspended? The word doesn’t even sound right in the air.
“Black eye and all,” she adds softly.
Your breath catches. Asaud? Your gentle giant? Fighting?
“What happened?”
Cherise exhales hard, “Let him tell it. ‘Need you to come get him.”
The kitchen suddenly feels too hot.
"I’m on my way."
The tires of your truck screech against cracked asphalt as you fishtail into the Bonnabel High parking lot, heart hammering against your ribs. You should text Onyankopon—should—but even thinking about it makes your stomach twist. The man would burn down the entire Eastbank if he heard his son was hurt, the welding torch still in hand, fury hotter than molten steel. No, better to handle this first.
The school looms ahead, its faded maroon bricks and rusted Saints banners looking harsher under the afternoon sun. Then—movement. The double doors swing open, and there’s Asaud, flanked by two security guards, his broad frame hunched like he’s trying to fold into himself.
You don’t even cut the engine before you’re out the car, bare feet slapping against hot concrete.
“Mon bébé—oh my God, look at your face!”
Your hands flutter over his swollen eye, fingers trembling as you trace the bruise purpling his caramel skin. It’s deep, angry—someone hit him hard. The Creole spills out of you unfiltered, a storm of “Qui t'a fait ça?!” and “Let me see, cher—”
Asaud exhales sharply, catching your wrists with a gentleness that belies his size.
“Chill, Momma. I’m fine.”
One of the guards—a thick necked man with a walkie crackling at his hip—clears his throat.
“Ma’am, ‘you gotta clear the lot.”
The dismissal in his tone snaps something in you.
“Clear the—do you see my child’s face? Who did this? Who—”
“Momma.”
Asaud’s grip firms, steering you back toward the car with a nudge. The kids pressed against the cafeteria windows don’t make it any better. He just climbs into the passenger seat without another word, jaw set.
And so, you follow.
The air inside the truck is thick with unspoken words, the only sound is the hum of the engine and the occasional rustle of Asaud shifting in his seat. His profile is sharp against the afternoon light streaming through the window—jaw clenched, lashes lowered—a portrait of quiet defiance.
“…Are you alright?”
“Yeah.”
One word, clipped.
“Does Coach know what happened?”
“Not yet.”
That stings. Asaud loves football—loves his team, loves the way his daddy’s face lights up when he makes a play. If he’s keeping this from Coach? Something serious must’ve happened.
“Ti-Loup… are you really okay?”
Little wolf—the childhood nickname slips out before you can stop it, tender as a bruise.
His broad shoulders slump as he leans his temple against the glass.
“…Head hurts.”
“Baby, if you hit your head, you can’t sleep—”
Your hand lifts instinctively, reaching to brush his temple, check for fever—but he tilts away before you can make contact. Your fingers hover in the air for a heartbeat before dropping back to the wheel.
The moment the truck rolls to a stop in the driveway, Asaud is already moving—door swinging open before you even cut the engine, his long legs carrying him toward the house in quick strides. You barely have time to gather your purse before he’s halfway up the porch steps.
“Wait—"
Your scramble after him, bare feet slapping against warm wood.
“Ti-Loup—Asaud!”
He slows down by a millisecond.
“I still need to know what happened—“
“Ain’t nothin’.”
“Nothing?”
You frown, “Look at your damn face!"
You catch his wrist, forcing him to turn—only for him to yank free with a force that makes you stumble.
“Why are you being like this? You don’t—you never avoid me.”
This time when he turns, his eyes aren’t just tired. They’re cold.
“Damn, can’t I just breathe without y’all up my ass?”
The words hit like a slap.
For a second you just stand there, the sting of them settling deep beneath your skin. Your chest tightens—but you won’t cry. Not here.
“Fine.”
The word comes out quieter than you meant.
“You can wait ‘til your father gets home to talk about it.”
His whole posture shifts—shoulders stiffening, eyes widening—like the mere mention of that man flipped a switch.
“Momma—”
But you’re already walking away.
The tension in the house is thick enough to slice with a butter knife—the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums, heavy and oppressive. Asaud's bedroom door hasn't budged since you got home, not even when you knocked softly with a plate of food an hour ago. The plate is still sitting untouched outside his door, grits congealing into sad little lumps.
This is how it always goes when Asaud knows Onyankopon is coming home to discipline him—radio silence, tense shoulders, the boy steeling himself like a soldier bracing for battle. Normally you'd bridge the gap, smooth things over with a joke or a hug. But today? The sting of his dismissal lingers like a bruise, and you can't bring yourself to force it.
Then—keys.
The front door swings open, and there he is.
Dressed in a navy blue shipyard uniform, his sleeves are rolled up to reveal thick forearms corded with veins, tattoos a roadmap of ink against deep brown skin. A faded Saints cap sits low over his cornrows, shadows accentuating the sharp angles of his face—that strong jaw, all the way down to the facial hair coating his chin. The scent of saltwater and engine grease clings to him, mixing with the spicy aroma of the crawfish takeout in his hand.
“‘Where my baby at?"
His gaze locks onto you—your bare legs peeking out from under his jersey, your hair still crimped and wild from the kitchen heat—and his glare is all sin.
“Goddamn,” he grunts—“You been walkin’ ‘round lookin’ like that while I’m gone? Gon’ make me come over there.”
You huff a weak laugh despite the weight in your chest, watching him flex his fingers like they’re stiff from gripping a welding torch all day.
“Hi, Papa.”
He grunts again—this one softer—as he stomps toward the kitchen, setting the takeout bag on the counter before peeling off his grease streaked work jacket. The muscles in his back ripple beneath his white tank as he tosses it over a chair, his voice rough but easy as he starts rambling.
“Shit was a goddamn warzone today—‘foreman got on my nerves ‘bout some pipe measurements, then ‘them Lafitte boys tried to cut in line at Nana’s.”
He pops the lid off the crawfish, steam billowing up as he scowls—“Like I ain’t gon’ notice they tryna’ snake my order.”
You lean against the counter, watching him. Normally you’d interject—tease him about being territorial over seasoned crustaceans—but your mind is still tangled up in the quiet rage of your son’s dismissal.
Onyankopon glances up, finally catching your silence. His dark brows furrow.
“What’s wrong wit’ you?”
You pick at the hem of the jersey.
“‘Had… a day.”
He murmurs, “I’m knowin’, Mama. A nigga glad to be home. ‘Been thinkin’ bout’ a shower, rubbin’ on yo’ feet—Where ‘Saud at? Lil’ nigga better be hungry ‘cause I got extra sausage just for hi—“
“He’s suspended.”
The moment the words leave your lips, Onyankopon goes still—unnaturally still. Like every muscle in his body locks down at once. The air in the kitchen shifts, thickens. You can practically see the switch flip behind his eyes—the shift from husband to father, from easy laughter to cold calculation.
“Fuck you mean suspended?”
You exhale, folding your arms across your chest, suddenly aware of how small you feel beneath his gaze.
“…I don't know, Ony. He wouldn't tell me."
His nostrils flare—once, twice—before his dark eyes scan your face, picking up the tension in your brow, the way your fingers clutch the jersey fabric too tight.
“"Y'all got into it?"
“He didn't want to talk to me."
A muscle in his temple jumps.
“He ain't got no choice but to talk to you."
His voice is low, final—“Ain't no option."
For a moment, silence stretches between you—thick and loaded—before his calloused fingers hook gently under your chin, tilting your face up to his. His thumb brushes your bottom lip, gruff but tender.
“Gimme’ yo’ mouth first."
You exhale shakily, leaning in. His lips are warm, firm against yours—brief but grounding—before he pulls back just enough to press his forehead to yours. His breath is hot against your skin, smelling faintly of peppermint and the crawfish he'd been handling.
And then—
"ASAUD!"
His roar shakes the damn house. No hesitation, no preamble.
“Get yo’ ass out here.”
You flinch, knowing how quickly Asaud heard him. Even through walls. Even through attitude.
Silence.
Then—footsteps. Slow. Reluctant.
Asaud appears in the doorway, broad shoulders slumped just slightly, hands shoved deep in his hoodie pockets. His eyes flicker up—just once—to meet his father's gaze before lowering again, careful not to show outright defiance but unable to hold the intensity of that stare for long.
Onyankopon doesn't speak at first. Just looks at him, eyes raking over the swollen skin, the purple black bruise blooming beneath his son’s eye. Then—movement.
His hand shoots out, calloused fingers gripping Asaud’s chin with a firmness that isn’t rough but leaves no room for resistance. He tilts his face toward the light, inspecting the damage with the clinical precision of a man who’s seen—and dealt—his share of blows.
“‘You alright?"
Asaud’s throat bobs.
“Yes, sir."
Onyankopon’s grip doesn’t loosen.
“Then why ain't you tell yo’ momma what happened?"
Asaud’s jaw flexes beneath his father’s hold, his voice barely above a murmur.
“...Didn’t wanna talk about it, sir.”
“What’d you say to her?"
“I ain’t say nothin’."
“Tch."
A sharp click of his tongue.
“Tête levée quand tu m'parles."
Head up when you talk to me.
The Creole rolls off his tongue sharply, and Asaud’s chin lifts almost immediately—eyes snapping to meet his father. The apology spills out before he can stop it—
“Désolé, Pops—"
“Whatchu’ apologizin’ for if you ain’t say nothin’?"
The silence in the kitchen turns electric, thick enough to choke on. Onyankopon’s grip loosens just enough to turn Asaud’s face toward you—not rough, but insistent.
“m‘What he say to you?"
“He said—" Your voice wavers, but you force it steady. “'Damn, can I breathe without y’all being up my ass?'"
Onyankopon looks back to Asaud.
“So we ‘up yo’ ass’ now?"
He steps into his son's space, forcing his head up again with a rough tap of two fingers beneath his chin.
"’You think you grown enough to talk to yo’ momma like that?”
Asaud’s lips part—but no sound comes out.
“I asked you a question."
“No, sir," Asaud mutters, jaw tight.
“Nah, see—you acted like it."
Onyankopon’s voice sharpens, cutting like a blade—“You got one mother. One. The woman who carried yo’ big headed ass for nine months, who still make yo’ plate first even when yo’ dumbass bein’ ungrateful. And ‘this how you talkin’ to her?"
The words land like bricks.
"Look at her."
Asaud’s eyes flicker to you once, then darting away again.
“Soft as fuck wit’ you," Onyankopon continues—“Always been. ‘You sick? She up all night. ‘You hungry? She cookin’ before you even ask. You ain’t just disrespectin’ yo momma—you disrespecting’ my wife.”
Asaud swallows hard, his shoulders tightening like he’s bracing for impact. Onyankopon doesn’t let up though, drilling into him with a stare that could crack concrete.
“Apologize."
“I’m sorry, Momma."
Your chest tightens.
“I’m not upset, baby," you murmur, “It just hurt my feelings—I wanna know what’s going on, okay? That’s all.”
Finally, Asaud exhales, defeated.
"...I fought Jamal."
That catches both of you off guard. Jamal? His wide receiver—his best friend?
Onyankopon’s brows shoot up, "The hell for?”
“...Cheer team girl."
The silence that follows Asaud's confession is deafening.
“So you gon’ fuck up yo’ throwin’ hand—lose yo’ scholarship—over some girl?”
The words come out low, measured, but they hit like a sledgehammer. You step forward, hands lifting slightly—
“Hey, let’s just—"
”Who the girl?"
Asaud shifts uncomfortably, shoulders rolling back like he’s preparing for war.
"Sabine."
“She ‘bad like yo’ momma?"
“Onyankopon!”
He doesn’t even glance your way, his glare still locked onto Asaud.
“Why you callin’ my name?" ’His voice drops dangerously—“That gotta’ be the reason. Otherwise, I need yo’ son to explain why he fuckin’ up all his opportunities over some bullshit."
“It ain’t bullshit!" Asaud’s voice booms, raw and defensive—“She’s different.”
Onyankopon doesn’t laugh—doesn’t even smirk. His expression stays stone-cold as he steps forward, closing the gap between them with a single stride.
“That’s what you thinkin’ right now,” he growls, “But I promise—she ain’t. You thinkin’ bout some pussy, and that ain’t gon’ get you in the NFL or keep yo’ wide receiver."
He jabs a thick finger against Asaud’s chest—hard.
“Yo’ head loose, and I ain’t raisin’ no kids outside of you."
Asaud’s chest heaves, his nostrils flaring as his temper flares hotter. Then—
“You were younger than me when you knocked Momma up.”
The moment those words leave Asaud’s mouth—sharp, deliberate, meant to cut—your stomach drops. Your lips part in quiet disbelief, brows knitting together as hurt flashes hot behind your ribs.
“Asaud!"
But Onyankopon is already moving—fast, too fast—his massive hand snatching the front of Asaud’s hoodie, yanking him forward until their faces are inches apart. Asaud’s breath comes ragged, shoulders rising and falling under the strain of his father’s grip, but he doesn’t fight it.
"You right."
A pause—sharp, loaded.
“Here I am sixteen years later—still bustin’ my ass for you the moment I ‘knocked’ yo’ momma up."
His fingers tighten in the fabric, knuckles whitening—" I don’t ever regret havin’ you, and if I can prevent you from goin’ through the same shit me and yo’ momma handled? That’s what Imma’ do."
Asaud swallows hard, his throat bobbing.
"Ion’ give a fuck ‘bout no lil’ ass girl," Onyankopon rasps, “Or yo’ feelings just ‘cause you on some puppy love shit. Football. School. That’s yo’ priorities."
Your fingers curl into Onyankopon’s sleeve, tugging gently—“Baby… let him go."
Asaud’s voice cracks as he mutters, “Pops—"
"Pop’s nothin’."
Onyankopon shoves him back—not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough to make his point. He spits something in Creole—low, guttural—before jerking his chin toward the kitchen.
“Go eat the food yo’ momma cooked."
The moment Onyankopon issued that command, Asaud's shoulders slumped—defeated but still simmering with that same stubborn fire his father carried in his bones. His jaw clenched tight, eyes flashing with frustration before he turned on his heel, storming down the hallway. The slam of his bedroom door echoed through the house like a gunshot, rattling the frames on the walls.
Onyankopon didn’t even flinch.
“Don’t be slammin’ no doors in this bitch you can’t pay to fix.”
And all you could do was sigh, pressing your fingertips to your forehead as the weight of the afternoon settled over you like a heavy blanket.
Hours later, the house was eerily quiet, the kind of stillness that only comes when two prideful men refuse to be the first to break. Nightfall crept in, painting the walls in long shadows as you moved through the dimly lit kitchen, plating a heaping serving of shrimp and grits—still warm, just the way he liked it.
But Onyankopon was nowhere to be found.
Not in the living room, not in the bedroom—so you already knew where he was.
Stepping onto the porch, the humid Louisiana air wrapped around you like a second skin. The cicadas sang their nightly chorus, the scent of magnolias thick in the breeze. And there he was—shirtless, his sweatpants hanging low on his hips as his massive frame crouched near the steps.
The metal bowl in his hands rattled impatiently as he shook it, muttering under his breath.
“‘What you doin’, Papa?”
He didn’t even glance up, his deep voice gruff with irritation.
“…Tryna’ feed this damn cat ‘Saud be so worried about.”
A soft mrrow sounded from the bushes, and a scruffy orange tabby slinked out, eyeing Onyankopon warily before darting forward to swipe at the bowl.
Of course he was out here—still pissed, still stubborn—but making sure his son’s stray was fed.
Some things never changed.
The stray cat—scruffy, wide-eyed, and perpetually suspicious—padded cautiously along the porch railing, its tail flicking with a mix of curiosity and defiance. It sniffed the air, nostrils twitching as it scented Onyankopon instead of Asaud’s familiar presence. With a deliberate hmph, it turned its head away from the bowl, pretending disinterest even as its stomach growled loud enough for you both to hear.
You couldn’t help the giggle that slipped past your lips.
"You’re mean to him too—that’s why he won’t eat."
Onyankopon scowled, shaking the bowl harder, the dry kibble rattling like a warning.
“Yeah? I take care of his ungrateful ass too."
You sighed dramatically, leaning against the doorframe as you murmured—“The Tin Man does have a heart, it seems."
Onyankopon shot you a look before gruffly calling out, "Aight, Tiger—come get this damn food."*
“His name is Tango.”
“Same shit."
Finally the cat hopped down, sauntering over with an air of reluctant grace. It rubbed its entire body along Onyankopon’s bare calf, purring loud enough to vibrate the porch boards beneath him.
“Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, nudging the bowl closer with his foot—“Gon’ head."
You stepped forward then, bringing the plate of shrimp and grits closer, the rich aroma mixing with the warm night air.
“You need to eat too, baby.”
Onyankopon’s fingers then curl gently around your throat—not tight, but there, possessive and grounding. He dropped a series of rough, smacking kisses against your lips, each one firm and fleeting before he finally took the plate with his free hand.
“Aight," he muttered, settling onto the wooden stairs.
The cat ate. Your husband ate. Now, you could have the real conversation you’d been holding off on.
You settle onto the wooden steps behind him, the worn planks creaking softly under your weight as you wrap your legs around his waist, molding your body against the warm expanse of his back. He’s hot to the touch—always running like a furnace—and you bury your face between his shoulder blades, inhaling the faint lingering scent of his cologne as he eats.
"Did you check on your son?"
The fork scrapes against the plate as he chews, his shoulders lifting in a half-shrug.
“Nah. But I know you did."
A gruff pause, “‘He still alive? Limbs all attached?"
You hum, fingers trailing lazily through the neat rows of his cornrows, tracing the patterns like you’ve done a thousand times before.
“Funny. He’s asleep.”
Silence stretches between you, thick with unsaid things. Then, softly—
“You do know you were wrong, right?"
“Which part? ‘Cause I ain’t wrong about a lot of shit."
You exhale through your nose, leaning into his shoulder as you murmur, “Ti tèt di."
Stubborn man.
He doesn’t respond, just keeps eating—his jaw working methodically, the muscles in his back flexing beneath your touch. You press a kiss to the nape of his neck before continuing—
”Remember when we found out I was pregnant? How scared you were?"
Silence.
You then whisper, “He’s got an amazing head on his shoulders, Papa. Just like you. Maybe...he’s serious about this girl."
“He’s sixteen.”
“And we were fifteen—sneakin’ into my momma’s house when she went to sleep, havin’ unprotected sex, and then what happened?”
He leans back into you with a rough huff, his head tilting just enough to bump against yours.
“You tryna be funny.”
“I’m not."
Your fingers trail down to his jaw, tracing the line of his beard as you say—“Our parents kicked us out, and we’ve been on our own since then."
The silence between you grows heavier, thick with the weight of memories neither of you ever really talk about—nights spent sleeping in his beat up Chevy, the way his voice had cracked when his own father slammed the door in his face, the quiet tears you'd wiped away when your mama called you a disgrace.
You press a kiss to his shoulder, soft as a prayer.
"But we knew our little wolf was special, didn’t we?”
A beat.
“Yeah."
You smile against his skin, “Asaud is yours, but he’s not you. He’s not gonna make the mistakes we did—and shuttin’ him down like our parents did to us? It’d be unfair.”
Onyankopon exhales—long, slow—his head tipping back against your shoulder.
Your voice is barely above a whisper, soft yet carrying the weight of years as you murmur, "Give him the grace we never got."
Your husband goes quiet. The cicadas hum in the thick night air, the stray cat now curled on the porch railing, licking its paws as if amused by the whole scene.
Then—
“‘Guess I ain't have to yank his ass up like that."
The admission comes out gruff, and you can't help the faint smile that tugs at your lips. With a playful flick to the side of his head, you tease, "Don’t be puttin’ hands on my baby no more."
Before you can blink, his massive arm hooks behind you, tugging you effortlessly onto his lap. You let out a surprised squeak of laughter, instantly melting into the familiar warmth of his hold—his thick thighs beneath you, the hard plane of his chest pressed flush against your back. His heat engulfs you, his scent wrapping around your senses like a second skin.
You nuzzle into the crook of his neck, fingers tracing the shell of his ear as you murmur, "But hey… we didn’t do so bad, did we?"
His arms tighten around your waist, lips brushing your temple—"Nah. We did better.”
You giggle as he kisses you, slow at first, then deeper, hotter—your tongue stroking his with a suddenly filthy, practiced familiarity. You pull back just enough to whisper against his lips, “‘Wore your jersey just for you…"
His hand cups your jaw, thumb brushing your cheekbone as he groans, half-amused, half-exasperated.
“You know I’ll never say no—but a nigga tired as hell."
You gasp in mock offense, pulling back to squint at him.
“Oh, so you can yoke up my child— but no dick for me?"
That deep, rich chuckle vibrates against your ribs as he leans back against the porch railing, pulling you tighter against him.
“Daddy ain’t Superman. One city at a time."
You blow out an exaggerated huff, lips pursed in playful frustration as you mutter, “You're annoying."
“And you horny."
You cross your arms over your chest but sink deeper into his embrace anyway, the steady thump of his heartbeat against your back. After a beat, you nudge him with your elbow, voice softening.
“...You love me?"
For a moment he says nothing—just holds you there in the quiet, southern night humming around you both.
Then, sweet as molasses—“When don't I?"
And yeah. That was your answer.
The next morning, Asaud wakes up early—his body already braced for a day of grueling chores and another lecture still hanging heavy in the air. He tiptoes down the hallway, bare feet quiet against the hardwood, expecting silence. Instead? The rich, savory scent of butter, garlic, and smoked sausage hits him the moment he steps near the kitchen.
He pauses. Frowns.
Spread across the countertop is a full Louisiana-style breakfast—crispy-edged fried eggs, golden-brown grits swimming in cheese, spicy Cajun hash, and fluffy buttermilk biscuits still steaming from the oven. His favorite.
Confusion knits his brows as he steps further inside, only to freeze at the sight of you and Onyankopon standing near the stove.
Onyankopon's massive frame is leaned into yours, his head tilted slightly as your fingers glide through his cornrows, re-braiding the edges with careful precision. You're both talking—voices low, words unintelligible from where he stands—but the ease between you is undeniable.
Then you glance up, spotting him lingering in the doorway.
"Mornin’, baby," you greet, smiling—“How’d you sleep?"
Asaud shifts awkwardly, eyes flicking between the food and his father's impassive face.
“...Good," he mutters—“What's all this?"
“Yo’ momma insisted on makin’ yo’ favorite breakfast," Onyankopon grumbles, voice rough with morning fatigue.
You flick his ear.
He then huffs, “Aight, I told her to."
You’re then crossing the kitchen toward Asaud, your bare feet padding softly against the tile. His eyes flicker with wariness, still bruised from yesterday’s heated exchange—though the mark looks lighter now, less angry. You reach up, fingers ghosting over the spot as you murmur, “Want momma to ice it for you?"
Asaud ducks his head slightly, but shakes it—“No ma’am, I’m aight."
You smile, nudging him toward the table where his plate waits.
“Eat ‘fore it gets cold."
Hesitant, he sinks into his chair, poking at the food before glancing between you both suspiciously.
“…Y’all poisoned my food or sum’?"
"Ain’t I tell you he was finna’ think that?"
“Hush, Ony.”
Your voice softens then as you turn back to Asaud.
“We had a…revelation last night... and we just want you to know—we love you. All of you. Every stubborn, hardheaded, beautiful part."
The kitchen falls silent—save for the sizzle of grease in the skillet, the hum of the ceiling fan.
You take a deep breath, clasping your hands together excitedly. The morning sunlight spills across the kitchen table as you announce, “Me and Daddy have been feeling a little disconnected from you lately, so we came up with an idea—Family Date! Yes Edition.”
Asaud blinks, fork hovering mid air over his grits.
“…Yes Edition?”
You beam, “Whatever you want to do today—no matter what—we have to say yes to!"
Asaud's frown deepens, but there's a flicker of something mischievous in his gaze now.
“Whatever I want?"
You nod enthusiastically. On the other hand, Onyankopon rubs his temple as he mutters, “My damn wallet achin’ already."
“The sky is the limit, baby. What’d you wanna do?"
For a long moment, Asaud chews thoughtfully, brow furrowed as he considers his options. Then? It hits him all at once.
“Aight, bet.”
He sits up straighter as he lists off, “First—we hittin’ up Bayou Guns for some target practice. Then, monster truck rally tickets—front row. After that, ’whole rack of ribs from Big Mike’s Smokehouse, extra spicy. And,”—he pauses dramatically, eyes flicking to his father—“Pops, you gotta let me drive the truck today."
Onyankopon almost chokes on his coffee.
“Hell nah I’m not!"
You level the look at Onyankopon—the one that makes his jaw twitch because he knows he’s already lost. His dark eyes flick from you to Asaud’s hopeful expression before he exhales sharply through his nose, resigned.
“It’s yo’ day, Papa. Gon’ head."
Asaud’s grin is immediate, lighting up his entire face like a kid on Christmas morning.
This was gonna be an adventure.
The day starts with everyone scrambling to get ready—you weren’t exactly thrilled about spending hours immersed in testosterone fueled chaos, but the thought of just being with your boys? Had you smiling despite yourself.
Onyankopon emerges looking stupidly fine—his black long sleeve clinging to every defined ridge of muscle, the ink snaking down his arms and neck peeking out from beneath the fabric. Camo pants hang low on his hips, black Dunks laced tight on his feet, and those damn chains glinting against his chest like he stepped straight out of some high end streetwear ad. His face—God—those sharp tattoos along his cheekbones contrasting his deep brown skin, that signature don’t fuck with me glare permanently etched into his expression.
You keep poking at it as you all get ready, making him swat your hand away with a grunt.
Asaud mirrors his energy effortlessly—hoodie layered over his own fitted tee, shoes swapped for something sleeker, but the same vibe radiating off him. Like father, like son.
You press kisses to both their cheeks before stepping back, smoothing down the backless top and capris hugging your curves—classy enough to turn heads, erotic enough to have Onyankopon’s fingers twitching. His dark gaze drops to your chest where your nipples press visibly against the fabric.
“‘You cold?” he rumbles, dragging a single fingertip over one peaked bud.
You pout, swatting his hand away—“It’s just chilly!"
Now, here was the card ride. Pure chaos as you’d imagined—Onyankopon gripping the passenger side handle like he was seconds from yanking the wheel himself every time Asaud hit the gas too hard or took a turn a little too sharp.
“Nigga, I swear—if you don’t slow down, Imma’ have you pull over right here and make you ride in the back like the toddler you actin’ like."
Asaud just smirked, glancing at you in the rearview before purposefully tapping the accelerator again—just to watch his father’s eye twitch.
The gun range parking lot was packed, buzzing with the low hum of engines and the occasional pop of gunfire in the distance. Stepping out of the truck, you immediately felt that familiar dread creep in—not from the firearms, but from the eyes. The looks. The inevitable moment when someone would glance between you, Onyankopon, and Asaud, their brows furrowing as they tried to piece together your dynamic.
Were you his older siblings? Friends?
Then—the shock when they realized—Oh. You were his mother.
Being a parent had never forced you to dress older than you were, never dulled your vibrancy to fit some matronly mold. Even now, trailing behind Onyankopon and Asaud—both towering over you, broad shouldered and imposing—you looked every bit the effortlessly sensual, youthful woman you were. Your deep merlot Coach purse swung at your hip, charms jingling with each step, your jet black curls bouncing against your back. Meanwhile, Onyankopon moved like he owned the ground beneath him, all quiet power and simmering dominance—a kingpin with his diamond in tow.
The inside smelled like gunpowder, leather, and faintly of the fried catfish wafting from the snack bar in the corner. The air was thick with humidity, clinging to your skin as soon as you stepped inside—sharp cracks of gunfire echoed off the concrete walls, making your shoulders tense involuntarily. Each shot sounded like a miniature explosion—too loud, too sudden—and you instinctively pressed closer to Onyankopon's side, fingers tightening around his hand as if anchoring yourself to him.
The man behind the register gruffly asked, “What’chu wanna shoot with today?”
Asaud’s eyes flickered toward the glass case displaying an array of firearms—some sleek and modern, others heavy and intimidating. His gaze lingered on the biggest one—a monstrous, black tactical shotgun that looked like it could knock a grown man flat on his back.
Onyankopon didn’t even blink, “That one."
Asaud's eyes widened, “Forreal’?"
“Yo’ day, right?"
You retreated to the far back of the room, perched on a worn leather bench like a reluctant cheerleader. Your knees pressed together, hands folded in your lap as you watched them gear up—ear protection, gloves, safety glasses.
Onyankopon looked illegal—his black sleeves rolled up to reveal thick, tattooed forearms as he handled the firearm with the kind of casual expertise that made your stomach flip. The range owner walked him through the basics—not that he needed it—but Onyankopon nodded along anyway, his deep voice rumbling something low in response.
The sight before you had your lips parting slightly—Onyankopon lifting that heavy shotgun like it weighed nothing, his massive frame balanced with effortless precision. The first BOOM of his test shot rattled through the private room, the recoil absorbed effortlessly by his broad shoulders. Smoke curled from the barrel as he exhaled, lowering the gun and turning to Asaud with that same unreadable expression—except you knew him, knew the subtle pride in the tilt of his chin, the patience in his stance as he prepared to teach his son the way his own father had taught him.
“Regarde,” he murmured, shifting fluidly between English and Creole as he adjusted Asaud’s grip.
“Firme, yeah? Shoulder tight—non, like this.”
His large hands guided Asaud's calloused fingers, pressing the younger man’s palm flush against the stock.
And just like that—Asaud shifted. His spine straightened, shoulders squaring under his father’s approval. The next shot he took wasn’t perfect—but it was strong, the kickback barely rocking him as the target downrange splintered at the edge.
“Decent,” Onyankopon conceded, “For yo’ first try.”
Your hands shot up in excited applause, curls tumbling over your freckled cheeks as you cheered, “Yay!”—you then blew a stubborn strand out of your face with a playful huff, watching as Asaud wandered over to stand beside you, wiping his palms on his hoodie.
"Gon’ head, Pops," he called out, nodding toward the range.
Onyankopon stepped up, and suddenly, the gun in his hands wasn’t just a weapon. It was an extension of him. Each shot boomed like thunder, paper targets shredding into confetti under his relentless precision. He moved like liquid—fluid, deadly—twisting the gun with an assassin’s grace, reloading without breaking rhythm. The sheer power radiating off him had your pulse thrumming in your throat.
Asaud whistled low under his breath.
“Aight, Sergeant! ‘Where you learn that from?"
“He wanted to be one, actually.”
Asaud turned to you, brow arched.
"Pops wanted to be in the army?”
Your gaze lingered on your husband, watching the way his shoulders flexed as he fired off another perfect shot—the way his focus never wavered, even now.
"Higher up in the Navy, actually," you murmured. “‘Wanted to follow in his father’s path… before I got pregnant with you."
A beat of silence. Then—
“What happened?"
Your fingers toyed with the charms on your purse, but your eyes stayed on Onyankopon. You exhale, “He disowned him. Hasn’t spoken to his father since I was in my first trimester."
The words hung heavy between you.
“He would’ve found a way to go overseas," you continued softly—"But he didn’t want to leave me. Or you. ‘Wanted to watch you grow up."
Asaud’s voice was quieter now, “So…he never went for what he really wanted?”
You turned to him then, smiling—really smiling—despite the ache in your chest.
“You became our first priority the moment I held you in my arms, baby.”
Your voice dipped into honeyed warmth, "And you cried, cried, cried.”
A dreamy little smile tugged at your lips, the memory of tiny fists gripping your finger, Onyankopon's unreadable mask cracking just once as he pressed his lips to your sweaty forehead in that delivery room.
You blinked back to the present, tilting your head toward Asaud.
“Your father can be…difficult," you admitted, “But know this—he loves you more than anything in this world. Everything he does, every hard lesson...it's because he wants everything for you."
Asaud scuffed his shoe against the concrete floor, "I know that, Momma.”
Just then, Onyankopon's shadow fell over you both, smelling like gunpowder and that stupidly expensive cologne he only wore on special occasions.
“Y’all talkin’ ‘bout me?" he rumbled, slinging an arm around your shoulders.
You batted your lashes up at him innocently—“Just tellin’ our son where he gets his handsome features from."
Onyankopon's nostrils flared, “Don’t be flirtin’ with me in front of our child, girl," he muttered, the heat in his low voice betraying him.
Your giggle spilled freely as you leaned even more into him, “Too late."
The monster truck show was deafening, and entirely too boyish for your liking. You spent most of it grimacing, and hiding behind Onyankopon’s shoulder each time you thought you were gonna witness a crime scene explosion. From the activities today? You were sure to be rewarded by this meal.
The scent of hickory smoke and sizzling meat hits you the moment you step into Big Mike’s Smokehouse—a cacophony of laughter, clinking glasses, and bluesy guitar riffs pouring from the jukebox in the corner. The worn wooden booth creaks as you slide in beside Onyankopon, your thighs pressing together beneath the checkered tablecloth. Across from you, Asaud taps his fingers against the menu, though all three of you already know what you’re ordering—extra spicy ribs, collard greens swimming in pot liquor, and cornbread so buttery it melts on contact.
Your fingers trace idle circles over Onyankopon’s knuckles where his hand rests in your lap, his rough skin warm against your touch. You take a breath, leaning into his shoulder before murmuring, “Did you enjoy yourself today, baby?"
Asaud nods, a rare softness in his expression.
“I did. ‘Preciate y’all."
You smile, cheeks flushing—but then you straighten slightly, catching Onyankopon’s eye.
“Well—now that we’ve played—let’s have a serious conversation, yeah?"
Asaud’s shoulders tense almost imperceptibly, but he nods.
“Yes, ma’am."
“Jamal," Onyankopon starts, “What really happened between y’all?"
Asaud exhales through his nose, dragging a hand over his locs.
"I…always liked Sabine. Jamal knew that. ‘Still tried to get at her."
You hum, tilting your head.
“I don’t doubt she’d like you, baby. But—“ You choose your words carefully, "Did she seem…responsive to your feelings? Or does she actually like Jamal?"
Asaud’s jaw works before he mutters, “She do like me. ‘Told me my dreads was cool last week."
Onyankopon blinks. Slowly.
Then turns to you, one brow arched—“‘That’s how the lil’ girls get niggas’ attention?"
Your shoulders lift in a helpless shrug, “I guess?”
Asaud frowns, “Why y’all actin’ like confused old people right now?”
You bite your lip, exhaling through your nose—“I’m sorry, baby. Y’all’s generation is just…different in courting each other. The only way you know how is to—”
Then—it hits you. Like a freight train.
Your spine stiffens. Eyes widening, you lean halfway across the table, gripping Asaud’s hands tight enough to make him blink.
“Asaud?”
He freezes.
“Lawd, Momma. You scarin’ me. What’s wrong?”
“This…Sabine girl…you haven’t…?”
“Haven’t what?”
Onyankopon leans back, raising a brow.
Asaud’s gaze darts between you both before he huffs, “Contrary to stereotypes with bein’ quarterback—yes, Momma—I’m still a virgin. Damn.”
The breath you’d been holding whooshes out of you. Your head drops forward, curls spilling over your shoulders as you clutch your chest.
“Thank God! Okay, I just…whew,” You fan yourself dramatically, “I almost fainted.”
Asaud shifts in his seat, rubbing the back of his neck before he drops the bombshell.
“Despite y’all thinkin’ my head is loose, I plan on waitin’ ‘til marriage."
“Mon chéri!” you squeal in Creole, launching yourself forward as you kiss his forehead no less than three times as he groans, trying to duck away.
“Mwen si fiè de ou! Oh, mon bébé!”
Onyankopon watches, amusement lacing his voice as he mutters, “She finna’ start speakin’ in tongues—don’t say shit else, boy."
You're still catching your breath from the emotional high when you lean forward, smoothing Asaud’s shirt before saying with earnest warmth, “Okay—well, although that’s amazing to hear—don’t be afraid to ask questions, baby. I know sex education isn’t the best in schools, so…anything in that aspect, you know you can always come to us, right?"
Onyankopon clears his throat, "I think you gotta leave that conversation for me, shawty—"
You wave a hand dismissively, “We’re supposed to be bonding! Don’t leave me out of it.”
Onyankopon exhales through his nose. He then says, “‘You right. Yo’ pops an open book, ‘Saud.”
Asaud’s gaze darts between you both, hesitating.
Then?
“Does the pull out method really work?"
Your mouth drops. Of all the questions—
Heat floods your cheeks as your brain short-circuits. Before you can even think of a diplomatic answer, Onyankopon leans back, arms crossed, and says completely deadpan—
“Ion’ know. I nut in yo’ momma everytime—"
“OHMYGOD—“
You shriek in Creole, “Pouki ou fè sa nan piblik?!”
“So how come ion’ got a sibling?”
You’re so disturbed by Onyankopon who nonchalantly begins eating his food, taking a moment to process Asaud’s other question. You take a slow breath, fingers tightening around your napkin.
"I got my tubes tied after I had you, baby. You’re my lifeline—but it was a horrible pregnancy."
Your hand drifts unconsciously to your lower stomach, remembering the months of bed rest, the way your ankles swelled like overripe fruit.
Then, shooting Onyankopon a look, you point a stern finger at Asaud—“Had your father answered educationally, you would’ve known why we can have unprotected sex—but you should not! Condoms. Every. Time."
Onyankopon interjects, "Unless y’all in love. Then? ‘Make yo’ wife a twinkie’.”
Your fingers clutch desperately at the diner table as you squeak, “Let’s move on!”—voice pitching high like a deflating balloon. You clear your throat, smoothing a hand over your top as you force yourself back into Mom Mode.
“What do you really like about this girl?”
Asaud pauses, staring down at his half-eaten ribs as if the bones might spell out the answer for him. For a moment, there’s nothing but the clatter of silverware and Big Mike’s raspy laugh booming from the kitchen.
“She got this…quiet way ’bout her," he starts, voice lower than usual.
“Like, she don’t gotta laugh loud to be heard. And when she do smile—" He shakes his head, a faint grin tugging at his lips—“Man, it’s like she savin’ it just for you. Makes you feel…special, I guess."
You reach across the table, squeezing his wrist.
“That’s sweet, baby. Real sweet. But…" You hesitate, exchanging a glance with Onyankopon before continuing gently, “Are you willing to pursue this girl and lose your best friend over it?"
Asaud’s jaw hardens, “Jamal clearly ain’t my friend."
Onyankopon shakes his head, “Nah. He’s a boy on some puppy love shit—just like you.”
You now rub at Asaud’s knuckles.
“Baby, think about it. Jamal stayed at our house more nights than you did sometimes. Went to your cousins cookouts, helped your daddy fix up the car—"
“Even came to yo’ grandma’s funeral," Onyankopon cuts in, dead serious—“That’s family shit."
Your voice softens, “A real friend would’ve stepped back the moment he knew how you felt. But love makes people act stupid—especially at y’all’s age. You sure this girl worth torching that bridge?"
Asaud’s throat bobs.
The diner’s chatter fades into a dull hum as Asaud sits back, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of his thoughts. His fingers fiddle with the condensation on his sweet tea glass, tracing idle circles as he chews on his bottom lip—the same nervous habit he’s had since he was a toddler.
Then, finally, he exhales sharply through his nose.
“A girl ain’t finna’ have me lose my wide receiver," he mutters, shaking his head.
“But that ‘don’t mean I ain’t got feelin’s, Momma."
He thinks on his words for a moment.
Asaud’s voice then drops lower, “A lot of my friends’ parents don’t get along—divorced, fightin’, separated, only cordial ‘cause they made a mistake back in the day. I know I clown on y’all’s gushiness…” he continues, waving a hand at the way you’re still practically draped over Onyankopon’s arm, “But…I’m glad I got parents that love each other. And I just—" He hesitates, eyes flickering down before meeting yours again—“I want somethin’ like that. Somethin’ real."
A whimpery giggle escapes you as tears well in your eyes—hot, stinging—before spilling over.
“Shit, here ‘she go," Onyankopon mutters, already rubbing at your hip affectionately.
Your heart swells so big it feels like it might burst right out of your chest. You slide out of the booth in one fluid motion, your hands cupping your son's face—rough stubble scratching your palms, his locs soft against your forearms.
“Do you know how much we love you, sweet boy?"
He rolls his eyes, but there’s no real heat behind it.
“I’m knowin’, Momma."
Then, quieter—“Look…I’m sorry for bein’ mean to you yesterday. And…"
He glances at Onyankopon who’s watching with his usual stoic expression, though his dark eyes hold a warmth only you and Asaud ever really see—“Sorry to you too, Pops."
That’s all it takes.
You squeak, pulling him into a crushing embrace, smothering his face in kisses—his forehead, his cheeks, the tip of his nose—while rapid-fire Creole endearments spill from your lips like a prayer.
“Mon petit roi! Mon cœur! Bondye beni ou, mwen renmen ou tout bagay!"
My little king ! God bless you, I love you with all my heart !
Asaud groans, half-heartedly trying to squirm away—"Damn, Momma—I said I was sorry—"
“Non, non! Mwen pa fini ak ou!"
I’m not done with you!
Onyankopon watches, shaking his head—but when Asaud shoots him a pleading look, he just smirks and shrugs.
“Take yo’ medicine, boy."
Your bottom lip juts out in an exaggerated pout as you turn pleading eyes toward Onyankopon, fingers still tangled in Asaud's locs.
"Be sweet, Papa!" you urge, batting your lashes dramatically—“Tell your son you love him—none of that manly grunting stuff!"
Onyankopon exhales through his nose, but after a beat, his deep voice rumbles—low, rough, but undeniably fond—
“I love you, ‘Saud. Even when you actin’ dumb."
Asaud snorts, but the corner of his mouth lifts as he mutters back, “Love you too, Pops."
You sigh happily, finally releasing Asaud—only to immediately eye his half-finished ribs.
“Baby, lemme get a bite of—"
“Nuh uh!" Asaud yanks his plate away, nodding toward Onyankopon.
“You better ask yo’ husband!"
Onyankopon slides his own plate toward you without a word, smirk smug as you stick your tongue out at Asaud.
“Haters," you mumble around a mouthful of smoky, tender meat.
Later, you’re curled into Onyankopon’s side on the couch, his heartbeat steady beneath your palm as some old cartoon flickers across the TV. The peace is shattered by Asaud’s bedroom door creaking open. He steps out fully dressed—hoodie, sneakers laced tight—and your head lifts from Onyankopon’s chest.
“You okay, baby?"
Asaud shifts on his feet, avoiding eye contact.
“I’m straight. Uh…Jamal finna’ be here in a couple minutes."
You and Onyankopon exchange frowns—just as a knock echoes through the house.
Jamal now stands on the threshold when Asaud opens the door, hands shoved in his pockets, head slightly bowed.
“Evenin’, Mr. and Mrs. Osei.”
You blink, glancing between him and Asaud—who’s now lurking awkwardly by the foyer.
“Uh…are y’all…okay now?"
“We talked. It's straight," Asaud mutters, shifting his weight as he glances between you and Jamal.
Your eyes narrow slightly.
“So that's it? Y’all ain’t fighting over this girl no more?"
“This my ‘quarterback, Momma—“ Jamal chuckles, “Beta to his alpha—even though we both run shit, you know how it go."
“Language, ‘Mal."
Jamal dips his head immediately at Onyankopon’s voice—“My fault, Mr. Osei."
You exhale, shaking your head as you sink back against Onyankopon’s side.
“You men are so strange."
Then, glancing back at Jamal with a small smile, you add, “Well—are you staying to hang out, Jamal?"
Before Jamal can answer, Asaud slips in smoothly—too smoothly—“Nah, we headed to a party."
Onyankopon’s arm tenses beneath you, his jaw tightening.
“Did you ask if you could go to a party?"
You press your palm gently against Onyankopon’s chest, “Ony, c’mon.”
He exhales through his nose.
“Curfew at eleven. Not a minute later. And both of y’all better answer yo’ phones when I call.”
Asaud nods quickly, relief flashing in his eyes—“Got it."
"We out, then. Love y’all!”
You wave them off with a smile, “Be safe!"
Your lashes flutter slightly as you watch Onyankopon’s sharp side profile an hour after they leave—the strong line of his jaw, the way braids shape out his face, his deep set eyes locked onto the TV screen like he’s studying every frame. You trace idle circles over his chest with your fingertips, admiring the way the dim lamplight catches the faint sheen of his skin.
"What you starin’ at, girl?"
You grin, pressing a kiss just above his heart.
“My amazing husband."
“Mmm”, he rumbles, “You just love flirtin’ with a nigga.”
You murmur, “Maybe," in a playful tone—then, with a gentle tug at his chin, you guide his face toward yours.
“You haven’t kissed your wife all day."
“Damn,” he grips at your waist, “A nigga finna’ get locked up, huh?"
You giggle close to his lips, “Life with no parole."
And then his mouth crashes into yours—full, warm, tasting like sweet tea and the lingering smokiness of barbecue. His kiss is slow at first, until you smoothly climb onto his lap, knees pressing into the couch cushions on either side of his hips. Your fingers tangle at the nape of his neck as you deepen the kiss, your tongue teasing his bottom lip until a rough grunt vibrates against your mouth.
“Why you feenin’?”
You don’t answer—too busy loosening his belt with practiced ease, your lips trailing down his neck as you palm him through his pants, earning another gravelly curse through your husband's mouth.
“Saud’ could walk back in this house at any moment, girl—"
Your laughter spills against his collarbone in breathy giggles, warm and honeyed, as your fingers hook into the waistband of his pants—finally freeing him into your grip. The moment his tip springs free, your breath catches—a sharp, needy whine escaping your throat as your eyes drink in the sight of him—thick, flushed, veins straining against heated skin, the tip already glistening with his impatience.
“‘M hungry, Papa. Can I?”
You mewl these words so desperately, lips brushing the twitching head as you gaze up at him through fluttering lashes.
Onyankopon’s grip tightens in your curls—not pulling, just holding—as he rasps, “Goddamn. Aight.”
Your tongue then darts out, tracing the swollen ridge beneath his crown, relishing the salt-sweet taste of him before dipping into his slit. His hips jerk—hard—knocking a choke from your lungs, but you don’t relent. Instead, you press open-mouthed kisses along his shaft, nuzzling into the thatch of coarse hair at the base before swirling your tongue around the tip again.
“Hollon’, Mama—” he grits out, fingers flexing in your hair, but you’re already sinking down, taking him halfway with a blissful whimper. The stretch burns sweetly, your lips sealing around him as hollowed cheeks suck him deeper. His thighs tremble beneath you, a ragged, “Fuck—” tearing from his chest as your tongue swirls along his length on the upstroke.
You pull off with a lewd pop, running your tongue viciously against your puffy lips at the way his stomach muscles clench.
“Missed this,” you purr, licking a stripe from root to tip before swallowing him down again—deeper this time—until your nose brushes his skin. His groan is filthy, echoing through the living room as his head thuds back against the couch.
“Gon’ make me act up,” he warns, voice dark with promise—but you just whimper again around him, eyes fluttering shut as you bob faster, hungrier. The wet sounds of your mouth on him mix with his ragged breaths, the cartoon still playing forgotten in the background.
Your lips stretch obscenely, saliva pooling at the corners of your mouth as you take him all the way down—nose pressed into his pelvis, throat fluttering wildly around the intrusion. Your eyes roll back slightly at the stretch, tears pricking at the corners as you whimper around his girth again— needy, gagging sound that vibrates against his skin and makes his hips jerk instinctively.
“Fuck—look at you," Onyankopon growls, fingers tightening in your curls, yanking just enough to make you mmph—air rushing into your lungs before you dive back down, hollowing your cheeks shamelessly.
You pull off with another wet pop, spit slick lips swollen and glistening as you pant—only to spit directly onto his dick, the glob of saliva trailing thickly down his shaft before you smear it with your mouth. You then smack his length against your tongue, giggling breathlessly.
“Goddamn," he snarls heavier, voice dripping with lust—a vein popping in his neck as he glares down at you like he wants to eat you alive.
You swirl your tongue around his tip, lapping at the precum beading there before sinking back down—deeper, messier—your throat working in desperate swallows around him. Drool drips down your chin, your brows knitting together in a mix of pleasure and strain as you gag prettily around him—the sounds leaving your mouth absolutely disgusting.
“Ain’t no way you suckin’ dick this good and actin’ all innocent at the dinner table," he grunts, thrusting shallowly into your throat, his grip on your hair bordering on painful—“Fuckin’ glutton—can’t even breathe right and you still tryna’ swallow my shit whole.”
You give a desperate moan in response—half-protest, half-agreement—your fingers digging into his thighs as you bob faster, sloppier, spit and precum fully smearing across your lips. His hips buck up violently, forcing himself deeper as he curses under his breath—“Gon’ make this bitch nut all over yo’ pretty ass face.”
You're drunk off him—every suck, every gag, every slurp of your lips dragging up his shaft leaving you dizzy with greed. Your tongue lolls obscenely along the underside of his cock, spit-slick and desperate, drool dripping in thick strands onto his heavy balls, making them glisten under the dim light. The mess coats your chin, smears across your cheeks—ruins you beautifully—but you don’t care, too lost in the taste of him, the weight of him on your tongue.
You usually ask—Papa, can I?—but right now, you don’t want permission. You want everything.
So with an aroused impatience you climb fully into his lap, knees sinking into the couch cushions on either side of his thighs. One hand grips his shoulder for balance as you yank your capris with the other, exposing bare skin—no panties, never panties when you knew he’d be home. His tip slaps wetly against your folds, already soaked just from sucking him off, and you whimper—high and broken—as his thumb ruthlessly circles your clit, sending sparks up your spine.
His mouth crashes into yours, tongues tangling sloppily, spit mixing between you as he grunts against your lips—
“I ain’t movin’. Put that bitch in.”
Your fingers knot in the hair at the nape of his neck as you sink down—slowly, so slowly—stretching around him inch by torturous inch. And the burn? It’s delicious. White-hot and overwhelming, your walls fluttering wildly as you take him deeper. Your eyes even begin to water, lashes sticking together as tears spill over, your mouth trembling against his in a silent sob.
Then—squelch—a wet, gushing sound punches from your pussy as you bottom out, his hips fully flush against your ass. The obscene noise—like air forced from a tight space—makes you shudder, your thighs shaking violently around him.
“Fuck—” Onyankopon snarls into your mouth, his grip on your waist bruising, “Tight-ass pussy always tryna act brand new.”
You whimper—pitiful, unable to do nothing else.
His palms cradle the plush underside of your thighs—calloused fingertips digging into soft flesh as he lifts you effortlessly, your body hovering above him for one breathless moment before he drops you back down.
The descent is slow—agonizing—every inch of him dragging against your walls until you’re whimpering nonsensically, Creole curses and praise tumbling from your lips in a slurred mess—
“Ah—Mon Dieu—Papa, li two cho—!”
Then—smack—your ass lands heavy against his thighs, skin sticking wetly before peeling apart with a lewd clap that ricochets through the living room. Your vision whites out for a second, mouth falling slack as pleasure crackles up your spine—
“Shit.”
Your voice fractures, knees trembling where they bracket his hips. His grip tightens—lifting you again—only to drop you back onto him, the force punching the air from your lungs.
“Fuck,” you sob, nails raking down his chest, “P—Papa, li two gwo—!”
You’re too big.
“Talk that shit now,” he taunts, “Thought you was hungry?”
“O—O bondye—P-Papa—!”
I can’t.
The fabric of your top crumples violently in Onyankopon’s fists—fingers twisting, yanking the material taut as he uses it like reins to drive you down onto him. Every bounce wrenches a gasp from your lips, your body jolting with each punishing thrust, his dick spearing into you with a relentless, bruising rhythm. Your face crumples, pouting down at him—eyes glazed, lips swollen and trembling—as he growls up at you in thick, guttural Creole.
"Ou vle sa, mm? Ou vle Papa kraze ou?"
You want me to break yo’ shit, huh?
You nod frantically, a pathetic, shuddering “Mm-hmm—!" hiccuping from your throat as your cream spills obscenely down his shaft, pooling at the base where his balls glisten with your slick.
“I—I’m gonna’ cum—!" you mewl, voice breaking, thighs quivering as your walls flutter wildly around him.
But Onyankopon doesn’t speed up—doesn’t slow down—just keeps grinding you onto him at that same, devastating pace, letting you feel every inch as your orgasm crests. Your back arches, a silent scream tearing through you as your pussy gushes—hot, wet pulses of arousal soaking his lap, dripping down his abdomen in sticky rivulets.
“Regarde ça," Look at that, he mutters, voice rough with lust as he watches you squirt all over him—“Fais un gros désordre, mm?"
’Made a big fuckin’ mess.
Onyankopon’s grip shifts—his hands cinching around your waist as he stands in one fluid motion, twisting you midair before slamming your back flush against his chest. Your breath hitches, fingers scrambling at his forearms as he bends you forward in the same motion, your spine arching obscenely as he crowds over you.
“Ain’t took my pussy like this inna’ minute. Let a nigga feel you.”
This position—back arched deep, ass tilted up, your body folded in half—was never one you could handle. He knew it. You knew it. Years of marriage, and he only pulled it out on two occasions: when you’d pissed him off just enough to deserve it—or when he wanted to ruin you so thoroughly you’d forget your own name.
His dick sinks back into you—slow, sadistic—the stretch bordering on pain as your walls flutter wildly around him. A petulant whimper claws from your throat, your face tucking into your own shoulder as you try to steady yourself.
Too deep. Too much.
Before you can adjust, his palm wraps around your throat from behind—his fingers splayed possessively as he jerks his hips forward, bottoming out with a force that makes your vision blur.
Your cry is muffled against your own skin, tears pricking at your lashes as he starts moving—no build-up, no mercy—just deep, piston-like thrusts that punch the air from your lungs with every snap of his hips.
“Always actin’ brand new,” he grits out, “Like I ain’t had this pussy a thousand times.”
Onyankopon yanks your head back as he starts fucking you with those long, slow, punishing strokes, burying himself to the hilt each time with a rough grunt. Your entire body shudders in shock, fingers clawing at your own ankles as you struggle to stay grounded, but there’s no escape—just the relentless drag of him stretching you open, over and over, the obscene squelch of your soaked pussy echoing in the air between you.
A dumb, pleasure-drunk frown twists your face—eyebrows knitted, lips parted in a silent gasp—before your voice finally shatters into whiny, hiccupping sobs.
“Ohh my god. Shit. Ughn, fuck—!"
Your thighs tremble violently, your back bowing even more as pleasure coils tighter in your gut—each thrust dragging you closer to the edge. But he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down. Just keeps stroking into you—rough, unhurried, perfect—until your mind whites out completely.
The next shift happens like lightning—his arms wrapping around you, hauling you flush against his chest as he lifts you just enough that your toes barely skim the floor, his strength suspending you effortlessly between his body and the air. His palm presses flat against your throat again—his lips dragging hot against the shell of your ear as his thrusts turn uneven, deeper, desperate.
“Missed this shit... missed you…”
You’re too far gone to answer—just weakly nodding, your head lolling back against his shoulder as pleasure crackles through every nerve. Onyankopon’s thrusts turn frantic, his breath ragged against your neck, his voice breaking every snap of his hips—
“Shit—fuck—gon’ make me—"
Your body aches—muscles trembling, thighs slick with sweat—but you force yourself to roll your hips back against him anyway, meeting each deep thrust with a weak but determined grind. Your voice is nothing but a breathless whimper, barely audible over the filthy slap of skin, but you need him to hear your words.
“I love you—love you so much—“
Your words dissolve into a gasp as he rams into you again, the force of it making your toes curl against the floor. You tilt your head back, pressing your temple against his, lips brushing his jaw as you whisper—
“Such a good...good father... takin’ care of us.”
Onyankopon groans—low, raw—the sound vibrating against your skin as his fingers flex possessively around your throat.
"Fuck—" he grits out, voice strained—almost shy—as if he’s not used to being unraveled like this.
You reach back blindly, fingers tangling in his braids, tugging just enough to make him growl.
“Sound so pretty,” you slur.
He curses again, biting at your shoulder as if you contain his own pleasure.
“Chill.”
His warning rumbles against your lips, but it's unsteady—almost shaking—his usual arrogance stripped bare as his breath hitches. You don’t listen. Instead, you crash your mouth against his in a sloppy, desperate kiss, swallowing his next groan whole as he thrusts up into you—harder, deeper—his hips pistoning in a rhythm that has you both practically singing into each other’s mouths.
His moan becomes muffled against your lips—“Oooh, shit—“ low and graveled, his forehead pressing against yours as his pace turns erratic. You nod frantically, whimpering in agreement, your own sounds just as broken as his, your nails scraping down his chest as you begin begging him.
“Fill me up, baby.”
And that’s all it takes.
Onyankopon cums with a ragged groan, his entire body tensing as he spills into you in thick, pulsing waves—hot, endless, like he’s been holding back for weeks. His fingers dig into your hips hard enough to bruise as he rides it out, fucking his release even deeper inside you.
You giggle—weak, breathless, but elated—the sensation of him twitching inside you sending little aftershocks of pleasure through your own trembling body.
Onyankopon’s chest heaves against your back, his lips still hovering over yours as he mutters—“Goddamn."
“Mmm,” you arch farther into his touch, “Would’ve gotten that last night if you weren’t so tired…"
His lips drag slowly along the curve of your ear—hot breath making you shiver as he murmurs, “Patience builds tension, girl.”
He grinds deep one last time, lazily rocking into you just to feel your walls flutter weakly around him.
Your fingers tighten around his forearm, a pathetic little “‘M tired now, Papa…" slipping from your lips—weak, whiny, still buzzing from pleasure.
“Oh, ‘you tired now?”
You twist in his arms, draping yourself fully against him—your arms looping around his neck, forehead pressing to his as you sigh, “C’monn, let's go shower."
“Aight. We hunchin’ again?"
“No, boy! I wanna go to bed. It's nearly twelve."
He smacks his lips, eyes flicking past you to the clock on the wall—then freezes.
“It's what time?"
You blink up at him, suddenly aware of the shift in his tone—that dangerous edge creeping in.
“Um…fifteen minutes to twelve?" you offer hesitantly.
Onyankopon exhales sharply through his nose, jaw tightening as he looks down at you with narrowed eyes.
“Imma' kill yo' son."
Your hands fly up in protest, gripping his shoulders—“Well hold on!—He's a little over curfew, it's fine!”
“So now I'm doin' too much?” He smacks his lips, pulling back just enough to level you with a look—mockingly pitching his voice higher, mimicking your earlier whimpers— “’You’re such a good father’—what happened to allat’, huh?"
You squeak, cheeks flushing hot as you slap a hand over his mouth, cutting off his teasing.
“Stop it!”
He licks your palm—nasty—making you yelp and yank your hand back as he grins, triumphant.
“So you gon’ need the belt after him, huh?”
You scrunch your nose.
“No. And you’re grumpy.”
A chuckle rumbles deep in his chest, but he doesn’t pull away—just tilts his head, pressing his forehead a little harder against yours in that way he does when he’s softening, letting you know he’s conceding.
“Imma’ let up, aight?"
Your shoulders relax, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt as you exhale, melting into him.
“'…’Kay.”
His lips brush your temple before he murmurs, “Lemme’ just call and check on ‘em—after that? Imma’ rub on yo’ feet and knock the fuck out."
You exhale as he finally pulls away, shaking your head with a quiet laugh. Always unable to let go of that protective dad instinct, even when he was supposed to be letting up—but that was just him. Overbearing, stubborn, yours.
The moment settles into something tender as you watch him grab his phone off the coffee table, his heavy silhouette outlined by the dim light of the living room.
“I love you," you murmur, the words slipping out sweet and easy—like they always did.
He pauses mid-step, glancing back at you over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth tilting up in that rare, real smile—the one reserved just for you.
“’Love you more, girl.”
And just like that—the day ends, wrapped in warmth, in home, in family.
Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan, and every other Black person in attendance should’ve been apologized to during the show. The apology needed to be as loud and as public as the offense.
Elijah sipped the last of the beverage out of the styrofoam cup. Stakeout assignments were well required in his job description, but they didn't make them any less boring. Private investigation utilized the skill sets that he learned in the army, without triggering his PTSD. The job required odd hours, which were the only hours his body would reasonably adjust to. It was a good night if Elijah could get six hours of sleep, thanks to his nightly Melatonin tablet.
The soothing rasp of Sam Cooke floated through his rusty sedan. It was a miracle the tin can could even move. It was a car that his father worked on when he was a kid. A true definition of a fixer-upper. The only thing separating him from living on the streets was his discharge from the Army. Back when work was hard to come by without a high school diploma.
He got into the business by doing an old favor to a neighbor who prepared him meals. She had a lingering suspicion that her husband was seeing other women, and paid him fifty bucks to follow him around. It led to the eventual end of the relationship, but also opened the door for many clients who wanted to pay for his services. He was thorough for every assignment, pictures, videos, receipts, all to be placed in a manila folder for his clients to inspect to their approval.
The assignment he was on at the time was in Mississippi. This client is paying him extra to cross state lines and recover physical evidence of the affair. He snapped a couple of pictures of the man, who was leaning into the woman's personal space. The age difference between them was obvious, as the girl didn't look old enough to buy a drink from the bar they were leaving.
Elijah's phone buzzed on the dashboard. He ignored it, figuring it was probably his kid brother. A second passed before his phone started to ring again. His target and the young woman were getting ready to leave. Elijah snapped a picture of him opening the passenger door for her.
He flipped his phone up to look at the caller ID. Your number appeared on the screen. His thumb hovered, his brain battling between duty and curiosity. He needed to ensure he didn't miss any evidence. Against his better judgement he answered the phone.
"Elijah?" Your voice was soft, it sounded like you were far away from the phone.
He wanted to keep his voice even. "Is everything alright?"
"I need you to come over."
Elijah took a pregnant pause. It was like you were speaking in code, and he was unlocking it any time soon.
"Can it wait? I'm in the middle of something." Remembering he was at work, he started his car and followed the target's car. Remaining at least five cars behind not to blow his cover.
"No," you cut in, the tremble in your voice becoming evident. "Please, Elijah. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't serious."
Elijah could feel the unresolved tension sparking between them.
"✮."
"It's about our son. I think he might be in danger." His foot nearly slammed down on the brakes. He ignored the furious honk from the car that nearly rear-ended him. His attention is no longer focused on his assignment. Sirens rang in his mind at the mention of his son. He switched lanes and got on the highway as fast as he could.
You stood near the front of the door, anticipating Elijah’s arrival. You were sure he was flying down whatever road to get to your home. Your son, Cole, was tucked into bed for the night. Safe and oblivious to the distress his mother was in.
Knocking on the door, Elijah made his presence known. You lifted the blinds and double-checked the peephole. With the unlatching of the lock, Elijah made his way into your living room.
“What happened?” he demanded, barely giving you time to speak.
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs. Asleep. I checked on him five minutes ago,” You whispered, shutting the door behind them. You shoved a crumpled note into his hands.
You can’t hide forever. We’ll take what you love most.
Elijah stared at the paper, his jaw clenched. “Who left this?”
“I found it taped to the door when I got home from work. Elijah, what is going on? Who would do this?” Her voice trembled, but there was steel beneath the fear.
His mind raced, trying to create and eliminate people who would hold a grudge against him or you. Until he remembed his time in Chicago.
He hesitated, the secrets of years pressing at his chest. Finally, he sank onto the couch. “I know who left this.”
“Tell me!”
“Luciano Morelli. He’s the leader of the Italian mob in Chicago. He’s the real reason Stack and I left Chicago.”
Your eyes narrowed, and hurt flickered across your face. To this day, you were left in the dark about what all happened in Chicago. Every time you asked, he’d say he didn’t want to worry you.
“You said it was for a job. You said—”
“I lied,” Elijah snapped, guilt raw in his voice. “It wasn’t a job. It was my brother and I… we robbed someone. The Italian mob. We thought we got away with it, but…”
Your breath caught, anger flaring. “You did this?! You brought this on us? On our son? Elijah, how could you—”
“I was desperate! We needed money.”
She cut him off, voice rising. “You thought what? That you could just steal from the mob and walk away? That it wouldn’t follow you!”
Elijah’s voice cracked. “I didn’t know it would go this far. I’m sorry.”
You shook your head, tears in your eyes. “Sorry doesn’t protect him. What do we do now, Elijah? How do we fix this?”
Elijah looked down at the note, the weight of his past finally crushing him. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I promise.”
Your hands balled into fists. "You keep lying, Elijah! You keep making promises you can’t keep, and now our son might pay the price. You think an apology fixes this? I trusted you. I let you into our lives again, and you—"
Elijah’s voice broke, pleading. "I was trying to protect you both. I thought if I left, if I stayed away, it would be enough—"
"Enough?" you spat. "You let a monster in the house and thought locking the door would keep us safe? You’re pathetic. If anything happens to Cole because of you, I swear to God, Elijah, I’ll kill you myself."
He flinched, pain flashing across his face. "I know I messed up. But I’m not leaving you to handle this alone. I will keep you both safe."
You pushed past him, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. "You have no right to promise me anything. Not anymore. But I’ll tell you this, no one touches my son."
Elijah nodded, swallowing hard.
You glared at him, your voice low and threatening. "I mean it, Elijah. You get one chance. One. If you screw this up, you’ll wish the mob got to you first."
Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. What one person finds attractive in another may not be desirable in the eyes of someone else. That's human nature. What isn't human nature is the ability to pull every man that comes within thirty feet of you.
It was homecoming at Florida State, and the highly anticipated game between the Seminoles and Gators was soon to commence in less than an hour. The tailgates were in full swing. Tents designated to different organizations were selling plates. Greeks were strolling to the perfectly crafted set played by the DJ. The atmosphere and hypnotic smell of grilled meats were a signature scent of homecoming. One of the reasons why Cameron was enjoying the transition from undergraduate to alumnus. This time last year, he was in the locker room, getting his mind right. Taking a step back from Cameron the individual, to Cameron the quarterback responsible for leading his team to another victory.
With the added advantage of being 6'5", it made navigating the crowd much easier. Cameron was on his third cup of jungle juice when he approached your figure. Tapping your shoulder, he watched you look over your left shoulder. Clearly, Cameron had interrupted the one-sided conversation a man was having with you. In a sea of garnet and gold, any drop of dark blue or orange was to catch anyone's attention.
"Cam! Hey, how are you, honey?" Your eyes twinkled as you recognized your beloved friend. Your outfit was a Gator t-shirt dress, with the sides cut out in a zig-zag pattern. White cowgirl boots with a two-inch wedge. The gloss of your lips shone from the sun.
Returning the hug, Cameron rubbed your back.
"What are you doing on this side? The loser, I mean, Gator tailgating area is over that way." He dramatically coughed and paused between the words 'loser' and 'Gator'.
Pushing his shoulder, you rolled your eyes. Defending your alma mater from his teasing remarks.
"You know you aren't my only homeboy at this school."
"But I'm your favorite one."
"Of course." Your voice when you spoke to him had dropped an octave. For the first time, your height difference had come into play. You were looking up at Cameron, hips cocked to the side, lashes batting up at him.
Catching himself, Cameron adjusted his posture.
"Where's Jasmine? I'm sure she's not too far behind."
"Don't be like that."
"I still don't know what her problem is with me."
You were a friend of Cameron's before Jasmine entered the picture. Your older brother and Cameron's brother were good friends. On multiple occasions, you and Cameron spent time together, as your older siblings preferred each other's company to that of their younger siblings. You and Cameron had formed your own friendship when you were in high school.
There was a brief period in which you and Cameron dated. From junior year of high school to the summer before freshman year. Cameron had committed to Florida State on a football scholarship. And you were going to UF. Neither one of you is particularly interested in long-distance; the split was mutual, and, most importantly, the friendship remained intact.
Before knowing who she was, you were at a mutual friend's kickback. Cameron was clearly intoxicated and the party was shutting down. You didn't think anything of it, taking him to your car so you could drive him home. Jasmine made her presence known at that very moment, causing a scene outside the apartment complex. She called your everything but a child of God that night. Cameron, one shot away from blacking out, had to de-escalate the situation. Making for an awkward introduction between you and Jasmine.
That night was two almost three years ago, and things between you and Jasmine hadn't smoothed over. Your calls with Cameron stopped, and you didn't speak to him unless you saw him back at home or commented on each other's Instagram posts.
Despite how everything unfolded that night, Cameron's relationship with you didn't change. Now effectively having a friend at the tailgate, the two of you stuck together until you decided to go to the football stadium. The end of the first quarter was approaching, and the score was neck and neck.
Seminoles fourteen, Gators seventeen. Splitting a funnel cake in your lap, you and Cameron rooted for your respective teams. Trash-talking the other when a penalty was called in their favor.
Your cheek rested on your shoulder as you scrolled on your Instagram page. Half-time shows were your least favorite part of the game. Opening up your camera, you puffed out your lips, making a kissy face. Snapping multiple pictures, allowing the sun to warm your face. The natural oils from being outside all day was wiping away the years off your face. The orange blush on your cheekbones made every image look professionally edited.
"Look Cam." Turning his jaw towards the camera, you snapped multiple pictures. Some of them were serious, but most of them were silly. You wouldn't realize it until later just how close your faces had gotten during the montage of pictures. The last one being a literal collision of your cheeks, causing you to rub your bronzer and blush off of Cameron's lighter complexion.
"Awww, we look so cute."
Agreeing, Cameron looked at the pictures in awe. "Tag me."
Posting a collage of the pictures for the unofficial Florida anthem, No Flockin', you uploaded them. A couple of minutes later, you received notifications of friends liking the picture.
It wouldn't dawn on Cameron how the image would look to those who weren't already aware of his relationship with you. It came across as a hard launch to a new relationship. Causing many to question when his breakup with Jasmine occurred. Before he could even push back against the growing replies in his DM. It would only be a matter of time before Jasmine got hold of the image.
