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I think every morning when Ezra wakes up, God gives him a tiny jar of words. He only gets so many, maybe a quarter of what the rest of us do. And he’s so scared he’ll run out, he uses as few of them as possible. Half his sentences are one word or a grunt. Weekends, he talks so little, I bet at the end of the day, he has leftovers.
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“You know what my daddy calls it when one person has a head start that the other person doesn’t even know about?” “What?” “America.”
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“Our pact is that we’ll always be friends,” he says, his voice quiet, sure. “That nothing will come between us, not even each other.” Not even each other.
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Grief gives no warning sometimes.
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“Get your house in order,” I tell him, “before you think about running for mine.” “Your house?” “Oh, yes, sir. I grew up in that district, Stoke, and I may not live there now, but I’ll be damned if I’ll send an ill-prepared, incompetent narcissist who can’t keep his dick in his pants to the House of Representatives on their behalf. We have enough of those already. And I don’t care if you’re my brother. If you’re not in it for the people, you could be my Siamese twin and I wouldn’t stand with you.”
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I’d forgotten this kind of telepathy we share, seemingly conducting thoughts between our minds with nothing more than a glance. There’s a disconcerting intimacy to it that feels wrong when his mind isn’t mine. Neither is his face, which settled into a roughly hewn beauty that I can barely tear my eyes from, or the big body standing like a tree offering shelter. I’m not his to shield. He’s not mine to shelter. We’re not each other’s anymore.
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like to think so. I taught him the most important thing to remember in chess.” “And what’s that?” He glances up from the board, his eyes tracing my face in that deliberate way of his. “The queen is the most powerful piece.” The bridge is out, and we stare at each other from opposite sides of it, each daring the other to leap. I break eye contact and clear my throat. “I think you held back some stuff when you taught me how to play.” He shakes his head, a rueful tilt at the corner of his mouth. “I never held anything back from you, Tru.”
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It’s a compulsion. It’s a high. After all these years, she’s here. And I can’t get my fill. All these people—I wish they’d disappear and I could have her to myself. I could excavate her mind and dig around in her soul and get close enough to hear her heartbeat. Beyond the desire to lay her down in the grass and plunge between those long legs, there’s something I want even more. To know her the way I did before. No, deeper than I did before because now we’re adults, re-formed by time and experiences. I want to learn the new shape of her.
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“I know you said Kimba’s on TV sometimes,” Mom says carefully, “but I haven’t seen her. You know I avoid politics whenever possible. How is she?” How is she? So pretty it makes my heart hurt to think of everything I’ve missed. Every questionable fashion choice, bad haircut, and acne breakout through high school. All the contouring and shaping and discipline it took to form her into who she has become. How is she? Powerful. Vulnerable. Brilliant. Kind. Ruthless.
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“And your mother? She was okay?” I for damn sure don’t want to discuss my mother when I’m sporting a semi in front of the literal girl of my dreams. “She’s good,” I reply tersely. “Did you need something, Kimba?” Like me? Do you need me? Because I need you, and if you keep standing here in my garden looking like this, smelling like summer and seduction, I’ll take you, so get on with it.
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I do know if soul mates are real, Kimba is mine. I believe that if people are “created,” we were made together. She was there for my scaffolding—there when my flesh was knit over my bones. And if love is not just an emotion, but a type of eternity, an infinity that lives in our hearts, then we have always been in love. It’s an ageless thing that isn’t about puberty or chronology, or even if we get to live our lives together. But when we are apart, I ache. I
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The fact that you do things like that, put yourself in situations you know make you uncomfortable and shine that way makes you more of a badass than if it came easily to you.”
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Her body is made with a reckless disregard for resistance.
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“Daddy used to say don’t waste time on things that don’t set you on fire inside,
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“I felt the same about people. I didn’t want to waste time on anyone who didn’t set me on fire inside. And there have been people I liked, people I enjoyed sex with, but no one I wanted to build a life with. That’s why I never committed. No one ever set me on fire inside.” She looks over at me, her eyes telling me before her words do. “Until now. You set me on fire inside, Ezra Stern.”
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“Whose are you?” I’ve never asked another woman for this, never needed it. But at the core of who I am, I know I belong to Kimba. I want to hear that she feels the same. “I belong to myself,” she says, a spark of defiance in her eyes. “And to the boy who married me when I was six years old.” I pull back and stare down into her eyes, alive with love and peace and fire. “You remember.” “I remember everything. You owe me a lifetime.”
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“I don’t just want you when you’re strong. I want you when you’re vulnerable, when you’re lost, when you’re not sure. I see the armor you have to put on to make it in your world. I just want you to know here, with me, you can take the armor off.”
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“You okay?” he asks. I look up at him, trace the strong line of his jaw and the dark silk of his brows. He doesn’t like it when I say he’s “dear,” but that’s exactly what he is. Dear and rare and precious and mine. “I am now.”
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But the alpha part of me that feels like he’s always been mine since the day we were born wants to pin her to the wall and growl that he was on loan, but he’s mine again and she will back the fuck down.
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“Study your queen so you can give her what she wants without asking.” Nipsey Hussle, Musician, Activist, Entrepreneur
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