Chapter one
Dead Calm
Male strippers just didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t the judgmental type, not usually, but all that aggressive air-humping and choreographed tongue-flicking didn’t exactly scream masculine to me. They were supposed to cater to women’s fantasies, but the sparkly outfits and bodies slicked down like greased pans gave me the distinct impression that most of them were really playing for the other team.
Opinions are like assholes though. Everybody has one, and mine was clearly in the minority tonight.
Around me the club was a chaotic crowd of screaming women and flying dollar bills. My first cousins London and Paris were leading the pack, both of them wild-eyed and loose with their singles like their bank accounts wouldn’t feel it later. We were dressed head to toe in black for the theme, Death to My Maiden Name, because in exactly one week London Simmons was officially becoming London Jackson.
She was marrying Eli Jackson, her deceased best friend’s widower. It sounds like a headline from one of those messy supermarket tabloids, but their history ran deeper than gossip. Eli grew up right across the street from them. He is four years older than London and back when she used to find reasons to be on the porch every single time he stepped outside, he never noticed.
It wasn’t until Eli went off to college and came home with Brandy on his arm that London’s crush faded. Brandy was warm and magnetic, the kind of woman who pulled people in without trying, and she and London became inseparable almost overnight.
Seven years ago that world cracked open when Brandy was murdered. Wrong place, wrong time. People always said that like it was a freak accident. Something rare like getting struck by lightning, but in Mobile the wrong place was just the neighborhood you grew up in. I learned that at eighteen.
What was supposed to be a regular night turned into blood and sirens and a future I never got back.
Prez, my first love, didn’t make it out of that night.
I did….somehow.
Surviving never felt like winning though. Not when it cost me my track scholarship and the part of myself that still believed the world was fair. I buried that version of me right alongside him and never went back for her.
So no, I never judged London for falling for Eli. I watched her become the shoulder he leaned on while he tried to piece his soul back together. Eventually grief turned into comfort, comfort turned into a spark, and that spark turned into something neither of them planned. Some people called it betrayal. To me it just looked like two people trying not to drown.
I was happy my girl found her person. That’s why I forced a smile and swallowed my cringe as a dancer dry-humped the air four inches from her face.
“Damn, his print is crazy,” Nicole hollered over the bass, nearly knocking over her drink leaning forward for a better look.
“Girl, please.” Amina sucked her teeth and tossed a crumpled dollar onto the stage like she was throwing away trash. “My baby daddy is packing way more than that. I’m used to bigger.”
I reached for my Patrón and rolled my eyes.
Amina was Paris’s best friend, which meant she was glued to our circle whether I liked it or not. Her baby daddy just happened to be Dexter Nash, my former best friend and the man who currently held the undisputed Most Hated title on my personal shit list. She wasn’t lying about his size though. I knew that firsthand, and the memory alone still made me want to throw something.
Dex was Eli's cousin and as teenagers we became best friends. He was always at Eli's house and I was always at London and Paris's. We bonded over track and anything competitive. For years it was platonic and easy between us. Our bond never needed a label.
Then came Paris and Kyson’s destination wedding in Jamaica four years ago.
We were posted up on the beach after the reception, high off a blunt we'd been passing back and forth, and drowning in rum punch under a sky full of stars. Our usual back and forth shifted into something charged and dangerous. Guards down,inhibitions gone, one touch of his soft full lips on mine and I was weak. He had me stretched out in the sand making promises with his body that his heart had no intention of keeping. The sex was so good I fell asleep that night quietly mapping out our future in my head. The waterfront home, the kids, all of it.
Reality slapped me hard at breakfast the next morning. I was ready to spill everything to London when I heard Amina at the other end of the table, laughing and bragging about how Dex had put it on her right before the ceremony.
That man had started his morning in Amina’s bed and ended his night stretched out in the sand with me, and never once flinched about either one. He hadn’t just crossed a line. He crossed it, came back, and crossed it again.
Niggas will be niggas, the streets say. Dex wasn’t just some nigga to me though. He was my person. That was the part that never fully healed, no matter how many times I told myself I was over it.
I knocked back my shot and let the burn settle in my chest where the anger lived.
I was still stewing when one of the dancers drifted over. He was dark-skinned, built like LL in his prime and smelled like cocoa butter and bad intentions. He gestured for London to take a seat in the chair they’d set up near the stage, and she plopped down in it squealing while he worked around her. The whole table erupted. Something about the energy shifted and before I knew it I was on my feet too, tossing singles and hollering right along with everybody else.
Then his eyes found mine and stayed there a beat too long.
“Damn,” he grinned, his gaze moving over my curves slow and deliberate, like he had all the time in the world. “You fine. Thick as hell, too.”
I glanced over at London and then back at him. “Baby, tonight ain’t about me. That’s your focus right there,” I said, nodding toward my cousin.
He laughed low and kept coming anyway.