“Dominique,” Uncle Tevin said at the same time, his fatherly tone doing the work mine couldn’t.
Nique’s eyes went glassy, but she didn’t let anything fall. She turned and walked toward the tree line before anyone could say another word, her leopard print disappearing into the green.
“Nique!” I started after her.
My mom’s hand caught my arm. “Go with Amina,” she said quietly. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but she is Demi’s mother and we are in a foreign country. She needs somebody she knows by her side.”
I looked toward the trees. I looked at Amina sitting on the ground with her ankle wrapped in a guide’s shirt, pale and shaken. My mom was right and I hated that she was.
“I got Nique,” Nel said, already moving.
Stella paused him. “She’s mad at me, so let me talk to her. Keep an eye out on Whitley for me.”
Nel looked at her for a long second then nodded and stepped back.
I helped Amina up, getting her arm over my shoulder while Wendell and Deuce gathered their things. She leaned into me, her weight familiar in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with years of shared history neither of us could completely walk away from.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as we made our way toward the clinic van.
“I got you,” I told her. And I meant it. Not as a partner or anything she had been trying to make me into on this trip, but as the father of her child. That would never change.
As the van pulled away from the cenote and the jungle closed in around us I let myself think about Nique walking into those trees with whatever she was carrying. The outburst wasn’t really about Deuce and the clinic. It was about years of feeling like she wasn’t worth staying for and having the woman who left her standing right there offering her son up to help a stranger.
I understood it. I just couldn’t be the one to go after her this time.
What I did know was that we were running out of days on this trip and I was not going home without her knowing exactly where I stood. Whatever time I lost today I was going to make up for. That wasn’t a hope. It was a plan.
Chapter twenty-one
Washed Up
The heat in the jungle was overbearing, pressing against my skin and sticking my hair to the back of my neck as I moved down the gravel path. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I just needed distance between me and Stella’s family first speech, and between me and the image of Dex crouching over Amina like she was something fragile and precious while I stood there invisible.
“Dominique! Stop walking!”
I didn’t stop. I picked up the pace, my wet shorts rubbing against my thighs with every step, the loose gravel shifting under my feet.
“Nique, I said stop!”
Her hand caught my shoulder and spun me around before I could shake it off.
“Get your hands off me,” I said, stepping back.
She had the nerve to look like a concerned mother standing there and it made my blood run hotter. “You had no right to say those things in front of the family. Especially not in front of Whitley and Deuce.”
A jagged laugh left my throat. “My bad. Didn’t mean to taint your perfect children with my issues.”
“Nique—”
“Don’t Nique me! What about my feelings, Stella? What about Nel’s? You want to talk about family first? Did you know your oldest daughter got in a fight that landed her in the hospital? Landed her in jail? And the only person she could call was a person she hates because she got in an argument with her brother and cousin over you being here?”
Stella flinched, her eyes darting around the empty trail. “Nique, I’ve been trying to be there for you!”
“It’s too late! I was a teenager by the time you wanted us back. By then we had friends and family that we didn’t want to leave behind in Mobile to go be with a mother we didn’t know and her new husband,” I stressed, the words shaking in my chest.
Something moved across her face, raw and quick, before the composure came back. “You don’t know the position I was in. You don’t know what it took to build the life I have.”
“I know exactly what it took,” I said, the tears finally breaking through no matter how hard I pressed against them. “It took us. It took Nel and me. You paid for your fresh start with our childhood and then you had the nerve to show up here expecting forgiveness.”