STILL (Grip Book 2)

by Kennedy Ryan

  Irritation flashes across her face before she can hide it. I really thought we were gaining ground, but I realize now she believes Bristol is an itch that, once scratched, will be gone. She’s just been biding her time.

  “I’m glad to see you working with Skeet.” I slouch into the cushy leather worn to buttery softness during many late-night recording sessions. “He needs the help.”

  “Yeah, his stuff was whack.” Jade keeps a straight face for a few seconds before sharing a grin with me. It makes her look younger, carefree, and I glimpse that girl who used to ride bikes with me until the streetlights came on. It’s for that girl that I want to be gentle.

  “I need you to try with Bristol, J.” I cut the small talk and get right to it, my voice soft enough to persuade, but firm enough to insist.

  “And what’d Miss Run Tell Dat say?” She twists her lips into a grimace. “I knew she couldn’t keep her mouth—”

  “She didn’t.” I’m losing patience the more Jade lets her resentment show. “I had to drag it out of her, what was bothering her.”

  “And it was me?” Jade touches her chest. “I’m what’s bothering her when I haven’t even talked to her?”

  “Not since my going away party, right? She finally told me about the conversation you had in the kitchen.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything Angie Black didn’t say in front of the whole world,” Jade snaps. “When you gonna realize Bristol is not for you? You have an opportunity to make a difference, and being with her is ruining it.”

  “Ruining it how?”

  “How much can black lives really matter when you fucking a snowflake?” A disparaging puff of air coasts past her lips. “We supposed to respect that? Just get rid of her and find someone like Qwest, that’s all I’m saying.”

  That’s all? Jade says it easily, like it should be self-evident, like giving up Bristol shouldn’t break me, when it would. How can she think she knows me and not realize that losing Bristol would crush me?

  “You still think she’s a trophy or a phase I’ll grow out of, don’t you?” I lean forward to study her face in case it tells me something different than her words do.

  She just looks at me, the damn right so clear on her face, she doesn’t bother voicing it. I reach into the pocket of my leather jacket.

  “Does this look like a phase to you?” I open my palm, exposing the large square canary yellow diamond I picked up before I went to the set of Luke’s show. Jade glares at the ring like the lights bouncing off the facets taunt her.

  “You really doing this?” she grits out. “Wait’ll Aunt Mittie sees that.”

  “Oh, she saw it.” I slip the ring back into the safety of my pocket. “When she helped me pick it out. Now all she talks about is swirl grandbabies.”

  “You’re gonna have kids with her?” Disgust wrinkles the smooth surface of Jade’s face.

  Now she’s pissing me the hell off.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna have kids with her,” I snap. “As many as she’ll give me. And fuck you for making it sound like some kind of violation. I found somebody I love and want to spend the rest of my life with.”

  “Oh, everybody says forever in the beginning.”

  “We’ve been through this before, Jade. It is forever with us.”

  Jade rolls her eyes and shoves the Raiders cap over her cornrows, resignation wrestling with protest in her expression.

  “Listen to me.” I take both her hands in mine and look at her until she looks back at me. “I will choose her over you.”

  Her lashes drop and blink several times, a frown drawing her brows together.

  “And if you can’t get over this bigoted shit, you won’t be in our lives.”

  Her eyes fly to my face, widen and then narrow.

  “I love you, Jade. You know that, but you need to understand something: anyone who wants to hurt Bristol has to go through me to get to her.”

  I pause meaningfully before finishing.

  “And they will not get to her,” I warn. “Keep showing your ass when she comes around, and you won’t be around. I’m not tolerating the toxic.”

  An unexpected smile quirks her mouth. She reaches into the pocket of her baggy jeans for lip balm and slides the stick over her lips.

  “Alliteration,” she murmurs.

  “What?” I exhale a frustrated breath. “Are you hearing me?”

  “Yeah, ‘tolerating the toxic’—it’s alliteration.” Her smile reminisces. “You came home one day from school. We were in like the sixth grade or something. You learned alliteration that day and couldn’t stop talking about it, giving me examples, making me come up with some. You were the smartest boy I knew.”

  She shakes her head, something close to pride creeping into her eyes.

  “You still are. Even on that panel, you stood out. You’re the best of us, Grip, and I wanted you . . .”

  Her rueful sigh says it: she wanted what she thinks is best for me, namely, for me to choose a black woman. I hook an elbow around her neck, pulling her into me.

  “You know what?” I touch our heads together. “Even though I dated all over the place, every ethnicity, I think somewhere in the back of my mind I thought I would settle down with someone just like Ma. Maybe I assumed that meant she’d be black. I never gave it much thought, but that’s not what it meant. Bris is strong and determined and loyal and as ride or die as they come, just like Ma. I didn’t see this coming, but she is exactly what I need.”

  I kiss Jade’s forehead and stand, looking down at her.

  “I’m not giving her up, J,” I tell her. “Not even for you.”

  She doesn’t reply, but fixes her eyes on the floor, offering no more words. I don’t wait for her to say anything, just head out the door. My words should be the last because they’re the only ones that count.

  17

  Grip

  “This is remarkable, Iz.” I study the proposal in front of me, so excited my foot is bouncing and I can practically feel my blood zooming through my veins. I saw an early draft, and talked Bris to death about it on the plane back to New York, but the final version is even better. “I want in,” I say decisively.

  “What do you mean?” Iz glances up from the stack of papers he’s grading in his office. “Want in on what?”

  “I want to invest in this program,” I say. “The community bail fund program.”

  Surprise widens his eyes behind his glasses, and he tosses his red pen onto the chaos of his desk.

  “Man, I wanted your opinion, not your money.”

  “Well you got both. Where are your beta cities?” I ask. “You say you’ll launch it in five major cities—which ones are you considering?”

  “LA is definitely on the list.” His deep chuckle fills the small office. “If that’s your next question.”

  “Now I really want in.” I take a deep breath. “But I want a seat at the table, not just somewhere to throw my money.”

  “What does that mean exactly?” Iz takes off his glasses and polishes them on the hem of his Morehouse College T-shirt.

  “With your organization, is there any room on the board of directors for a ridiculously rich budding philanthropist who needs to learn the ropes?” The question comes easily, but I’m holding my breath. I want this—as much as I wanted my first record deal, as much as I wanted studio time so badly I swept the floors for it. The only thing I’ve ever wanted more than this was Bristol. I got her, and I’m getting this, too.

  “For a man with your resources,” he says, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers at his chest. “That could be arranged.”

  “For real?” I don’t want to sound eager, but the chance to pour my energy into something that will have immediate impact on the community where I grew up? Hell yeah, I’m eager.

  “For real.” Iz nods. “And when I say your resources, I’m not just talking about your money, Grip. You’re a smart guy—principled, articulate. You have a level of influence, a platform no amount of money
could buy.”

  Iz’s words affirm me in a way I don’t think I ever have been, in a way I don’t think I knew I needed. It feels different than the things my mother told me growing up. He may not be old enough to be my father, and I may not have known him very long, but there’s no one else I respect more. That was one of the few things Angie Black and I did agree on.

  “By the way,” I say, turning the subject partially to avoid the emotions his encouragement elicited. “Not sure if you caught that panel I was on last week, but Angie Black was singing your praises.”

  He picks his pen back up to resume grading papers, his forehead crinkling into a frown.

  “Yeah, I saw it.” It feels like the words are being pulled from his mouth with pliers. “As much as we’d talked about your girl, I never thought to ask if she was a sister. I just assumed.”

  “And I never thought to mention it because it doesn’t matter.” I suck my teeth then grit them. “I can’t believe Angie turned what should have been a thoughtful, productive dialogue into a circus, and she had the nerve to question my commitment to these causes because my girlfriend is white. How ridiculous is that?”

  He’s especially preoccupied with the papers in front of him. He doesn’t acknowledge my statement with even a grunt, and suddenly I need him to.

  “Right, Iz?” I press. “The idea that my effectiveness is compromised somehow because Bristol is white—it’s bullshit, right?”

  He doesn’t lift his eyes from the page in front of him.

  “Well, you do like to make it hard for yourself, don’t you?”

  Tension stretches across my back like a wire hanger.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s just an awkward time to be talking black and sleeping white.” He shrugs the linebacker shoulders rebelling against his tweed sports jacket with patches on the elbows. “To be dating someone outside your community when you’re emerging as such a voice for it.”

  The smartest man I know just said some dumb shit.

  “You see those two things as somehow incongruous?” My question is laced with dread as I brace myself for the man I saw as a hero to show his feet of clay.

  “I just think a lot of successful brothers do what you’re doing.” He finally meets my eyes, tossing the pen down again. “You probably don’t even realize that you’ve been societally conditioned to see the white woman as the ideal. On some level, winning the white man’s prize is a symbol that you are now equal to him. You acquire her as an extension of your success.”

  “Acquire her?” I throw my voice across the desk like a blade, honed and precise.

  “It’s natural really,” he continues matter-of-factly. “It’s the ultimate act of defiance against those who have traditionally oppressed you. She’s an ideal to achieve, and we see that, in every aspect of your life, you’re an overachiever.”

  “Bris isn’t some ideal, some lie mainstream media fed me and I fell for. This is love, not politics.”

  “Love is politics,” he counters. “Because love is merely a function of your values and priorities.”

  “If you think love is politics, then I see why your marriage failed.”

  A storm cloud bursts on his face, raining anger.

  “Watch it, Grip,” he says. “You’re way out of line.”

  “I’m out of line?” Incredulity and fury brawl within me. “You dare to bring this bullshit to me, insult the woman I plan to marry, insult me this way, and then you say I’m out of line?”

  He narrows his eyes on my face at the word “marry.”

  “That’s your decision, of course,” he says. “Not one I would ever make. I believe the greatest expression of commitment to black people and the black family is the commitment to a black woman. For that reason, I don’t date outside of black, much less marry.”

  “Oh, so I imagined the vibe between you and Callie?” A mocking laugh grates in my throat. “You don’t date or marry outside your race, but you’d fuck outside of it if Callie was down.”

  The fury in his eyes bores into me. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  “I really have no idea who I’m talking to.” I grab my saddlebag and stand, my hands shaking with the rage I’m suppressing. “I can’t believe I moved to New York to study under a bigot.”

  He surges to his feet, fists balled like a boxer.

  “You have the audacity to call me a bigot?”

  “I have the audacity? You’re the one talking to me about Gandhi and Martin then spouting this crap. Martin said we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, yet here you are judging Bristol because she’s white before you’ve even met her? Hypocrite.”

  Anger ignites in his eyes at the insult, but he runs a slow hand over the stubble on his jaw. He sighs, shoving big hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  “Look, we’re both upset,” he says. “This is why I didn’t bring it up. I knew we didn’t agree on this subject, and it does no good to talk about it. We can still work together, do a lot of good. That seat on the board is yours, and I meant what I said—it’s not just because of your money.”

  “So we can work together and do all this good,” I say, “but the whole time you’re looking at my wife and thinking she’s a mistake? That she’s some Anglo trophy I use to prove something to other people? Even worse, because of some self-hate, to feel better about myself?”

  He goes quiet, his chest swelling with the deep breath he draws in. I gesture to the proposal abandoned on his desk, my excitement smothered by disappointment and disillusion.

  “How do you squeeze such big ideas into such a narrow mind? You’re smarter than this, Iz,” I say quietly. “I thought I could follow you. I thought you had answers, solutions.”

  I walk to the door and give him one last sad, disgusted glance, saying what I’m fully prepared to accept may be my last words to him ever.

  “Turns out you’re the problem.”

  18

  Bristol

  I’m in the kitchen when Grip comes home. I bought a cookbook, and it openly mocks me from the counter, its pages a reminder of my culinary failings. Occasionally I have these domestic urges. They typically pass, but ever since we moved into this beautiful place that has never been anything but a home since the O’Malleys drafted their first designs, the urges are harder to ignore—to buy fresh flowers for the kitchen from the stand up the street, to try cooking pan-roasted chicken with lemon garlic green beans.

  That’s why I’m in the kitchen asking myself how the hell to make lemon garlic sauce when Grip comes home. It’s crazy that I know him so well, but I allowed Angie Black and Jade and others to get under my skin, to play on my unreasonable insecurities. And I do know him. I know how his steps sound at two in the morning when he’s been at the studio laboring over a track and drags himself through the front door, or when Dr. Hammond says something that rocked him to the core, rearranges the way he thought about life. Those days his steps eat up the hardwood floor, eager to find me and share. Today’s steps stutter, like someone lost and looking. They pause, wait. They’re not sure.

  He’s on the couch when I enter the living room, head in his hands and elbows on his knees. On bare, silent feet, I pad over to him. He doesn’t look up until I rest a hand on his head, caress the tight muscles in his neck.

  “Hey.” He manages a bend of his lips, almost a smile, but his eyes are defeated.

  I instantly want to make whatever it is better, and my fix-it instinct springs into action. He pulls me down onto the couch to straddle his lap. Many days I don’t leave the house because it’s also my office, but today I met with Charm about Grip’s book deal. The Stella McCartney dress I wore to her office inches up my bare legs as I settle over him. His hands are on me right away, caressing my calves and feet, venturing over my thighs, reacquainting himself with the shape of my back through the thin silk. He greets my body the way he typically does, but there is nothing typical about his expression
as he lays claim to me one limb at a time.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” I back the question up with kisses feathered over his jaw.

  He surprises me, grabbing me by the neck and pulling me into his lips forcefully. He kisses me like a savage, a greedy plundering of my mouth, consuming me with both hands. His kisses spill down my chin, a delicious mess. I hate to stop this but I know him too well and love him too much to be an escape hatch.

  “Hey,” I say against his lips, scooting back from the stiffening length of him. “This is all very nice, but I asked you a question. What’s wrong?”

  He stares into my eyes, and I see hurt there. Someone hurt him, and now I’m the savage. My teeth clamp down. My nails cut half-moons into my palms. All I want is a name, a name I’ll find a way to erase. He leaves kisses in the hair curling at my temple from the heat of the kitchen. I just caress his jaw, giving him room to tell me what happened.

  “Iz and I talked about the Artists As Activists panel.” He shakes his head, a fraudulent laugh escaping. “I assumed he’d be on my side, that we believed the same things.”

  I already know, but I still ask.

  “Believe the same things about what?”

  At my question, a shadow passes over his face, like the sun playing hide and seek with the clouds. In an instant, he goes from telling me to protecting me.

  “It’s nothing.” He shrugs and pulls me back down to lock my crotch over his. I resist, forcing resolve into my look and my voice.

  “Tell me.”

  He sighs and licks his lips before speaking.

  “Iz doesn’t think we should be together,” he finally says. “He doesn’t believe in us.”

  Doesn’t believe in us.

  I don’t think Grip realizes how telling the phrase is, how much the professor’s opinion has come to mean to him. In a relatively short time, Dr. Hammond has become much more than Grip’s temporary professor. Grip moved here for the social justice maven with the brilliant mind, but he’s become friends with the man. He respects Dr. Hammond as much as I’ve seen him respect anyone ever. He may not say it, may not even be able to put into words how deeply injured he feels, but it’s there.