by Kennedy Ryan
Deeper. Harder. Faster. More.
Deeper. Harder. Faster. More.
Deeper. Harder. Faster. More.
It’s an imperative rhythm. In the shadow of the tree I always thought was magic, we make our own. A necromancy that’s uniquely ours. In the shadow of the place I thought was safe, I realize it’s not a tree, a city, or a particular place where I find safety. It’s in Kenan’s arms, in the harbor of his love. That’s the safest place I’ve ever known.
I wake with a start.
I don’t know what wrenched me from sleep, but I jerk up like someone’s dumped a bucket of water over my head. My heart clamors behind my ribs, and a thin layer of sweat slathers my skin. The moon illuminates a swathe of the bed, showing me Kenan asleep—peaceful, still. He’s too big for the bed, but there isn’t one in this house large enough to hold him. His feet hang off the edge, and his massive shoulders and chest leave only a sliver of mattress for me. I didn’t mind. I laid on top of him and fell asleep. It was the best rest I’ve had in weeks, until now.
Even though it’s almost October, it’s still warm in the bayou, and we slept with only a sheet covering us. A violent shiver reminds me of my nakedness. There’s a quilt I used to love in MiMi’s old room, so I trip down the hall and open her closet to search for it while the warm night air caresses my skin.
The warm night air.
I check the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom—all warm.
It’s only cold where we slept.
My thoughts riot, an unreasonable panic sending me down the hall at a gallop and stumbling into the bedroom. It’s so abruptly cold, the marked difference in temperature stops me at the threshold. An unnatural chill sprinkles goosebumps over my arms and shoulders, pebbling the sensitive skin around my breasts. I approach the bed slowly, afraid to see if Kenan is still breathing.
He draws in long, even pulls of air that lift and lower his bare chest at regular intervals.
But I know what I feel. I know what this is. I’ve felt it before.
A dozen things MiMi told me, all the things she ever taught me crowd my mind. I mentally sift through the information, discarding the useless, grabbing hold of what I need with desperate hands. I rush through the house, collecting the necessary items. Salt. Candles. I dig around in boxes searching until I have everything I need.
I watch Kenan for hours, I think. I’m not sure. Seated naked at the foot of the bed, I watch over him, willing to call in every cosmic favor, to invoke any saint, to utter any prayer. I’ll beg God not to take him and do whatever is necessary.
My shoulders have grown stiff and my feet are numb by the time he wakes. It’s still dark in the room, but I’m not sure what time. He reaches for me, sliding his hand across the cotton sheets, blindly searching.
I’m right here.
I don’t say it. Fear locks my jaws and ties my tongue in a knot.
“Lotus,” he mutters, squinting and pulling himself up to sit, his shoulders almost as wide as the headboard of the narrow bed I slept in as a girl. He’s a king, a pharaoh, the ruler of my heart. And I’ll fight anything, anyone who tries to take him from me.
I’ll fight death itself.
“Lotus, what the hell is going on?” He sweeps the room with a confused look, taking in the four lit candles strategically placed around the bed at the north, south, east and west. At the salt encircling us.
“What’s all this?” He looks at me, naked and completely still, sitting cross-legged with my hands pressed together between my breasts. “What were you saying?”
“Psalm thirty-five,” I croak, my voice raw from repeating the psalm the protection spell required for so long.
“Why?” He walks on his knees toward me, naked, magnificent. Mine.
Tears sneak past my lashes and jagged breaths fight their way out of my lungs.
“Okay,” Kenan says, his voice hardening. “You tell me right the fuck now what’s going on. Why you’re crying. What’s—”
“It’s death,” I cut in over his building tirade. “It’s here. In this room. I can’t lose you.”
Confusion gives way to frustration as he realizes what I’m saying.
“Lotus, this shit isn’t real,” he says, his words heated. “I hate seeing you upset over superstition and hocus-pocus bullshit people use to control others, to make money off them.”
“No.” I shake my head adamantly. “Yes, there is some of that. I know what you mean, but this isn’t that, Kenan. I know what I feel. I felt it when MiMi died. I felt it when my mother died. I know how death feels, and it’s here.”
I close my eyes because I know he won’t believe what I say next, and I need him to believe me. “It’s here for you.”
He sits on his heels and runs a hand over his face, dropping his head back and contemplating the ceiling before returning his gaze to me. The moon reveals the stark masculine beauty of his features. It reveals his disbelief.
“I’m gonna blow these candles out before you burn down the damn house.”
He jumps out of the bed and runs his foot through the salt, disrupting, destroying the circle. All four candles snuff out at once.
Dread starts as a knot in my chest and blooms over every limb.
“What the . . .?” He looks from the extinguished candles to my face and back again. “These trick candles don’t fool me so—”
“They’re not trick candles, Kenan,” I tell him solemnly. “I know you don’t believe me, but—”
“Of course, I don’t, Lotus.” He sighs. “Baby, what do you expect me to think when I wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by some candles and salt and you chanting? I . . . it’s too much. Tell me you know this isn’t real.”
We watch each other in mutual obstinacy, the silence an impasse hanging like a broken bridge between us. I won’t say it’s not real. I don’t know everything. I don’t always know what’s true, and I can’t always interpret what I sense, but I know there is more beyond the limits of the three dimensions we see—that the walls between one dimension and another aren’t as thick as we might believe. Beyond this life lies eternity, infinity, time that’s not measured by minutes, hours, days or years.
“I can’t lose you, too,” I finally whisper. My hands tremble around St. Expedite, the little statue I found at the bottom of MiMi’s chest. “If anything happened to you, I . . .”
The stiff lines of his shoulders, the inscrutable expression softens. One strong arm scoops me from the end of the bed and into his arms, into his lap. He rocks me like a baby and kisses my hair.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to me,” he says in what I’m sure is supposed to be a reassuring voice. “We fly out tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.”
I bury my face in his neck and swallow my tears, letting him think he’s comforting me, but long after he falls asleep, his heartbeat evening out under my ear, I lie awake. In this house, I learned to peel the film from my eyes—to discern beyond what’s right in front of me. I may not be able to see the threat, but the threat sees me. I show it my rabid heart, prowling in a fiery, salted circle, my teeth bared. Vigilant. A psalm on my lips, and the little saint who guards the grave clenched in my hand.
41
Kenan
Lotus and I are exiting the airport, headed for the car my assistant, Davis, arranged for us when the first reporter approaches.
“Kenan,” he says, the phone aimed at me to record, audio or video, I’m not sure. “How’d you feel about tonight’s episode?”
With the fast trip back from China, going down to Louisiana, and our idyll in the bayou, I’d forgotten the first episode of Baller Bae aired tonight.
Dammit.
“No comment,” I mutter, lowering my head and pulling Lotus closer.
“Lotus, is it true what Bridget said?” another tosses out. “About you and Chase Montclair?”
Lotus’s head jerks around in the direction of the question the reporter hurled at her. “What are they talking about?” she asks, looking up at m
e with wide, angry eyes.
“Ignore it, babe.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Don’t give them anything.” I spot the car service ahead. “Banner’s blowing my phone up. I’ll call her in a second. Let’s get out of here.”
I settle Lotus in the back seat and hand our bags to the driver so I can escape the glare of any cameras as soon as possible. It’s not the chaos that followed the scandal, with a hundred cameras and questions catapulted at my head every time I stepped outside, but if we don’t get this shit under control now, it could be.
I call Banner back as soon as we pull off.
“B, what the hell is going on?”
“Where are you?” Banner asks with that forced calm I’ve learned to see through over the years.
“Just landed in New York, but heading back to Cali day after tomorrow.” I frown and lean forward. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong, per se.”
“The hell, Banner. You don’t call me four times for some ‘per se’ shit, and reporters harassed me as soon as I stepped outside the airport doors. What’s going on?”
“You checked any TV, social media? That kind of thing?”
I stiffen. “No,” I say, dragging the word out. “Why?”
“I’m sending you a link. Don’t lose your temper. It’s nothing, but I wanted you prepared.” Banner hesitates. “Is Lotus with you?”
I told Banner about Lotus soon after we officially became “more than friends.” She represents me best when she knows what’s going on in my life and what’s important to me, so she definitely needed to know about my girl.
“Yeah, she’s here. They had questions for her, too.”
Lotus glances up at me, something that is concern, but not quite worry, in her expression. We’re both exhausted. Waking up in the middle of the night to some Angel Heart shit didn’t exactly make for a good night’s sleep. We haven’t discussed it further, thank God. Things have been relatively normal all day. Until all this not normal hit us.
“Watch the clip,” Banner says. “And let me know if you need anything.”
“Bye.” I hang up and grab the link from her text.
The preview of the video already has me gritting my teeth before I’ve even pressed play. It’s the Baller Bae logo and a still of Bridget at lunch with two other cast members in the sequence.
“I tried to make it work.” Bridget shakes her head, apparent sadness and regret on her face. “I know it wasn’t right, what I did, but Kenan abandoned me in the marriage. I was so BEEP lonely, and he didn’t care about anything but ball.”
A sheet of ice forms over my anger. I want to stop the video and not listen to the two minutes and forty-one seconds remaining, but I need to hear what else she has to say. Banner wouldn’t have asked about Lotus if she wasn’t involved in this nonsense somehow.
“And now he’s dating this child.” Bridget rolls her eyes, touching the hand of one castmate who murmurs something to commiserate. “She’s like fresh out of college. Not much older than our daughter. Can you believe that?”
“Girl, that’s how they do,” says a woman I recognize as the girlfriend of some guy in the league, but I can’t remember who. “He married you right out of college. You raised his baby, kept his house, stood by him while he built his career, and now he wants some fresh snatch.”
“That’s why we gotta revaginate, honey,” the other cast member says. “Keep it tight or they stray like that.”
Stray? As in I strayed? In what alternate reality has Bridget existed where I’m the villain in our story?
“And he was so mad that I had one little indiscretion,” Bridget says. “But I heard she’s going behind his back with this photographer she was BEEP before he found her.”
I press the screen to stop the clip. I can’t hear anymore right now. My temples literally throb with suppressed rage.
“Why’d you turn it off?” Lotus asks.
I glance down at her with a frown.
“Babe, she’s—”
“A bitch,” Lotus says sharply, staring at the screen in the dim light provided by the city lights beyond the car. “But she can’t hurt us.”
She tosses the phone onto the seat beside me and holds my face between her hands. “We know the truth.” Her eyes pierce mine. “You know I would never cheat on you with Chase or anyone.”
“Of course,” I answer immediately. “I trust you completely.”
“And we know that I’m not almost your daughter’s age.” She teases me, chuckling. “Though there’s eleven years between Simone and me, too. Should I call you Daddy?”
“You’re laughing?” I ask incredulously.
“What do you want me to do? Cry? Pout? Throw a tantrum? There will be people who watch that, feel sorry for her, believe her lies. We can’t control it. All we can do is live our lives, and refuse to let it come between us.”
I dip my head to kiss her, caressing her jaw with my thumb.
“Thank you for being so cool about this circus act.” I heave a frustrated sigh. “I’m not. I hate having my privacy invaded and having lies told about us, about you. Doesn’t she even think about how hard it will be on Simone? Dragging us back into the tabloids like this?”
The thought of my daughter being set back after the small steps forward she’s taken infuriates me. Despite her progress, I know she’s still emotionally fragile, and so many transitions, so much pressure and attention? It’s bound to wear on her.
“Fuck!” I expel the word harshly and slam my hand on the console between us. “If this hurts Simone . . . God, why can’t Bridget just . . .”
“It’ll be okay. Whatever comes, we’ll deal with it.”
“This is the last thing I want to be thinking about when I only have a day with you before I have to fly back.”
“Then don’t think about it.” Lotus leans in to kiss me, slipping her hand between my legs to squeeze my dick.
“Damn, babe,” I rasp into the kiss.
“I had to distract you somehow.” She laughs against my lips.
“Distraction or not, you woke the sleeping beast. Now you have to handle it when we get upstairs.”
I ask the driver to drop us off in the private car garage in case there are any more reporters lurking. I tip him, grab our bags, and half-limp as fast as I can with this hard-on to the elevator. As soon as the doors close, Lotus strains up on her toes to kiss my jaw and suck my earlobe. I kiss her so deeply we’re both out of breath by the time the doors open for my floor.
We drop the bags and Lotus wraps her arms around my neck, and her legs around my waist. I walk back to the bedroom, my hands full of her ass. She scatters kisses over my face.
When we reach my bedroom the light is already on. Weird, since I haven’t been here in weeks. I’m mesmerized by the passion, the love in Lotus’s eyes as she slides her legs down to the floor. She turns toward the bed.
“Oh, my God!” she gasps.
I look past her, and my heart stops then sprints in my chest. Simone is on my bed, asleep. She looks so peaceful that at first it doesn’t compute. The open, empty bottle by her hand. My daughter’s preternatural stillness.
“Moni?” I rush over to the bed and shake her. “Simone, baby, wake up.”
She doesn’t stir. She’s so cold. Fear squeezes my heart until I’m sure it’s hemorrhaging.
“I’ll call 911,” Lotus says behind me, horrified panic in her voice.
I don’t feel panic, though I know this is serious, but an eerie calm descends as I answer the operator’s questions. Yes, she’s breathing. She’s taken a bottle of her mother’s pills, but I don’t know how many. The EMS team arrives quickly, loads Simone onto the stretcher, and rolls her out of the apartment building. In the ambulance, she stops breathing, and they intubate. Watching them force a tube down my daughter’s throat, my icy wall cracks, and terror, panic, anger—they all rush in on a tidal wave. Bright lights and the screaming siren, muted before by my shock, flood
my senses.
God, my baby girl. Simone.
“Moni,” I mutter, paralyzed by my helplessness.
Lotus squeezes my hand, but doesn’t cease her persistent whisper. Psalm thirty-five, what she was repeating last night. Tears course over her cheeks, and she shakes her head.
“It wasn’t you,” she says, her voice thin and reedy. “It wasn’t you. It was . . .”
She doesn’t finish that thought. She doesn’t have to, but resumes her urgent whisper. I have no idea what to say or believe. What to think. Could Lotus have been right? Could last night, her premonition or whatever it was, have been about Simone?
As soon as we reach the hospital, they wheel Simone out of sight. She’s breathing, but still hasn’t regained consciousness. They have to pump her stomach.
A tube down her throat, her stomach being pumped. I’m caught in my worst nightmare, and I can’t wake up. Can’t even stir, but watch uselessly like some spectator trapped behind a glass partition separating reality from fiction.
“Bridget!” Lotus says, her tear-filled eyes wide. “You have to call her.”
“Shit.” I pass a shaking hand over my face. I dread having to break this to Bridget, but I’m also struggling to keep my temper under control. The lies she told, the scrutiny she exposed our family to again for her own gain—it’s all fresh in my mind. And the pills. Her name’s on the bottle of pills Simone took.
My conversation with Bridget is brief, terse, almost stoic in spite of her hysteria. It has to be. If I allow one emotion, compassion, through that wall of ice, they’ll all overtake me—trample my intention to save recriminations for later. For after Simone is out of the woods.
I’m seated in the waiting room, gripping Lotus’s hand like it’s a rope thrown over the side of a cliff, when Bridget arrives.
“Kenan, oh my God.” She’s dressed simply in jeans. No makeup. Tennis shoes. None of the camera-ready glamour I’ve gotten used to seeing since she’s been filming Baller Bae. Her face is streaked with tears.