“It all ends tonight.”
A second flash.
Then nothing.
(Three months later)
Trauma doesn’t disappear.
It just kind of fades into something bearable.
At first, it was loud in my head. A voice that wasn’t really there. Footsteps that made my breath catch. Sudden noises that sent my heart racing. Even Mekhi’s touch startled me sometimes. I had to learn all over again that it was safe.
Mekhi and I were on a healing journey. He had trauma of his own. For all her faults, Gillian was his mother, and he loved her. Finding her like he and Mekhayla had... it was horrifying. His sister’s screams had echoed in my head for weeks. She wasbarely in the ground before word came that Medgar had been found hanging in his cell.
Now, things were quieter. Not gone, but softer, like background noise I knew how to tune out. And standing on this porch, with the late afternoon sun warming my shoulders and Mekhi pacing beside me like an anxious cat, I realized something else had gotten softer too.
Him.
Not the outside version. That still entered the room like steel and silence when he wanted it to. And not the everyday one; he still got on my damn nerves with his little sarcastic comments. But this man held my hand in the middle of the night when nightmares clawed at me. This man kissed me and held me often. This man had settled into himself.
He had settled intous.
“You okay?” I asked, watching him glance at the door for the tenth time.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“You lying.”
He side-eyed me. “You diagnosing me now, Dr. Gray?”
“I don’t even have my doctorate yet, Mr. Venzant,” I shot back. “But if you pace any harder, you gon’ fall straight through this porch.”
He stilled for a second… then, started pacing again.
“You ain’t seen your grandmother in what? Eighteen years? It’s okay to be shook.” I said gently.
“I ain’t shook.”
“You scared,” I teased
“I ain’t scared either.”
“Then why you breathing like you running from the law?”
He turned to face me. “Because I feel like I don’t deserve her anymore. I believed a bunch of bad shit about her. Cursedher name. And now I’m about to be smiling in her face like that didn’t happen.”
That caught me right in my heart.
“You deserve everything good that finds you, Mekhi,” I said, stepping closer. “Even if it comes late.”
He stared at my face, like he was searching for the lie. He wasn’t going to find one.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “You ready for this?”
“Been ready.”
He raised his fist to knock.
