I felt myself smile. It was the best offer I’d had all day.
“I’m coming.”
I told myself to put the Gillian stuff—and myself—to bed for the night. Something in my chest twisted tight as I thoughtabout the instructions I’d given Kimora. I didn’t know if I was walking toward the truth or straight into another trap. But I was done waiting on answers. If my mama wouldn’t give them to me, I’d dig them out myself, even if it meant getting blood on my hands all over again.
Aside from me,my very prim and proper parents loved two things more than anything else on earth: traveling (whenever they’d finally take off) and acting like they didn’t worry themselves sick over me when they were gone. Knowing that last thing was part of the reason I was staying with Mekhi Venzant right now. Could my family have looked out for me? Most definitely. Would my parents have been total nervous wrecks if they knew I needed looking out for? Hell, yeah.
So, naturally, after spending two weeks living with Mekhi Venzant—a man who made my heart, blood pressure, and common-sense malfunction on a daily basis—I found myself across from my parents at Emancipation’s newest Mexicanrestaurant,La Azteca, pretending not to sweat through my mascara as I prepared to politely lie to their faces.
My mother waved at the waiter. “Do you have sweet tea? Not the instant kind, love.”
We’d been at the table for three minutes, and here her bougie self went.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “Therealkind.”
“Well, thank goodness. I was afraid Louisiana had lost its standards. People act like this isn’t the Deep South,” she said as he walked away.
I breathed out very slowly. “So… how was Bali?”
My father perked up immediately, straightening in his seat. “Transformative. Absolutely transformative.,” he enthused. “Your mother insisted on going to a yoga retreat.”
“I did notinsist. I stronglysuggested,” she said, all proper.
“And then dragged me to a sound bath,” he added.
She turned to me with a small eye roll. “Your father has no spiritual center, girl. It was a cultural experience. He fell asleep,” she added flatly.
“I was meditating,” he argued.
“You snored.”
They bickered back and forth while I nodded along, stirring my queso as I tried to get my story together. Normally, I would’ve found all of this adorable. Tonight, all I could think of was how to explain that I wasn’t coming home because a dangerous man with a vendetta kept popping up like a Black-ass jack-in-the-box?
And the answer was simple: I absolutely could not tell them that. They’d wrap me up in cotton and Kevlar and try to buy me a ticket to Mars. My mother took a sip of her sweet tea and looked at me over the rim.
“So, sweetheart, how was your stay at home without us? You study so much. Please tell me you had a little kickback or something.”
“Or something,” I mumbled weakly.
Of course, she caught it. The hearing that God gave mamas should really be studied. My mother frowned at me.
“What does that mean, Farrah?”
“Umm…” I cleared my throat. “Actually… umm… I didn’t exactly stay at home.”
Both of them froze. It wasn’t that they didn’t respect my adulthood. We definitely had some clear boundaries about my life being mine. It made sense for me to stay with them while I was in grad school and unable to work full time, and they accepted it as just that, mostly. They worried about me, though.
My father set down his chips. “Then, where did you stay?”
I inhaled. Lie gently, I told myself, and with confidence.
“With… a friend.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Which friend?”
I took a long sip of water like it was a shield. “A guy friend.”
My father blinked twice. “A man?”
