When she pulled back she looked up at me and said something about seeing me tonight and turned to walk away toward the parking lot.
I watched her for a second and then I heard my name.
“Xavier.”
I turned.
Brielle was walking up from the direction of the parking lot. She had on something simple the way, like she’d been working out today or something. Her eyes were moving between me and Kyla’s back as Kyla walked away and I could read everything on her face before she even got to me. The question. The hurt. The expression of a woman who had just watched something she didn’t want to see and was trying to decide how to handle it.
She stopped in front of me.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
I looked at her. Then I looked back at Kyla who had stopped walking toward her car and was looking between me and Bri. I could tell by her expression that she knew this was the woman that I had mentioned. I raised my voice just enough to carry across the lot.
“Kyla. Be ready at eight.”
Kyla looked back over her shoulder and smiled and kept walking.
I looked back at Brielle.
Her jaw was tight. Eyes doing that thing where she was holding something together that wanted to come apart. She wanted to cry and the tears were threatening to fall. Now she sees how she always left me feeling.
“What is it you want Brielle,” I said.
Ihad been sitting in that parking lot for twenty minutes before I got out of the car. I was debating on going inside or not. Just when I got up the courage, the doors to the gym opened, and they walked out.
I watched Street walk Kyla out, then I watched him hug her and I watched the way she looked up at him when they pulled apart. I sat in my car and felt every single thing I had been trying not to feel for the past couple of days hitting me all at once like I had been holding a door shut and finally ran out of strength to keep it closed.
Then I got out my car anyway because I didn’t drive across town to sit in a parking lot. I came to talk to Xavier, and that’s what I was about to do.
He saw me coming and I watched his face change. He went from being shocked, then back into that neutral expression he put on when he didn’t want me to know what he was feeling. I knew that face. I had been reading that face since we were kids.
I looked between him and Kyla’s back as she walked away and I couldn’t stop myself.
“I need to talk to you.” I immediately said as I walked up on him. At that same moment, he called out to Kyla, letting her know that he’d see her tonight. Jealousy and anger was building and I couldn’t hide it.
I knew exactly who she was, the entire city and surroundings knew who she was. The part that hurt the most was that he and I both knew that being with Kyla would upgrade his status and his life. Seeing them together made me feel small. Even the way that she’d just came here to the gym, dressed to impress. She was just naturally that girl and it made me self conscious. Was this how Street felt all those years? Like he wasn’t good enough?
“Is that who you’re with now.” I asked, without shame.
He looked at me for a second and something in his eyes shifted.
“You got a man Brielle.” His voice was even. Not mean. Just flat like he was annoyed by my question. “You don’t get to ask me that.”
“I’m just—”
“You’re just what.” He crossed his arms and looked at me like he was disgusted.
“What exactly are you just doing right now? This don’t look good, and I don’t want anybody getting the wrong idea.”
I didn’t have an answer for that and we both knew it. But I understood what he meant.
He looked at me for a long moment and then he looked away toward the parking lot and back at me and when he spoke again something in his voice was different from all the other times we had done this. Not angry. Not hurt the way he had been hurt before. Something quieter than both of those things and that quietness scared me more than anything else he could have said.
“I’m going to be honest with you because that’s the only thing I know how to be.” He looked at me straight. “I love you. I have loved you since I was fourteen years old and I don’t know how to stop that and I stopped trying to fight it a long time ago.” He paused. “But I’m done. I’m done waiting on you. I’m done being the person you come back to when life gets complicated with everybody else and then disappear on when things get hard. I never deserved that. Not once in all the years we’ve been doing this did I deserve to be treated like something you could just put down and pick back up whenever you felt like it.”
I swallowed hard. My throat was tight in a way that was getting harder to manage.
