“Not as insane as I can show you I know how to be. Stop moving like you don’t know who the hell I am.”
“He got injured, Jio.”
“And?”
“I’m supposed to not care?”
“Exactly,” he said as if it wasn’t rocket science. She was the reason why they weren’t locked in. Her and her stupid shenanigans.
Nina’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, you’ve officially lost your mind.”
Jio stood up slowly.
“Nah. I’m watching another man continuously play in my face with a woman I made clear was mine.”
Nina scoffed loudly. “I do not belong to you.
“You sure about that princess?”
The way he said it sent heat up her spine. But it wasn’t fear. Nina hated when he talked to her in this way because fuck, it turned her on so bad. She was delusional but he’d made her this way.
“You don’t own me.”
“I don’t remember saying I did.” He stepped closer. “But I do remember saying I don’t share.”
Her pulse jumped and her coochie did too.
“This is exactly why people think you’re crazy.”
“And yet you still answer my calls.”
He stopped right in front of her now. Jio was close enough to smell his cologne and feel the tension boiling between the two of them.
“I’m gone y’all. Please don’t tear my store up.”
Neither of them bothered to say goodbye. Ephrem turned the open sign off and locked the door behind him.
“You like that nigga?” he asked quietly.
Nina swallowed. “No.”
“So, why do you keep entertaining him?”
Jio desperately wanted to know.
She knew that as bad as she wished she could tell him the truth, she couldn’t. It wasn’t easy to say, “Because baby he answers the phone when you don’t.”
Or perhaps, “He watches all the corny shows that I like when you can’t even sit still for thirty minutes without your phone ringing.”
And…. “When I’m with him, I know that I’m safe and I don’t have to worry about my head being blown off.”
She couldn’t say any of that, so instead she whispered, “I don’t know.”
Jio stared at her for as long as he could before nodding like he’d recently received the confirmation he’d been searching for.
“That’s the problem…. I get it now.”
“What?”
