“What happened?” She needed to know because that would determine how she handled him.
He shook his head once, like he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Nina walked toward him slowly. “Talk to me, babe.” She was soft as ice cream when it came to him.
He stood but not with his usual confidence. The man reaching for a hug wasn’t the man who normally entered a room and changed the temperature merely by his presence. This wasn’t the dude who made a threat sound like poetry. His bottom lip quivered and he was struggling to not cry. Nina was scared, but she had to be strong for him and provide a safe place for him to land. He didn’t have to be tough with her.
“You can tell me anything, your secrets are safe with me,” she reassured him.
His eyes moved over her face as if he had been waiting all day just to see it.
Jio tried to hurry and turn his head, but she’d already peeped a few tears slipping down his cheek. His composure cracked and she heard the pain in his cries.
He was ashamed of his emotions, but he didn’t have to be.
Nina’s heart broke instantly. “Oh baby,” she whispered.
Her sweet voice was all it took for him to step into her aura. She didn’t have a clue how much he’d been needing her. His body was weak, but little did she know his spirit was weaker. Nina caught him in her arms. His arms wrapped around her waist and he pressed his face into her stomach as he sank in front of her, not quite kneeling but close enough to where she didn’t want to let him go.
She froze for half a second, stunned by the posture of it all. Jio was unshakeable. He was trying his hardest to remain God’s strongest soldier, but today he folded, and he was not a man whogave up. Ever. He didn’t give up nor did he give in. But here he was, holding her like she was the only solid thing left in his world.
Nina’s hand went to the back of his head, her fingers rubbed it gently.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again in a voice barely above a whisper.
His hold tightened around her.
“I don’t wanna be him,” he confided in his baby.
Nina looked down.
“Who?”
“My father.”
The words came out rough and heavy, like they had been sitting in his chest for years with nowhere to go.
Nina stayed quiet and Jio breathed against her, trying to gather himself. She could feel the tension in his shoulders, the restraint in his body, and the war inside him between his pride and his feelings.
“I look at myself sometimes,” he continued, “And I see that nigga and I don’t want to see him at all.”
Nina swallowed. She felt that completely.
“He’s what niggas in the streets call slime,” Jio said. “My dad isn’t just violent… he’s cruel and sneaky.”
“That’s what makes him slime?”
Jio nodded. “Exactly.” He pulled back just enough to look up at her, his eyes wet and angry at the same time.
“I used to swear I’d never be nothing like him.”
Nina’s thumb brushed along his temple. “You won’t be.”
“But then I hear myself sometimes,” he said. “I hear how I talk and I notice how I’m moving. I don’t want people to be scared of me…I hate that shit.”
Nina’s chest tightened. Because there it was… a realization. Jio had never named his fears aloud before. He was openlyadmitting that there was a darkness that lived inside of him. He was capable of love but it often came with a sharp bite like a vampire. He was protective but it came off as possession. Jio was a flawed man and he’d done plenty of irreparable damage while masking it as loyalty because admitting otherwise would mean sitting with every wound he had ever created.
“You’re not your father,” Nina said but she didn’t sound so convincing.
