Page 43 of Love At Close Range

“She won’t be if I can help it,” Lennox assured me as he rubbed his hand over his beard. “I got a daughter who’s known me her whole life and a son who still doesn’t know I’m his father. They’ll both have to adjust, and I gotta figure out how to make sure neither one of them feels like they’re losing something because the other one exists.”

“And you need to hear me out regarding something else too,” he added.

“And what’s that?” I quizzed.

“What Kree did ain’t changing how I move with you either,” Lennox said as he stepped a little closer. “I didn’t know… you didn’t know that I didn’t know, and we’ve both spent years operating off some shit that wasn’t true.”

“That doesn’t erase everything else that happened between us,” I asserted.

“I’ain saying it does,” Lennox replied calmly. “and I ain’t pretending finding this out magically fixes everything either.”

“And it doesn’t mean we suddenly go back to being who we were,” I added as I searched his face.

“I know that too,” Lennox said, and the calm way he kept agreeing with me irritated me. “That’s what you were about to eat?” Lennox asked, changing the subject.

“Yes,” I answered.

For a moment, neither one of us said anything, and the silence between us felt heavier than it had a few minutes earlier. There was too much still lingering. The breakup… Kree… Rhyse… Lennyn, and eight years of us believing completely different versions of the same story were all still there, even if one piece of it had finally been cleared up.

I looked down at the container before speaking again. “I’m still pissed, and I might be pissed for a while. Not just at Kree either. I’m pissed about all the time that got wasted because of this shit.”

“You should be,” Lennox responded.

For the first time since Lennox had walked back into my life, one of the biggest reasons I had spent years keeping him buried in the past no longer belonged there. I still had plenty of reasons to protect myself from him, and finding out the truth about Kree hadn’t suddenly erased everything that went wrong between us. But it had removed something I had carried for years, and standing there with him in my kitchen, I wasn’t sure yet what the hell that meant for us.

Lennox and I were still standing in the kitchen when the sound of the front door opening brought me out of my thoughts. Before I could move, Rhyse’s voice came from the hallway, loud and curious like always.

“Ma, whose truck is that outside?” Rhyse called as his footsteps got closer. “That black one sitting by the—”

He stopped the second he stepped into the kitchen and saw Lennox standing across from me. His eyes moved from Lennox to me and then back again before his little face scrunched up.

“What he doing here again?” Rhyse asked as he pointed at Lennox.

Before either one of us could answer him, Mona came around the corner with Quentin right behind her. The second she saw Lennox, she stopped too, and her eyes bounced between the two of us before finally landing on me.

“Well, damn,” Mona muttered as one eyebrow lifted. She looked toward me and held up her hand. “My bad. I should’ve called before we came back. Q had to stop somewhere on the way, and Boosie was ready to come home, so I didn’t even think about it.”

“You’re fine,” I assured her as I shook my head. “You don’t have to call before bringing my child home.”

Quentin stepped farther into the kitchen and looked Lennox over before extending his hand. “Quentin,” he introduced himself.

“Lennox,” Lennox replied as he shook his hand.

Quentin held his hand a second longer than necessary, and I watched recognition slowly settle over his face. His eyes narrowed slightly before he released Lennox’s hand.

“Steele?” Quentin asked.

“That would be me,” Lennox acknowledged with a straight face.

“Ain’t this some shit,” Quentin laughed.

“Wait… you two know each other?” I asked.

“Not personally,” Lennox explained. “I’ve done business with Q a few times.” I looked between the two of them and knew it was more to it, but I’d get into that later.

“Small world, huh?” Lennox smirked.

“Apparently,” Quentin replied with a grin.