Page 42 of Lease to Love

Then snatched my hand from her waist like it had burned me.

It had.

She backed away from me, both hands lifting slowly, the specific retreat of a woman who understood she'd done something irreversible and was now trying to figure out how the hell to account for it.

"Summer."

"Before you get mad—" she started.

"Too late."

"You got here way earlier than I expected and I was just—"

"You were just what?" I said, with the patience of a man who was absolutely at the end of it, "Because unless I’m mistaken, you just grabbed me and announced me as your ‘new nigga’ in front of a man I don't know and the ten thousand people watching him."

"It was closer to twelve thousand by the time you—"

"Summer."

She closed her mouth. A wise choice.

I pointed at her. "Explain. Now."

She made a sound—a stuttering little noise that said she was both stuck and outraged—then went still, taking a calming breath, letting her raised hands drop to her sides.

"Here's my situation…" she started.

I stood there and listened while Summer explained exactly how she'd managed to turn the last five minutes of my week into a public declaration that I was her boyfriend.

She talked quickly when she was nervous, words tripping over one another as she explained the live, the comments, her ex, the side chick, and the fact that half of Langston Park was probably already screenshotting and forwarding the video to everybody they knew.

I said nothing.

There wasn't much to say.

I was still processing the fact that I'd walked into my tenant's apartment to collect rent and somehow ended up starring in a relationship announcement to twelve thousand strangers.

But beneath the absurdity, my mind had already started doing what it always did.

Assessing.

The facts were simple.

One: Summer Proctor was trusted in Langston Park in a way I wasn't.

She knew everybody. Everybody knew her. Shop owners, residents, block association members, the old heads sitting on the corners, the women who had lived on these blocks for fifty years and could tell you exactly which family had owned which house before anybody had thought to put it in a deed.

Summer could walk into a room where my presence would have people clutching their wallets and have them offering her a plate before she'd even sat down.

Which brought me to fact number two: my reputation was the opposite.

Every property I bought looked like another piece of the neighborhood disappearing into the hands of a developer. Every renovation looked like displacement waiting to happen. Every dollar I spent made people more suspicious of what I wanted in return.

And I had been trying to get them to listen to me for months.

They wouldn't.

The upcoming block association meeting was the most important opportunity I'd had since acquiring the first property in Langston Park. I needed access. I needed credibility. More importantly, I needed people to understand that what I was building wasn't another step toward erasing them.