Page 23 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“See,” Raven said, pointing at me like she’d proven a case in court. “He had to think about it. That’s not normal, Amai. Put you on a T-shirt and jeans sometimes. You don’t have to look like you walking the runway in Fashion Week.”

“I dress for war, love. I dress in a way that muth—I mean, people know not to play with me,” I said, deadpan.

Truth kicked me under the table hard enough that I knew I’d overstepped some line about how much of my actual life was allowed at this table. But Raven just laughed harder, not catching the weight under it, and I let it go, grateful nobody pushed further.

“He got two grown men standing outside Mama’s house right now like they Top Flight Security,” Saroya said. “My kids asked if they was Secret Service.”

“Tell ’em I’m running for something,” I said.

“Running from something, more like,” Raven muttered, and even Delphine snorted at that one, shaking her head as she reached for the pie server.

“Y’all leave that man alone and let him eat,” Delphine said, though she didn’t sound like she meant it, and nobody at the table treated it like a real instruction.

“One more,” Honor said. “Truth, tell him about the car.”

“Oh, my god, not the car.”

“What car?” I asked.

“She drove Mama’s Buick into a ditch, trying to parallel park in front of a boy she liked,” Honor said, not waiting for permission. “Seventeen years old. Boy watching from the porch the whole time. Car in a ditch. She got out like nothing happened and just said, ‘I meant to do that.’”

“I did not say that.”

“You said exactly that. I was in the passenger seat,” Raven said. “I was there. I have never let you live it down, and I never will.”

“See, this is the problem with having sisters who remember everything,” Truth said to me, resigned. “No statute of limitations on humiliation in this family. You ain’t even gotta pay them. They just tell all my business for free.”

“None,” Delphine confirmed. “You do something embarrassing in this family, that’s yours forever. We keep receipts.”

I found myself laughing—really laughing, not the practiced kind I did in rooms full of men trying to read my face for weakness, but the kind that came up out of my chest before I could decide whether to let it out. It caught me off guard how easy it came. I looked around that crowded table, kids fighting over the last piece of cornbread at the card table in the corner, Delphine threatening to take Raven’s plate if she didn’t stop talking with food in her mouth, Saroya wiping sauce off her youngest’s face with the corner of a napkin without even looking, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time a room full of people made me feel like I belonged in it instead of like I was managing it.

I wasn’t Amai the Demon of New Orleans in this family. I was just Amai. Damn, I loved that feeling. Is this what a family iss supposed to be like?

Truth caught my eye across the table, and something passed between us that didn’t need words—she’d noticed. The way my shoulders had dropped an inch. The way I wasn’t tracking exits the way I did in every other room I walked into. I looked terrifying everywhere else, and here I was, laughing about a Buick in a ditch.

“You good?” she mouthed to me.

I nodded and meant it.

“Alright,” Raven said, standing to start clearing plates, “since Amai over there finally cracked a smile like a real human being, I’m taking that as permission to roast him properly next Sunday. Tonight was just warm up. We let him make it the other two times.”

“God help me,” I said, and Delphine laughed loud enough that it carried clear into the kitchen.

After Saroya’s kids were rounded up and loaded into her car, and Honor hugged her sisters goodbye at the door with the specific tiredness of a woman heading back to real life. After Raven left with a container of leftovers and a warning to me that she’d be checking on the wine situation personally next time, the house went quiet in the particular way houses go quiet after they’ve been full—not empty exactly, just settling, the noise still echoing in the walls even after the people who made it were gone.

I found myself in the kitchen with Delphine, a dish towel in my hand that she’d handed me without asking if I wanted it, because apparently, in this house, you didn’t get asked; you were given a job.

“You don’t have to do this,” Truth said from the doorway, watching me dry a plate with the careful, slightly wrong technique of a man who mostly paid other people to do this.

“I got it,” I said.

“You’re holding that towel like it’s a weapon.”

“I’m holding it fine.”

Delphine, up to her elbows in dishwater, didn’t even turn around. “Leave him be, baby. Man wants to help, let him help. Even if he doing it wrong.”

“I’m not doing it wrong.”