Page 28 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

The words came out easier than I expected, like the old rhythm we used to have was still under the surface, waiting for either of us to pick it back up.

“Feel like shit, too,” Amai said, not turning around right away.

When he did, there was a half-second where his face did something complicated—surprise, maybe, that I was there, that I’d said something that wasn’t a threat. “Rahsaan’s people don’t go down easy.”

“They’re not supposed to.” I crossed the room and found the first-aid kit in the same cabinet it had always lived in because some things about this building hadn’t changed, even when everything else had. I pulled out gauze and antiseptic, then tossed the roll onto the table in front of him. “Wrap that before it gets infected, and you’re out of commission for a week, crying about it.”

“I don’t cry.”

“You cried when you were eight, and Winston made you finish the fight with Bernard, even after he broke your arm.”

“That’s different. That was legitimate trauma. Nard was seventeen and had forearms like a grown man.”

“He was fourteen, Amai.”

“Them hits felt like he was seventeen.” He almost smiled, and for a second, the room felt less like a war room and more like our mother’s kitchen, the two of us patching each other up after some backyard disaster while Mama pretended not to notice from the stove.

“Uh-huh.” I pulled a chair around and sat across from him, watching him tear the gauze packet open with his teeth because his other hand was too torn up to be useful. “You’re wrapping that wrong. Give it here.”

“I know how to wrap a hand, Kaisen.”

“Clearly, you don’t, since you’re about to tape over an open cut without cleaning it first.” I took his hand before he could argue further—an old motion, one my body remembered from patching him up after fights when we were kids. Before Winston taught us both that showing each other weakness was a liability instead of just being brothers. Amai let me, which surprised me more than anything else about the whole afternoon. He sat there and let me clean the wound, wrap it tight, and tuck the end of the gauze under itself the way our mother used to when neither of us wanted to bother her with something this small.

“You didn’t have to come by,” Amai said, watching me work.

“I was in the area.”

“You’re never in this area.”

“I was today.”

He studied me a moment with that assessing look he’d inherited from Winston whether he wanted to admit it or not, but he didn’t push. Maybe he didn’t want to break whatever this was either.

“Priest says you’ve been doing good,” he said instead, changing the subject with the ease of a man who’d learned early that some doors were better left shut. “Are you good?”

“Good as can be considering everything.”

Neither of us said anything else about why I’d come by. It felt, for those few minutes, like something close to the way it used to be—before Truth, before the sperm swap, and the clinic, and the war with Victor and Rahsaan. Before we became two men circling the same woman like she was territory instead of a person. Just two brothers in a room, one of them hurt, one of them tending to it, and nothing underneath that except the fact that we’d grown up together and some muscle memory hadn’t forgotten it, even when everything else had.

“You should go get ice,” I said. “That hand is going to swell if you don’t.”

“There’s a freezer in the back.”

“I know where the freezer is, Amai. I helped you install this whole floor plan four years ago. I already patched you up. That’s all you get out of me, nigga.”

“You installed nothing. You stood there and told the contractor he was doing it wrong while I actually paid for it.”

“That’s called project management.”

He almost smiled at that—almost—and got up, moving with the careful stiffness of a man whose whole body had taken a beating recently. He walked toward the back room where the mini fridge and chest freezer sat, his footsteps unhurried against the concrete floor.

The moment his back was turned, I looked down at the gauze on the table—the used piece, dark with his blood, still damp, still warm from being pressed against the wound. It sat there between the antiseptic bottle and the roll of tape like nothing, like garbage waiting to be thrown out. From the back room, I could hear the freezer door open, the rattle of ice against a plastic bag, ordinary sounds that meant I had maybe fifteen seconds before he turned back around.

I picked it up and folded it once, then again, and slid it into my jacket pocket before I’d fully decided to do it. The way you catch something falling before you’ve consciously registered that you’re reaching for it.

It wasn’t a decision, exactly. It was more like an instinct following through on logic I hadn’t finished articulating even to myself. The same instinct that made me keep the crib, keep the ultrasound picture, keep the room’s proportions unchanged. A man in my position needed contingencies. That’s all this was. A brother’s blood, taken during a moment when he trusted me enough to let his guard down, filed away for a day that might never come.

Amai came back with a bag of ice pressed to his knuckles. “You still here?”