“Can I ask you something?” I ask after a moment of us wrapped up in each other.

“Anything.”

“Well, you have this reputation for being kind of surly.”

He chuckles. “How do you know that? Remember you don’t even follow basketball.”

“It doesn’t take much digging. And I didn’t google you. My friends were very quick to tell me all about how intimidating you are. How you don’t talk much to the press. How everyone thinks you’re all hard and enigmatic.”

“Okay, your point?”

“You’ve never been any of that with me, Kenan.” I glance up. “From the start, you were open and curious about me, and you told me things and—”

“I wanted you,” he interrupts. “I hadn’t ever wanted anything or anyone the way I wanted you almost from the beginning. I saw you in that hospital room, and that was it. I’m not saying I fell in love that day, but you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

He’s quiet for a beat and then glances at me, a flicker of uncertainty foreign on his strong features.

“You didn’t feel anything that first day we met?” he asks. “Or at that awards show? At the Christmas party last year? Any of the times we ran into each other?” He gives a quick shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter. You feel it now.”

I take his chin between my fingers and direct his eyes to meet mine. “You’re asking if all the times I fled the room as soon as possible, all the times I pretended you weren’t there or was a smartass to put you off, if I was feeling anything?”

He lowers his face until our noses touch.

“I told you before you scared me to death,” I confess, licking my lips. “I should still be scared. Love is hard. Trust is hard.”

“Well I have no choice now,” he says, kissing one of my cheeks and then the other. “You have something of mine that I’m not sure I’ll ever get back.”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask huskily. “And what do I have of yours, Mr. Ross?”

He tells me in the way he knows melts me into a puddle—with a song.

“You have stolen my heart with one look of your eyes.”

38

Lotus

In the hospital room, I search for my mother through the tangle of wires and tubes. She’s unconscious, giving me time to study her without the awkwardness of what I should say. Of what she could possibly say to me.

“You came.”

Aunt Priscilla’s voice is a mix of sweet tea and Sazerac, the French Quarter cocktail; an old Haitian family recipe of bitters, Cognac, absinthe, and the peel of a lemon. That’s the bitter edge Aunt Pris’s voice carries from scratching out her living in the Lower Ninth. With Aunt Pris, you gotta take the bitter with the sweet.

I don’t know how she does it, but Aunt Pris never ages. She looks like Iris’s slightly older sister, not her mother. A shade darker than Iris and a few shades lighter than I am, she is more beautiful than us both. Her hair hangs in a fluent wave to her waist, and her eyes, still unlined, could make a man jump from a cliff to get to her. I’ve seen it happen, figuratively at least. Men who left their wives, abandoned their kids, lost their jobs for a taste of Aunt Priscilla. She, however, was wiser than my mother, and never developed a taste for them. She never got caught up on one particular man—never gave herself so fully to one lover that she would excuse his sins against her own flesh and blood. That she would turn her back on her

daughter with no regret. No, she committed different sins, and those are for her and Iris to sort. I’m here to deal with my own demons.

“Yeah. I came,” I reply.

“Thank you.”

Her voice actually trembles, and when I look at the ageless beauty, I see real vulnerability, real fear. Seeing anything sincere on her face is new to me. She and my mother knew all about armor—about shiny façades to draw a man close enough to pay, but to keep him at arm’s length so he couldn’t inflict pain. They cared less about keeping their daughters safe apparently.

“She’s in a bad way, Lo,” Aunt Pris says anxiously, clasping her hands in front of her. “They say it’s a stroke.”

“A stroke?” I ask. My mother had me when she was seventeen and is barely forty-two years old.

“It’s not unheard of,” Aunt Pris says. “Unless . . . you don’t have anything to do with this, do you?”

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