The Scratch (The Lovers #4)

The Felt

Rayna

O ur house in Wilkinsburg wasn’t big or fancy, but Mama kept it acting like it was.

Curtains washed and pressed, floor vacuumed in neat lines like Daddy mowed the yard.

Pine-Sol lived in every room, like it paid rent.

Daddy kept the porch light fixed and the hedges trimmed.

We weren’t poor. We weren’t rich. We were steady — TV in the living room, a microwave that dinged too loud, plenty of food in the fridge and gifts that still surprised us on birthdays and Christmas.

Only the house always seemed to know when it wasn’t enough.

The fridge would hum harder, like it was nervous. The kitchen light would flicker once, like it’d just swallowed something sharp. The air pulled tight in the corners, like the walls were holding their breath with me.

I was in my room, coloring a dolphin in my Lisa Frank notebook, when Mama’s voice creased through the plaster. Not the same voice she used to sing Frankie Beverly with. Not the honey voice that teased Darren. This one was thin and tired.

“Marcus, I can’t do this no more. I can’t.”

My blue pen slid outside the line. Ink bled into white.

Daddy’s answer came low and even, the kind of voice that carried its own warning. “Denise, let me finish. You always cuttin’ me off—let me get it out.”

I crawled to the hallway, my belly flat to the carpet, cheek to the floor, a kid with eyeballs on a hinge. Darren was there too, socks half-off, crouched like he’d promised himself stoneface. We knew the rule: don’t breathe loud, don’t make a sound.

Mama tapped the counter—tap, tap—when she was trying not to cry. Daddy sat at the table in his work boots, a tool bag at his feet. His shoulders held the way wires hold current—tight, taut, too much running through them.

“We had plans,” Mama said faster, as if speaking quick would catch lost time. “For me to go back to school. for us to travel. Paris. Jamaica. All the things we talked about when we was twenty-one and stupid in love. ”

Daddy rubbed the back of his neck like he did before he measured wire. “I ain’t forgot. I been working so y’all got what you need. Roof. Heat. Clothes.”

“That was your dream,” she shot back. “Surviving. Paying bills. Acting like steady is the same as living.”

He softened, like he was trying to fold the heat into something manageable. “I thought making sure you never had to worry was love. It won’t be much longer before my business starts getting steady clients and I get bigger jobs.”

Her hands stilled. “Comfort ain’t love, Marcus. Comfort is silence. Comfort is this house bein’ clean and me feelin’ invisible. I don’t wanna just survive. I wanna feel chosen.”

He looked at the back door like it might open with an answer. “You the best thing I ever touched. You know that?”

“Then why I don’t feel it?”

The words landed and made the kitchen smaller. Darren shifted beside me, but his face stayed still. Daddy finally stood, slow. “Maybe I should go on and leave tonight. Don’t wanna keep hurtin’ you if I can’t give you what you need.”

Mama folded her arms like armor. “Maybe you should.”

It was clear but the way her palm pressed against her chest, that she didn’t want him to go—but her mouth never said stay. She never shared her truth.

My throat locked. I wanted to yell don’t go for all of us, but my mouth forgot how.

Daddy saw us on the floor before he left. He gave the little chin lift he always gave—pride and sorry mixed in one tilt. “Hey, Sparky,” he said, voice breaking .

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Y’all too cool to help your old man with this bag?” he asked Darren.

Darren stood, shoulders like he was carrying his own weather. Daddy patted him, then went down the hall. He came back with a duffel, set it down, and put his thumbs on Mama’s arms like he was memorizing the way her shoulders sat. “I ain’t quittin’ you. I’m quittin’ this way.”

She blinked fast, tears spilling down her beautiful face. “I know.”

He kissed her forehead and walked out the back door. The door sighed like wood that’s had too much weight put on it. That sound etched itself into me — the exact pitch of a family breaking apart quietly. The silence afterward was worse than their shouting.

Friday his truck came back, loud as ever. Darren dragged his feet, but I took the stairs two at a time, too excited and young to care about the dangers of breaking my neck.

Daddy let me drown my pancakes in syrup before we headed to the pool hall — an old spot with dim lights and chalk dust in the air, the smell of fried food and smoke like an old jacket.

Daddy slipped a penny under my bridge hand. “Don’t let it roll. Steady hand, steady mind .”

“What if my mind too fast?” I asked. Mama always said my mind ran ahead of my mouth.

“Then your hand is gon to teach it,” he said.

Darren wandered off to the pinball machine. I stayed at the table. The green felt didn’t care that I was small. It didn’t care I was a girl. It cared if the aim told the truth. Plunk. The balls said yes or no and then waited for you to try again. I liked that a lot.

That night, under my covers, I played the sound of the backdoor over and over.

I replayed Mama’s shoulders, Daddy’s tired eyes.

I tried to map the pieces, the plans they’d named like stars we missed.

I didn’t understand adult things yet — how love could crack, how comfort could offer shelter and hold you invisible at the same time — but I understood the shape of a thing when it broke.

So I made a rule, because kids make rules even when grown folks don’t notice.

I wasn’t gonna be the kind of love that let you stand in your own kitchen and disappear. I wasn’t gonna be homework checked off at bedtime.

I’d play other games.

Pool was fair. Pool told the truth. Miss, and you knew why. Line up right and breathe, and the table would give you another chance. Pool never lied.

Quentin

Donnie and Letitia Hale—my parents—were gone like somebody snatched the tablecloth out from under us and left me and Jada standing in the wreckage, watching everything break.

The crash didn’t end that night. It lived in me. Every siren that tore through the dark. Every flash of headlights too bright in the rain. Every silence after the phone stopped ringing and the house went still.

I was thirteen. Old enough to understand words like “ impact,” “fatal,” “no survivors.” Too young to know what to do with them.

For months, I didn’t say much. Couldn’t. Words felt dangerous, like if I opened my mouth, the wrong one would slip out and make it true all over again. So I sat in classrooms with my head down, homework half-done, the boy who’d gone from gifted to ghost overnight.

Most teachers gave up on me. The kid who used to know every answer now staring at the board like the numbers had turned into fog. But two didn’t.

One was Ms. Lopez, English. She kept putting books in my hands, even when I didn’t crack them. Said stories save people, whether you finish the page or not.

The other was Mr. Buchanan. Science. Dark brown skin, serious eyes, generous laughter, balding head, thick black-rimmed glasses, and a voice that filled the room without ever needing to shout. He looked like a man who’d seen plenty, but still believed the world ran on more than luck.

One afternoon, after the final bell, I stayed behind without meaning to. Sat there while kids poured out, my desk empty except for a worksheet I hadn’t touched.

“You missed number five,” he said, strolling past my row, hands clasped behind his back.

I didn’t lift my head. Didn’t care.

“Funny thing about number five,” he went on. “It’s the kind of problem you’d never miss before.”

That made my jaw clench. Because he was right. I used to be that kid—the one who solved things fast, who finished early, who liked the way answers fell into place. Not anymore.

“You know why you missed it?” he asked.

I shrugged, my eyes on the desk.

“Because you don’t care,” he said. Matter-of-fact. No judgment. Just truth.

Something in me flinched. I wanted to deny it. Wanted to tell him he didn’t know me, didn’t know what had been ripped out of my chest. But I stayed quiet.

He pulled up the desk in front of me, turned it backward, sat like we were just two people on the same side of a table.

“I had a boy in here last year,” he said. “Smart as you. Sharper, maybe. He lost his sister. Couldn’t find his way back. Know what he told me once? He said life felt like chaos. That nothing meant anything anymore.”

My throat tightened. That was it exactly. Like the universe was some cruel dealer, throwing cards without rules. My parents one minute, gone the next.

“I told him what I’ll tell you,” Mr. Buchanan said, leaning in, eyes behind those thick frames steady on mine. “Some things are unpredictable. But not everything. Science exists because patterns exist. Laws. Principles. Equations. Not to erase the chaos, but to show us where order still lives.”

I frowned, the first sign of life I’d given him in weeks. “Order?”

“Take physics,” he said. “You put force behind an object, it moves. You angle it, you can predict where it’ll land. Energy, motion, momentum—they follow rules. The world might feel like it can spin off any second, but there are places where it won’t. Places where it obeys.”

I lifted my eyes, really looking at him for the first time. “You saying science makes it… safer?”

“I’m saying it gives you something to hold on to,” he said. “You can’t control everything. But you can measure. You can calculate. You can find rhythm in it. Enough to breathe. Enough to build.”

I didn’t breathe for a long second. Then I whispered, “I don’t want to lose again.”

His face softened. “Then let’s find the things that hold.”

That night, I sat at the kitchen table, Jada upstairs crying herself to sleep again. I opened my science book for the first time in months. And I read about Newton’s laws.

An object in motion stays in motion. Unless acted on by another force.

It hit me like gospel. Maybe I couldn’t stop cars from spinning out in the rain. But I could understand why. I could map it. Name it. Break it down until it was numbers and not just hurt.

From then on, I counted. Not out loud, not where anyone could hear. But inside. Four beats in, three out. Force, vector, direction. If life was going to blindside me, I’d at least know the math behind the impact.

Physics gave me permission to name what had no name. Force. Resultant. Friction. Heat. Even grief fit, if I angled it right. Two pushes in opposite directions—that was me and the world. Wasted work. Heat rising. No movement forward.

But sometimes, sometimes, the vectors lined up. Two pushes, same direction. Magnitude enough to move mountains. That’s what Mr. Buchanan had shown me—what he’d sat across from me to say: the world still had rules. And if I could learn them, maybe I wouldn’t get swallowed whole.

I didn’t become perfect. I still broke down.

Still woke with my chest tight, heart racing at shadows that looked like headlights.

But I wasn’t drifting anymore. I was working equations in my head, filling notebooks, turning the mess into something I could solve.

Encouraged that some things—laws, patterns, beats—could hold up when everything else collapsed.

I became the boy who counted in fours because life had taught him the cost of being caught unprepared.