6. KO
The storm was beating the hell out of the building, hard enough to make the floor shake under my Timbs.
We were definitely in it now. Hurricane Imani had officially touched down.
I sat up in the recliner I’d ended up in after doing several rounds on the punching bag, trying to work Lyrius out of my system.
That shit didn’t work. Not really. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her and Dakoda.
Damn! I had a son by the one woman who had wrecked me.
I gazed around the room. It was still dark.
The little tealight candles Lyrius had dug out of her bag earlier were barely holding on.
I looked down at my phone for the time. It was barely early morning, three-thirty.
I dragged a hand down my face, looked up, and Dakoda was standing right there next to my chair. He was quiet as hell, just watching me.
“You good?” I asked, and he shrugged.
“It’s loud.” Right on cue, another gust slammed against the building.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Hurricane is here.”
“Are we going to die?”
I glanced at him. Seeing him so afraid did something to me. It made me want to protect him.
“Come here.” I stood immediately and held my hand out. “Ain’t nobody going to die today. We good inside this building.”
He nodded his head like he understood every word I had said and trusted it.
The way he just took my word for it like I was supposed to be the one he could trust had me feeling a way.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I lifted him onto my hip and carried him further away from the windows before sitting down on the weight bench with him still tucked against my chest. He looked up at me carefully, like he was checking if I was lying.
I realized then that kids always knew when adults were full of shit.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. We good in here.” Another loud boom shook the building, and he pressed closer into me automatically.
“It sounds mad,” he said.
“It is,” I muttered. “But it’s going to keep all that mad sh—stuff outside.”
He studied my face like he was checking me for bullshit again, and then he nodded.
“You scared?” he asked.
“Of hurricanes?” He nodded. “Nah.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I can’t do anything about it. Ain’t no point in being scared of something you can’t fight.”
He thought about it for a second with a puzzled look on his face. “Hurricane got hands?” he asked.
“Nah, and that’s exactly why you can’t fight them.” That got a little laugh out of him and me too.
“How come I don’t see you?”
There it was. The question I knew was coming, and one I wasn’t sure I knew how to answer. I held his gaze for a second.
“I didn’t know where you were,” I said like it was that simple. I watched his forehead wrinkle up just like mine when I thought someone was full of it.
“You didn’t know?” he asked.
“Nah.”
“But Mama knows where we be.”
“Yeah, she does.” I paused. “I’m just finding out, though.” He sat with that for a second, staring at me like he was thinking. Kids always sensed when adults were skipping parts of the truth.
“You look like me,” he said suddenly.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I noticed that too.”
“You got cereal?”
I huffed. “Cereal?”
“Yeah. The little circle ones.”
I laughed a bit while shaking my head. It was amazing how kids could hop from one thing to the next so quickly.
“You talking about Cheerios?”
He shook his head.
“Not those, the color ones.”
My eyes wandered toward the back corner where I’d stacked some of the shit I grabbed from upstairs last night. A small box of Froot Loops stuck out.
“Aw, you’re talking about Froot Loops,” I said when it finally clicked. A few minutes ago, we were talking about death and abandonment. Now this little dude wanted breakfast. “Come on. I got Froot Loops.”
“Yeah, Froot Loops.”
We made our way over to the little table that sat in the corner.
I was glad I’d gone upstairs earlier and brought food down before the storm got worse.
There was no way we were going anywhere near those windows with Hurricane Imani hitting like this now.
I grabbed the box, poured some into a bowl, then picked up the milk and paused.
Shit, was it okay to drink milk that had been sitting out for a few hours?
I stared at the carton and then glanced at the expiration date.
This milk had expired two days ago. Yeah . . . nah. I set it back down.
“You like dry cereal?”
He climbed up onto the bench. “Yeah. Mama gives me dry cereal all the time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Mama calls it snack cereal.”
“Snack cereal?” He nodded like it made perfect sense.
“Aight then,” I said, handing him the bowl.
“Snack cereal it is,” I said, and he started crunching like he hadn’t eaten in days.
I leaned back against the table, watching him.
How was I going to build a relationship with a child that had already begun life without me?
I looked over at Lyrius. She was still curled up in a ball on the couch, knocked out.
How could she have kept this from me for so long?
I understood that shit was complicated, but she could have at least told me I had a son.
“Mama is always tired,” he said. “She never wakes up before it’s light out.”
I looked back at him. “Yeah?”
“She works a lot. But we still do stuff. She just falls asleep sometimes.”
I glanced over at her again. Hearing him say it like that did something to me. She really had been carrying this shit by herself. And for a second, all I could think about was how tired she looked.
“Yeah, I can see that.”
He ate a few more bites of the cereal and then slid off the bench like he was done. He didn’t even finish it and took off toward the punching bags.
“Can you show me how to punch like you?” he asked, and I smiled as he ran in zig zags to the other side of the room. Where he’d gotten all this energy from at three in the morning, I had no clue.
“Of course,” I said, following behind him. By the time I made it to the other side of the room, Dakoda was standing in front of one of the punching bags, looking up at me. I raised my hands and put them in position.
“This is how you stand,” I said, and he copied me the best he could. Wrong as hell. I dropped my stance and leaned forward to adjust him. “Nah, spread your feet. Hands up.”
“Like this?” He fixed his hands and clenched his fists, looking serious as hell.
“Yeah, like that. Now punch it.” I stood behind the bag and held onto it as he tapped the bag with all of his little strength. It barely moved.
“I’m strong!”
“You aight,” I muttered, and he hit it again a little harder this time. I let the bag swing back and bumped him. He stumbled, caught himself, then looked at it like it had just disrespected him.
“It hit me back.”
“That’s boxing.”
“That’s cheating.” He leaned in closer, squinting at it. I couldn’t stop laughing, and neither could he. He grinned like he did something and then leaned into me like he knew what we both needed. I rested my hand on his back.
“You done punching?”
“Yeah, I don’t think I like boxing,” he replied. “Can we do shadows again?” I nodded, and we made our way back toward the couch. I sat down with him still half on me. The wind outside was louder than ever.
“You said we’re safe?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded and relaxed into me like that was enough.
I leaned back a little, adjusting him in my arms as his body started going heavy. Sleep was creeping back in. He settled into me like it was easy, and I forced myself not to lean too much into it. I couldn’t afford to. Not until I had proof.
“KO?” He yawned.
“Yeah?”
“You gonna ask Mama how to find us?” I looked down at him, then over at her, then back at him, a smile creeping on my lips. “You know, so you can come see me?”
I blew out a deep breath. I’d taken a lot of punches.
Took hits to the chest without blinking.
But his words? Them shits landed. I looked down at him.
That question was heavy as hell on my chest. He said it as if it was easy, like I could’ve been doing that the whole time.
And for a second, all I could think about was how none of this was simple.
Not with everything still sitting between us, but he didn’t have anything to do with that.
I couldn’t fix what was already done, but I damn sure decided what happened next.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna be around.”
“Like every day?”
I looked at him and then back at Lyrius.
“As much as I can.” He nodded, already halfway gone, and I tucked him in closer.
I pulled him in without thinking. I knew it wasn’t that simple.
We still had shit to figure out. Hell, I still needed to make sure he was really mine, but he didn’t need to know all that. Nah, he just needed to know I was here.