Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“You ain’t had no dick since LA?” Shadow asked, causing Kennedi to roll her eyes.
“Why are you always playing? You know my situation.”
She hadn’t told anyone about the backroom at Velvet.
“Not you saving yourself for the man you ghosted. Girl, please, the delusions.”
“This is why I don’t call your ass. I’m not saving myself, I know I have unfinished business, and I don’t need anything else on my plate.” Mind or heart is what else she wanted to say. “I need to stay focused.”
“He’s still single, you know?”
She did know.
“This is not about Rolani. I was calling because I don’t know how you use that demon ass rose. I ought to file assault charges.”
They burst into a fit of giggles.
“You gotta let it simmer down to about fifty percent charge,” Shadow said, matter-of-factly.
“Friend, that’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard of. But look, I need a new recommendation for a B.O.B, but I gotta go in.”
“Okay, and I forgot you hanging with the stars now. Ouu, fancy.”
“Bye, girl. Send the rec.”
She disconnected as she pulled into the long spiral driveway, taking in the house as it came into view. DaVinci Bryns lived the way Kennedi expected a man of his caliber to live — well, but not loud about it. She loved seeing Black excellence, and that’s what the Bryns gave.
Kennedi had been in Silverrun long enough to get folded into their circle without fully meaning to.
It started professionally and became personal thats how it was with genuine people.
Halo didn’t perform. Sametra, who was Halo’s best friend, didn’t perform.
They made up their minds about you fast, then treated you like you’d been part of their lives the whole time.
Kennedi had spent most of her adult life keeping people at a comfortable distance and had no defense ready for that.
So now she was at game night.
“Ken, you made it.” Halo squealed, hugging her at the door.
“Thanks for inviting me. I’m competitive, so I’m just warning you.”
“Then you are exactly where you should be.”
The living room had been rearranged around a long folding table, cards and game boxes stacked at the center, drinks going around. Maybe ten people total — DaVinci's teammates, a couple she didn't recognize, Malik already in his spades face before the cards were even dealt.
“Baby, Ken made it,” Halo announced it like she was presenting somebody.
DaVinci leaned in and embraced Kennedi. He let his wife do what she wanted. If she said Kennedi was good people, he followed her lead. Plus, it was because of them that she was here alone.
“Ken, tell this nigga that boiled anything is a southern delicacy.”
“He’s not lying. We boil and pickle everything.”
“That’s nasty. So nasty. I ain’t eating no boiled pickled pig feet.”
“More for us,” Kennedi joked.
The night got started with Uno because someone always wanted to start with Uno, and the argument about house rules burned through fifteen minutes before the first card hit the table.
“Draw four is draw four,” Kennedi said for the third time. “You cannot stack. That is not a rule.”
“That is absolutely a rule,” Malik said, completely confident and completely wrong.
“Malik, I need you to tell me where you learned to play Uno, because whoever taught you did you wrong.”
“I taught myself.”
“And there’s the problem.”
The table burst into laughter. DaVinci shook his head at Malik, Halo covered her mouth as she laughed, and Kennedi felt herself relax into the moment.
This was what she had been missing. Not a specific place, but a feeling.
People around a table being loud and comfortable with each other, without an agenda.
She wanted that and hadn’t until recently.
They moved through Uno and into Phase 10, which brought out the true character of everyone present. Sametra was ruthless. She was the one you hated playing against. DaVinci trash-talked constantly and was losing. Halo complained the whole time because she couldn’t catch how to play the game.
Kennedi was holding her own and feeling good about it when Chance sat down in the empty seat to her left.
She’d seen him around the set. DaVinci’s manager and close friend. His cologne filtered into her nose and did nothing for her. Chance wasn’t ugly — he was very good-looking — but he just wasn’t Rolani.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” Chance said, leaning in with elbows on the table. “I didn’t know you could play.”
Kennedi laid down a card without looking up. “I can do a lot of things.”
“I believe that.” He reached over and helped himself to the chip bowl in front of her like they were already familiar, and she let him because correcting it would require more energy than she had. “How much longer in Silverrun?”
“A few more months.”
“We should do dinner before you leave. Somewhere good. I know all the spots.”
“Mm.” She studied her hand. “I appreciate that.”
He waited like she had more to add. She didn’t.
“All work,” he said finally, shaking his head. “You need some play. I could help with that.”
She glanced up at him then, just briefly, the way you looked at someone when you were being polite about something that wasn't landing.
She'd tried once, briefly, to think of a reason she shouldn't entertain him. He was attractive, employed, and clearly interested. On paper, there was no reason not to. She’d reached for one anyway and come up empty.
“I’m good,” she said, and meant it in every direction.
Sametra made a sound across the table that was technically a cough.
Halo did not look up from her cards, but her mouth moved at the corner.
Kennedi opened her mouth when the smell hit her. Someone had set the appetizers out from the kitchen, a whole spread in the middle of the table, and the pimento cheese was right there, close, cutting through everything else in the room and going straight to the back of her throat.
She blinked. Set a card down without thinking about it.
“Does anybody else smell that?”
Sametra looked up. Bri looked around. Chance glanced toward the kitchen like he was trying to be helpful.
Nobody said anything because nobody smelled anything the way she was smelling it.
Her stomach lurched hard. She covered her mouth and pushed back from the table, moving toward the hallway with as much composure as she had left, which wasn't much. She made it to the bathroom off the hallway and got the door closed before her body finished making its point.
When she straightened up and gripped the sink, her own reflection looked back at her, looking exactly how she felt. Exhausted. Wrung out. This had been happening for weeks in exactly this pattern: some days, nothing; other days, she was against the ropes with no warning and no dignity.
A soft knock. “Ken.” Halo’s voice.
She unlocked the door.
Both of them came in, Halo and Sametra, the bathroom suddenly very full. Sametra had a bottle of water and handed it over without a word. Kennedi accepted it, rinsed her mouth, and looked at both of them in the mirror.
“What?”
“Honey,” Sametra said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just—”
“Just what?”
Halo had her arms folded, and her eyebrow raised in that way that meant she had already put it together and was waiting for Kennedi to stop pretending. “Bestie. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I sure am.”
And then it happened. Standing in that bathroom, stomach still rolling like the tide, she had a full That’s So Raven moment.
It came in flashes — the hotel room, that night at Velvet, and everything that came with it, the way it had gone and kept going until sunlight.
She had tried very hard to file those nights under a category that would make it manageable. She had not succeeded.
“Oh my God.” Then again, quieter. “Oh my God. No.”
She could blame the birth control, and she would, but the honest truth was that the weeks leading up to the premiere had been busy; she had not been consistent, and she had known better and not applied what she knew.
“It’s not that bad after a while,” Sametra said, voice gentle the way only a mother’s could be. “Your body will recognize the blessing and cut you some slack.”
Kennedi met her eyes in the mirror and shook her head. She was in Silverrun, Colorado, miles from everyone she loved, on a production job with a timeline. This was not the time for this.
She went back to the table and tried to finish out the game night, but she was spiraling. Mildly panicking. They could be reading the situation wrong. Bodies did strange things. She was tired. Probably just exhaustion.
“I, uhm — I need to get back into town. Thank you so much for inviting me. I had fun.”
“You’re welcome anytime. You’re family now.”
Halo and Sametra walked her to the front door.
“Sis, take care of yourself. Call me if you need me. I don’t have kids, but Sametra does, so let us be there for you if you need us.”
“I’ll send my list of recommended doctors in the area.”
“Y’all, you could be wrong. I could be tired.”
“Well, go find out.”
She hugged them both and drove off in silence until she stopped at CVS. She bought every test on the shelf — six of them — and a Gatorade she didn’t need but grabbed anyway. The cashier didn’t blink. She appreciated that more than she could say.
At her Airbnb, she paced the bathroom as the timers counted down.
She opened his Instagram to keep her eyes busy; it had become an unhealthy habit she wasn’t proud of.
Her gaze landed on the photo first — the stolen one, the embarrassing shot from the cabin that triggered everything, the least professional moment of her career.
Yet, she kept it. You can't forget a man who looked like that, nor what he gave her.
She had messed up royally running from him, and she knew it.
The timer went off and scared her half to death. With trembling hands, she looked at the first test.
Positive.
The next one. Positive. All six, one after the other, thirty dollars’ worth of confirmation saying the same unbothered thing.
She sat on the edge of the tub.
“This is what you get, Kennedi,” she said out loud.
Because it was. She had stood in a doorway at Club Velvet and let that man kiss her forehead and tell her he would wait, and she had walked away anyway, run the minute she could find a reason to. God had a sense of humor. She was beginning to understand that personally.
She picked up her phone. Opened Rolani’s contact and sat there with her thumb over his name.
Then she closed it.
She opened Instagram instead and went back to his page, scrolling until she found the one she always stopped on.
Monroe at a spelling bee, trophy raised with both hands, Rolani in the frame behind her with his arms crossed, pride written all over him.
She swiped to find another, but this time all that was visible was Monroe’s legs, the roses so big they swallowed her.
She smiled and shoved that down.
“Dammit.”
She pressed her hand flat against her stomach.
She had months before her body stopped keeping her secret, and the only thing she had figured out with any certainty was that she was having this baby.
That decision had been made before she finished taking the tests, quiet and firm, not up for renegotiation.
Everything else was still a mess she would have to sort through.
Her phone buzzed.
Mommy: How was game night with the stars?
Her mama was sitting somewhere in Coupeville with no idea what her daughter was currently holding. She would be over the moon, which was a whole separate problem, because Heidi Walters over the moon required management, and Kennedi did not have that in her tonight.
She called her anyway. She needed her mama’s voice more than she needed the quiet.
Two rings. “I was just thinking about you.”
That voice. Warm and settled, the after-dinner version. Kennedi had been hearing it from every city she’d ever lived in, and it always landed the same way — like coming inside from the cold without knowing she’d been freezing.
“Hey, Mommy. Game night was fun. We had a good time.”
“Good, but you sound tired, baby.”
“I’m fine.” She moved to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. “Long day. How are you?”
“We’re good. Your daddy’s been in that kitchen all evening, so we ate well. He grilled some ribs.” A pause. “How’s the project coming?”
“Real good. DaVinci’s easy to work with. We’re ahead of schedule.” She leaned back against the headboard. “And Halo and Sametra, the women I told you about — it feels like I’ve known them forever.”
“Sounds like you found your people out there.”
“For now,” Kennedi said, and the way she said it caused her to pause.
Her mama caught it also. “For now?”
Kennedi looked at the window. Silverrun was doing what it did at night, settling down into itself. Winter was brutal here, but she had always loved it here. But loving a place and needing to be in it were two different things, and she was only now understanding that she had sometimes confused them.
“I’ve been thinking about how many Sunday dinners I’ve missed,” she said, and didn’t try to dress it up. “I think about it more than I usually do when I’m away.”
Her mama fell silent.
“Mama, I think my feet are getting tired,” Kennedi said. It came out softer than she intended and more honest than she’d planned. “Like, actually tired. Not I-need-a-vacation tired. Tired.”
“Baby,” her mama said, and the word itself was a whole sentence. “There is nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. You’ve been moving since you were eighteen years old. Nobody can run forever.”
Kennedi pressed the heel of her hand to her chest and forced herself to breathe through it.
“I’m not going anywhere after this project,” she said. “I mean it this time.”
“We’ll be here. Your room’s the same if you need to visit. Come home when you’re ready. We love you either way.”
“Soon,” Kennedi said. “I promise.”
They talked a little longer until she began to yawn.
“Love you, Mommy. I need a pound cake when I come home.”
“I already knew that. Love you, Kenny.”
They disconnected, and she stepped out onto the patio for some fresh air.
She thought about Rolani without much resistance. The doorway at Club Velvet, the blunt between his fingers, the way he'd watched her leave — disappointment with respect underneath it. He'd never once asked her to be different. Just told her where he'd be and left the door open.
She believed him.
Kennedi dropped the tests in the trash one at a time, washed her face, and crawled into bed.
“Your daddy is going to have a lot of feelings, Little LA,” she said quietly. “He’s going to be mad at Momma for a minute. But I believe he’s going to be happy about you.”
She put her hand on her stomach in the dark.
She was going to be a momma.