Paid In Full
THIS CHAPTER HAS A SOUNDTRACK
julian
The morning started like any other Friday, except for the steady stream of interruptions that reminded me why I preferred to work from home on this day.
My family had learned a long time ago how to handle my birthday. In and out, quick, no fuss. Tre dropped a wrapped box on my desk after lunch: neon green running socks with reflective strips. “For visibility, old man. Can’t have you getting clipped on your pre-dawn jogs.”
I threw them at his head and he ducked, laughing. Zion gave me a slap on the back and a bottle of good whiskey. Simone gave me a hug and a card.
That was how I preferred it. Acknowledgment, not celebration. They’d figured out years ago exactly how much fuss I’d tolerate and kept to it.
Birthdays had been productions once. My mother made them big deals with themed cakes, singing, and presents that proved she’d been watching who you were turning into.
Then she was gone, and I’d turned twenty in a house in mourning and not one person said a word.
The truth was, I was relieved. I didn’t want a candle to blow out and a wish I couldn’t make.
The day stopped meaning anything, and I let it, because the alternative was feeling the size of what was missing from it.
Around eleven, my phone rang with Alyssa’s name on the screen.
I answered, “Hi, Alyssa.”
“Happy birthday to you...” Her voice came through the speaker immediately, warm and melodic, launching into the Stevie Wonder version without warning, with runs and embellishments that required actual vocal skill.
I sat back in my chair, caught completely off guard. People didn’t just sing to me. Not unless it was business-related and they were trying to get a record deal or something, but even that was more Zion’s lane.
“Happy birthday to you... happy birthday...”
She was good. Really good. The kind of voice that could make you stop what you were doing and just listen. I found myself doing exactly that, phone pressed to my ear, work forgotten, as she serenaded me through the phone.
She finished, then shifted to her normal speaking voice. “So, what are your big birthday plans?”
I cleared my throat, still processing what had just happened. “Working. Just another day.”
“Hmm. Well, how about you come by after work, since you don’t have plans.”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it. Might have to work late.”
She was silent for a moment. “I’ll check back in with you later.”
By early afternoon I had received all the obligatory texts and messages I was used to. So I wasn’t expecting much when Alyssa’s text came through a little before four.
ALYSSA
It’s illegal to work late on your birthday so I’m certain you will be clocking out by five?
Hadn’t planned to, why?
ALYSSA
Stop by my house after work? 5:30. Don’t be late. Don’t eat. Don’t argue.
Alyssa, I don’t celebrate my birthday like that. I don’t need anything. Really.
ALYSSA
Did you miss the part where I said “don’t argue”?
I read her text twice and typed three different replies and sent none of them, then left the office at four-forty-five.
Micah ambushed me before I’d cleared their doorway, with a plate held out in both hands like an offering. Four cupcakes, with the icing thick and uneven and clearly applied by a child with no adult supervision.
“Happy birthday, Mr. Julian! I did the icing all by myself. And I made you this.” He shoved a folded square of construction paper at me.
Three stick figures at a table, smiles too big for their faces. Inside, in careful crayon:
Happy Birthday Mr. Julian. Thank you for helping my mom and being my friend. Love Micah.
I read it twice, the same way I’d read her text. “Thank you, Micah. This is excellent work,” I told him, and meant it, as I watched his whole face light up.
Alyssa came out of the kitchen with a lighter and an expression caught between pride and apology. “Correction. He did half the icing. The other half he ate.” She pushed candles into the cupcakes, and lit them.
Then Micah started singing the Happy Birthday song loud, off-key, completely without shame. Alyssa joined him, her voice dropping under his, soft and clear and good, her eyes flicking up to mine on dear Mr. Julian.
I stood there and tried to remember the last time anyone had sung that song to me other than er that morning. I couldn’t. Not since I’d turned twenty and I’d made it my job to make sure everybody else had something to sing about.
“Make a wish!” Micah demanded.
I closed my eyes, because it was expected, and felt the weight of the moment settle around me. What did people wish for? What was the point of wishing for things that either would happen through your own actions or wouldn’t happen at all?
But looking at Micah’s expectant face, I found myself wishing for something I couldn’t define. Something about time moving more slowly, about moments like this existing without the inevitable ending that made them temporary.
I blew out the candles.
“Best cupcakes I’ve ever had,” I said after taking a bite. The icing was too sweet, the cake slightly dense, but there was something about food made by small hands that rendered technical critique irrelevant.
Micah’s chest puffed with pride. Alyssa rolled her eyes, trying not to smile.
Once Micah had extracted a promise of leftover cupcakes for breakfast, he went to grab his overnight bag. “Raschad’s on his way to get him. Sleepover,” Alyssa said, then handed me a small envelope.
“The cupcakes were his gift. This is mine.” She lifted her chin, daring me to object. “Happy birthday, Julian. And thank you. For being a good friend to me. Tonight you don’t run anything. I do.”
I opened it and went still when I read it. Rock the Bells had put together a rare Southern stop: Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Busta Rhymes, Scarface, LL Cool J, Redman, the whole class of them on one bill. Floor seats. Front row, dead on the stage.
I let out a low whistle, my thumb running along the slick gloss of the print. “Alyssa. These aren’t cheap.”
“Well, somebody keeps paying for things he wasn’t asked to pay for, so my budget has a surplus.” She shrugged. “Go figure.”
“How’d you know this would be my thing?”
“You’re not that mysterious, Julian. You’ve got Illmatic in your dawn rotation and you still play Ready to Die.
And I’ve heard you humming Big Daddy Kane at the grill on Sundays when you think nobody’s listening.
” She shrugged again like she hadn’t just told me she’d been studying me the way I studied everything else.
I didn’t have a response for that, so I said the only thing I could think of. “Alright. But I’m driving.”
“It’s my treat. I can drive.”
“I know you can. But I want to drive. You can’t argue with me on my birthday. I think that’s a law.”
“Is that a control thing or a masculinity thing?”
“It’s a Julian thing.” I held out my keys and made it sound like a joke, because the truth was harder to admit. She’d taken the planning, the paying, the surprise, and letting her drive me around on top of it felt like lying down in the middle of a road. I needed one thing in my own two hands.
She sucked her teeth. “Fine. Run up and change into something comfortable and meet back here. Vámonos.”
I stood in my penthouse closet and decided on dark denim, a black tee, the low-tops I’d never worn, and a chain that usually lived under a collar, then went back down to Alyssa’s floor. She answered and her eyes did a slow trip from my face down and back up.
“What,” I said.
“You clean up casual, Mr. Wade. Looking good.”
She was also in dark jeans, a faded Wu-Tang tour tee knotted at the waist, red kicks, and gold hoops.
“Raschad just left with Micah. Let’s roll.”
The drive went easy. She commandeered the aux and ran me through her own rotation, and somewhere around the halfway mark I realized I was driving to a concert I hadn’t scheduled, vetted, or turned into a business opportunity, and that I couldn’t remember the last time that had been true.
The arena was packed with grown folks who knew every word and weren’t shy about proving it.
I’d been to more shows than I could count and spent most of them doing math: who to greet, which exec had clocked me, what the merch line said about the tour.
Down on the floor, dead center, a body’s length from the lip of the stage, there was no math to do.
There was just the noise and the lights and the bass coming up through the soles of my feet, and Alyssa beside me already lit from the inside.
Big Daddy Kane opened, and when the beat hit for Ain’t No Half-Steppin’ the floor came apart.
Alyssa was in her element, rapping along with both hands up, head back.
I found myself watching her more than the stage.
The way she knew every word, how her whole face lit up during LL’s Mama Said Knock You Out.
When he went into Around The Way Girl she was gone.
And then I was gone too. I rapped along, loud, no edit, hands moving. Now and then she’d catch me and her smile would go wide and delighted, and instead of watching the stage she’d turn and watch me, mouthing the words back. The look on her face was worth more than the floor seats.
The crowd surged when Busta Rhymes came out to Gimme Some More then transitioned to Break Ya Neck with the frenzied wall-of-energy he’s famous for.
The floor pushed in tight around us. I felt her get jostled, a shoulder catching her from behind, and before I’d decided anything my hands were on her waist and I’d pulled her in front of me, her back to my chest, my forearm a loose bar across the crowd at her shoulder. She glanced up at me.
“Just keeping you off the ground.”
She settled back into the space I’d made and let me hold the crowd off her, and for a few songs we moved like that, her hands up, mine bracketing her body, both of us shouting along close enough that I could feel her laugh more than hear it.
Busta clocked the front row mid-verse during Touch It, pointed his mic straight at us, and the whole section had to throw the hook back at him.
Alyssa screamed it. I came in right under her, and Busta caught us knowing every word, grinned, and pointed again like he’d found his people.
She turned her head and looked up at me, delighted, and I just shrugged and kept going.
When Scarface came out with I Seen A Man Die the room shifted with that Houston gravel settling over the floor.
The crowd swayed instead of jumped. Alyssa had gone quiet in front of me, her head tipped back near my shoulder, and at some point her hand found mine where it rested at her side and laced through it.
It was nothing. It was just a hand, but it felt more intimate than anything I’d let near me in years.
I couldn’t tell you the last time something that small had gone through me like that.
Then Eric B. and Rakim with the first notes of Paid in Full rolling across the floor, a song I played during almost every morning run.
She twisted in my arms to face me and smiled.
I smiled back, answering with the whole verse, every syllable still wired into me.
She rapped it right back at me, the two of us shouting poetry at a stage, grinning like teenagers.
After the lights came up I pulled a quiet flex, flashing my industry credentials, walking us backstage, and we ended up dapping up and taking pictures with men I’d grown up a fan of.
At one point, someone from an entourage clocked the two of us. “She with you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said without hesitation. “She is.”
Alyssa raised an eyebrow at me and mimicked, “She with you?”
“Did I stutter?”
She rubbed her lips together, looking away, trying not to smile.
She was insufferable on the walk to the car. “Julian Wade got spoiled tonight and there was nothing he could do about it! Say it: ‘Alyssa, you got me. You won.’”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You haven’t stopped smiling, though.”
I hadn’t stopped. Our buzz carried us out of the parking lot and onto the highway, and then it started to thin somewhere in the first fifteen minutes when she went quiet. I glanced over and she’d tipped against the window, lips parted, gone. Asleep before we hit the county line.
I drove the rest of the way with the radio low and her soft snore, and I let myself think about what the whole night had been circling.
I ran a music company. I’d spent years inside this business.
Music had been my job and my burden and the thing that kept the lights on for a lot of people.
I’d forgotten it had ever been anything else.
And tonight, for the first time since I was nineteen years old, I’d just enjoyed it.
As a fan. As a man. Not as someone holding things up.
And then there was the other thing. I hadn’t celebrated my birthday since before my mother died.
Now here I was eighteen years later, leaving a concert Alyssa had spent her ‘surplus’ dragging me to.
On my way home with plans to scarf down the last too-sweet cupcakes sitting in my kitchen next to a card that said: thank you for being my friend.
I’d be going to bed with the memory of being sung to by Alyssa and Micah, who’d decided the day I was born was a day worth marking loudly.
She’d handed me something I’d put down years ago and never gone looking for. I wasn’t going to be able to say that to her. But I knew it.
When I pulled into our building I said her name softly, and she stirred then blinked up at me, disoriented.
“We home?”
“Yes, Sleeping Beauty. And you wanted to drive.” I chuckled.
She smiled, sleep-drunk. “Thank you for letting me treat you, Julian.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Mm, I think I just might,” she teased.
I started to reply that I was looking forward to that. But I didn’t.
“Thank you for today. All of it. Micah’s card. The cupcakes. The show. I’ll remember it.”
And I would. The way she’d built a whole night around nothing but my own joy and things I couldn’t afford to want.
The trouble was I was beginning to want them anyway.