Chapter 40 - Oak
forty- Oak
The studio was louder than I expected. Not just the music, but the people.
The energy. It was like stepping into another world—one where time didn’t exist, and nobody gave a fuck about anything but the beat.
Jordin had invited me because she said we need time to be away from the house, something to occupy our minds.
I had been thinking a lot about what she had said and I was considering see how thing went if we did it her way.
I looked over to my right and Ciarán was in his zone, head bobbing, eyes closed, rapping under his breath while the engineer fine-tuned the levels. I stayed posted on the couch, arms crossed, trying not to look as out of place as I felt in khakis and a button-up.
I couldn’t believe this was my first time in a studio with Jordin. And just then, it hit me—
That might’ve been one of our problems.
The rapper, “Kold-B,” was treating the space like his personal throne room.
I watched Jordin move through it all, a diplomat in a den of wolves. She was correcting a lyric sheet with Kold-B’s producer when it happened. His hand—thick-fingered and dripping with gold—slid from the small of her back down to her hip.
My entire body went rigid.
The pen in Jordin’s hand—a Montblanc she borrowed from me—stilled.
Before I could even stand, Ciarán was there. It was like he materialized at the man’s shoulder, leaned in close, and spoke in a low, venomous whisper that somehow carried over the beat.
“You got a death wish, playa?” Ciarán’s tone was deceptively calm. “Keep your fucking hands to yourself. She ain’t part of the track.”
Kold-B pulled back, sneering, trying to save face in front of his crew. “Relax, man. Just showin’ love.”
“Show it from a distance,” Ciarán replied, eyes flat and cold. The threat hung in the air—more potent than any shouted insult. I almost grinned.
Jordin looked back at me and gave a slight nod. Let him handle it. This isn’t the place for you to go off.
Kold-B threw his hands up. “I got it, jit. No hands.”
The session limped on after that, tension stretched thin like a live wire.
An hour later, we stepped into the dimly lit parking lot, the humid Miami air a slap compared to the cold studio. Jordin was already at the car, digging for her keys. Kold-B and his entourage swaggered out behind us.
He spotted me.
“Yo, Mr. Dress Pants,” he called, voice slurred. “I thought she was your bitch—why the nigga checking me about yours? What, ya’ll running a train on ole girl?”
The word bitch echoed in the quiet lot.
It was the match to the gasoline already simmering in my veins.
Everything—the accident, the wheelchair, the constant, gnawing presence of Ciarán, the helplessness—all of it coalesced into a single, white-hot point of rage.
I didn’t think. I moved. Dropped my cane.
My left hook wasn’t a wild swing—it was the focused, brutal strike of a man who’d boxed downtown for fifteen years just to manage his temper. It connected with his jaw with a sickening, wet crack. The most satisfying sound I’d heard in a year.
He dropped like a sack of bricks.
My leg didn’t even hurt anymore.
His crew moved toward me, but Ciarán was already beside me. He didn’t throw a punch. He didn’t have to.
He just stood there, a predator’s grin on his face, wild energy rolling off him. One hand at his side, a pistol clearly visible. Finger tapping the trigger.
“Anyone else wanna continue the conversation?” Ciarán asked, voice dangerously pleasant.
They backed off.
Ciarán looked at me with a flicker of something that almost resembled respect.
We stood there for a second, chests heaving, adrenaline coiled between us like a wire—tight, volatile, unspoken.
Then Jordin stormed over. “Are you two insane?” she hissed, eyes darting from my bloody knuckles to Ciarán’s smile. “Y’all trying to get us shot in Miami?”
“He called you a bitch,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”
“And he touched you earlier,” Ciarán added. “He did exactly what he was supposed to do,” he said like that settled it.
She just shook her head, muttering something about fucking children as she got in the car. “Let’s get breakfast.”
It was two in the morning. Not much was open.
We ended up at a diner. None of us really spoke during the fifteen-minute drive.
We slid into a booth—Jordin on one side, Ciarán and me, improbably, on the other. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. A waitress with tired eyes took our order for three burgers and fries.
Jordin sipped her water, eyes moving between us. “You realize you just assaulted a client. His label’s gonna want answers.”
“He won’t press charges,” Ciarán said, snatching a fry the moment the plate hit the table. “He’d never live it down. Got his ass kicked by a businessman—a white, middle-aged one, at that.” He smirked. “It’s poetic.”
“This is what you deal with all the time?” I asked, softer now. “This… posturing? These egos you have to constantly manage?”
She let out a short, bitter laugh. “Welcome to the music industry, Oak. It’s not all Grammys and creative freedom. It’s babysitting grown men with toddler emotions and bank accounts big enough to make them think they own you.”
She pointed a fry between us. “And it’s cleaning up everything that happens when they don’t.”
Her eyes locked with mine—and something cracked open.
All the things I’d misunderstood. All the ways I’d minimized what she did, all the ways I’d resented the time and space her career demanded.
This wasn’t a side hustle.
She wasn’t just a songwriter.
She was a negotiator. A strategist. A therapist. A crisis manager. A warden.
And somehow, still an artist beneath it all.
It was a profoundly humbling realization.