Chapter 22 Mekhi
I don’t even know what made me tell her to get up off the damn couch.
Maybe it was the day I had after talking to Jarmon and searching for Ramón Black.
Maybe it was because she’d been sitting there for hours with her red hair tied up, little pierced nose buried in that thick ass forensic psych book, lips moving while she read under her breath.
Or maybe it was those lips themselves. The same ones that had been driving’ me crazy since the day I’d brought her here pouting and talking about, “I don’t need your help!”
The same ones I had now tasted… and wanted to feel and taste again.
“Farrah, get up,” I said, standing in the doorway staring at her.
She didn’t even look up. “I’m busy.”
“Yeah, I can see that. You been busy all day. You need some air.”
“I’m breathing just fine, thanks.”
This girl and that mouth, man. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Mm-hmm. You gon’ end up crazy, staring at that damn book all day. Well… crazier than you are.”
She flipped me off before finally looking up, eyes bright and challenging me like always. “Aww… you worried about me, Mekhi?”
She had that little tone in her voice, the one that made me want to mush her head and pull her close at the same time.
“Worried? Nah,” I said. “Just tryna protect my couch from that permanent imprint you making.”
She laughed, low and soft and so damned sweet.
“Fine,” she said, standing up, stretching until her t-shirt lifted just enough to flash that little pudge in her stomach. Shit was kinda cute.
“Where we going then, bossy ass?”
I grabbed my keys and smirked at her. “You’ll see.”
To my surprise, she didn’t ask any more questions, just ran upstairs, grabbed a purse and who knows what else, and let me lead her to my car and to the nearby city.
The newly-opened True Crime Museum was quiet when we got there.
It was also way colder than outside. I watched her rub her arms in the sudden chill as we walked, our feet echoing across the new tile.
There were glass cases everywhere, lit with soft illumination.
Black-and-white mugshots lined the walls, all the faces of people who thought they were better than others, smarter than the system.
As soon as we stepped in, her whole face lit up. I liked that for her… and for me.
“This is crazy!” she exclaimed.
I didn’t bring her there to impress her.
That’s what I told myself when we walked in.
I was just bored and didn’t want her ass to go stir crazy.
The fact that she was studying forensic psych was coincidental.
If I were honest, I might admit I brought her because I wanted to see her eyes light up about something that didn’t end with my being cussed out in her sassy little drawl.
I wanted to see what made her mind move when it wasn’t snapping at mine.
Farrah stepped ahead of me eagerly and then thought about it.
She slowed, as on guard as I was, not wanting me to see her excitement.
She tried to pull off a disinterested look, and I smiled inside.
If my little thug could pretend, I could, too.
I pretended I wasn’t waiting to see her reaction, pretended my hands were in my pockets because I was bored, not because it kept me from reaching for one of hers.
I had never been a hand holding dude and one little ginger upstart wasn’t about to take me there.
“This is crazy,” she said again. “You really brought me here?”
“You acting like I flew you to Paris, Little Thug,” I said. “It’s just a museum.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder, a look that was part attitude, part awe. “Just a museum? Boy, you know what I’m studying! Mekhi, this is like… Disneyland for me.”
I smiled. “Yeah, that shit kinda concerning.”
“It’s called academic interest.”
“Right. Whatever makes you feel normal, shorty.”
She side-eyed me, then leaned in close to a case filled with raggedy-looking case files and an old Polaroid camera.
I watched her read the placard, lips moving like they had when she was reading back on my couch.
Fuck, those pretty ass lips. I don’t even think she knew she did that.
She reached up, pushed curls behind her ear, exposing the soft curve of her jaw.
I watched it all like the simp she was making me into, even as I told my eyes to mind their business.
“Look at this,” she said, tapping the glass with one purple-polished nail. “They used this to profile one of the first serial offenders in Louisiana. Imagine being the one who had to figure that mind out.”
Her voice was soft, thoughtful. In that soft, my teasing her would’ve felt too loud. I let it go and stood beside her. She smelled like chocolate, always like chocolate, and the way my dick started to harden, I wondered if it had a sweet tooth.
“So,” I said, as casual as I could manage with a hard ass dick and a weak ass mind, “you really think studying killers all day ain’t gon’ mess with your head?”
She didn’t take her eyes off the placard. “Understanding stuff doesn’t mean you turn into it. It means you can stop being scared of it.”
“That’s from a psych book or something?”
“Nah,” she said, finally turning to look at me. “That’s just life, Mekhi.”
I wore a smirk to keep from letting whatever her words did to me show. “You always talk like one of them books?”
She frowned at me, a challenge in the cute little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “You always run from real talk?”
I paused for a moment. So, she was trying to read me, too.
And succeeding.
“Touché,” I said finally, and I felt the smile curve my mouth before I could stop it.
We moved along the exhibit, pretending again, this time, like we weren’t two people walking together.
She read everything. I read her. She’d tilt her head at a detail and hum in agreement, or she’d bite her lips when the words got interesting to her.
Every time she reacted, I held onto it. I don’t know why I needed to build this inventory, just that I did.
She was into this. She looked passionate, smart. .. and so damn beautiful.
Her curls slid forward again as she leaned down, and she repeated her earlier actions, pushing them back, showing the soft line of her jaw. I looked away before she caught me half-ass daydreaming about kissing her right there.
We kept walking. Eventually, our usual bickering started. She called me “impassive” about the exhibits; I called her a nerd for being so into them. But underneath all that taunting, something felt different, like the tone between us was changing, something new under the sarcasm and one-upping.
We came to a section with reconstructed interrogations—audio you could listen to, clips about body language and manipulation.
Farrah slid the headphones on and became very still.
I watched her be still, not just because I pissed her off or she was dismissing me, for once.
The stillness here wasn’t defensive. It was her careful focus, a look into how she thought, how she took things apart.
She passed me one side of the headphones. We stood shoulder to shoulder at the little listening station, the wire tugging between us. The recording was an old interview from the eighties—a detective pressing a suspect who’d been lying for three days. Farrah gasped suddenly.
“He slipped,” she said under her breath.
“How?” I asked, legit lost and confused.
“Pronoun. He said ‘we’ when he meant ‘I.’ He’s telling them without telling them.”
I looked at her incredulously. “You peeped that from two seconds?”
“From the way he breathes after,” she said, eyes on the suspect’s face in the grainy black-and-white monitor. “That little pause says a lot.”
I nodded because I heard it, too, now that she pointed it out.
“You always been like this?” I asked, when the audio cut out and a narrator launched into a dry ass explanation.
“Like what?”
“Breaking people and behavior down into pieces to make ‘em make sense.”
She took off the headphones and turned toward me, close enough that I could count the gold flecks in her honey eyes. “You scared? About my learning people? About my learning you?” she asked.
Shrugging, I tapped the headphone against my thigh. “I ain’t scared of being understood. I’m just selective about who gets to try.”
She held my eyes for a minute, a little smile playing around her mouth. “So, why I get to try?”
“Who said you did?”
She rolled her eyes, that smile growing. “Boy, please.”
We wandered again, past a case of handwriting analyses, past knives and evidence bags, until the flow of the room spilled us into a small space that was an interrogation room replica.
It had a metal table, two chairs, and a two-way mirror slick and dark on one wall.
Someone had gone all out, trying to make this shit authentic.
The overhead light was hot and harsh, and the closed door made the room warmer.
A plaque invited visitors to sit, to see how discomfort and posture changed a conversation.
“You tryna play good cop, bad cop?” she asked, one eyebrow rising.
I sat, stretching out my legs. “Who said I ain’t tryna play lawyer and defend myself from your assumptions?”
She scoffed. “Definitely what I should be doing, all the assumptions you’ve had since day one about me.
” She slid into the chair across from me and immediately pulled it closer to the table, leaning forward.
It shifted us into a frame I recognized too well.
I had sat at tables like this, back when I didn’t know half the shit I did now.
The memory ghosted over me, and I straightened.
Her eyes widened, tracking my movement. “You been in rooms like this.” She said it, not asked it.
“Girl, it just reminds me of a school principal office,” I said lightly, refusing to reveal too much.
“But it’s not,” she pointed out softly.
We stared at each other. The truth hung between us, so obvious that I had to acknowledge it. I sighed.