13. Voltage
Voltage
P oliteness wasn’t supposed to feel like a trap, but lately, it did.
Nia Coleman wasn’t a bad woman. In fact, she’d be a good woman for sure, but just not for me.
Body soft in all the places men noticed, confidence that could hold a room without raising her voice.
But she’d taken my yes ma’ams, my respectful nods, my small talk in the break room and read them all like invitations.
And maybe it would’ve been once, back when I was younger and chasing whatever attention wanted me back. But I’d long stopped needing every smile to turn into a number in my phone. I wanted more than that now. With Rayna, I felt it. Real. Passionate. Alive.
Still, when Rayna saw me outside school last week with Nia standing too close, that look in her eyes—it burned. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I hated that it still put a crack in the trust she was building with me.
Carver High had been a fresh start. I came from a school where the paint peeled in the stairwells, where half the computers in the lab booted up to error screens and never got fixed, where kids shared tattered textbooks that were already outdated when I was in high school.
The district talked a lot about “preparing them for the future” while making sure they had nothing to prepare with.
It gnawed at me when I left—I knew those kids deserved more.
Carver was different. Hallways polished, science labs with equipment that worked, Wi-Fi that didn’t choke under the weight of a single class logging in.
They had a robotics program, a music wing that smelled like polished brass, art rooms stocked with supplies that didn’t come out of teachers’ pockets.
The students walked taller here, like they knew they were being invested in.
My first in-service day, I showed up early, shirt pressed, folder under my arm.
A few older teachers shook my hand, welcomed me, gave me the lay of the land.
And then there was Nia. She taught history, had already been there a few years.
Her smile was bright, her eyes keen, and the way she lingered in conversation told me exactly where her interest lay.
I saw it. I wasn’t blind. But I’d also been through enough to know better than to play where I worked. I wasn’t looking for a distraction. Not anymore.
I’d had women—plenty. I knew the pull I had when I wanted it, and I used to lean on that.
Easy sex, easy company, never anything that lasted.
But that game was old. My phone had been dry for a long time now.
No late-night DMs. No unread “u up?” texts.
My IG might as well have been a ghost town. I’d cleared the noise on purpose.
Which is why Nia, showing up where she wasn’t invited, sliding too close in places I wanted quiet—it grated. She wanted me to play, and I didn’t. Not with her.
Then Rayna came along. Wild, brilliant, quick-tongued, beautiful Rayna. Stubborn as hell. She was never going to let me hand her a watered-down version of love. She made me work for every inch of her trust.
And when I fucked her into the mattress—when I had her spread under me, walls gripping me like she wasn’t letting go of anything she finally claimed—I felt it: something closing, locking me in. Terrified me, how much I wanted to stay there. How much I wanted her to keep me.
She had walls taller than the buildings she wired for a living, but I could feel the cracks forming. If I could just keep real, I knew we were going somewhere. She made me feel alive. More than that—she made me feel loved.
That thought followed me to Grandma’s the following Sunday.
Grandma was folding napkins when I came in, sitting at the table like it was her pulpit. Bangles clinked every time she snapped the corners into triangles. The kitchen smelled like cornbread cooling on the stove.
“I texted Jada,” I said, and put my hands on her shoulders for the brief kiss-hug she pretended to hate.
“Texting Jada is not calling me.” Her eyes were bright and a little stern. “Don’t get slick.”
I grinned and sat. She smoothed another napkin, pressing the fold until it snapped flat. “You been scarce lately. And don’t tell me it’s grading papers. I know the weight of a woman when it’s sitting on a man’s time.”
I shifted. “It’s not like that.”
Her eyebrows did the work my aunties used to do. “Not like what?”
“Not like somebody pulling me away from you,” I said, careful. “Grandma, I know my priorities.”
She studied me like she studied choir robes before Easter: making sure every stitch matched. “I’ve seen men say that and then lose themselves in somebody who wasn’t worth the time. You hear me?”
I met her. “Yes, ma’am.”
Her voice softened a hair. “Don’t let some woman put herself between you and family. Don’t let yourself forget who was here first.”
She wasn’t blind to the way my attention had shifted — to how my eyes softened when I said Rayna’s name — but she had the right to be wary.
Grandma Ruth loved hard and she guarded what she loved with an old-time fierceness that came from living through loss.
She dresses pretty — pearls and scarves, hair set in a style that flatters and announces “I still got it” — and she’s sharper than she looks.
She’s also, in the quiet, the kind of woman who’ll sit you down and say the thing you don’t want to hear because she’s seen where you can go wrong.