Prologue #4
Ro scratched his jaw and exhaled with a smirk that did not challenge God, only begged Him to come closer. “I’m learning,” he admitted, eyes sliding to me like I was the class.
“I believe,” I whispered, and felt the words pull a chair out for faith to sit down in. “And I’m stubborn.”
“Stubborn faith still counts,” the preacher chuckled, a smile carving itself into tired cheeks. He opened the Bible and let it fall to a place the pages knew by muscle memory. “Then let’s start with the truth we can carry.”
He lifted his chin and the room steadied.
“Marriage ain’t a stunt,” he warned, voice deepening into that rhythm funerals and weddings share because both are doors.
“It’s a covenant with teeth. It’ll bite you if you feed it lies.
It’ll guard you if you treat it like holy.
Loyalty is not a lyric; it’s a whole language.
If you ain’t fluent, you gon’ hurt each other.
If you learn it, you gon’ build a house nobody can tow. ”
Ro breathed through his nose like he’d been running and then found his stop. “I’m fluent,” he vowed, fingers tightening around mine.
The preacher pointed two fingers at both our chests as if he was issuing badges. “Then speak your truth.”
Ro’s shoulders squared and the room got quiet the way a room does when a man is about to put down what he really is.
He swallowed, caught my eyes, and everything smoothed.
“Look,” he started, and his voice tripped on the first word, then caught its feet and ran.
“I ain’t the church boy who knows the verses by the commas, but I know this.
Nova Rae Jenkins, I wake up thinking about where you are and I sleep wondering if the world treated you right.
I don’t got a last name that buys favors.
I got these hands, this back, this bike, and my breath.
I’m laying all of it on your altar. On Moms. On Grams. On Dre—July third.
On Boo—May twenty-first. On Tasha—February eighteen.
On every name the street tried to swallow.
” His throat worked; his gaze held. “You mine till death taps me on the shoulder. If the block yell, I’ll still hear you.
If the night pulls, I’ll pull back harder. On hood. On God.”
Tony choked around his toothpick so violently his flannel jumped. “Ay—man,” he croaked, wiping his eye with the back of his wrist like a clown who wasn’t happy to be funny anymore.
My knees shook, but my mouth didn’t. I squeezed his hands and pulled my voice up from the place the aunties store extra strength for you.
“Roman Zore,” I breathed, and heard the name fit inside me like a lamp finding its plug, “I ain’t the silk-and-roses bride.
I’m a woman who knows how to carry groceries up three flights without dropping the bread.
I’m a woman who will pray when you cuss and cook when you forget to eat, who will stand in a doorway with one hand on your chest if you come home with fire in your eyes and make that flame choose warmth over burn.
Where you go, I go. Where you lodge, I lodge.
Your people, my people. Your God, my God.
Where you die—” my voice caught and found itself, “there will I be buried, and this vow do the Lord to me and more also if anything but death parts you and me.” My fingers trembled; my spirit didn’t.
“I’m yours without a church bulletin telling me to clap.
I’m yours because God heard me when I asked for a home and He spelled it R-O. ”
The preacher’s jaw worked once like he was chewing on pride, and it tasted good. “That’s Scripture and spine,” he approved, nodding slow. “Now rings.”
Ro pulled the folded napkin from his pocket like it was contraband and laid it on the pulpit.
Inside, two thin bands winked in the cheap light, gold shy but game.
He lifted mine, and I watched his fingers shake, not from fear—just devotion that finally understood itself.
He slid the ring onto my finger as if the bone might complain and he didn’t want a fight.
“With this,” he murmured, breath thinning, “I lock it.”
“With this,” I echoed, placing his ring where his pulse could keep it warm, “I keep it.”
The preacher covered our hands with both of his, big and heavy and warm like somebody’s good quilt.
“Lord,” he prayed, “bind what’s Yours with a cord that don’t snap.
Make their loyalty loud when their voices are tired.
Make their home a house for Your name. Put iron in his love and mercy in his temper.
Put oil in her lamp and thunder in her prayer.
And when the street whistles for them, help them answer You first. In Jesus’ strong name. ” His Amen rolled like a drumline.
“Hold up,” Tony blurted, half-standing, camcorder hovering like a timid bird. “Can I—like—just… they gon’ want to show their grandkids the drip.”
Ro shot him a look that would have melted the film if it wasn’t plastic. “Tap,” he reminded, eyebrows up.
Tony slapped his own shoulder twice in a frantic little signal. “Tap! Tap!” He pointed at Ro’s chest and then at me, then at the camcorder red light still off. “Y’all say the part.”
Ro’s smile broke a little at the corner—boyish, yet beautiful—and then he leaned his forehead to mine. “You my wife,” he breathed, the words slipping out like a life raft thrown with perfect aim.
“You my husband,” I returned, vision stinging, voice catching on a laugh and a sob that had decided to share a throat.
The fluorescents flickered once—just once—like heaven blinked. The preacher chuckled under his breath, the sound full of ten thousand baby dedications and three too many funerals. “You may seal it,” he invited, not showy—just right.
Ro cupped my face like it was the only thing he owned that mattered, thumbs pressing the corners of my mouth as if joy were a dangerous substance best handled with care.
The kiss wasn’t long. It was deep. It tasted like winter mints and courage, like bike oil and midnight promises, like every fast I’d ever failed, and every prayer God answered anyway.
When our mouths parted, our foreheads stayed, and our breath pooled in the small, electric space between two people who had finally put down their stubbornness and picked up a yoke with two necks.
From the side door, a cough scraped the air and a shadow leaned into the sanctuary that did not belong to innocence.
Leather creaked; a lighter clicked; the brief flare lit a face I had seen my whole childhood in smiles and sermons and warnings: Sal Zore.
He didn’t step in proper—just enough for the smoke to write his presence on the air like a signature nobody forged.
His eyes tracked Ro, then me, then the rings, then drifted to the preacher as if to ask whether he had the spine to bless a thing this messy.
“You gon’ stand on that?” Sal rasped, voice wrapped in gravel, not addressing the room—addressing Ro the way men address men when affection wears steel. “You gon’ keep what you just promised when the block starts collecting?”
Ro didn’t break our small press of foreheads; he only turned his eyes, and they darkened like a sky that had decided yes to thunder. “On everything,” he growled, no theater, just oath. “On name. On blood.”
Sal dragged smoke and killed it between his fingers like a habit he’d tried to quit and failed.
“Make sure your mouth ain’t writing checks your brothers’ bodies gotta cash,” he warned, then hooked a nod toward the preacher that somehow contained respect and threat and love.
He ghosted back through the side door like a man who only visits churches to make sure God still knows his address.
Jinx exhaled in the corner like he’d been holding air for both of us. “Clock on y’all,” he murmured, sliding the tool roll back under his arm. “You need to bounce before the liquor store starts leaking police.”
“Copy that,” Tony chimed, popping to his feet, red light finally blinking to life as he panned toward the GOD CAN DO IT sign like a cinematographer who knew symbolism when it smacked him with a tambourine.
“I got y’all walking out slow-mo like a Hype Williams video. Y’all gon’ be legendary in silence.”
The preacher closed the Bible with a sound I’ll hear in my bones when I’m ninety. “By the power vested in me by the God who ain’t ever lost a case,” he announced, warmth rolling back into his tired frame like a second wind, “I pronounce you husband and wife. Go in peace; come back with testimony.”
Ro slipped my ring hand onto his chest like he was docking a boat in a safe harbor. “We locked,” he whispered, a grin trying to fight its way onto his face and losing to awe.
“We kept.” I breathed, and those two words wrapped themselves around each other like ropes that had finally found their knot.
We stepped into the night. The liquor store neon gave us bad haloes, but I took them—ratchet light still shines.
The pawn shop’s sign flickered like it wanted to clap.
Ro handed me my helmet like a crown, then palmed my cheek for one more stolen taste of what we had just made legal in the eyes that count.
Tony hovered behind the glass, camcorder a shy eye, recording the walk to our bikes like it was the kind of footage you bury in a glove box next to old tax receipts and a spare Timberland lace.
Engines woke the block again—my Ninja with a silky hum that didn’t need to brag, his Yamaha R1 with the deeper throat that makes dogs across the street reconsider their choices.
Jinx drifted to the curb and tapped my tank with two knuckles, the small benediction of men who worship at altars made of gas and chrome.
“Idle’s right,” he affirmed, chin lifting a hair. “She’ll carry you.”
“She already do.” I smiled, hazel eyes catching every dumb neon and making it look expensive.