Chapter 21
chapter twenty-one
patrice
I spent the five-minute drive to the building between trying to calm myself and figuring out a way to have a conversation with Easton about what he had done without losing my shit on him. I hated feeling like I did, humiliated and scared, so fucking scared.
I pulled into my parking spot, feeling like my head could snap right off my neck from the tension.
I didn’t want to blow up, take things out on Easton.
I didn’t want to say things that I could never take back.
I thought of the sweet moment we’d just had by our cars, and it felt like it had happened to someone else.
I opened the door and saw him getting out of his car, which he parked on the spot nearest the elevator. As he hurried over to me, I took one breath, then another.
“Are you all right?”
I turned and leaned against my driver door as he stood just a few feet away.
Still trying to breathe through the jumble of emotions of the last few minutes.
I decided to stay here, to talk to him while we were out in an open space.
A place where I’d have to keep my voice down, where I’d have an easier time walking away.
I looked down at my feet as I thought of what to say. Of how to explain to Easton that what he’d done was not even remotely all right. When I finally looked up, I could see the flatness of his mouth, the way his fists were shoved in his coat, that he knew things were not okay.
“You’ve been telling me for weeks now to be patient, that things are just so slow when it comes to these things.
Not a public statement, not a word to the community that this was not okay, that they were right to be scared.
Your boss didn’t, you didn’t.” With every word I said, Easton got paler, his eyes downcast, and something in me almost wanted to hurt him.
When I spoke again, my voice sounded so fucking tired.
“But the minute these stops come to your door, you have it taken care of it in three minutes.”
He stepped toward me with a protest in his mouth, but I held up my hand.
I kept wondering why I wasn’t more heated, why the only thing I felt right now was exhaustion. “I want you to tell me, Easton. Tell me how it makes sense to let those stops go on for months now without taking any kind of position, when it was other people’s lovers or parents or kids.”
My voice broke then, and I had to take a deep breath, to finish saying this shit, because the shock from everything that had gone down in the last hour was starting to wear off and I was shaking.
“I can’t be that person, Easton. I can’t be the one for whom the rules are broken, while every other fucker that looks like me has to just live with it. ”
His mouth twisted then and he took a step, closing the space between us.
“That is not what that was, Patrice,” he said, desperation clear in his voice.
“It’s not that I don’t care about what happened to other people.
I know now how wrong it was for us to stay silent, to not reassure the community.
” He fisted the hand he’d been running through his hair.
“I freaked out, okay. I got scared. I get that I may seem hypocritical—”
I scoffed and leaned my head back, starting to feel pissed off. “May seem hypocritical, Easton?”
“Patrice—”
“No. That’s the kind of energy you need to have for every single person that is stopped in this town and doesn’t have a boyfriend with the pull to help him out.
That’s not how it works. You know what it takes to make this better for everyone?
Sacrifices. Your boss won’t say anything because she can’t piss off the police, the sheriff can’t do it because he already lost some votes.
Meanwhile black and brown people in this town go on thinking the people who are supposed to keep them safe just don’t care.
You knew all along that what was happening was dangerous. ”
He hung his head then. What else was there to say?
I wanted to touch him one last time, to run my fingers over those lips one more time. “You remember when you told me that you could go your whole life thinking about the real history of this country?”
He gave a sharp nod in response, his arms crossed tightly against his chest. “We’re not just learning history, we’re making it, too. You can’t just be brave when you’ve secured yourself a soft landing or without making any of your friends uncomfortable.”
“Does anyone get a second chance with you? Or is everything black and white, Patrice?”
I laughed again, pushing off the car. “That may be, Easton, but I also don’t have the luxury of navigating in the grays. I won’t be anybody’s token, and I won’t let you use our relationship as your excuse to not do better.”
I walked away and headed to the elevators, but before I took two steps, he was hot on my heels.
“Oh no you fucking don’t,” he gritted out, getting into the elevator with me.
I pushed the button for my floor and put in the special access code for him.
And almost laughed about the symbolism in that small detail.
The fact that Easton had the kind of life where one needed a special code to get to him.
As the elevator doors closed, he got right back in my face. “I’m not going to beg you, Patrice, because I know that there’s nothing I can say that you won’t turn into another self-righteous reason to condemn me and then yourself for caring about me.”
His eyes were a dark green now and blazing, to anyone else, he would’ve looked angry, but I could see that he was hurting.
“I fucked up. I should’ve done better, I should’ve been better.
I don’t have a do-over, and I have to live with that.
” He shook his head as the elevator stopped on my floor.
“But there was never going to be a way for me to win when it came to us.”
I stood there not knowing what to say, too tired to try.
“Before we even really begun you’d already decided that I was going to disappoint you. Now I have. I hope your sanctimoniousness keeps you warm at night, because I’m done with begging you to see me as anything other than a vice you can’t seem to break.”
With that, he pushed past me and walked out of the elevator, but before taking the stairs to his place, he turned back to look at me, and in a strangled voice said, “You’re so much stronger than I am, Patrice, because I would never put my convictions ahead of the people I love.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was being unfair, but before I could, he pulled the door open and took the steps up to his place.
When I got to my apartment, I closed my eyes tight and tried to breathe through the tears that were threatening to spill. I kept repeating under my breath, “this is for the best, this is for the best, this is for the best.”
Easton needed someone who could be with him without reservation, who could love him without conflicts or guilt.
I didn’t know if I could ever be that man.
Easton
“Are you all right?” Pri asked, the naked concern in her voice making me grimace.
I sighed as I tried to sit up on my bed, my muscles achy from lack of use. My head still groggy from all the sleeping I’d done. I debated on what to say but in the end decided I didn’t have it in me to act like I wasn’t wrecked.
“No,” I croaked, glancing up at the clock on the wall, which was telling me I’d been in bed for almost fifteen hours.
“Did something happen with you and Patrice? I called him after I read his thread about the stop, but he didn’t pick up. Just texted back ‘I’m fine.’ Like the broody asshole he is.”
She sighed again and I could tell she was trying to gauge how much to push. “I didn’t even bother asking him how you were doing, because those tweets about the stop were at an eleven, so I figured at the very least you and him got into something.”
I scoffed at that major understatement and slumped against the headboard, completely at a loss about how to make things right with Patrice.
Because no matter how much I hedged, he had been right about me.
I’d chosen to let an issue, that at some point would end in a tragedy, slide until it came right to my door. Because it would piss people off.
I swallowed hard thinking about the thread, of what he’d written about the humiliation he felt last night, the things I never got to hear. I opened my photo app and pulled up the screenshot with the tweet that had almost made me weep for him.
That feeling that no matter what I do, how hard I work, how far I climb… It can all be taken away in a moment.
No matter how much I tried to act like Patrice overreacted to my calling Day last night, I understood that it felt like I was adding insult to injury. “He ended things last night. After.”
“What? Why?” Pris asked, sounding exasperated. She let out a long, harsh breath. “Patrice cannot be so fucking unreasonable that he’s blaming you for this?” I appreciated her outrage, but I didn’t have the energy to be mad.
I swallowed past the lump in my throat and confessed to Priscilla. “Patrice got pissed because I reached out to Day to call off the deputy who stopped him.” Pri gasped at that, not knowing it was so much worse.
“That’s not the worst part. I’ve been tiptoeing around all these stops that have been happening in town. There was one earlier this week even.”
“But that’s not just on you to figure out, Easton,” Pri said in my defense, and I smiled at her loyalty.
“It’s not to a degree, but it at least warranted some kind of public acknowledgement from us, and I didn’t say a word. But when my boyfriend got stopped, l literally called on the cavalry. Like Patrice said, it’s hypocritical.”
I could almost hear Pri thinking on the other end of the call. “I can see how he could be upset, but things had been going well. Right?”
I wanted to curl under the covers and not come out until I’d literally slept away all my feelings.
“We were doing great.” I ran my hand over the satin-covered pillowcase that still had the imprint of Patrice’s head.
The smell of coconut oil still lingering on the smooth surface.
“I don’t know how to fix this, Pri. Patrice wants perfection, for every person in his life to interpret things the way he thinks they should and anything beyond that is betrayal.
I can’t live up to that. I need him to be able to love me with the flaws I have.
I can’t do with Patrice what I had to with my parents my whole life. ”
“Fuck no.” Pri’s outrage made a tired smile break out on my face. “Patrice needs to get his head out of his ass, for real.” She let out a long breath, deflated by the conversation. “Babe, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too, but I’m not going to beg Patrice. I own that I fucked up, and I will make it right, but I can’t be in a relationship where I’m constantly one mistake from being iced out.”
“He’ll come around. This time he has something big enough to lose.”
I sighed again, getting up to go look down on the sidewalk behind the building. It was already getting dark.
“I’m not going to pretend I won’t open the door if he comes here with an olive branch, but I can’t keep bending myself to keep Patrice appeased. I have some things I need to take care of and for now I’ll put my energy on that.”
“Okay babe, that’s good. Put that energy elsewhere. If you do need me to come up there, just call, all right? I’m pretty sure I can still kick his ass like I did when we were kids.”
I laughed at that and kept my attention on the sidewalk as I saw a figure that looked a lot like the man I loved coming closer to the building, “Thanks, Pri.”
We ended the call as I saw Patrice finally get to the door at the back of the building.
Before he went in, he stepped back and looked right up at where I was.
Seeing him still made my stomach flip, even as hopeless as things felt right now.
He was in a black parka, his locs unbound and hanging down his back.
He looked as stark and as lonely as I felt.
Our eyes locked for a few breaths, and I saw the same regret in him that I’d been swimming in since last night.
I wanted to lift my hand in a wave or call for him, but I just stood there until he finally dipped his head and walked inside.