Chapter 4 #2
“Pretty much.” Giani shrugged, but emotion still thickened her voice.
“You scared the fuck outta me, Koko. One minute we was together, and then the next, I’m getting a phone call saying—” she stopped talking.
“You know what? Let’s not get into that right now.
My cousin is having a party. Let’s have fun and catch up later. Is that cool?”
“Yeah, that’s cool,” I replied with a shudder, glad for the change in topic.
I didn’t want to think about what happened to me right now. It would only make my paranoia worse, and I was barely hanging on by a thread.
Tiffany broke the tension first. “Well, shit,” she muttered. “This turned emotional as hell.”
That earned a small laugh out of Giani, and a reluctant smile tugged at my mouth too. Then Giani slid her arm through mine naturally, like she’d done it a thousand times before.
“You not about to disappear on me again now that I found you,” she said. “Matter fact, your ass sitting with me the rest of the night.”
“Long as you don’t have me in the middle of all this,” I said, glancing around at the crowd.
Giani laughed. “Girl, you used to love this kinda shit.”
“Did I?” I asked before I could stop myself.
The question softened her expression for a second.
“Hell yeah,” she replied. “Couldn’t keep your ass in the house.”
Right when I was about to tell her that I didn’t want to sit with the crowd, a man yelled, “Tiffany, you and yo’ people bring y’all fine-asses over here.”
“Aight, bae.” Tiffany blushed and walked away, having forgotten about us that fast.
I couldn’t blame her. I was sure my man made me forget about everybody and everything, too.
“Want me to get you anything before I go?” Tink asked, looking from me to Giani and back at me again.
I was so consumed with everything going on around me that I wasn’t paying attention to him, still standing there.
“Nah. I’m okay,” I said, brandishing another tight smile.
“Sureeeee. Just make sure you find me if you need me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Satisfied with my answer, Tink drifted away, but I stayed where I was, still taking everything in.
Everything seemed cool, but it didn’t stop the anxiety from pressing down on my shoulders.
“You wanna eat?” Giani asked, pointing at the tables. “The food is good as hell. My Aunt Minnie can cook her ass off.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the spot she pointed to and saw an older woman with a polite smile, reaching for a plate.
“Yeah,” I said, stepping forward.
The food smelled too good. Might as well act as if I belonged there.
Even if I didn’t feel like it.
The woman handed me a plate and started loading it before I could tell her what I wanted.
“I’m giving you a little bit of everything,” she said, and it wasn’t up for discussion.
She added a scoop of potato salad and a helping of baked beans before placing a piece of chicken on the plate, the grill marks still running across it. Then she set a rib on top.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You welcome, baby,” she replied, reaching for the next plate.
I stepped to the side, balancing the food in my hand while I looked for somewhere to stand that wouldn’t put me in the middle of everything, but there wasn’t one. Every space was filled to capacity. I wanted no parts of that.
“You still do that,” Giani said suddenly.
I looked over at her. “What?”
“Separate yourself from everybody when you start getting overwhelmed.” She smiled faintly. “Booda used to hate that shit.”
The mention of his name made my chest twist. Before I could respond, Giani nodded toward the building.
“Come on. We can sit over there.”
Turning around, I walked toward the building and took a seat on the steps where I could see everything and everyone. Giani sat beside me, close enough for our shoulders to brush.
Sitting here was perfect. If something were off, I’d catch it before it got too close. Though everything looked normal, I still didn’t trust it. I kept my eyes moving, scanning faces, windows, parked cars, anything that could hide somebody watching me.
“You still doin’ that too,” Giani murmured.
I looked at her again.
“Watchin’ everybody,” she explained quietly. “You never liked sittin’ with your back to people.”
She was right. I’d been doing it the entire night.
Even without my memories, parts of me were still moving on instinct, but none of it was new to Giani. She spoke about those habits like she’d seen them a hundred times before. That should’ve scared me, but instead, it made me feel connected to her.
For the first time since waking up in that hospital, I wasn’t sitting beside a complete stranger pretending to know me. I was sitting next to someone who actually did.
“You can have a piece of my love (Oh, oh, baby).”
The song switched, and Piece of My Love by Guy blasted from the speakers.
“Ooooh, this is my shit,” Giani laughed as she set her plate down and stood.
She closed her eyes, her hips swaying from side to side, when a man walked over and grabbed her hand.
“Come dance with me,” he said, pulling her toward him.
Giani laughed and went willingly, relaxing against him as he wrapped an arm around her waist and guided her into the crowd.
I watched their bodies sway to the beat as everyone around them laughed, drank, and sang along. The way she looked at him caught me off guard. There was comfort in her eyes, trust, too.
Watching them stirred up a feeling so deep and familiar that it almost hurt. For a second, I found myself wondering if someone had ever looked at me that way before. If I had ever been in love enough to forget everything around me and just exist inside a moment with another person.
Then my vision blurred. One moment I was sitting on the steps watching Giani dance, and the next I was somewhere completely different.
A garden.
Roses climbed a white trellis, their petals deep crimson against the morning light. The air smelled like them, sweet and heady, mixed with that same cologne that always made my knees weak.
Booda was here, standing at the center of everything, like gravity. It was his birthday, and I was throwing him a party.
He wore black slacks and a white dress shirt, collar open and sleeves rolled up. He seemed different in that moment, softer but still just as strong. His eyes were gentle in a way I hadn’t seen before, and when he looked at me, I felt like I was the only person that mattered.
The yard was crowded with people in suits and dresses. Some I loved, some I just put up with, and some I hadn’t seen in years. They were all laughing and drinking under the warm lights of an evening I had created from scratch.
“Come here,” he said, extending his hand.
I walked toward him, my bare feet sinking into the soft grass. The garden felt as if it were outside of time, holding us in a moment that was both impossible and meant to be.
When he took my hand, his touch sent a jolt through me and made me catch my breath. He pulled me close, his other hand on my waist, and we swayed together to music I couldn’t hear but could feel deep inside.
“I love you,” he whispered against my temple. “You know that, right?”
I nodded, unable to find words big enough for what I felt right then. Everything was perfect. He was perfect. We were perfect.
Booda pulled back to look at me, moving his hand from my waist to my back and holding me closer. He searched my eyes for something, and whatever he saw seemed to make him happy.
“Then marry me,” he said, and the world stopped.
Not figuratively either. Everything actually stopped. The music I couldn’t hear went silent. The people around us froze mid-laugh, mid-sip, mid-movement. Even the wind died, leaving the roses perfectly still.
I stared at him, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might break through my ribs.
"What?" I whispered, feeling joy spread through every part of me.
Booda lowered himself to one knee, his eyes finding mine like they always did as he took my hand and held it, his thumb moving over my skin.
“I never been the type to do all this,” he admitted, a small smile pulling at his lips. “But you deserve the world. You been solid with me from the start. Whether I was on top of the world or lost it all and was tryna get back on my feet, you still chose me.”
His voice quivered as tears filled his eyes.
“Nobody ever held me down the way you do, and I don’t want nobody else waking up next to me, arguing with me, laughing with me… building anything with me. Just you. So, you gon’ let me make you my wife or what?”
The world unfroze all at once. The music rushed back in, swelling around us like a tide.
The guests erupted in cheers that I could barely hear over the roaring in my ears.
Booda slipped a ring onto my finger, one I hadn’t seen him pull out, and the diamond caught the light, throwing rainbows across my skin.
The garden blurred into streaks of color, green and red and gold, and I was laughing, really laughing, from somewhere deep inside me that I thought had died a long time ago.
When he set me down, he kissed me, and it tasted like promises and forever. His hands tangled in my hair, and I held onto his shirt as if I let go, he might vanish.
But then his lips were gone, and so was he.
My body went rigid. The garden bled out of color, the roses going gray first, then the grass, then the sky, until there was nothing left but dark water rising fast around my ankles, my waist, my throat.
I clawed for something to hold onto, but my hands found nothing, just cold and pressure and the sound of my own pulse swallowing everything else.
Then the water was gone too, and I was back on the porch, gripping the plate in my lap so hard it cracked down the middle.
Nothing had changed. The music kept playing.
People were still laughing, swaying, and leaning into each other under the string lights while I sat there, feeling like my chest was collapsing with every breath.
My lungs worked too hard for how still I was, and the streetlights now had a halo.
Everything looked like it was playing out through a foggy window.
I pressed my lips together, battling the urge to cry. Why did these memories feel like fresh wounds? It was as if each one opened a door to a pain I thought I'd locked away.
I stood up, turned, and walked through the breezeway, focused on getting away before anyone noticed something was off with me.