Chapter 10
I didn’t notice I was slipping at first.
That was the part that bothered me.
I’d spent so much of my life managing load-bearing shit that fatigue just became another variable like distance, or risk, or temperature. Something you factored in and then ignored.
But that night, it caught up with me.
We were in the same third-floor study room in the engineering building.
The one with the busted camera in the corner and the conveniently “malfunctioning” card reader I’d paid a quiet janitor a hundred dollars to overlook.
We’d been there so much that our scent probably lived in the carpet by now—paper, ink, nicotine, and the faint tang of cologne and stress.
Maps and printouts were spread across the table. My handwriting threaded through Zayden’s notes, neat and precise even though my hands were starting to shake from too much caffeine and not enough sleep.
I was staring at a campus map focused on the west lot, overflow lot, and the delivery route, when his voice cut through the hum of the fluorescent lights.
“You've been lookin’ at that same block for five minutes, YaYa.”
I blinked.
“I’m recalculating,” I said automatically.
“Nah,” he said. “You're stuck.”
That made me look up.
Zayden sat across from me, chair leaned back just enough to piss off any professor who still believed they had authority on this campus. His eyes were on me, not the map. That was the part that made my skin prickle.
“I don’t get stuck,” I said.
“You do when you're tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
That lie tasted like burnt sugar on my tongue.
His mouth tugged at the corner, not quite a smile. “You lyin’ to you or me?”
I clicked my pen harder than necessary. “You wanna micromanage, or you wanna listen while I explain why this route doesn’t work anymore?”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
Instead, he pushed his chair back and came around the table. He didn’t crowd me; he wasn’t stupid. He just pulled out the chair beside mine and sat, long legs taking up more space than they needed, warmth radiating off his body in waves.
“Move,” he said quietly.
I shifted the map toward him; his arm brushed mine. My nerves went on high alert like this was a threat situation when it was just proximity.
He glanced down, eyes flicking over routes, timings, and margins. His finger tapped one intersection.
“You already solved this,” he said. “You adjusted it yesterday.”
“I was revisiting.”
“Kenya.” His tone sharpened just enough to cut through my defenses. “You double-check. You don’t triple-check unless something's off.”
“It is off,” I snapped. “We expanded volume. We added three new runners. Campus security tightened patrols on the north side. The system is heavier, the environment is different, and if I don’t adjust the math properly, somebody ends up in cuffs or a casket. So yeah, I triple-check.”
He let me finish. Let the words hang between us. Then he nodded slowly.
“I hear all that,” he said. “But that’s not the only reason you starin’ at the same damn square.”
My jaw tightened. “You think you know me that well now?”
“Yeah,” he said simply. “I do.”
I hated how my chest reacted to that. I felt a stupid little ache, like something inside me clenched around the truth of it.
He shifted in his chair, angling his body toward me fully.
“You don’t ever slow down unless something scares you,” he said. “You don’t call it fear, ‘cause you think that’s some weak shit. You call it ‘margin of error.’ You call it ‘planning.’ But I see it, lil’ mama. You tense as fuck.”
I forced myself to meet his gaze. “You think I’m scared?”
“I think you finally realize how much you hold,” he said. “And that shit can feel heavy.”
The room felt smaller suddenly.
I hated being seen. Not the surface-level attention I got from thirsty boys and jealous girls. I hated being seen in the way Zayden was looking at me, as if he was reading the part of the graph nobody was supposed to notice.
“I don’t have time to be scared,” I said.
He nodded once. “Yeah. That’s your problem.”
I dropped my pen and sat back, shoulders stiff.
“What do you want from me right now, Zay? You want me to admit I’m exhausted?
That I’ve been juggling so much shit, I don’t remember the last time I slept more than three hours.
That if I fuck this up, my sister’s future, the money for my brother’s appeal, and your whole operation gets crushed under white folks’ ‘zero tolerance policy’? ”
I laughed, sharply. “Congratulations. You're right. I’m tired. I’m terrified. And I can’t stop.”
His eyes softened. “You can, though.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees.
“If you fall apart for five minutes, the world doesn’t end, Kenya.
Product still moves. Money still hits. My name still holds weight.
X is still my brother. Your sister still looks at you like you hung the fuckin’ moon.
The math doesn’t evaporate ‘cause you exhaled.”
I swallowed. My throat felt thick.
“That’s not how it worked in my house,” I said quietly.
It slipped out before I could stop it.
He went still.
“How does it work in your house?” he asked.
I didn’t talk about home. I talked about numbers, systems, and risk.
I didn’t talk about how my mother’s eyes sliced me open every time I walked through the door.
How I felt like an intruder in my own family.
How my father tried to balance what couldn’t be balanced, and my brother got thrown away like a cautionary tale.
“You already know,” I said, voice flat. “You've seen enough to guess.”
“That ain’t the same as you sayin’ it.”
A bitter smile twisted my mouth. “They expect me to hold shit. To fix shit. To be strong enough to take the hits and quiet enough not to make it about me. If I stop for five minutes, everything I’m holding drops. That’s all.”
He watched me as if every word mattered.
“You know what I think?” he asked.
“No.”
“I think you holdin’ shit you ain’t supposed to be carryin’ by yourself,” he said. “And I think you scared to give anybody else a grip ‘cause you don’t trust muthafuckas not to fumble.”
Silence stretched out between us.
He wasn’t wrong.
That pissed me off.
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“I might not understand your house,” he replied. “But I understand weight. I understand bein’ the one who always has to be ready so everybody else gets to be soft.”
His voice was rougher now, something old and familiar in it.
“You don’t even sit in chairs right. You sit on the edge like you're ready to jump. Like rest is a luxury you gotta earn with blood.”
My eyes burned.
I blinked hard.
“You shouldn’t say shit like that,” I muttered.
“Why?”
“Because I might believe you,” I said. “And if I believe you, I might relax. And if I relax, I might miss something.”
He shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving my face.
“Or,” he said, “if you relax, you might breathe. And then you might see we ain’t just standin’ on what you build by yourself. We standin’ in this together.”
The words landed somewhere deep.
Too deep.
“You can’t promise me that,” I whispered.
“I already did,” he said. “You just ain’t noticed.”
I stood up suddenly, the chair scraping harshly against the floor.
“We should call it a night,” I said. “It’s late.”
He rose too, towering over me.
“You runnin’,” he said.
“Always,” I shot back. “That’s why I’m still alive.”
We walked out of the engineering building together.
In the stairwell, our footsteps echoed. The campus was hushed. Outside, the air was cold enough to sting my lungs.
We stopped by my car.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“For letting me crack without making it a thing.”
His mouth curved slightly. “Newsflash, YaYa, it is a thing.”
“I mean, without weaponizing it,” I corrected.
He nodded once. “I don’t ever use your truth against you.”
My chest did that stupid ache again.
“Zay,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“You can’t look at me like that,” I said. “Like I’m… breakable.”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I see.”
“What do you see then?”
“Structural integrity,” he said. “With stress fractures.”
I rolled my eyes even as my lips twitched. “Leave it to your ass to make jokes sound like a construction site.”
I opened the door, hand on the handle.
“Zay?”
He exhaled. “Yeah, lil’ mama?”
“I’m not used to people seeing me and still staying,” I said quietly.
He held my gaze, all the bullshit stripped away for a second.
“Get used to it,” he said.
I got in the car before I could ask what the hell that meant.
I drove home with my fingers tight around the steering wheel, the streetlights washing everything in orange and shadow.
I told myself the trembling in my hands was just adrenaline.
But deep down, I knew better.
Something had shifted.
Not in the plan but in me.
And that kind of shift was the most dangerous variable of all.