6. Chapter 3 | Dom
Dom woke to silence, which meant she'd actually slept.
That was rare. Most nights she lay awake doing math — bills and bail funds and how many fights until something broke that couldn't be fixed. Most nights her body hurt too much to find a comfortable position, ribs screaming every time she shifted.
But she'd slept. Four, maybe five hours straight. The wrapping was tight and even, better than she'd have done herself, and her ribs had quit their screaming long enough for her body to remember rest.
She sat up slowly, testing herself. The bruising was worse today, dark splotches spreading across her left side, every breath still a negotiation. Her knuckles were swollen, the left hand twice its normal size. She flexed her fingers experimentally. Pain shot up her arm.
Yeah. Probably fractured.
Dom looked at the forty-five dollars on her nightstand. Hadn't been worth it. It hardly ever was these days, but Claudette kept booking her new fights, and Dom had never once managed to say no.
Fifteen of that would go to the doctor. Ten to CJ — new pencils, shoes he needed and hadn't asked for. Five for the bail fund.
That didn't leave much for bills and food and incidentals. It was fine, though. CJ needed to eat more than she did anyway. Growing boy, all elbows and appetite.
Dom pulled on a clean undershirt and suspenders. The motion tugged at her ribs, and she breathed through it, slow and deliberate.
She moved quietly through the hall. Papa Louie's door was closed, which was normal — he'd slept that way as long as Dom could remember, nocturnal as a cat, always the last one to leave the bar at closing.
CJ's room was across the hall. The second floor had four rooms — Dom's, CJ's, Papa Louie's at the far end, and the room next to his that had been empty until yesterday.
Until Elle moved in.
Dom had met her for maybe forty-five minutes total. In the dark. While bleeding on the hallway floor. And yet she'd fallen asleep thinking about her, which was inconvenient, and woken up thinking about her, which was worse.
She moved like a dancer — every gesture placed, nothing wasted.
Dom knew that face from somewhere, and it nagged at her like a half-remembered song.
One of those Jet beauties, maybe — the magazine ran one every issue, a new "Beauty of the Week," always billed as an eligible single, like the point was for some man out there to see her photo and call the editors.
Swimsuit shots mostly, sometimes a sundress, always that same smile, warm and careful in equal measure.
Dom read Jet for the real reasons — the news, the culture, everything happening to Black folks that the white papers wouldn't touch — but she wasn't above lingering on those pages too.
She'd torn a few out over the years and kept them folded in her nightstand drawer, for the nights nobody was around to see what she did with them. She wasn't ashamed of it.
Much.
She let it go. It would come to her. Though if she was being honest with herself, which she wasn't, not this early — the Jet theory didn't quite sit right either. It was just the nearest thing she had to explain a face that felt like it should mean something.
Dom went to the kitchen. Coffee was the first order of business, always was.
She measured the grounds with the care of someone conducting a small and serious ritual — the chicory, the cinnamon stick from the jar by the stove, the water poured slow, the pot set on the burner while she stood over it like a sentinel.
Papa Louie had taught her: real chicory, real cinnamon, cooked on the stove the way his mother had done it and her mother before that.
Every shortcut ruined it, and Dom had opinions about good coffee she wasn't quiet about.
She made grits and eggs while it brewed, listening to it work, half her attention on the hallway.
The coffee finished. She poured herself a cup, lifted it, breathed it in before she sipped, and winced when the heat found the split in her lip she'd managed to forget about.
Then footsteps in the hallway, light and hesitant.
Dom set her cup down. Picked it back up. Set it down again.
Elle appeared in the doorway — Dom had half convinced herself she'd imagined the whole thing, but there she was.
"Morning," Dom said, and it came out rough.
"I didn't know if you'd be up," Elle said, hovering in the doorway, "or if you slept late like Louie."
"Can't sleep late when your ribs are cracked."
"Right." She still hadn't come all the way in. "I can go—"
"You want coffee?"
That stopped her. "Yes. Please."
Dom poured a second cup and slid it across the counter, then pushed the plate of grits and eggs toward her. "I made extra."
Elle sat slowly, wrapping both hands around the mug, and breathed in the chicory smell with her eyes closed. "Thank you," she said quietly. Dom took her own plate and sat one stool away; for a while they just ate.
Elle's hands stayed wrapped around the mug, careful, like she expected it to be taken from her. When she finally sipped it, her expression stilled.
"This is extraordinary," she said.
Dom watched her.
"The coffee." Elle glanced down at the mug, recalibrating. "What is that, cinnamon?"
"Chicory and cinnamon. I brew it on the stove." Dom took another sip, considered. "Most people do it wrong."
"How do they do it wrong?"
"They try to cheat and use a percolator."
Elle looked at her mug with new respect. "I've had coffee my whole life," she said, "and I don't think I've actually had coffee."
The corner of Dom's mouth moved. "No. You probably haven't."
They settled back into silence, but it felt different now. Easier.
Dom snuck a glance. That face — one of the Jet beauties folded away in her drawer, maybe. She still couldn't place it.
Elle wasn't looking at Dom's face, though. She was looking at Dom's arms, the wrap of muscle in her forearms, the bruised knuckles, the breadth of her shoulders under the thin undershirt. Not the way you looked at someone's injuries. The other way.
Dom knew that look. Had spent years learning to read that split second on a woman's face when she wanted something she wasn't supposed to say aloud — women like that kept it careful, kept it moving, never let it land too long.
She was as alert to it as she was to an opponent's fists in the ring, and right now Elle Brown was looking, and Dom let her.
She set her coffee cup down slowly, then reached for the pot she didn't need, just to let the motion stretch the muscle in her forearm. Taking her time. Just to see what would happen.
A flush moved up Elle's neck, fast and unmistakable, and she looked away quickly.
Dom didn't. She let the silence sit between them, small and charged, and didn't rescue Elle from it.
"You should ice those ribs," Elle said, her voice smaller than before.
"I'm fine." A small smile. "Your wrapping helped."
Elle was quiet a beat, then, softer: "I'm glad."
A lock fumbled downstairs. The front door creaked open. Elle's eyebrow rose, then frantic footsteps galloped up the stairs, and Dom's shoulders dropped before she even saw him.
CJ burst through the door, overnight bag swinging, already talking.
He'd just turned fifteen but looked younger — thin and disheveled, curls loose and going every direction, the same close cut as Dom's but softer, a rough draft of it.
"I spent the night with Auntie Oretha and Mama Virgie, before you say anything—"
"You should have called."
"I didn't think you'd mind—"
"I mind."
"Dom—"
"I mind, CJ."
He stopped, dropping the bag. He scanned her quickly, a practiced motion she'd taught him — the wrapping, bruised knuckles, the set of her jaw. Fast, quiet, filed away.
"You were fighting," he said, and then, knowing better than to leave it there, "did you win?"
Dom gave him a look.
"Right." He glanced at Elle, then back at Dom, then at Elle again.
"CJ." Dom's voice went flat — a reminder. "We have a guest."
He straightened. "Sorry. Hi. I'm CJ."
"Elle. It's nice to meet you."
"Elle's taking the spare room," Dom said. "She'll be helping Papa Louie at the bar."
CJ nodded, absorbing this with the ease of someone used to the house expanding and contracting around him, already moving toward the hallway. "Okay. I gotta shower — I smell like Mama Virgie's couch."
He disappeared down the hall. A moment later, pipes groaned to life.
Elle looked at her coffee, then, carefully: "Is that your...?"
"That's my boy."
Elle nodded slowly, doing the math — the age, the numbers, trying to work out how Dom had ended up with a fifteen-year-old.
"He came to me a few years ago," Dom said. "He's mine."
Elle looked down at her mug, her face softening.
The pipes shuddered off. CJ reappeared, fresh shirt, bag repacked, pencil in hand.
"I gotta go."
"You didn't eat," Dom said.
"That's kind of the point. I'm going to a lunch counter."
Dom shot him a look.
"Well, I thought it was funny," he said, shrugging.
"Where are you going, exactly?" Elle asked.
Both turned to look at her.
"The sit-in," CJ said. "Canal Street lunch counter. I go every day — we're not stopping until they desegregate." He headed for the stairs.
"Got your bail card?" Dom called after him.
He stopped, patted his shirt pocket, then his chest, then his back pocket, his face falling. "Be right back." He galloped off down the hall.
Elle looked at Dom. "Bail card?"
"For when they arrest him."
Elle set her cup down slowly. "He's fifteen."
"Yes."
CJ reappeared, bail card in hand, already moving, grabbing a piece of bread off the counter on his way past. "You could come with me," he said, mouth already full.
"You know Oretha doesn't want me there."
He stopped chewing. "She does, though. She talks about you all the time — like, all the time, Dom. It's actually kind of a lot."
"CJ—"
"She says if you're not actively fighting against oppression, then you're complicit in it." He said it with the fluency of someone who'd heard it many times and believed every word.
"She put those words in your mouth."
"Does it matter who put the words in my mouth if the words are true?"
"They're not true. I'm not complicit in the oppression — I'm fighting against it." Dom reached into her wallet and held out five dollars. "Give that to Oretha."
"Give it to her yourself." He didn't take it. "Come on. What else are you doing today?"
Dom looked at him. He looked back, waiting her out.
Elle sat very still on her stool, watching the two of them, unsure if she was allowed to.
"I'll come," she said finally. "For a little while. My shift doesn't start until later."
CJ grinned and pumped his fist.
"Don't drag her into this," Dom said.
"I didn't! She volunteered!"
"He didn't drag me," Elle said, laughing softly. "I volunteered."
Dom looked between them — CJ trying hard not to smile, Elle studying her coffee cup with great composure.
"I mind," she said, to no one in particular.
CJ grinned wider, kissed the top of her head before she could stop him, and was gone, the front door banging shut behind him.
Elle stood. "Let me get ready," she said, and headed for the stairs.
Dom stood alone in Papa Louie's kitchen with her coffee gone cold and five dollars still in her hand for Oretha. Upstairs she could hear CJ and Elle banging around, getting ready to head off into a protest — one a veteran, the other about to see for the first time exactly what it cost.
She sighed, and went to get dressed for it too.