Chapter 20 Cross Currents
Chapter twenty
Cross Currents
The staff didn’t play about their water. Before we could even catch a glimpse of the cavern they marched us over to a row of outdoor showers carved into the rock. “No chemicals,” the guide kept repeating in a thick accent. “Rinse everything. Hair, skin, clothes.”
I stood under the cold spray, the water cutting through the sun’s heat but doing nothing to cool what Amina had stirred up in my chest earlier.
I watched Nique step under the shower head beside me.
She didn’t hesitate, just let the water drench her leopard print suit and those denim shorts until the fabric turned dark and heavy, clinging to every curve she had.
She caught me looking and wiped the water from her eyes, giving me a small smile that didn’t seem genuine.
I wanted to step over and check on her, but Whitley had been glued to her side all morning.
It was good to see the two of them finally building something real, so I kept my distance and let it breathe.
“I hadn’t planned to get my hair wet,” my mom said from the rinse station, standing with Aunt Maxine and Aunt Lynn looking like she was reconsidering her whole decision to come.
“I told you to get it braided like us,” Aunt Maxine said, flipping her curly braids with a smirk.
“Girl, I only have a teaspoon of hair,” my mama snapped back, raking her damp pixie cut with her pink nails.
“I know a young girl in Maysville that can grip anything,” Maxine insisted.
I couldn’t help myself. “What she gonna grip? Her thoughts?”
My aunties cackled, the sound bouncing off the limestone. My mama cut her eyes at me and planted one hand on her hip. She looked over at Amina, who was just walking up to the showers. “Get him before I do,” she said, half joking.
Amina laughed, sliding up beside my mother with that easy familiarity she had been performing all morning. “Oh trust me Mama Nash, I've been trying.” She cut her eyes over at me with a smile that was meant to look playful but had an agenda sitting right underneath it.
I didn’t give her the satisfaction of a response. I just kept walking toward the edge of the water where the crew had already gathered.
“I got a hundred dollars for the first girl to jump!” Kam announced, standing near the ledge with that same reckless hype man energy he slipped into whenever he was feeling himself.
London peered over the edge and immediately stepped back. “Absolutely not.”
“I value my life,” Paris said flatly, not even bothering to look down.
Then Nique said “I’ll jump” like it was the most casual thing in the world.
I was beside her before she could take another step toward that ledge. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
She looked at me. “You’re Demi’s daddy. Not mine.”
The air went still for a half second.
“Please don’t speak on my daughter,” Amina said, her voice carrying that particular tone she used when she wanted to sound offended without technically starting anything.
Nique’s eyes slid over to Paris. “Paris, get your friend.”
“I’m not in it,” Paris said flatly, stepping back toward Kyson. “I’m tired of being in the middle of y’all every time we’re in the same space.”
Nique didn’t miss a beat. She looked directly at me. “Then Dex, get your baby mama.”
Amina’s whole face changed. “Baby mama?” she repeated, her voice dropping into a deadly register. “Say that again.”
“Baby mama,” Nique said, calm as ever. “That’s what you are, right?”
“I am the mother of his child,” Amina said, stepping forward. “There’s a difference between that and what you are, which is nothing. A hobby. Something he picks up and puts down whenever it’s convenient.”
“A hobby he keeps coming back to,” Nique said, her voice still even. “Must be frustrating watching him choose his hobby over his baby mama every single time.”
Amina’s jaw tightened. “You think you’re so special. You’re just a woman he feels sorry for. That’s all this is. Pity.”
“Then why are you so threatened by his pity?” Nique asked.
Amina started moving toward her, her face past smug and into something colder, but the wet limestone didn’t care about her momentum.
Her designer sandal caught the slick transition wrong and her ankle rolled hard.
She went down fast, grabbing at nothing, hitting the rock with a sharp cry that cut right through the noise of the whole group.
“Amina!” I was already moving.
She was sitting up, one hand braced on the ground, the other reaching for her ankle. Her face was tight with pain, eyes watering.
“?Médico!” one of the guides called out, and two of the staff came hustling over with a first aid kit.
Stella was already there, her nurse instincts cutting through the vacation energy like a switch had flipped. She crouched down, her hands moving with a calm efficiency that commanded the space around her. Wendell was right behind her.
“Give them room,” my mom said, gathering my aunts back a step.
Stella worked quickly, pressing carefully around the ankle, watching Amina’s face for the response.
“It’s a bad sprain,” she said after a moment.
“Maybe a slight grade two. She needs to stay off it, get it wrapped and iced. If the swelling doesn’t respond she may need an X-ray to rule out a hairline fracture but I don’t think we’re looking at a break. ”
Amina let out a shaky breath, some of the tension leaving her face now that she had a read on it.
“He said there’s a clinic about ten minutes from here,” Deuce spoke up, translating a rapid exchange between one of the guides and another staff member.
Everyone looked at him.
“You speak Spanish?” Nel asked.
“Spanish, Mandarin, and a little Portuguese,” Deuce said with a shrug that was trying very hard not to be smug and failing slightly.
“Show off,” Whitley muttered.
“Wendell, why don’t you and Deuce take her to the clinic,” Stella said to her husband. “They could use the translation help and I want to make sure she gets looked at properly.”
“Mom, I came here to swim, not sit in a clinic,” Deuce said.
“Family first,” Wendell said simply, in a tone that closed the discussion.
Stella was softer about it. “I know baby. But this is what we do.”
“But Amina is not his family,” Nique said. Her voice was quiet but it carried. “And what do you know about putting family first anyway? You abandoned your first two kids.”
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water. Everyone felt the ripple.
“Nique,” I said.
“Dominique,” Uncle Tevin said at the same time, his fatherly tone doing the work mine couldn’t.
Nique’s eyes went glassy, but she didn’t let anything fall. She turned and walked toward the tree line before anyone could say another word, her leopard print disappearing into the green.
“Nique!” I started after her.
My mom’s hand caught my arm. “Go with Amina,” she said quietly. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but she is Demi’s mother and we are in a foreign country. She needs somebody she knows by her side.”
I looked toward the trees. I looked at Amina sitting on the ground with her ankle wrapped in a guide’s shirt, pale and shaken. My mom was right and I hated that she was.
“I got Nique,” Nel said, already moving.
Stella paused him. “She’s mad at me, so let me talk to her. Keep an eye out on Whitley for me.”
Nel looked at her for a long second then nodded and stepped back.
I helped Amina up, getting her arm over my shoulder while Wendell and Deuce gathered their things. She leaned into me, her weight familiar in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with years of shared history neither of us could completely walk away from.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as we made our way toward the clinic van.
“I got you,” I told her. And I meant it. Not as a partner or anything she had been trying to make me into on this trip, but as the father of her child. That would never change.
As the van pulled away from the cenote and the jungle closed in around us I let myself think about Nique walking into those trees with whatever she was carrying.
The outburst wasn’t really about Deuce and the clinic.
It was about years of feeling like she wasn’t worth staying for and having the woman who left her standing right there offering her son up to help a stranger.
I understood it. I just couldn’t be the one to go after her this time.
What I did know was that we were running out of days on this trip and I was not going home without her knowing exactly where I stood. Whatever time I lost today I was going to make up for. That wasn’t a hope. It was a plan.