13. Vice Blackwell
VICE BLACKWELL
It had been three days since I almost kissed Milan, and I still couldn’t get that shit out of my head.
I’d tried.
Between work, Sam’s murder and everything Mace had told me about what my cousin had been digging into before he died, I had more than enough to keep my mind occupied. Somehow, Milan still found her way into my thoughts when I least expected it.
More specifically, the way she’d looked at me right before she stepped back.
She wanted me to kiss her. I knew she did.
The problem was, wanting something and being ready for it were two different things, and for once, I wasn’t interested in pushing until I got my way.
Milan had spent ten years with a man who betrayed her in a way that would fuck with anybody’s ability to trust again.
If she needed time, I could give her that.
What I couldn’t seem to do was stop thinking about what would’ve happened if she hadn’t pulled away.
I sat behind my desk, staring at the same numbers I’d been pretending to review for the last five minutes before finally closing the folder. This shit was getting ridiculous.
My phone sat beside me, and I picked it up before I could talk myself out of it. Milan and I had texted a few times since that night, but neither one of us had mentioned what happened at her apartment. She hadn’t avoided me, and I hadn’t made shit awkward by bringing it up.
Still, three days felt longer than it should have.
I opened our messages and typed.
Me: You working?
Her response came less than a minute later.
Milan: No. Why?
I looked at the screen, already thinking about asking what she was doing, when someone knocked on my office door.
“Come in.”
The door opened, and one of my managers stepped halfway inside. “You got a visitor.”
“Who?”
He hesitated for half a second. “Simone.”
I frowned as I looked back down at Milan’s name on my phone.
“Send her back.”
He nodded and closed the door.
I put my phone on the desk without answering Milan. Simone showing up without calling wasn’t completely unusual when we were together, but we hadn’t been together in a year. The last time I saw her before lunch with Milan had been months ago, and even then, we only talked for a few minutes.
A knock hit the door again before it opened.
Simone stepped inside wearing a fitted black dress and heels, looking exactly like she always did. Put together. Confident. Beautiful enough to make most men forget whatever they were doing before she walked into a room.
There had been a time when I was one of them.
“Hey,” she said as she closed the door behind her.
“What’s up?”
Her eyes moved around the office before settling on me. “That’s all I get?”
“What you want?”
“A hug would be nice.”
I leaned back in my chair. “You came all the way over here for a hug?”
“No, Kaiden. I didn’t come all the way over here for a hug.”
“Then come sit down and tell me what’s up.”
She shook her head, but there was a small smile on her face as she walked toward the chair across from my desk. Simone had always hated how hard it was to get a reaction out of me. She used to tell me I could make a woman question her entire life with one word and a blank expression.
I never understood why she thought that was my problem.
“You look good,” she said as she sat down, but I didn’t respond to that. Her eyes stayed on me for a few seconds before she realized I wasn’t going to entertain her antics. “How are you doing?”
Her voice was filled with much sympathy when she asked me that, far different from the way she sounded the other day.
“I’m good.”
“I heard about your cousin… I wanted to come to the funeral, but I was out of town, and I tried to reach out to you but… I didn’t even know what to say because I knew how close ya’ll were. I called auntie, though. Did she tell you?”
I cleared my throat as I rubbed a hand down my face. “Nah, she ain’t told me shit.”
“Oh okay… Well, yeah, I talked to her.” She paused before continuing. “I didn’t want to bring it up at lunch while you were with… Um, what’s her name? Milan?
Again, I wasn’t about to entertain her ass. The way she said Milan’s name told me we were getting closer to the real reason she was sitting in my office.
For a moment, neither one of us said anything. Simone knew me well enough to understand I wasn’t about to sit here and talk about Sam with her or the way his death had affected me, especially when she hadn’t come to discuss him in the first place.
She crossed one leg over the other. “So, are you going to ask why I’m here?”
“Figured you’d tell me.”
She softly laughed as she settled further into the chair, swallowing hard as she voiced her next few words. “Well, I’m trying to figure out if you’re still the same.”
I frowned, not sure where she was going with this. “What? Fuck you mean?”
“If you’re still the same… or, if you’ve finally changed from when we were together.”
For a second, I just studied her. She had never been one to beat around the bush, so why she was doing it now was beyond the fuck out of me.
“You came here to figure that out?”
“Partly.”
I leaned back in my chair. “What’s the other part?”
She hesitated long enough for me to know I probably wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Milan…”
Yup… I damn sure didn’t like it.
I reached for my phone, more out of habit than anything, and glanced at the time before putting it back down.
“What about her?”
“Who is she?”
“Somebody I know.”
Simone’s eyebrows shot up, and the look she gave me made it clear she wasn’t buying that simple-ass answer. “Somebody you know?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what we’re calling it?”
“I ain’t calling it nothing.”
She watched me for a few seconds before a low laugh left her mouth, but there wasn’t much amusement behind it. “Okay.”
Her eyes stayed on mine, and this time, she didn’t bother dancing around whatever had been on her mind since she walked into my office.
“You fucking with her?”
“I barely know her, but if I was, that ain’t got a gotdamn thing to do with you.”
The words came out automatically, but even as I said them, Milan standing in her apartment three nights ago flashed through my mind. The way she’d looked at me when I touched her face. The way she’d stayed still until the last second.
Three days later, and I was still thinking about a kiss that never happened.
She leaned back in the chair and studied me. “You barely know her, but you introduced her before she could introduce herself. You sat there watching her every time she spoke, and you barely looked at me.”
“I looked at you.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did, but that didn’t mean I was about to help her make whatever point she was trying to make.
“She was sitting across from me,” I said. “Where else was I supposed to look?”
Simone chuckled but it was filled with a little hurt. “You know, you used to do that to me too.”
“Do what?”
“Act like everything has a simple answer when you don’t want to talk about how you really feel.”
I rubbed a hand across my jaw. “You came here to talk about my feelings?”
“No. I came because seeing you caught me off guard.”
That answer was honest enough to make me stop.
Simone looked down at her hands before continuing. “I knew I’d run into you eventually. Atlanta isn’t that big, especially when we know half the same people. I just didn’t expect the first time I saw you again to be while you were having lunch with another woman.”
“We been broken up almost a year.”
“I know how long we’ve been broken up.”
“Then why would that bother you?”
Her eyes came back to mine. “I didn’t say it bothered me.”
“Then why the fuck you here asking about her?”
“Okay. Maybe it bothered me a little.”
At least she admitted it.
I leaned back in my chair, watching her more closely now. “Why?”
Simone looked at me like the answer should’ve been obvious. “Because I spent three years with you.”
“I know.”
“I loved you.”
Something in her voice changed when she said it. The words came out quieter than everything else had, and for the first time since she walked into my office, I could see past the confidence she always carried. There was still some hurt there, even after all this time.
I held her stare. “I know that too.”
Her face changed almost immediately, and she let out a short laugh as she shook her head. “See, that right there.”
“What?”
“I know.” She repeated the words like she was tired of hearing them. “You always knew how I felt about you, Kaiden. I told you. I showed you. I spent three years loving you and waiting for you to figure out what you wanted, and half the time, all I got from you was I know.”
I looked away for a second, rubbing my hand across my jaw. There wasn’t much I could say when she wasn’t wrong.
This conversation was starting to sound familiar, except sitting here almost a year later made it harder to brush off the things I hadn’t wanted to deal with when we were together.
Simone and I had been good. For a long time, I thought good was enough. We didn’t argue every day. We enjoyed each other. She had her own life, I had mine, and somehow we always found our way back to each other at the end of the day.
The problem was, eventually, Simone wanted more than good.
She wanted marriage. Kids. A house we picked together instead of spending half the week at my place before she packed her shit and went home because I never asked her to stay for good.
She wanted to know that the three years she’d given me were leading somewhere, and every time she tried to talk about the future, I found another reason why right then wasn’t the right time.
I’d cared about her.
Probably more than I ever said, and definitely more than I knew how to show.
Looking at her now, I could admit that maybe that had been part of the problem. I knew Simone loved me, but I’d gotten too comfortable believing she would keep loving me without ever asking me to do anything with it.