Chapter 8 Quest
QUEST
I took her to Ray’s.
Not because I was trying to impress her.
You don’t impress a woman who just sliced your hand open by taking her somewhere with cloth napkins and a wine list. Ray’s was a twenty-four-hour spot off Rhode Island Avenue that served the best jerk chicken in the district and didn’t ask questions when you walked in at eleven PM on a weeknight with blood on your handkerchief.
The owner knew my name, the food came out fast, and nobody was taking pictures for Instagram.
She followed me in her own car, which was cool.
She wasn’t the type of woman who let a man drive her anywhere.
She probably had a switchblade in the cup holder and another one in the glove compartment.
At this point, I was starting to think she kept them the way other women kept lip gloss—just scattered around in various locations for easy access.
We walked in and the hostess seated us at a booth near the back.
Corner spot, good sight lines, two exits visible.
I chose it on purpose because I always chose seats where I could see the door.
It was one of the few things my pops shared with me before he died.
As a man, you never sat with your back to an entrance.
Ever. That was how people got caught slipping, and I didn’t get caught slipping.
I slid into the side facing the door. And Mehar stopped.
“I need that side,” she said.
“You’re good over there.”
“No. I need to face the door.”
“So do I.”
“Quest, I’m not sitting with my back to the entrance.”
“And I’m not moving. I don’t sit with my back to doors, windows, or anything else somebody could come through unexpectedly. That’s not negotiable.”
“I’m not a damsel in distress. I don’t need you playing bodyguard. I need to see what’s coming.”
The way she said it—I need to see what’s coming —told me everything.
That wasn’t a preference. That was survival.
That was a woman who’d been blindsided by men enough times that sitting with her back to a door probably made her chest tight and her hands shake.
I recognized it because I had my own version of it, just for different reasons.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Slide in next to me. We can both see the door and neither one of us has to pretend we’re normal.”
She looked at me like I’d suggested we rob the place together. “I’m not sitting next to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“You just cut me and pulled a knife on me twice. I think we’re past personal space concerns.”
She stood there for another three seconds, running the math in her head, trying to find an option that let her face the door without sitting next to me. There wasn’t one. The booth was against the wall with only two sides.
She slid in next to me. Left a solid two feet of space between us. Sat rigid, shoulders tight, eyes already scanning the room like she was cataloging every person in it and assigning them a threat level.
“Happy?” she said.
“Thrilled.”
The waitress came over and I ordered the jerk chicken with rice and peas, a side of plantains, and a ginger beer. Mehar stared at the menu like it had personally offended her.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You agreed to come eat with me. That typically involves eating.”
“I agreed to come so you’d stop talking. There’s a difference.”
“Get the oxtail,” I said. “It’s the best thing on the menu.”
“I don’t need you to order for me.”
“I’m not ordering for you. I’m making a suggestion.”
She looked at the waitress. “I’ll have the oxtail.”
I kept my face completely neutral, but internally I was doing a victory lap.
The food came quick, which was good because the silence between us was the kind that had weight to it.
She wasn’t giving me anything—no small talk, no eye contact, no acknowledgment that we were two people sharing a meal like regular human beings.
She sat there with her arms folded, scanning the room every thirty seconds, radiating hostility like it was a fragrance she’d put on that morning.
But she was here. That counted for something.
When the plates hit the table, she unfolded her arms and picked up her fork, and I noticed two things.
First, she held it in her right hand with her left hand flat on the table near her knife—not the butter knife, her actual knife, the second switchblade she’d set down next to her napkin like it was a normal utensil.
Second, she took a bite of the oxtail and her whole face changed for about half a second.
Her eyes softened, her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, and her lips did something that was almost, if I was being generous, approaching a reaction that wasn’t hostility.
Then she caught me looking and the wall went right back up.
“What?” she snapped.
“Nothing. Told you the oxtail was good.”
“It’s fine.”
“Your face said more than fine.”
“My face didn’t say anything. Eat your food and mind your business.”
I ate my food. But I did not mind my business.
“So,” I said between bites of plantain, “you always carry two knives?”
“You always ask women about their personal belongings?”
“Only the ones who use them on me.”
“One on each side,” she said, like she was telling me the time. “Left pocket, right pocket. I sleep with one under my pillow, too.”
“That’s three knives.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Just doing inventory in case I need to approach you again in the future. I’d like to know how many times I’m going to get stabbed.”
Her mouth twitched. She covered it by taking another bite of oxtail, but I saw it. A crack in the armor so small most people would’ve missed it. I didn’t miss it.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“You’re going to regardless.”
“Fair. What’s your plan with Thad? Like actual plan. Not the ‘watch me’ tough talk from the parking lot. What are you actually going to do?”
She set her fork down. “I already told you. That’s not your concern.”
“It became my concern when his baby mother texted me asking for help. She’s got a baby boy and a three-year-old daughter who keeps asking where Daddy is. That’s real life, Mehar. Those are real kids.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t think about those kids?
” Her voice had an edge to it that wasn’t anger.
It was something rawer than that. “I think about them every time I go to that warehouse. But that man killed my sister. He ordered a hit on Zahara and let Zainab sit in prison for it. He’s a rapist. He used me as a side piece and lied to my face every single day.
So don’t sit here and lecture me about real life like I don’t understand consequences. ”
“I’m not lecturing you.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Trying to convince you to give him up or kill him so his baby mother and the rest of the family can have some closure.”
She exhaled through her nose. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said after a while. Quieter now.
“I know some things.”
“You know what Prime told you. That’s not the same.”
“Then tell me something Prime didn’t tell me.”
She was quiet for a long time. Pushed a piece of oxtail around her plate with her fork. I didn’t rush her. One thing I’d learned in business and in life is that when someone is deciding whether to trust you with something real, the worst thing you can do is push.
“I didn’t have a childhood,” she finally said. “Not in any way that counts. My father was a monster who hid behind religion. I was married off at eighteen. I’ve been surviving since before I knew that’s what I was doing.”
“I didn’t have one either,” I said.
She looked at me sideways. “Please. Your mother was the mayor. You grew up rich. You probably had a nanny and a trust fund and a pony.”
“My mother was the mayor,” I repeated. “You’re right about that.
And she used every single one of her children as chess pieces in whatever political game she was playing at the time.
She threw my brother away when he was thirteen years old.
Let him go to prison as a kid and didn’t visit once.
Not once.” I took a sip of my ginger beer.
“And me? She kept me close, but it wasn’t out of love.
I ain’t gon get into the horrible shit she did.
But my childhood ain’t one for Disney movies. ”
“That’s not what I expected you to say,” she admitted.
“What did you expect?”
“Something arrogant. Something about how you built yourself from nothing despite your silver spoon. The bootstraps speech.”
“Nah. I’m not going to sit here and pretend my pain was worse than yours. It wasn’t. But it was mine, and it shaped everything I am, same as yours did for you.”
She picked her fork back up and took another bite. The silence that followed wasn’t heavy like before. It was different. It wasn’t comfortable exactly, but not hostile either. Like two people who had been circling each other from a distance and accidentally ended up standing in the same spot.
“This oxtail really is good,” she said. Still not looking at me. But her shoulders had dropped. And the switchblade on the table had migrated about an inch further from her hand.
“Told you.”
We finished eating without saying much else. When the check came, I paid it before she could tell me again that I was paying. We walked out into the cool night air and stood in the parking lot the way two people do when the conversation isn’t quite done but neither one knows how to keep it going.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said, and it sounded like it physically hurt her to say it.
“Thanks for not stabbing me. Well—not stabbing me a second time.”
“The night’s still young.”
“Goodnight, Mean-har.”
“Don’t call me that.”
I just winked at her.
She turned and walked to her car without looking back. Same way she’d walked out of the warehouse.
I stood there and watched her pull out of the lot.
Her taillights disappeared around the corner and I was alone in a parking lot for the second time tonight.
I got in my car. Sat there for a second.
Looked at my phone—no new messages from Mekhi about the snake tattoo, nothing from Justice, nothing from anyone who needed me to solve something or fix something or be something.
Just quiet.
And the faint smell of her perfume that had somehow gotten on my jacket during the bear hold and was now filling up the interior of my car like it had every intention of staying.