Chapter 15 Mehar
MEHAR
“A roller rink.”
“A roller rink.”
“Quest, I am a grown woman. I am not roller skating.”
“Yes yo’ angry ass is.” He turned off the engine and looked at me with that expression he used when he’d already decided something and was just waiting for me to catch up.
“When’s the last time you did something just because it was fun?
Not productive, not strategic, not a means to an end. Just fun.”
I opened my mouth to answer and nothing came out because the honest answer was that I couldn’t remember.
Everything I did had a purpose—school was for the medspa, the dungeon was for money, therapy was for survival, the range was for safety.
Even dinner with Bryce had been partly about reconnecting for information.
I didn’t do things for fun. Fun was a luxury that belonged to people who weren’t running from something.
“That silence is exactly why we’re here,” he said. “Come on.”
The rink was called Stardust and it had clearly been there since the eighties.
Neon lights on the outside, a parking lot that needed repaving, and a sign with two bulbs burned out so it read “S ard st.” Inside it smelled like popcorn and floor wax and something nostalgic that I couldn’t name because I had no nostalgia for a place I’d never been.
I’d seen enough skating rinks on social media to know what they looked like.
The carpet was that wild geometric pattern that all skating rinks seemed to share, and there were about thirty people inside, mostly teenagers and a few couples and a group of women who looked like they came every week.
Quest walked up to the rental counter and asked for two pairs of skates like he did this regularly.
The kid behind the counter recognized him—I could tell by the way his eyes got wide—but Quest just shook his head slightly and the kid kept it moving.
Money and power bought a lot of things, but the thing Quest seemed to value most was discretion.
“Size?” he asked me.
“I’m not doing this.”
“What size shoe do you wear, Mehar?”
“Eight. But I’m not—”
He looked smug as he held up a pair of tan rental skates with orange wheels and a look on his face that dared me to keep arguing. I grabbed them from his hand and sat down on the bench to put them on, furious at myself for giving in and even more furious at the tiny part of me that was curious.
I had never roller-skated in my life. I had never ice skated, never skateboarded, never ridden a bike without training wheels.
My father considered recreational activities to be frivolous distractions from prayer and study.
The other kids in the neighborhood would be outside playing and I would be inside memorizing Quran with bruised knees from kneeling on rice as punishment for whatever infraction Khadija had decided I’d committed that day.
By the time I was old enough to choose my own activities, I was married to Ahmad, and Ahmad didn’t let me do anything that didn’t involve serving him.
So when I stood up on those skates and my ankles immediately buckled inward and I grabbed the wall with both hands like it was the only thing between me and death, Quest had the absolute audacity to laugh.
“Don’t.” I pointed at him with one hand while gripping the wall with the other. “Do not laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Your whole face is laughing.”
“My face is doing its own thing. I can’t control my face.” He was already on his skates, standing there perfectly balanced, completely at ease, looking like he’d been born on wheels. He rolled backward a few feet just to show off and I wanted to throw one of my skates at his head.
“How are you good at this?” I asked through gritted teeth as I inched along the wall toward the rink entrance.
“I grew up going to Crystal Skate in Forestville every Friday night. Quest Banks was nice with the skates. I’m talking crossovers, spins, backward skating—the whole thing. I was that kid.” He said it with zero shame and maximum braggadocio and despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitched.
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’ve been told. You ready?”
“No.”
“Perfect. Let’s go.”
He offered me his hand. I looked at it the same way I’d looked at the oxtail at Ray’s—suspicious but tempted.
I took it, and his fingers closed around mine, warm and firm, and he guided me onto the rink floor like he was escorting me onto a dance floor instead of a waxed wooden oval surrounded by teenagers who were about to witness a grown woman eat shit on roller skates.
The first lap was humiliating. My legs kept trying to split apart in opposite directions and my arms were windmilling and I was making sounds I didn’t know I could make—grunts and gasps and one actual squeal that I would deny under oath.
Quest skated beside me, holding my hand, matching my glacial pace, and occasionally steadying me with his other hand on my waist when I started to lean too far in one direction.
“Stop overthinking it,” he said. “You’re trying to control every muscle in your legs. Just let your body find the rhythm.”
“I don’t have a rhythm. I have survival instincts and they are telling me to get off this floor.”
“Your survival instincts are dramatic. Bend your knees a little more. There you go. Push with one foot, glide with the other. Push. Glide. Push. Glide.”
I tried. I pushed. I glided. For about two seconds, I felt something close to momentum and my brain went oh, okay, maybe this is—and then my right foot went sideways and I went down.
Not a graceful fall. Not a slow-motion movie fall where you look cute on the way down. I went down hard and fast, landing on my hip and sliding about a foot across the wax, and a group of teenagers nearby tried very hard not to laugh and failed completely.
Quest was over me in a second, crouching down with his hand extended and that smile on his face that was somehow not mocking. It was warm and amused and patient and it made me angrier than if he’d been laughing at me.
“You good?”
“I’m on the floor. No, I’m not good.”
“Take my hand.”
I took his hand and he pulled me up in one smooth motion. And when I was standing again, wobbly and bruised and humiliated, he didn’t let go. He held my hand and steadied me and waited until my ankles stopped shaking before he moved.
“One more lap,” he said. “And this time don’t think. Just move.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
We went again and something shifted on the third lap.
I stopped trying to control every micro-movement and started trusting the momentum.
My legs found something resembling a pattern—not graceful, not smooth, but functional.
Quest let go of my hand at one point and I didn’t fall.
I skated on my own for about twenty feet and the feeling that went through me was so unexpected that I almost stopped to examine it.
It was joy. Simple, stupid, uncomplicated joy.
The kind I hadn’t felt since I was too young to know what the world was going to do to me.
The purple, blue, green, gold rink lights were cycling through one another.
And the music was some old nineties R&B.
KP and Envy’s Swing My Way blared through the speakers.
I was moving on wheels and not falling and nobody was hurting me and nobody wanted anything from me and for thirty seconds I forgot to be afraid.
Quest circled back to me skating backward, watching my face with an expression I couldn’t read. “There she is,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
“There who is?”
“The version of you that’s not trying to stab somebody.”
I laughed. A real laugh, from my stomach, loud enough that the woman skating past me looked over and smiled.
I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed like that—full and involuntary and born from something that wasn’t dark humor or sarcasm.
It felt foreign in my body, like a muscle I hadn’t used in years was remembering how to flex.
We skated for another hour. I fell three more times and each time he picked me up without comment. By the end, I could make it around the rink without holding the wall or his hand, and I was sweating through my hoodie and my hip was definitely going to bruise and I didn’t care about any of it.
We turned in our skates and walked back to the car and the night air hit my damp skin and everything felt different. Lighter. Like somebody had removed a few bricks from the wall I carried around my chest and hadn’t told me about it.
The drive to my apartment was quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet than before.
The first silence in his car had been tense and loaded.
This one was comfortable. I was tired in a good way, the way you’re tired after doing something physical that wasn’t violence.
My legs ached. My cheeks ached from smiling.
I leaned my head against the window and watched the streetlights pass and didn’t reach for my gun once.
He pulled up to my building and parked. Before I could open the door, he was already out of the car and walking around to my side.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened my door.
“Walking you to your door.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Maybe not. But I’m too protective to let you walk to your door alone at this hour. Sue me.”
“It’s my building. I live here. I walk to this door by myself every single night.”
“Well tonight you don’t have to.”
I didn’t argue. I was too tired to argue and too honest with myself to pretend I didn’t want him walking next to me.
We took the stairs because I lived on the third floor and the elevator in my building had been broken for two weeks and management kept saying they were “working on it” which in DC meant they’d get to it sometime between now and never.
We reached my door and I turned to face him.
The hallway was dim—one of the overhead lights was flickering—and he was standing about two feet away with his hands in his pockets and that charcoal suit still looking pressed even after an hour in a roller rink.
I probably looked like a mess. Sweaty hoodie, box braids half falling out of my ponytail, tired eyes.
But he was looking at me the same way he’d looked at me on the rink when he said “there she is”—like he was seeing something he’d been looking for.
“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. I meant it in a way that covered more than just the tire and the ride and the skating.
I meant it for the parking lot when he held me without hurting me.
I meant it for Ray’s when he let me talk about my childhood without flinching.
I meant it for tonight when he took me somewhere silly and safe and let me fall without making me feel weak for it.
“You’re welcome,” he said. Simple. No jokes, no cockiness, no follow-up.
We stood there for a second too long. The flickering light.
His cologne. The warmth still in my muscles from the rink.
Something was pulling between us—a gravity I could feel in my sternum, this slow magnetic drag that was closing the two feet between us one centimeter at a time.
I looked at his mouth and then looked away and then looked back at his mouth and I hated myself for it but I wanted him to kiss me.
I wanted it so badly that my body was actually leaning forward without my brain’s permission the same way it had relaxed in his arms in that parking lot.
He didn’t kiss me.
He looked at my mouth too—I saw him do it—and something moved behind his eyes, a war between want and restraint that lasted about two seconds before restraint won. He stepped back. Put his hands back in his pockets.
“Goodnight, Mean-har,” he said with that half-smile.
“Goodnight, Quest.”
He turned and walked down the hallway toward the stairs. I watched him go, and when he disappeared around the corner, I unlocked my door and stepped inside and locked it behind me.
I didn’t check the windows. I didn’t check the closets. I didn’t walk through every room with my hand on my blade making sure nobody was hiding behind the shower curtain or underneath the bed.
I just stood there in my dark apartment with my back against the door and my eyes closed and my heart doing something it hadn’t done in a very long time.
Beating without fear.