Chapter 43 Mehar
MEHAR
Class ran long today and by the time I got to my car I was exhausted in the good way.
The way that comes from learning something new and being one step closer to the life I was building for myself.
Mrs. Pak had pulled me aside after the session to tell me my technique was improving and that she thought I’d be ready for the advanced certification by the end of the semester.
I was getting there. One class at a time, one client at a time, one dollar at a time.
Speaking of dollars. I checked my phone and saw the CashApp notifications stacked up.
I had tributes from three clients this week alone.
I transferred all of it into my high-yield savings account and watched the balance climb.
Every deposit was another brick in the foundation of my spa.
My name on a building. My hands healing people instead of hurting them.
My life on my terms without a man’s money or a man’s permission or a man’s name attached to any of it.
The dominatrix work was going to have to end eventually.
I knew that. Quest would lose his mind if he found out.
His possessive, alpha, “you’re mine” energy did not include sharing me with men who paid to kneel at my feet, even though I never touched them sexually and the power dynamic was entirely in my control.
He wouldn’t see it that way. He’d see other men in a room with his woman and that would be the end of us.
But I couldn’t give it up for a man. Something about that equation felt like every other equation I’d lived through. Change who you are so a man can be comfortable. Shrink yourself so he has room. I’d spent my whole life doing that and I wasn’t doing it again. Not for Quest, not for anyone.
For now, he didn’t know. And I wasn’t ready to transition out because this was the fastest path to my spa, and the spa was the thing that would outlast every man I’d ever meet.
I drove home with the windows down and my music playing and that rare feeling of a good day sitting warm in my chest. Parked in the lot, took the stairs because the elevator was still broken.
The door was already open. Not unlocked. Open. Cracked about three inches with the deadbolt hanging loose like someone had forced it.
My gun was in my hand before my next breath. I pushed the door open with my foot, stepped inside, and the good day died on the spot.
My apartment had been destroyed.
The navy leather sofa was slashed open, stuffing spilling out of long gashes that looked like they’d been made with a knife.
The orange accent wall that I’d painted myself had been spray-painted with a word I couldn’t bring myself to read twice.
My plants, every single one of them, the pothos and the snake plant and the monstera I’d been nurturing for almost a year were ripped out of their pots and scattered across the floor, soil ground into the carpet like someone had stomped on them.
The portraits of Black women that I’d hung with care and intention were pulled off the walls and slashed through the faces, canvas hanging in ribbons.
The Afro pick coffee table was flipped and cracked down the middle.
My bookshelf was emptied onto the floor, pages torn out of journals I’d been writing in since I left Ahmad.
The kitchen was ransacked. The cabinets open, dishes shattered, food pulled from the fridge and smeared across the countertop.
I walked through each room with my gun raised and my heart slamming against my ribs.
In the bedroom the mattress was flipped, clothes pulled from the closet and cut up, my underwear drawer emptied onto the bed.
In the bathroom, the mirror was cracked, products swept off the shelves, towels shredded.
Nobody was here. Whoever did this was gone. But they’d taken their time. This wasn’t a robbery—nothing of value was missing. My laptop was still on the desk. My emergency cash was still in the shoebox in the closet. This was personal. This was someone sending a message.
I stood in the middle of my living room surrounded by the wreckage of the one space in the world that was entirely mine and I called Quest.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Somebody broke into my apartment,” I said. My voice was steady because I’d been trained by my own life to stay calm when everything around me was falling apart. “They destroyed everything. I need you.”
He didn’t ask questions. “I’m coming. Don’t touch anything. Stay by the door with your gun. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He was there in eleven.
I heard him take the stairs two at a time. He came through the open door with his own gun drawn and swept the apartment the same way I had; room by room, closet by closet, checking windows and exits. When he was satisfied nobody was inside, he holstered the gun and looked at the damage.
His jaw tightened when he saw the slashed sofa. Tightened more when he saw the portraits with their faces cut through. And when he saw the plants ripped from their pots with dirt ground into the carpet, something behind his eyes went from concern to cold fury.
“Pack a bag,” he said. “You’re not staying here.”
“I know.”
“You can stay at the hotel with me.”
“My own room. Not yours.”
He looked at me for a second and I could see him wanting to argue, wanting to say you’re staying with me where I can see you and protect you and make sure nobody touches you again.
But he read my face and understood what I was saying without me having to explain it.
I needed help, but I needed it on my terms. Proximity without dependence.
Close enough to feel safe, far enough to still feel like myself.
“Your own room,” he said. “Across the hall from mine.”
“That works.”
I packed what I could salvage, a few outfits that hadn’t been cut up, my toiletries from the destroyed bathroom, my laptop, and the one journal that had survived because it had fallen behind the bookshelf and whoever did this hadn’t found it. Everything else was gone.
We drove to the hotel in his Maybach. I stared out the window and felt the emptiness settling into my chest—not sadness exactly, more like the hollow feeling of having something taken that you built with your own hands.
My apartment wasn’t fancy. It was small and cheap and the elevator never worked.
But it was mine. The first space I’d ever had that no man controlled and no man paid for. And now it was destroyed.
“Who do you think did this?” Quest asked as we pulled into the hotel parking garage.
“I don’t know.” But I had an idea. Timothy Baker had been sending me money from new phone numbers despite being blocked on every platform I had.
He’d shown up at my school begging. He’d screamed that he loved me across a parking lot.
And his wife Allison had already confronted me once.
She walked into my dungeon uninvited and begged me to stop seeing her husband.
A woman who’d lost her college fund and her home equity to her husband’s obsession might be angry enough to destroy the woman she blamed for it.
Or Timothy himself, unhinged enough to think that wrecking my space would somehow bring me back to his.
“You don’t have any idea? Nobody you’ve had problems with? Nobody who might have a reason to come at you like this?”
“No.”
He looked at me for a long second. Quest could smell a lie the way a shark smells blood in the water, and I could see him processing, turning it over, weighing whether to push. His jaw was doing that thing it does when he’s deciding between patience and eruption.
“If I find out somebody is after you and you knew about it and didn’t tell me, Mehar, I swear to God—”
“I don’t know who did this, Quest. I came home and my apartment was destroyed. That’s all I know.”
He didn’t believe me. I could see it in his eyes. But he let it go for now because there were more immediate things to deal with than interrogating a woman who’d just lost her home.
We checked in. Two rooms, same floor, directly across the hall from each other. He carried my bag to my door and I unlocked it and stood in the doorway of a hotel room that was clean and anonymous and nothing like the home I’d built and lost.
“Come sit with me for a minute,” he said, nodding toward his room.
I followed him across the hall. His room was lived-in by now. There were clothes in the closet, a bottle of Banks Reserve cognac on the desk, his laptop open on the bed. He poured me a glass without asking and I took it because I needed it.
We sat on the edge of the bed, side by side, both of us holding glasses of cognac and staring at the wall like the wall had answers.
“I told you that apartment wasn’t safe,” he said. Not gloating. Just stating a fact that had proven itself true in the worst way.
“I know you did.”
“I told you to let me get you a condo with real security.”
“I know.”
“And you told me you didn’t need me to buy you anything.”
“I remember what I said, Quest.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he set his glass down and turned to face me.
“I’m not bringing it up to be right. I’m bringing it up because I need you to hear something.
” He paused. “Letting somebody help you isn’t the same as letting somebody control you.
I know those two things look the same from where you’ve been standing your whole life.
Every man who’s ever helped you had strings attached.
So I understand why you hear me say ‘let me help you’ and your brain translates it to ‘let me own you.’ But that’s not what I’m saying. ”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying trust me. That’s it. Trust that I want to help because I care about you, not because I want to control you. Trust that I’m not going to hold it over your head or use it as leverage or throw it back in your face when things get hard. Just trust me.”
I took a sip of cognac and let the burn settle in my chest. Trust. The word that kept coming up between us like a test neither of us could study for because the curriculum kept changing.
“I’m trying,” I said. “That’s the best I can give you right now.”
“That’s enough.” He put his hand on my thigh, casual and possessive and warm the way it always was. “For now, that’s enough.”
We sat there for a while longer. Two people in a hotel room, both displaced from their lives for different reasons.
Him because his mother detonated his identity.
Me because someone detonated my home. Both of us sitting on the edge of a bed trying to figure out if the person beside us was safe enough to fall into.
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He let me.
And for a few minutes, that was enough.