Smoke and Solace of Bellhaven

Prologue

S O L A C E

“You know yo’ ass ain’t leavin’.”

“I’m definitely leaving.” I smiled without looking at Smoke, took a sip of the spiked apple cider, and pulled the sleeves of his large hoodie farther over my free hand.

The temperature had dropped as soon as the sun went down, which was typical when summer started giving way to fall.

I hadn’t brought anything warm enough for sitting outside for long, so Smoke had pulled off his hoodie and handed it to me when he caught me rubbing my arms. Now he was sitting beside me in a Polo T-shirt while I was warm in his shit.

“Nah, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

I finally turned my head and looked at him. “I literally have a start date and a signed offer letter, Sherrod.”

“Okay, and?” He tapped the ash off the end of the blunt onto the ground beside him.

“And an apartment.”

Smoke put the blunt back between his lips. “That shoebox ain’t no damn apartment.”

I sucked my teeth and shoved his shoulder, but Smoke barely moved.

He laughed around the blunt before taking it from his mouth and catching my wrist when I tried to shove him again.

He pulled me closer until our hips bumped.

I tried to fight the grin spreading across my face, but I already knew I was losing.

“You’re such a hater.”

“I’m real as fuck.” He released my wrist and took another pull of his blunt before reaching for his own red cup of cider. He blew the smoke out before taking the last sip. “Them pictures is crazy. Yo’ bedroom damn near in the kitchen.”

“It’s a studio!”

“It’s a closet wit’ a stove.”

“It’s mine and that’s all that matters.” That shut him up but only for a second. Smoke dragged from the blunt again, and when I looked over at him, he was already smiling.

From where we sat at the top of Bellhaven Hill, I could see almost the whole town beneath us.

That sounded more impressive than it was.

Bellhaven wasn’t big enough to require much of a hill to see across it.

Main Street cut through the middle, lined with old brick buildings, streetlamps, and trees that had turned orange and red over the last few weeks.

Beyond that were neighborhoods full of houses I had passed every day of my life, the school football field, the steeple from New Bellhaven Baptist Church, and stretches of woods that made Bellhaven feel even farther away from everything else than it actually was.

I’d spent years sitting up there with Smoke.

He’d started bringing me when I was barely a teenager, and he was already two years ahead of me, but he’d been part of my life long before we found that hill.

When we were kids, I pretended I didn’t like that Smoke waited for me after school every day, even though we lived in the same direction.

I pretended it wasn’t a big deal that he knew my mother’s work schedule better than I did, or that my father never had a problem with him hanging around because Smoke had been in and out of our house for years.

By the time we were teenagers, neither of my parents bothered asking who I was with half the time because the answer was almost always Smoke.

We rode bikes through Bellhaven until the streetlights came on, spent summers at the park arguing over basketball games, and hit up every Fall Festival together. We’d eat enough fried food between us to make our stomachs hurt. Then puberty fucked up a perfectly good friendship.

By the time I was thirteen, Smoke was fifteen and had gotten tall enough that I had to look up at him when we argued over dumb shit. His voice had gotten deeper, his shoulders had gotten broader, and girls who used to ignore him suddenly giggled too damn hard whenever he said something.

I hated every single one of them without having enough sense to understand why. He wasn’t much better. The first boy who kissed me freshman year barely got his tongue in my mouth before Smoke decided he was a bitch for reasons he could never properly explain.

By fourteen, we had stopped pretending there wasn’t something between us.

Our hugs lasted too long, his hand started finding my waist whenever he moved past me, and I noticed every time he took his shirt off.

He damn sure noticed when my body started filling out too because my curves got crazy early on.

We still called each other best friends, but best friends probably weren’t supposed to sit in parked cars staring at each other’s mouths or get pissed whenever somebody else came around.

The first time Smoke kissed me, there hadn’t been anything sweet or hesitant about it.

We had been arguing in his car about who was the better player between Allen Iverson and LeBron James when I told him to stop acting like he was my damn boyfriend.

He stared at me for a second before saying, “Maybe I’m tired of not bein’ that nigga.

” Then he kissed me, and after that, pretending we were only friends didn’t make much sense anymore.

By fifteen, there wasn’t much about each other we hadn’t discovered.

Smoke was my first, and I was his. We learned each other clumsily at first because neither of us knew what the hell we were doing, but that didn’t last long.

The more time we spent together, the better we got at knowing what the other wanted without asking.

By twenty-two, Smoke knew every sound I made, every place that made my legs shake, and exactly how to touch me when he wanted me begging before he ever got inside me.

I knew how to make that cocky shit disappear from his face, how to make him lose control, and how to leave him breathing my name as if it was the only word he remembered.

We had gone from two best friends figuring out sex together to two grown people who knew each other’s bodies almost too fucking well.

The hill had been there through most of that too.

We came up there when we needed somewhere our parents couldn’t easily find us, then kept coming as we got older.

We came after football games, after arguments, and later, after dates when neither one of us wanted to go home yet.

The first time Smoke told me he loved me had been right on the hill, although he would still swear to anybody who asked that I said it first.

In less than a week, I wouldn’t be able to come up to the hill whenever I wanted or look down and see half of Bellhaven from one spot.

I still had emails to answer about onboarding paperwork, parking passes, direct deposit, orientation, and everything else I needed to handle before starting my new job.

Soon, I would be living in Los Angeles, where nobody would know what I got suspended for in tenth grade or who I’d lost my virginity to.

Nobody would know me as Miss Loretta’s daughter, and nobody would know about Smoke unless I told them.

That was what I wanted. I was ready to see what my life looked like outside of Bellhaven, but leaving meant walking away from everything that had been normal for me my whole life, including him.

Sherrod Cole, better known to everyone in Bellhaven as Smoke, was fine as hell.

Over the years, he grew into a big man, standing six-foot-five and weighing close to two hundred and seventy pounds of solid muscle.

He had broad shoulders, thick, tattooed arms, and a wide chest. It was the kind of size that made him take up space without even trying.

Not to mention he had brown skin, that smooth milk chocolate kind, a full beard, a low haircut, a cute nose, and full lips.

He’d gotten the name Smoke when we were teenagers because he always had some weed on him and stayed high whenever he could get away with it.

The nickname stuck long after he stopped being the teenage boy sneaking off to smoke.

He sat beside me in a black tee, faded black jeans, one Timberland planted against the gravel while his other leg stretched out in front of him.

Construction had put more weight on him over the last couple of years.

I’d known that face since he was a skinny ten-year-old boy.

At twenty-four, Smoke was the type of man everyone had eyes on, including me.

“What?” Smoke asked without looking at me. He brought the blunt to his lips and took a slow pull.

“Nothing.”

“You starin’ at a nigga.”

I took another sip of the spiked cider, already feeling warm and a little buzzed. “I was thinking.”

“‘Bout me.” He blew the smoke out and flicked the ash over the edge of the hill.

I rolled my eyes. “See, that’s your problem. You think everything is about you.”

“When you lookin’ at me like that, it is.”

“Looking at you like what?”

He turned toward me, the blunt between his fingers and his mouth lifting at one corner, showing off his perfectly white teeth. “Like you wanna get fucked.”

I stared at him for a second before laughing. “You are so fucking aggravating.”

“You ain’t say I was wrong, though.”

“Because I’m not feeding into your ego.” He grabbed my thigh and pulled me against him without warning. “Smoke!” I squealed and grabbed onto him when my body shifted on the edge of the hill, and Smoke’s arm locked around my waist before I could even think about it.

He looked at me with that cocky ass grin while I held onto his shoulders. “Fuck you scared for? You know I got yo’ ass.”

“You could’ve warned me.”

“For what?” His grip tightened around my waist as he pulled me even closer. “I said I got you, Lace. You ain’t goin’ no fuckin’ where.” His arm stayed tight around my waist, and once my heart stopped trying to jump out of my chest, I relaxed against him again.

If Smoke said he had me, he meant it. He had me in ways nobody did. Even after all this time, he still remembered the little shit I never expected anybody to pay attention to. He remembered that I liked the corner brownie because I wanted the crispy edges and that I hated pulp in my orange juice.