CHAPTER 2 #2
Monique leaned forward, pressing her forehead flat against the cold, smooth surface of the white tile wall. She let the tears come—quiet, steady, and silent, her shoulders shaking with small, contained tremors that she kept locked tight inside her ribs.
Monique always cried in the shower. It was a rule she had established when she was eleven years old.
The shower was the only place in Detroit where the water coming off your face didn't count as weakness.
The shower washed away the evidence before anybody could look at you and ask what was wrong. The shower didn't leave a trail.
She was falling. She was falling hard, fast, and with both eyes wide open, plunging headfirst into something she couldn't control, couldn't predict, and couldn't fight her way out of.
And that terrified her more than any switchblade, any corner boy, or any six-foot-eight basketball player who thought his chest was broad enough to crowd her into a corner.
Growing up on the East Side—over near Conner and Warren, where the streetlights stayed dark three months out of the year and the city buses ran whenever they felt like it—trust wasn't just a luxury; it was a currency Monique simply couldn't afford to spend.
She had learned the balance sheet early.
Friends who sat on her front porch, drank her mother’s sweet tea, and smiled to her face, only to spread foul, vicious rumors across the middle school courtyard the second her back was turned.
Cousins who came around asking to borrow fifty dollars for groceries, promised on their dead grandmothers' names to pay it back by Friday, and then vanished into the city for six months until they needed another handout.
Teachers at the high school who called her "gifted" and "a bright young lady" in the hallway, right up until she opened her mouth in class, called out their lazy lesson plans, and challenged their authority—at which point the label shifted overnight to "difficult," "aggressive," and "unmanageable. "
Everyone was terrified of her intelligence.
They were afraid of her brains, afraid of her sharp, merciless eyes that saw straight through the performance, through the posturing, through the cheap, performative bullshit that people used to cover up their own cowardice.
Monique didn't play along. She named the lie out loud, every single time, and people hated her for it.
She had learned before her fifteenth birthday that when people wanted to destroy you, they didn't aim for your arms or your legs.
They didn't try to bruise your skin. They went straight for the chest. They waited until you let your guard down, until you opened a window, and then they reached inside, grabbed your heart, and shattered it into a thousand jagged pieces of glass—leaving you standing alone in the dark, forced to sweep up the mess with your bare hands while they walked away laughing.
Except Uncle Dave.
Uncle Dave had been the single, solid oak pillar in a world made of rotting drywall.
His garage on Seven Mile smelled endlessly of 10W-30 motor oil, unrefined tobacco, and old, dried sweat that had baked into the wooden rafters over forty years.
He had taken Monique in every summer, sitting her down on an overturned grease tub while he worked on the carburetors of vintage Chevys.
He was the one who had wrapped her knuckles in thick white canvas tape for the first time when she was fourteen, showing her how to tuck her thumb outside her fingers so she wouldn't break her bone when she landed a hook.
"Listen to me, Nique," he had told her one blistering August afternoon while the radio played dirty blues in the background, his hands black with engine grease as he pointed a wrench at her chest. "The world out there is full of cowards.
Men, women, all of 'em. They gonna see a dark girl with a sharp mind and a thick frame, and they gonna try to conquer you. They gonna try to break you down so you fit inside their small-ass boxes. You stand your ground. You speak the truth, even if your voice shakes. Standing up for what’s real is the only kind of strength that lasts when the lights go out. "
Uncle Dave was the entire reason she was sitting in cold university classrooms, suffering through endless hours of legal theory and criminal procedure.
She was sick to her stomach from watching boys from her neighborhood—nineteen-year-old kids who hadn't done anything worse than stand on the wrong porch at the wrong time—get dragged off to state facilities for ten years simply because their mothers couldn't afford the five-thousand-dollar retainer for a real lawyer.
It felt to Monique as if humanity had abdicated its throne.
Mankind had turned feral, becoming a cold, unfeeling collection of beasts trapped in a relentless, bloodthirsty slave trade powered by green paper.
The only currency that should have ever mattered in this life was love—pure, unadulterated reciprocation.
What you put into a human soul, you should get back in equal measure.
Equality at its absolute finest. But the world had rotted out from the inside, drunk on greed, obsessed with gaining ascendancy over their fellow men by any means necessary, whether through a badge, a bank account, or a six-foot-eight athletic scholarship.
Monique felt like an ancient, tired soul walking around in the vibrant body of a twenty-one-year-old hood girl from Detroit, carrying three hundred pounds of generational weight for a world that didn't know how to be soft without getting slaughtered.
With Denise, though...
Monique wiped the excess water from her eyes, her breathing beginning to slow, the sharp, panicked flutter in her ribs settling into a low, manageable thrum.
With Denise, the air felt different.
Denise didn't look at her like she was a threat.
She didn't look at her like she was a trophy to be won, or a wild animal that needed to be broken and tamed. Denise looked at her like she was... precious. Like Monique’s strength was something to be respected, and her softness was something to be protected.
It felt as if, for the first time in twenty-one years, Monique could let the iron armor slip off her shoulders just half an inch.
Like those long, dark arms, that deep, sun-warmed chest, and that chocolate embrace might actually be a place where she could lay her weapons down and rest without getting stabbed in the back.
Monique turned off the brass handles. The shower gave one final, metallic groan and went silent.
She stepped out onto the damp bathmat, grabbed her towel, and began drying herself with slow, deliberate, meditative movements.
Her body still hummed. Her clit still held that deep, aching throb.
But the cold, suffocating terror in her chest had quieted down enough for her to fill her lungs with air.
She walked back to her room, locked the door, and dressed with meticulous care.
She pulled on a pair of dark-wash Levi’s that hugged the thick, heavy curve of her rear and clung tight to her thighs before tapering down to her ankles.
She selected a soft, fitted black cotton crop top that left three inches of dark skin exposed at her waist—showing off the sharp, defined line of her upper abdominals and the faint, elegant script of her tattoo climbing her ribs: Only The Strong.
She inserted her thick gold hoops into her ears, applied a thin layer of clear lip gloss, and carefully lined her eyes with dark pencil, making her brown eyes look sharp, clear, and dangerous.
She ate a quick, solitary bowl of Corn Flakes standing at her tiny laminate counter, the milk cold and sharp, the flakes going soggy before she could finish them. She rinsed her bowl in the small sink, grabbed her leather knapsack, and stepped out into the morning.
***
The hallway outside the Criminal Justice locker rooms smelled of floor wax, pine disinfectant, and someone’s stale, microwaved sausage breakfast sandwich.
The fluorescent lights overhead hummed with a low, annoying B-flat pitch that vibrated against the back of Monique’s skull as she walked down the long row of gray steel lockers.
She stopped at locker 114, spun the brass combination dial three times to the left, once to the right, and popped the latch with a sharp metallic CLACK.
She reached into the dark interior, her fingers sliding over the slick, heavy cover of her ninety-pound Introductory Psychology: Human Behavior and Cognitive Development textbook on the top shelf.
She was halfway through pulling the thick volume free when a shadow fell across her locker door, blocking out the light from the hallway window.
A voice slid down her spine like cold grease.
"Hey, sexy. You miss me?"
Monique didn't jump. She didn't startle. She simply stilled her hand, holding the heavy textbook by its spine, and closed the locker door with a deliberate, slow, terrifying calm that made the metal latch click shut with absolute finality.
She turned her head.
Josh Fraser was leaning against the adjacent locker bank, chewing a wad of pink bubblegum with his mouth open, his jaw moving with a lazy, arrogant rhythm.
He was wearing his red-and-white varsity letterman jacket over a gray hoodie, his six-foot-eight frame filling the narrow corridor like an unwanted obstacle.
His small, dark eyes were bloodshot around the edges, but his mouth was pulled up into that same insufferable, cocky smirk that suggested he believed yesterday’s humiliation outside the food court had just been a temporary glitch in the matrix.
Behind him, hovering three feet back near the water fountain, were two of his freshman basketball cronies—both wearing matching university athletic gear, their smartphones already held half-raised at chest height, ready to record whatever performance their captain was about to put on.