Page 34 of Lease to Love

Laughing.

Wearing it around her neck like it had always belonged to her.

My face went hot.

Then Ayo looked directly into the camera… And said my damn name.

Chapter Five

Summer

Ayo was a cautionary tale with good dick and dreads.

And I say that with the full clarity of a woman who had recently been forced to reckon with her own bad decisions.

I hadn't been planning a wedding or anything. I wasn't one of those women who picked out baby names after the second date or had a Pinterest board titled Our Future Home before a man knew her middle name.

But Ayo was fine as hell, made me laugh, and the sex was spectacular. With everything else on my plate, easy laughs and good sex were more than enough to keep me satisfied.

The problem was that the dick kept me too distracted to notice that everything else about him was trash.

And now @AyeYoAyo was LIVE, with my government name coming out of his ashy ass mouth with the unbothered air of a man who had decided that I made for good content.

I'd never been more annoyed with my own poor pussy management.

"I mean, I ain't proud of how it all went down with Summer," The smirk on his face suggested he wasn't particularly ashamed of it either. "But it is what it is."

It is what it is.

Boy fuck you.

I still remembered the day I became suddenly single.

I'd woken up to thousands of Instagram notifications—DMs, comments, tags—and for one blissfully stupid second, I'd thought something good had happened.

Maybe one of my designs had gone viral. Maybe somebody with a blue check had posted one of my pieces. Maybe some celebrity had wandered into House of Autumn and tagged me.

I was wrong.

Instead, I'd found myself tagged in a post by a woman I'd never met.

@KeeyaTheMUA.

The side piece.

And because Keeya had a follower count that made Ayo's look embarrassing, the post already had thousands of views and comments by the time I saw it.

that ain't @SunnyDays202

Waitttttt don't he got a gf?

Do @SunnyDays202 know she got dumped six months ago?

I had called Ayo six times before Maya confiscated my phone. Six. He rejected every single call.

I'd texted him ten times, increasingly unhinged.

His response?