Page 38 of Lease to Love

Staying silent?

Responding?

Pretending I hadn't accidentally joined?

My finger hovered over the screen.

Ayo was still smiling.

“What's wrong, Sunny? You ain't got nothing to say?”

I clenched my jaw.

Keeya was sitting behind him with my chain still around her neck. She looked amused.

“Shit, she probably still sitting in that little apartment doing one of them damn puzzles right now.”

That was it.

I snapped.

My thumb moved before my brain could catch up.

I tapped the button.

Request to Join.

The screen shifted.

My own face appeared in a tiny square beside his— Sunday morning Summer, hair piled messily on top of my head, mumbo sauce stain on my shirt, bare face, no makeup.

And in that moment, I didn’t give a shit.

If he wanted a show, I was about to give him one.

The chat exploded. Comments stacking so fast they were blurring. And Ayo was looking directly into his camera — directly at me, through twelve thousand people — with an expression that made me want to throw something significantly heavier than my phone.

Ayo's grin widened.

“Damn,” he said. “There she go!”

I nearly put the phone through the window.

The self-aware part of my brain was screaming at me to tap the X and close out of the live and go touch grass and never speak of this again.

And then Ayo leaned forward with that grin still on his face, and started speaking again.

"For real though, Sunny—no shade—let me give you some advice. Your little shop is cute and all, but you gotta start thinking bigger than a zip code, you feel me? You're gonna be doing that same thing in that same spot in ten years and I just — I genuinely feel bad, 'cause you don't know what you don't know, and I tried to show you, but—" another shrug, and it was the shrug that did it, the casual, generous, magnanimous shrug of a man doing me a favor by discussing my limitations on a live stream — "some people just ain't built for more than what they already got."

He was talking about my store—Autumn's store—and using it to call me small. And he was doing it with the cruelty of someone who had been inside my apartment and my refrigerator and my life long enough to know exactly which door to walk through.

I unmuted myself.

"First of all," I said, with the calm of a woman who had just made a decision she was not going to take back, "you don't feel bad about shit. You have never felt bad about anything in your raggedy ass life. Let's establish that."

The chat went sideways immediately—I could see it without being able to read it, the volume of it, the energy of it—and I kept going because I had been not saying things for weeks and I had apparently reached my limit.

"Second of all, giving people business advice while operating with nothing but an EBT card and audacity is bold. Third of all, that's my chain." I pointed to side bitch through the screen.