Page 39 of Lease to Love

Keeya straightened on the couch behind him.

Ayo's smile had not left his face but it had become a different kind of smile, the performance kind, the I'm-being-watched-and-I-know-it kind.

"There she is," he said, to the live, like he was introducing me. "That's the energy right there. See, this is what I'm talking about — she got that fire, that's not the issue. The issue is she just don't know where to—"

"Ayo, honey, please shut the hell up." I kept my voice pleasant with the specific effort of a woman who had done customer service for years and knew exactly how to weaponize a syrupy tone. "You don't have any advice I need. You don't have any advice anyone needs. What you have is my chain on a woman you were cheating on me with, and a live stream that isn’t even paying you, and an apartment that I'm going to guess is not yours."

Keeya's expression changed in a way that confirmed it.

"You want to talk about thinking bigger than a zip code? I have a business. I have a real, running, revenue-generating business. Something I built. What do you have? What are we doing today? What’s the content? Me?"

The comments were moving too fast to track. I caught she ate and uh oh and approximately forty versions of my name. Ayo's jaw did the thing it did when he was plotting—that small reset when a conversation wasn't going the way he'd planned—and then his eyes went to the chat and came back to me with something sharper in them.

"Okay, okay, I see you." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice had dropped into the lower register he used when he was about to say something he thought was devastating. "You're doing your thing, you got your little—" he stopped himself on little— "your boutique, your brand. Cool. That's cool. I respect the hustle. But as a woman? You need to stop playing like you're unbothered."

“Exaaactly.” Keeya must have decided that it was her turn to talk, sitting up and wrapping an arm around Ayo. "Because if he wasn’t shit, and you’re unbothered, and all that," she waved a dismissive hand, "You must have a new nigga by now. You moved on? Okay. Where's your man, Summer?"

I looked at her.

Keeya, who I had never met, never wronged, never given a single reason to come for me, sitting on a couch with a man that wasn’t hers, wearing jewelry that wasn't hers asking me where my man was.

This bitch had balls.

The chat lost its mind.

I opened my mouth. I closed it. I opened it again.

My brain was doing the thing it sometimes did under extreme social pressure, generating approximately fifteen responses simultaneously, none of them fully formed, while also being acutely aware of twelve thousand people watching me generate them.

The smart response was something deflecting and dignified and closed. The petty response was something pointed and devastatingly specific. The Hail Mary response was—

Knock knock knock.

I froze at the sound.

Ayo was still talking—I could hear him, “Like I thoughtl, ain't nobody there,” something about the chat agreeing with him— but I wasn't listening anymore.

Because I knew that knock.

I knew the measured rhythm.

The controlled force.

I knew exactly who was on the other side of my front door.

And the impulsive, dumbass devil on my shoulder whispered in my ear: Go with it.

"I'm gonna stop you right there," I said, to Ayo, to twelve thousand people, every instinct screaming that this was a terrible idea, but my mouth moving anyway. "You want to know where my man is?"

I walked to the door. Gripped the handle.

"He's right here."

I opened the door.

Roman Sterling stood in my doorway in a charcoal suit, looking precisely like a man who had no idea that his Sunday morning was about to go somewhere unexpected.

He clocked the phone in my hand first. Then the camera. Then, I watched it happen, the specific recalibration of a man who assessed situations for a living and was assessing this one in real time.